Buzzcocks were always a different kind of punk band. Founder Pete Shelley (lead vocals/guitars) loved the energy and directness of punk, but he never embraced the confrontational and provocative ethos of the movement. As a consequence, Buzzcocks developed a different image than many of their rebellious 1970s punk contemporaries. “I won’t be nasty,” Shelley told Melody Maker in 1978. “We’re just four nice lads, the kind of people you could take home to your parents.”
Their music was as uncompromising as that of any punk band, though. Music critic Mark Deming once noted, “Pete Shelley’s basic formula in the Buzzcocks was to marry the speed and emotional urgency of punk with the hooky melodies and boy/girl thematics of classic pop/rock. When he applied this thinking to that most classic of pop themes, unrequited teenage love, he crafted one of his most indelible songs, Ever Fallen In Love.”
The full title of the track is Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve). It was their biggest hit, released as their sixth single on 8 September 1978, reaching #12 on the UK Singles Chart. It was also included on their second album Love Bites (1978).
The song was written the year before, and its inspiration came more or less out of the blue. “The song dates back to November 1977,” Pete Shelley told The Guardian in 2006. “We were on a roll. It was only six months since we’d finished the first album. Up in Manchester this was what we used to dream of… a whirlwind of tours, interviews, TV. We were living the life.”
The band were on a headlining tour at the time, and found themselves staying at the Blenheim Guest House ahead of a gig at the Clouds (also known as the Cavendish Ballroom) in Edinburgh. Sex, drugs, and/or rock’n’roll were however not on the menu that night. The young band opted for a quiet night in, and settled down in front of a 1955 Hollywood musical on BBC2: Guys And Dolls, starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, and Frank Sinatra.
“We were in the guest house enjoying our pints of beer,” Shelley recalled. “We were sitting in the TV room half-watching the musical Guys and Dolls. One of the characters, Miss Adelaide [Vivian Blaine], is saying to Marlon Brando’s character, ‘Wait till you fall in love with someone you shouldn’t have.’ I thought, ‘fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have?’ Hmm, that’s good.”
The following day Shelley wrote the lyrics of the song in a van outside the main post office on nearby Waterloo Place. “I did have a certain person in mind,” he said, “but I’ll save that for my kiss’n’tell. The music just seemed to follow, fully formed.”
The band’s drummer back then, John Maher, remembers the tour which also took the young band to Dundee and Falkirk, but is a little hazy on the details of the Blenheim. “I don’t remember the guest house in particular,” he told Edinburgh Evening News, “but it was the beginning of us getting big and we were staying in lots of them, it would have been basic, two to a room, no en-suite toilets. We had a name for them, ‘Mrs Bogle’s’.
For the longest time, the openly bisexual Shelley shied away from answering questions about who he’d had on his mind when he wrote Ever Fallen In Love. Eventually, he revealed that it was about a male friend named Francis. In Buzzcocks – the Complete History, author Tony McGartland further revealed that the object of Shelley’s affections was Francis Cookson, a musical collaborator who Shelley lived with for about seven years.
The lyrics consist of two verses (of which one is repeated) and a chorus. According to music critic Mark Deming, “the lyrics owe less to adolescent self-pity than the more adult realization of how much being in love can hurt – and how little one can really do about it.”
You spurn my natural emotions
You make me feel like dirt and I’m hurt
And if I start a commotion
I run the risk of losing you and that’s worse
Ever fallen in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
You shouldn’t have fallen in love with
In an interview with Uncut magazine, Shelley recalled: “The opening line was originally ‘You piss on my natural emotions,’ but because Orgasm Addict hadn’t been getting radio play because of its title, I needed something a bit subtler. So I came up with ‘spurn.’ It had the same sort of disregard, but wasn’t so likely to offend!”
In the same Uncut interview the song’s producer Martin Rushent recalled: “Pete played me Ever Fallen In Love… for the first time and my jaw hit the floor. I felt it was the strongest song that they had written – clever, witty lyrics, great hook lines. I suggested backing vocals to highlight the chorus and make it even more powerful. No one could hit the high part, so I did it. I’d sung in bands in my youth and I also worked as a backing singer.”
Both the verse and the chorus start with minor chords, which gives the song a distinctly downbeat, edgy feel. The minor chords and the B-major-to-D-major move in the chorus are unusual for a 1970s punk song, yet they contribute to its ear-catching nature, along with the vocal melody and the short lead guitar line that shows up in every pre-verse section.
John Maher is still proud of the song which became a classic: “If it wasn’t for Pete’s tangled love life he probably wouldn’t have written the great songs he did so I guess we have to thank him for that. At the time I never paid much attention to the lyrics of the song. I was more interested in the melody that I had to play to, but looking back now with the benefit of hindsight I can see that he was doing something really different from a lot of what was going on in punk at the time. He was writing great, melodic pop tunes and he really didn’t give a toss, which I suppose is more punk than anything.”
I can’t see much of a future
Unless we find out what’s to blame, what a shame
And we won’t be together much longer
Unless we realize that we are the same
While the song did not go to the top of the charts, it was a favourite amongst its core audiences. The song was ranked as the #1 track of the year for 1978 by NME, showing its wide appeal to fans of rock, alt-pop, and punk.
It’s worth noting that the UK pop band Fine Young Cannibals recorded a cover version of this song for the Something Wild soundtrack in 1986. It was later included on their 1987 album The Raw & the Cooked. This version of the song surpassed the Buzzcocks version in the UK singles charts, making it to #9. It also garnered more airplay in the United States and might be the more well-known version of the song. Fine Young Cannibals did a fine job of turning the song into a pop song, no doubt bringing a great song to an even wider audience, but ultimately the desperate intensity in Pete Shelley’s original delivery packs a far greater emotional punch. Still, Shelley was very happy to see the song covered, even appearing in the Five Young Cannibals video of the song.
Since then, several other acts have covered this song, the most noteworthy being the charity tribute single to DJ John Peel released 21 November 2005. It featured artists including Roger Daltrey (The Who), The Datsuns, The Futureheads, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Peter Hook (New Order), Elton John, El Presidente, Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Pete Shelley and the Soledad Brothers. The single was supported by Peel’s son, Tom Ravenscroft, and proceeds went to Amnesty International.
In May 2021, the DC’s Legends of Tomorrow season 6 episode The Ex-Factor prominently featured the song. It becomes the backdrop to the story arc of the characters John Constantine and Zari Tarazi as they try to figure out the nature of their complex relationship. It all ends – in usual crazy LoT fashion – with the two of them somehow ending up performing it together on a talent show set in the future. It was cool to see, and it has hopefully exposed new audiences and age groups to an amazing song.
Pete Shelley died of a suspected heart attack in December 2018. He was only 63. He had moved to Estonia in 2012 with his wife Greta, an Estonian, preferring the less-hectic pace there to London where he had lived for decades. Tributes came in from an impressively diverse range of artists and music industry professionals, and if you search YouTube you will find footage of dozens of bands playing one of his songs in tribute. Invariably, Ever Fallen In Love… will be the most common pick.
The song was a landmark moment not just for Buzzcocks, but for punk in general. The song bravely displayed raw feelings of hurt, wearing its heart on its sleeve at time when punk rock mainly did that to show anger or opposition to something. Pete Shelley showed that punk rock could be a thoughtful expression of naked feeling, while also embracing the finer points of classic pop songcraft.
At the same time, the band was wary of being seen as a band chasing chart success. Pete Shelley said, “I think there’s a lingering misconception that we were just a singles outfit, but if you listen to the albums, they contain lots of things beyond three minute love songs. As well as people like The Beatles, Bolan and Bowie, I always enjoyed more challenging stuff like Can or Yoko Ono.”
The song is one of the genuine anthems of the punk generation – a forlorn cry from the heart packaged into a punchy melody.
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