FACT SHEET

Title: TBC

Due: TBC Production: TBC Songs: Heavy Street/Queen Of The Scene/The Greatest Of Them All

The Buzz: “You feel like you’re giving it relevance. I know we’ve got all those classics from the past and so doing the new ones is good and invigorating, you know? It’s time to create a new future for the band and take it somewhere else a little bit.”

Steve Diggle industrial estate in Tottenham,” says Diggle. “There’s a realism to it, you feel like The Velvet Underground in New York!”

The studio also boasts a desk built by German production legend Conny Plank which, says Diggle, was used by Eno, Bowie and Bob Marley. Guitarist Mani Perazzoli may also join for the sessions. “I think [2022 LP]

was like a bridge album,” says Diggle, “where we had all the ingredients you know about Buzzcocks, but it moved on with little twists and turns. Hopefully with his one, we can turn it upside down. You can’t recreate the past, but you can create the future.”

Songs will include Heavy Street, which Diggle calls “a great heavy funk dub track… about having your phone nicked and being stabbed in the street,” while Queen Of The Scene concerns the personality-disordering effects of modern celebrity and media overload. “There’s a big power ballad as well,” says Diggle, ”a story about a girl called The Greatest Of Them All. Imagine if the Small Faces had a stadium anthem.” He intends to use a £20 second-hand Bontempi organ. Might Conny Plank’s desk lend Deutsche kosmische flavours? “I wouldn’t mind metronomic drumming so you can drive along to it, Autobahnstyle,” says Diggle, “but with guitars, rather than the bleeps.

“I’m in the fast lane now,” he continues. “You can see the end of life in some ways. I love being in the studio, so to have doing that hanging over you adds a bit intensity to it.”

Is he thinking of Shelley, wonders MOJO? “It breaks my heart and I wish he was still here,” he says, “but you cannot live your life just thinking about that. You’ve got to keep moving, otherwise I’d be in a fucking lunatic asylum. He would have carried on and done what he was doing. Anyway, I’ll be seeing him before I know it!”

Something else he’s done is a new memoir: co-written with Simon Goddard, Autonomy: Portrait Of A Buzzcock arrives in August. “It’s my rock’n’roll journey,” says Diggle. “Hopefully it’ll be an inspiration for a working-class kid, that things can happen in your life.”

“You can’t recreate the past, but you can create the future.” STEVE DIGGLE

and Daddy: Grant compares it to “the Carpenters if John Carpenter were also a member” …re-formed ’80s hitmakers