UK punk legends the Buzzcocks to play Tumbleroot in Santa Fe

On Saturday, May 3, Tumbleroot Brewery and Distillery in Santa Fe will host British pop punk legends the Buzzcocks, whose high-octane performances remain as enthralling as ever, after nearly a half-century of touring and through several major lineup changes over the years.

The Buzzcocks, who formed in 1976, may not have been as aggressively anti-establishment as their peers The Sex Pistols, as overtly political as The Clash or as poetically complex as The Jam. Their up-tempo adolescent love songs, delivered with feel-good bubblegum hooks and tinged with cheeky humor, recalled the work of early rock ‘n’ roll hitmaker Little Richard, whose “Tutti Frutti” Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle has cited as a major influence.

In turn, the Buzzcocks influenced everyone from Oasis to Green Day to The White Stripes.

Diggle was recruited as the Buzzcocks bassist by punk impresario Malcolm McLaren, the band’s first manager. When the original lead vocalist Howard Devoto left shortly afterward to form Magazine, Pete Shelley became the new frontman, and Diggle was promoted from bass to guitar. Following Shelley’s death in 2018, Diggle took on the frontman role, writing and singing all the songs on the Buzzcocks’ tenth studio album, “Sonics in the Soul,” which they released in 2022.

The Buzzcocks’ name is not vulgar, as many assume, nor does it refer to a buzzcut hairstyle. At a time when “cock” in Northern English slang meant “lad” or “dude,” the band happened to notice a music review in Time Out, titled “It’s the Buzz, Cock!,” promoting a new teen music trend. So, a “buzzcock” could be defined as a buzzworthy or trend-obsessed young man — similar to the term “hypebeast” nowadays. Calling themselves the “Buzzcocks” was a way for the band to acknowledge their own desire to become a popular and commercially successful band, while at the same time poking fun at themselves for it.

But the Buzzcocks are not all hype and no substance.

“Buzzcocks were probably the most philosophical of all the punk bands,” Diggle said in a news release. “We’d read the existentialists. We were interested in the complexity of life. It was deep thinking wrapped up in a pop song.”

Their existential perspective is seen in early hits like “Why Can’t I Touch It?” (1979), which delves into the elusive and sometimes disappointing nature of appearances, asking if something “feels so real … why can’t I touch it?” The philosopher Martin Heidegger couldn’t have posed the problem any more succinctly.

Despite their infectious hooks and danceable melodies, the Buzzcocks’ deceptively simple lyrics often betray an existential longing, which has only strengthened in recent years. Diggle’s “Manchester Rain” (2022) asks “How do you solve a problem you can’t explain?” and “How do you catch a dream you just can’t find yet?” In other words, how can anyone become happy, or even have agency in their life, without first knowing the source of their dissatisfaction?

The Beat writer Jack Kerouac once said, “I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.” But isn’t grappling with one’s confusion in an honest way what makes great poets and philosophers “great?”

On one level, the Buzzcocks were just a group of working-class kids from Manchester, England, who wanted to become pop stars, but their souls always hungered for something deeper.

Nearly 50 years later, with Diggle as the last surviving original member of the band carrying on their legacy, the Buzzcocks continue to pose existential questions, seemingly no closer to uncovering the answers to those questions than when they first began. But they also continue to rock out and have fun, proving that one need not understand life to enjoy it.

As the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus once said, “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.”