As British punk rock reaches its official 30th birthday, One band remains as resilient in 2007 as they were thirty years earlier. That band are Buzzocks and they come to The Ironworks Live Music Venue, Inverness on May 23rd 2007

“Sometimes I feel as if we’ve been on borrowed time ever since our first gig,” laughs singer/guitarist and chief songwriter Pete Shelley, who formed the group with original frontman Howard Devoto at Bolton Institute Of Technology in the winter of ‘75. Just over a year later, in January 1977, the month Buzzcocks released that monumental debut EP Spiral Scratch (recently praised by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos as “a punk landmark responsible for starting alternative music from the ‘80s to the present day”), Devoto famously quit Buzzcocks Mk I to form Magazine.

“Full respect to Howard.” says Steve Diggle, bass player on Spiral Scratch but soon to become Buzzcocks' second singer/songwriter/guitarist.

Buzzcocks would sign with United Artists, becoming one of the most commercially successful punk groups of the era. Releasing classic albums such as 1978’s Another Music In A Different Kitchen and Love Bites, 1979’s A Different Kind Of Tension along with twelve of the most immaculate and inventive ’45s in the history of pop (the first eight of which would later be collected as the flawless Singles Going Steady, since hailed by Uncut magazine as “possibly the greatest A- and B-side compilation of any band, ever”).

“There’s a lot of bands today citing Buzzcocks as an influence,” says Diggle, in summing up why he and Shelley are still active, “which is always nice, but a lot of music today is sexless. Buzzcocks, to me, has always been about putting sex in music, and I don’t mean in a lap-dancing way. Music is based on sex, it's an animalistic thing like a Jackson Pollock painting, it's a vicious 21st century thing. There has to be sex in music. I'm sure if Freud was here he'd say the same thing. You've got to stir the loins like DH Lawrence, and that's what a lot of bands today lack. But it’s there in this album and it’s why we’re still here.”

From 1977 to 2007. Thirty years of sex, punk and some of the greatest pop music ever made.

Buzzocks tickets go on sale at 10 am April 4th priced at £15.00 and are available from Box Office 0871 7894 179 or www.ironworksvenue.com