The room on the Loop is not built for nostalgia acts that phone it in. Delmar Hall is too close, the floor too unforgiving, the sound too honest. On Sunday night, October 4, Buzzcocks treated that room like a club in 1978 and got away with it.
Doors were at 8. By the time Steve Diggle and the band hit the stage, the general-admission floor was packed with the usual Loop mix: original-era punks, kids who found Singles Going Steady on a playlist, and the people who have been waiting a long time. Songkick had the last Buzzcocks St. Louis date at 34 years ago. That gap showed in the faces and in the volume.
This is the 50th-anniversary run, built around Attitude Adjustment, the band’s eleventh studio album, out January 30 on Cherry Red. It is the second full record since Pete Shelley’s death in 2018, and the first time a lot of this city has seen the band without him. Diggle, the remaining original, carries vocals and guitar. Chris Remington holds the bass, Danny Farrant the drums. The songs still sound like Buzzcocks. That is the whole argument, and Sunday night it held.
Diggle has described the current set as a three-tier hour and a half: the Singles Going Steady hits, the deeper album tracks, and the newer material from Sonics in the Soul and Attitude Adjustment. That is what St. Louis got. The night leaned on the songs that built the name — “What Do I Get?,” “I Don’t Mind,” “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” “Orgasm Addict,” “Love You More,” “Promises,” “Why Can’t I Touch It?,” “Harmony in My Head” — and on “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve),” which still stops a room cold and then starts it again. Newer cuts, including “Queen of the Scene” and “Senses Out of Control,” sat in the same tempo and the same bite. Nobody checked their phone during them.
Diggle does not try to be Shelley. He sings the catalog in his own voice, a little rougher, a little more bark than ache, and the band plays it fast and clean. Remington’s bass is the glue. Farrant keeps the songs at the length they were written, which is the right length. No extended jams, no speech longer than a sentence. Manchester punk-pop was always about getting to the chorus before the feeling wore off. They still do that.
Delmar Hall helped. About 800 capacity, all ages, general admission, the room next door to The Pageant on Delmar Boulevard. The mix was bright without turning the guitars into a wash. You could hear the hooks. You could also hear the floor singing the “whoa-ohs.”
The next morning Diggle posted a photo and four words that covered it: “St Louis Missouri u s a an amazing night.” He was not overselling it. Fifty years in, the songs still do the work, and the band still plays them like they mean it. For a city that had not had them since the early ’90s, Sunday was less a reunion than a correction.
