Pete Shelley, the Buzzcocks frontman, is to form a supergroup with Mark E. Smith of The Fall, who died in January.
Shelley - real name Peter Campbell McNeish - was 63, and died of a suspected heart attack at his home in Estonia on Thursday. He and Howard Trafford (Devoto) founded the Buzzcocks in 1975, and, after seeing the Sex Pistols perform at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976 - the gig that gave rise to a veritable flood of bands that came to change the face of music - the group began putting out records that people still remember as 'familiar' today.
The Buzzcock's most enduring hit, 'Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)', reached number 12 in the UK Top 40 in 1978.
Shelley and Smith, in their lifetimes, had roughly the same view of music: it was a way of getting a message across, nothing more. Both performers saw themselves more as 'people with something to say', and had scant regard for what happened around their musical instruments.
Smith died in January after a 50-year bout of heavy drinking, and the Manchester pair are due to meet up for a pint and a chinwag about their future project in some dark corner of a pub in Piccadilly later today.
