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The Herald Scotland
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Buzzcocks on how punk went from Glasgow ban to Bellahouston
On Saturday though a star-studded lineup of the scene's progenitors - Stranglers included - will headline Bellahouston Park, capacity circa 35,000. Buzzcocks were there from the beginning, as Britain's youth turned to spiky hair and safety pins, and they'll be there in Glasgow on Saturday when the combat boots are dusted off by the city's elder punks. Read More: Who better, then, to chart the journey from banned to Bellahouston. Guitarist and last suriving original member Steve Diggle tells The Herald: "We brought the Sex Pistols to Manchester when it (punk) was kind of unknown, really. "That's where we all met, the next day me, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley plugged into an amp and a terrible beauty was born, to quote Yates. "A couple of weeks later we opened for the Pistols in Manchester, we got reviewed and that put it on the map. So we were there right at the beginning. "We were doing that in Manchester and The Clash and the Pistols in London and we got to know them well, there was a connection between us because all of this was kind of new at the time. "The landscape was kind of dead, really, you had prog rock bands but they'd run their course and nothing was happening for a few years. "Suddenly you got this excitement, and everybody came alive." The Britain into which punk was birthed was one of high inflation and unemployment, of industrial unrest and a shifting political climate. It was famously referred to as "the sick man of Europe", with unemployment reaching 5.5% in 1978, the year the first Buzzcocks album was released. Diggle says: "Britain was black and white and grey - it was just boring, you know? "I was coming up to 20 and you kind of wanted some excitement. I'd been playing guitar since I was 17 and for three years I'd been trying to write songs and all that stuff and then suddenly this punk rock thing happened. "It hit the country like a carpet bomb, it was an explosion of the imagination - people thought things were possible, including ourselves, it was like an exchange between the bands and the crowd. "There wasn't any rivalry then, because we all started at the same time so if I run into a member of The Clash, or the Pistols, or The Jam we know where we come from so there isn't any rivalry. "It was great, we'd put a record out and they'd acknowledge that, then we'd acknowledge theirs. "It seemed like every week a single from one of those bands was coming out, it was a magical time." The poster for the punk all dayer (Image: DF Concerts) As punk was booming in the UK a similar thing was happening across the Atlantic with bands like The Ramones, Dead Kennedys and Television. However, Diggle doesn't feel there was a great deal of cultural overlap. He says: "The Ramones released their first album just before we released Spiral Scratch (the first Buzzcocks EP) and that was kind of a big influence, that first Ramones album was great. "I think it inspired The Clash and really everybody, it was fast and furious and straight to the point - all the music was direct in those early days. "So we had The Ramones and in the past MC5, Iggy Pop, The Suzies and all that stuff, and obviously The Velvet Underground. "But me and Pete grew up as kids of the 60s really, with The Kinks, The Beatles, The Who. "So we were aware of the American part but this was more of a British thing, all those bands were very British and thinking about things more over here, the stuff we were all going through at the time. "Actually when we first went to America, The Ramones came to see us. We got off the stage and they were all there, and they were kind of saying, 'we do that straight ahead stuff but you guys take it somewhere else' so they loved that about the Buzzcocks." Buzzcocks in 1978 (Image: Newsquest) British punk also carried a more political bent, though Diggle's band were less overt than contemporaries like The Clash. He says: "The Buzzcocks sang a lot about the human condition, you know? "There were political ones, Joe Strummer loved my song 'Autonomy' on the first album. "We had distorted guitars and we had that attitude, we had things like 'Orgasm Addict' (which was banned by the BBC). "The Clash were a bit more externally political but a lot of my songs are political underneath. Songs like 'Why She's A Girl From A Chain Store', we had a lot of complexity with it as well, we had a bit of existentialism about us. "It wasn't as simple as going 'the government's wrong', it was dealing with other complexities as well. We knew the government was wrong but it's not a case of thinking the crowd is so simple they don't understand those kind of things. "When we all started it was all under this umbrella of punk, initially no-one could particularly differentiate between any of them. "But then as we kept making albums each band got its own identity, so even within that movement we were all different." Though bands like The Clash and the Sex Pistols had their pop chops too, Buzzcocks were perhaps the most melodic of the first wave bands. Their influence can be heard in the lineage of punk and its offshoots, from Nirvana and Green Day to Supergrass and the Manic Street Preachers. L-R. Steve Diggle, Steve Garvey, John Maher, Pete Shelley (Image: Fin Costello/Redferns) Diggle says: "It's quite amazing, at the time you're just making a record you don't think you'll be inspiring other people. "It's a great compliment, Nicky Wire from the Manic Street Preachers said 'when we started we were playing 'Autonomy'. REM, U2, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and loads of other bands you've probably never heard of will say 'we used to do a Buzzcocks song when we were starting out'. "You can hear a lot of echoes of Buzzcocks in other people's records, Green Day and people like that, which is not something we ever set out to do." The group has somewhat come full-circle, and will once again play alongside the Sex Pistols at the 'punk all-dayer' at Glasgow Green on June 21, as will The Stranglers, The Undertones, Skids and The Rezillos. Punk's not dead, as they say, though admittedly some of those groups' former members are. Diggle says: "They still do Shakespeare and he's a lot older than us, so we've got time! "We were supposed to headline Hyde Park twice and were banned because we were a punk band, but we've gone full-circle here. "It'll be a great day playing with all those bands. It's still alive and well, you know? Still rolling on." The Punk All Dayer takes place at Bellahouston Park on Saturday, June 21. Tickets are available here.
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
He called the 2008 crisis, took a 14-year break and today warns us that a fresh financial storm is brewing
Steve Diggle's Artradis was once the biggest hedge fund in Asia. In the era of the global financial crisis and 'The Big Short,' his tail-risk fund — a portfolio of instruments that benefit from highly adverse market conditions — doubled its assets and returned $3 billion to investors in the process. Diggle's strategy of being long volatility and short credit risk, with a particular focus on the then-nascent credit-default-swap market, proved tremendously successful as markets malfunctioned and asset prices collapsed. The fundamentally bearish approach proved tremendously successful as investors realized how badly risk had been mispriced in a long bull market stretching back to 2002. 'The situation is extreme': I'm 65 and leaving my estate to only one grandchild. Can the others contest my will? My ex-wife said she should have been compensated for working part time during our marriage. Do I owe her? S&P 500 scores best May since 1990, but stocks end month with fresh tariff worries My daughter's boyfriend, a guest in my home, offered to powerwash part of my house — then demanded money Five emerging pillars of stock-market support that should keep investors from rushing the exits Diggle closed his long volatility fund in 2011 when unprecedented — and concerted —quantitative easing by the world's largest central banks depressed volatility to such an extent that the Artradis blueprint was no longer applicable. Things have moved on since 2011, though, and Diggle thinks the time is right to reinitiate his strategy. 'I see a lot of the same complacency and mispricing of risk we witnessed before the global financial crisis began to bubble in 2007,' he told MarketWatch in an interview. Diggle believes, he said, that the opportunity set that markets present to his new Vulpes AI Long/Short, or VAILS fund, launched on May 1, is very similar, which he'll be running from London rather than Artradis's former home of Singapore. There are some differences, however. In 2005–08 much of the hidden risk and excess leverage in the system was in banks and mortgages. Said Diggle: 'In 2025 financial markets are riddled with several fault lines, but now the bubble and the dangerous leverage is centered on private equity and private credit.' Here, again, the assets are misunderstood, poorly regulated, illiquid, mispriced or overvalued, and divestment is difficult without taking hits or marking down the value of other holdings. First, given the enormous budget deficits and huge debts incurred by a decade of QE and then the global pandemic, said Diggle, 'central banks are simply not in a position to implement similarly accommodative monetary policy again.' Second, there is inflation in the system once more. After 40 years of exporting deflation, China is no longer in that position, as globalization is reversing, and protectionist economics are destabilizing supply chains. Third, geopolitics present a clear and present threat to the security of asset markets. Fourth, the U.S. equity market, representing two-thirds of the world's total, is now — by most valuation metrics — expensive. Lastly, he added, ''the world's largest and most powerful economy is being piloted by a disruptive and, some may contend, reckless captain whose unpredictability and irrationality have generated wild market turbulence.' Of course, there are other tail-risk funds and strategies that benefit from bearish views. So what does he add? Straight off the bat, Diggle replies: 'I did it before.' He pointed out that he never gated Artradis during the global financial crisis. Unlike many funds during those periods of wild swings and illiquidity, Artradis always allowed clients to get their money out immediately. Investors back then were frequently obliged to liquidate their tail-risk hedges to offset losses elsewhere. Diggle is also keen to point out that 'I'm not a permabear, like the Nouriel Roubinis and Albert Edwardses of this world.' His investment opinions are tactical, not ideological. His misgivings about asset prices have a simple origin: 'Not enough people have hedges.' VAILS intends to combine selected long volatility positions in indices and stocks with credit-default swaps, not unlike the approach that served Diggle and his investors so well in 2008. For investors running tail-risk funds, the challenge is staying alive while the market, as it usually does, rises. 'We were able to carve out sufficient returns in a low-volatility environment through capital arbitrage,' said Diggle. That means trying to exploit differences in valuations between different securities of the same issuer. This time round, VAILS is unlikely to deploy capital arbitrage strategies. Markets, in some respect at least, have become more efficient in the last 15 years. While positioning for the correction that Diggle believes must come, and generating some alpha to keep investors content in the meantime, VAILS intends to wrap the long volatility/CDS strategy up with a complementary trading model. His proprietary model uses an AI engine, designed to trawl through sheaves of corporate data and communications and spotlight assets that are abnormally vulnerable to failure, be that because they are overvalued, fraudulent or high risk. 'I am getting very frustrated': My mother's adviser has not returned my calls. He manages $1 million. Is this normal? This chart shows why investors should be worried about the latest bond-market selloff It's my dream to travel to Africa. My husband says it's not on his bucket list. Do I pay for him or go alone? 'What we found horrified us': My elderly relative mistook charity envelopes for overdue bills — and gave thousands to other family members Bond 'vigilantes' are sending warnings globally. What does that mean for your portfolio? Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
