Homosapien
	Produced by Martin Rushent and Pete Shelley
	Released on December 1981
	US CHART POSITION #121
	Find it at GEMM
AL 6602 cover [high resolution photo]

A ll right. Apparently Pete Shelley loves boys and synthesizers. All right. Let me just scratch The Buzzcocks off my Bands Most Likely to Take Over the World (BMLTOW) list... scratcha scratcha scratcha. Now, that leaves The Clash and Adam & The Ants. (Okay, so the list was doomed to failure from the get-go.) Pete Shelley, the heart and brain of The Buzzcocks, sacrificed both organs to the great god of technology and emerged as a club wunderkind with the single “Homosapiens” (which, from this point onward, I will not be touching with a ten-foot stick with doody on the end of it). Where The Buzzcocks were raw passion and emotion, the music on Homosapien is icy stuff: Gary Numan, Peter Schilling, pasty-faced Europeans who had graduated from street kidz to sartorial sophisticates. Underneath it all Shelley is still an ace songwriter, but you’ve got some digging to do before “Qu’est-ce Que C’est Que Ca,” “Guess I Must Have Been In Love With Myself” and “I Generate A Feeling” generate any genuine warmth. (Imagine me kind of nodding my head and saying “I guess that sounds a little like Something’s Gone Wrong Again.” That’s the most you can hope for after a few spins.) It is such a different chapter than The Buzzcocks that I’ll warn fans of the one to steer clear of the other. However, I would say the same to Pistols fans about PiL, and there are records by Love and Rockets, Devo and Sparks that would likewise leave original fans feeling cold. Punks are a mercurial lot by nature, and many of them took pains to embrace disco as if nothing could be more shocking. I suppose that’s true, but I wish they could have agreed on just one of them to do it (say, Lydon), so that we could have been spared BAD’s beatbox and Shelley’s bloodless warbling.

AL 6602 back cover

TRACK LISTING

1. HOMOSAPIEN
2. YESTERDAY'S NOT HERE
3. I GENERATE A FEELING
4. KEATS SONG
5. QU'EST-CE QUE C'EST QUE CA
6. I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS
7. GUESS I MUST HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH MYSELF
8. PUSHER MAN
9. JUST ONE OF THOSE AFFAIRS
10. IT'S HARD ENOUGH KNOWING
    
    CD reissue bonus tracks
    
11. WITNESS THE CHANGE
12. MAXINE
13. IN LOVE WITH SOMEBODY ELSE
14. HOMOSAPIEN (DUB)
15. WITNESS THE CHANGE/I DON'T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS (DUB)
16. LOVE IN VAIN
    
    US LP track listing
    
1. HOMOSAPIEN    4:32
2. YESTERDAY'S NOT HERE    4:08
3. LOVE IN VAIN    3:05
4. JUST ONE OF THOSE AFFAIRS    3:37
5. QU'ESCT-CE QUE C'EST QUE CA    4:18
6. I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS    3:27
7. WITNESS THE CHANGE    4:47
8. GUESS I MUST HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH MYSELF    3:33
9. I GENERATE A FEELING    3:10
10. IN LOVE WITH SOMEBODY ELSE    3:00
    
    All songs written by Pete Shelley

CREDITS

PETE SHELLEY -- engineer
Martin Rushent -- engineer
Paul Henry -- art direction
Bruno Christian Tilley -- graphics
Trevor Rogers -- photography

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