I Didn't Meet The Buzzcocks, But I Brushed With Their Aura

It's that guitar solo: it totally took/takes the p*ss out of every single overblown guitar solo that has happened before it or since.
Once Spiral Scratch came out, you knew you were OK because punk had  a sense of humour as well as a sense of disruption and fury.
The first bass guitar that I ever played belonged to the Buzzcocks.
Sue, the raven-haired bass player in Poison Girls was from Manchester and had somehow acquired it and lent it to me for the first few Joby and the Hooligans gigs. It was a deep red semi-acoustic with f-holes, and it was magnificent. It was a bit like being given a magic wand to play; every time I touched it, I glowed. It was hard to give it up for the little Jedson, cream with white scratch plates, that I bought later on and it was the best way to start, honestly.
The washing up job in the French restaurant meant that I missed many of the punk gigs in Brighton but attended by default.
The night of the riot at their Brighton gig, a local drummer turned up at my house at midnight bearing a cymbal that he had nicked from them. I think he felt guilty and needed a witness to what he had done: he looked very sheepish on the doorstep.
Later, I met a chap who had rolled one of their amplifiers into a multi-storey car park with one of his friends, and hid it behind a car until the furore had died down.
I had mixed feelings about this, because Buzzcocks were clearly not prats. Someone said that their roadies had been really heavy, and that's what made things kick off, but I felt it was a bit weird to nick stuff from your own. It would have bene different if it was Led Zeppelin or one of the other poncy dinosaur bands, I thought.
They were like the boys from school, weren't they? Pete Shelley was a good guy.

Photo of Poison Girls below via Pete Fender: and that's the bass. I wonder if it was Sue who invited Buzzcocks to play in the Vault? She knew them quite well I think.