At first he didn’t take much notice of the woman with the big smile and blonde hair. The Buzzcocks had just played New York’s Madison Square Garden and guitarist Steve Diggle was drained from the performance.
“As I came off, she came up and said ‘I really enjoyed your show’ and asked me for a cigarette. I said, ‘This is worse than being in Camden.’
“I didn’t know who it was – and then someone told me, ‘That was Meg Ryan’.”
The next night another Hollywood star, Drew Barrymore, was bumming his cigs.
That was in 2003, 22 years after the Manchester band first split up.
They had formed in 1976, in the raging furnace of punk, and blitzed the charts for five years with their sublimely catchy energy-charged hits like Ever Fallen In Love, What Do I Get? and Everybody’s Happy Nowadays.
Steve, 68, sees those songs as musical postcards winging their way around the world, winning unexpected fans. Like Kurt Cobain who turned up backstage at their 1993 Boston show with his Nirvana bandmates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, when the trio were the hottest band on the planet.
“Kurt said he loved me smashing TV sets on stage and loved my vocals on Harmony In My Head,” Steve recalls.
“I told him you need to smoke 20 cigarettes to get that sound. We got on really well.”
So well that Cobain invited them to support Nirvana on their 1994 European tour.
“One night he asked how we’d survived so long. I told him the answer was a sense of humour which seemed to faze him.
“But you have to build that as part of your armour, especially coming from Manchester where it rains all the time.
“Without laughs how can you survive sharing a van with the same people for months on end?”
Cobain killed himself before that April’s London show, which the Buzzcocks were also due to open.
“A terrible loss, he was a great artist,” Steve says.
“On stage he was so intense, emotional – he had real presence.
“But they were all talented. Near the end of that tour Dave Grohl told me he had a couple of songs he wanted to do after the tour, and I’m thinking ‘Yeah, the drummer’s got some songs…’”
He laughs: “You’d never have guessed he’d become the Foo Fighters…amazing talent.”
Other Buzzcocks fans included the Ramones, Green Day, Joy Division the Manic Street Preachers – who were playing Steve’s song Autonomy before they wrote their own – and a doorman named Eddie who started coming to Diggle’s parties and became a good friend. “I was shocked years later when he turned out to be Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam.”
Vedder asked the Buzzcocks to open their 2003 US tour. It was a far cry from Diggle’s humble beginnings, recalled in his new memoir Autonomy.
His father was a delivery driver who could also turn his hand to painting and decorating. His mother had a small children’s shop. “She sold prams and kids’ clothes but she gave too much credit and lost it. She was too kind hearted.”
They moved to “a row of terraced houses that could have been twinned with Coronation Street” when he was seven.
Not long after, Steve’s parents bought him a transistor radio: “One day fiddling about on the radio I heard the Beatles’ Love Me Do and the world changed.”
He taught himself to play rudimentary guitar, mastering the opening notes of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy on one string, before learning
Beatles songs.
Largely self-educated, he’d pore over writers who weren’t on his comprehensive school curriculum, like James Joyce, DH Lawrence
and Dostoevsky.
Mod excited him.
The music of The Who and Motown, the fashion, the scooters – he had a Lambretta TV 175, an Li 150 with a chrome exhaust and a Vespa GS sold to him by a priest. “He gave it to me on condition I put what I thought it was worth in the collection box – I put £4 in and scarpered.”
Diggle was arrested at 16 for stealing a scooter and spent a weekend in the cells. He briefly worked in an iron foundry.
Always more loveable rogue than hardened criminal, he had just turned 20 when he saw the Sex Pistols play their first gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall.
Malcolm McLaren introduced him to future Buzzcocks guitarist Pete Shelley and singer Howard Devoto – Diggle tells the full story in his memoir.
Incredibly, just weeks later they were supporting the Pistols at the same venue.
“I’d never been on stage before, except to read a poem at school which was embarrassing. We did 20 minutes and went straight to the bar.”
Their five-song set included covers of The Troggs’ I Can’t Control Myself and Captain Beefheart’s I Love You, You Big Dummy. By the time they joined The Clash’s 1977 White Riot tour their set was all original and Devoto had quit.
Pete Shelley took over vocals and bassist Steve moved onto guitar, giving them a unique two-guitar sound and a winning formula of riffs, melodies and smart lyrics. “The Who’s early, three-minute songs and the Kinks were my influences,” he says.
Destroying TV sets on stage was his equivalent of Townsend’s theatrical equipment smashing.
“I got a huge electric shock doing it with a steel microphone at the start, but didn’t realise how much it hurt because I was pumped with adrenalin.”
The pinnacle of punk was 1977, he says.
“Chaotic, but magical. It felt like the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll again. Punk opened up people’s minds and people’s lives. It was our blues, Manchester blues,” he adds thoughtfully. “It came from the cotton mills, people working long hours for low pay, others stranded on the dole.”
But Darkness lurked there too. Diggle’s near neighbours included the Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
“We had a bonfire at the end of our street and Brady and Hindley were just watching us kids run around,” he recalls.
“We were seven or eight. Eventually he said, ‘Come and sit next to Myra’. That’s how easy it must have been to entice kids.
“We didn’t sit next to her, thank God.”
As the Buzzcocks grew, they became agony uncles for their fans.
“They’d tell us their problems and ask us for advice. Then they’d ask about politics.”
They split in 1981. “We had to – when the Buzzcocks came to town we had orgies, parties, groupies, cocaine…it was like Hammer Of The Gods, we took everything.
“Then we went to America and it all happened again, but bigger. It was proper rock ’n’ roll. We weren’t thinking long time, we were thinking for the moment. But it started to burn us out.”
Diggle carried on with his own band until the Buzzcocks reformed in 1989, even rubbing shoulders with Coronation Street regulars.
“I held the fruit machine while Ivy Tilsley went for change as she had two lemons,” he laughs. “Mike Baldwin bought me a whisky and lime.”
When Pete died in 2018, Steve copped a backlash for carrying on.
“I kind of understood, so at first I mainly played the songs I’d written” – including Fast Cars and Top 40 hit, Harmony In My Head. He also wrote the Everybody’s Happy Nowadays riff.
Last year’s critically acclaimed Buzzcocks album, Sonics In The Soul, more than justified his decision to keep going.
Steve is now touring the United States for six weeks, followed by French festivals, shows in Australia and New Zealand, with a new album scheduled for early 2025.
Surprisingly, his memoir swerves sex-and-drugs sensationalism.
“What mattered most to me was to tell the true story of Manchester punk,” he says. “James Joyce said you’ve got to feel alive. I’ve given it my all and it sort of worked out. But had I ended up a bricklayer in Manchester, I still would have put as much effort in.”
● Autonomy: Portrait Of A Buzzcock by Steve Diggle (Omnibus, £20) is out now.