Howard Devoto - “You were really going for it, weren’t you, lad..?”
Magazine have been very much on my mind of late. This stems from the aftershock of interviewing and seeing Dave Formula and Noko recently as they reimagined the post punk fabulists’ greatest shoulda been hits.
You can read the interview here - https://neilcooper.substack.com/p/dave-formula-and-noko-turning-over and the live review here - https://neilcooper.substack.com/p/dave-formula-and-noko-la-belle-angele
While Magazine frontman Howard Devoto gave his sort of blessing to Formula, Noko and Affection Place singer Peter Petersen*, his absence reminded me of the two interviews I did with Devoto for the Herald newspaper.
The first was in 2009, when Magazine first reformed. The second was two years later, after the group had recorded No Thyself, their first LP of new material in thirty years. Both interviews were done on the phone, and I remember feeling really nervous beforehand. I knew Devoto would be a slippery interviewee from having read articles on him going right back to the first music press piece I read on Magazine. That was in Sounds circa 1977 in a piece by by Jon Savage.
Sure enough, while Devoto was perfectly affable during both our chats, there was a gnomic sense of guardedness to everything he said that was hard to pin down. Not being able to see him didn’t help. Oh, to have had Zoom back then.
Looking back at that first piece now, my opening line totally tallies with what Formula said to me about Devoto’s approach. While both pieces are reined in by the confines of a 1200 word printed broadsheet rather than the expansive bandwidth Substack allows, the second piece for me is the most interesting. As Devoto opens up about mortality and suicide. for a second it seems like he lets his guard down. Oddly, I can’t find any trace of the 2011 piece, either in the Herald’s online archive, or in my own print-based archive from that time. If I hadn’t kept a copy of the text in my own online archive, it might have been lost forever.
Quotes from both interviews, I think, were used in Helen Chase’s forensic biography of Magazine, as were a couple of lines from the accompanying reviews. This was the case in both the original, published in 2009, and in the 2025 updated and expanded edition.
Seeing them all together in full as published below, several repeated phrases jump out from each. I was clearly trying to work out how to write about and define the band who, as a serious young man changed everything for me.
This began after I was startled awake by the urgency of their debut single, ‘Shot By Both Sides’. It continued when I saw them live on the Royal Iris ferry on the River Mersey and Liverpool University within a few nights of each other in 1980 as part of their The Correct Use of Soap tour. The four Magazine shows I saw during the 2009-2011 renaissance - there were gigs in Manchester and Edinburgh as well as the two Glasgow shows reviewed here - felt like vindication.
Looking at some of Devoto’s answers, both in my interviews and others from around the same time, I think he was sort of doing something similar to me in terms of using stock phrases. It was like he was working it up into some kind of routine. Of course, Howard…
At some point I’ll probably write about my growing up listening to my favourite group and the effect it had on me. More importantly, I hope Devoto sets down his thoughts on life in and out of Magazine from the inside. The world is waiting.
In the meantime, Dave Formula & Noko still have several dates to play yet; Nottingham Rescue Rooms, May 21; Leeds Brudenell Social Club, May 22; Manchester Academy 2, May 23. Tickets for all shows and all things Magazine here - https://wire-sound.com/news/
*Devoto issued a statement on the Magazine Facebook page on 18.5.26.
‘DAVE FORMULA & NOKO PLAY SONGS FROM UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS
Last year when Dave spoke to me about this venture with Noko I privately wished them well but said I wouldn’t be endorsing it.
So just to be clear: I’m officially neutral.
Love & peace everyone.’
Howard Devoto - The Second Coming…
Howard Devoto is trying to play the game. The vocalist and lyricist behind legendary Mancunian post-punk band Magazine clearly isn’t comfortable with doing interviews, but given that that after twenty-eight years the band have finally decided to reform for a handful of dates this week, he understands the expectations that go with it. Magazine may have split up in 1981 following a career book-ended by two classic singles, ‘Shot By Both Sides’ and ‘A Song From Under The Floorboards’, but they’re now regarded as one of the most influential bands ever.
Both Radiohead and Jarvis Cocker have covered ‘Shot By Both Sides’, while Devoto’s contemporary, Morrissey, who wrote ‘Last of the International Playboys’ about him, has played ‘A Song From Under The Floorboards’ in concert. As three-verse distillations of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground go, Magazine were nothing if not ambitious. Given the band’s prevailing elusiveness, however, one can’t help but wonder why they’ve chosen now for such a significant resurrection.
“Well, some things need to happen at some point, don’t they?” says Devoto of the reunion, “and we did actually get together for a few rehearsals in 2005. That sounded fine, but back then I had a proper job. I’m much more of a free man now.”
Given Devoto’s existential leanings, one can see a certain irony in this last statement, although now he’s no longer working as a full time photo archivist, his free time has allowed him to re-open the door on his past. It was Magazine keyboardist Dave Formula, however, who set things in motion.
“These dates have all been clustered around Dave’s solo album,” says Devoto, “which he’s been working on for the last couple of years. We all recorded different tracks separately, and I’d co-written something with Dave as well, so that was going on. Then we were contacted by a promoter who asked if there was any chance we might do something together, and within a couple of weeks that was that.”
One part of the equation missing from the line-up is Greenock-born guitarist John McGeoch, who died in 2004. McGeoch does appear, however, on Formula’s album, after an old studio tape was discovered with McGeoch heard between takes. This formed the basis of a brand new track by Formula, as well as a BBC Radio Two documentary tribute to the guitarist. The vacancy for the Magazine guitar slot has been filled by Noko, formerly Devoto’s foil in his post-Magazine project, Luxuria, and later of Apollo 440, much, it would seem, to Devoto’s pleasure.
“In a sense,” Devoto insists, “Noko wasn’t my choice, because I wasn’t there at the auditions. I left it to Dave, Barry (Adamson, on bass) and John (drummer Doyle), but he’s worked with all of us, either producing, co-writing or playing, so it kind of makes sense. He’s part of the framework.”
Formerly Howard Trafford, Devoto formed Magazine after leaving Buzzcocks, the band he led with Pete Shelley (nee McNeish) after the pair saw The Sex Pistols. The duo put the band on at a now legendary Manchester show attended by future members of The Fall, Joy Division and other luminaries, and released the Spiral Scratch EP, defining punk’s independent aesthetic. Devoto jumped ship shortly after, craving something more complex. Magazine was the result.
“When music entered my life,” Devoto recalls, “it entered like an emotional hurricane, and when I was a teenager I wouldn’t have thought it possible that I would end up making music. But something clicked, and if it hadn’t been through punk, and if it hadn’t happened in a very quick way, I’m not sure I would have ended up in music. I didn’t work on it, but it just seemed to take hold.”
After four albums of nouveau punk-prog-glam wrapped around the vocalist’s studied ennui and lyrical allusions to Proust and Dostoyevsky, Devoto called time on a band who had possibly become too clever for their own good. After a solo album and two releases fronting Luxuria, in 1990 he left the music business completely.
“A lot of that was to do with the lack of response to the second Luxuria album,” Devoto reflects, “which I would have right up there with the Magazine albums. I just thought, well, there’s a lot more of you than me, so that was that.”
Devoto came up for air in 2002 as one half of Buzzkunst, which reunited Devoto with Shelley. As for the rest of the band, McGeoch had left following 1980’s The Correct Use of Soap album to join Siouxsie and the Banshees, and later John Lydon’s Public Image Limited, while Adamson became one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds before embarking on a solo career. Formula joined Steve Strange’s Visage project with McGeoch and Adamson, while Doyle joined Richard Jobson’s Armoury Show with McGeoch. With such a patchwork of post-Magazine activity, then, just how well does the band’s own material stand up?
“Well,” says Devoto, “I’ve been listening to the records again, and on the whole have been very pleasantly and excitedly surprised, especially with The Correct Use of Soap. Somebody reminded me lately that I’d always said that album was designed to have a timeless quality. Now, thirty years on, I feel fairly vindicated. We were quite young when we made it, but those songs don’t feel like kids stuff, and as I start to step back into them, they still seem to stand up.”
Given the band’s welter of individual activities, any new material, or indeed any life for Magazine beyond the six scheduled shows seems unlikely. Devoto does, however, seem open to suggestion.
“One step at a time,” is how he puts it. “But we’ll see. Stuff like that can creep up on you and surprise you at the strangest times.”
As for attempting to pin down his thoughts on Magazine’s legacy beyond the songs, Devoto is awkward to the point of embarrassment.
“Do I really have to think about that?” he asks. “I can’t say it’s something I’ve even ever considered. That would be immodest, and I’m not capable of that.”
Magazine played the O2 Academy, Glasgow, on Monday February 16 2009.
This article first appeared in The Herald, February 12th 2009
Magazine
O2 Academy, Glasgow
February 16 2009
4 stars
Like some missing link between Roxy Music and Radiohead, Howard Devoto’s troupe of post-punk fabulists always understood the power of pure melodrama. So it is with this second coming twenty-eight years on. Against a back-drop of Linder Sterling’s chalk-faced chorus, the band enters to the strains of ‘The Thin Air’, a majestic instrumental by the band’s late guitarist, John McGeoch. “We’re still Magazine,” Devoto teases, sporting espadrilles, three-quarter length trousers and a dazzling off-pink jacket that threatens to bleach out his bald pate, “and I’m still Adam Faith.”
It’s a typically arch introduction to a ninety minute set of should’ve been hits, throughout which Devoto conducts the band the way a precocious two-year old would, updates a lyric in ‘Model Worker’, still the only love song to use the word ‘hegemony,’ to reference Obama, and, on ‘Definitive Gaze’, swoops across the stage, arms outstretched like a bird. Most theatrical of all is when he leads Rosalie Cunningham of uber-bobbed support band Ipso Facto to the microphone for a bittersweet collision of two waltz-time songs, ‘The Great Beautician In The Sky’ and ‘The Honeymoon Killers’.
Magazine live were always much looser, more urgent and appositely funky than their records’ polish suggested. Much of this stems from Barry Adamson’s gulping bass and the science-fiction ska of Dave Formula’s keyboards. Noko, Devoto’s former foil in his post-Magazine duo Luxuria, steps into McGeoch’s shoes admirably, making paranoid anthem ‘Shot By Both Sides’ sound scarier than ever. By the time they finish with their brutal version of Captain Beefheart’s ‘I Love You, You Big Dummy’, the Ipso Facto girls are in the heart of the crowd, dancing wildly aloft their companions’ shoulders. As closure on their back pages, it’s a wonderful image.
This article first appeared in The Herald, February 18th 2009
Howard Devoto - ‘Of course, Howard…’
“Suicide has always been quite an important idea to me,” says Howard Devoto, vocalist, lyricist and mouthpiece in chief of post-punk fabulists, Magazine. Devoto is talking about ‘Hello Mr Curtis (with apologies)’, the band’s recent single which trailed No Thyself, the first album of new Magazine material for thirty years.
The Mr Curtis in question is one Ian Curtis, the former singer with Magazine’s Manchester scene contemporaries Joy Division, who hanged himself on the eve of what should have been the band’s first American tour in 1980. Devoto’s song also references a certain Mr Cobain, as in the late Kurt, of 1990s grunge icons Nirvana, and another rock and roll suicide.
By the end of an appositely jaunty number in which both of his forebears are put on the couch and encouraged to explain what caused them pain enough to take their own lives, Devoto is declaring his own intentions to die like a king. Such a lofty pronouncement is up-ended somewhat when the monarch of these aspirations is revealed to be Elvis Presley, and that the said death will take place ‘on some god-forsaken toilet’. The outro of a song dedicated at recent live shows to author, Alzheimer’s sufferer and champion of assisted suicide Terry Pratchett finds Devoto scatting the all too familiar line, ‘I hope I die before I get old’.
“In my mind,” Devoto explains, “I’m talking about assisted suicide, and I’m talking about a subject I feel really quite strongly about. I’m not someone who thinks about topping himself every six months or anything like that. Far from it. I’m the happiest now that I’ve ever been. But as a young man, I was very tense, and very intense, and suicide has always been an idea to me. I’d go as far as to say that, when my time comes, I’d like to die by my own hand. Some people might call me a control freak, and in some respects that’s probably quite understandable.”
This weekend’s Glasgow show will be the first chance for aficionados of a band named partly after a coffee table accessory, part loaded gun, to see how ‘Hello Mr Curtis’ and other songs from No Thyself stand up next to material from the band’s first incarnation. Since reforming for dates in 2009, Devoto, keyboardist Dave Formula, bass player Barry Adamson and drummer John Doyle, with guitarist Noko replacing the late John McGeoch, have reinvigorated Magazine’s sophisticated melding of post-punk, prog and glam.
Never a comfortable figure onstage, Devoto himself looked reborn in a theatrically inclined live show that proved the magnificence of songs like ‘Shot By Both Side’s and ‘A Song From Under The Floorboards’, both of which had influenced the likes of Radiohead and Jarvis Cocker. After such a triumphant second coming, then, writing new material was a calculated risk.
“When we first talked about getting together, I thought it would be okay for a year or so,” Devoto explains of going out to play songs largely from the first three Magazine albums, Real Life, Secondhand Daylight and The Correct Use Of Soap, with one or two cuts from the original band’s swan-song, Magic, Murder and the Weather, thrown in. “After we’d played on Jools Holland and at the Electric Proms, we had a meeting and talked about the possibility of putting one or two new songs into the set. In due course, Dave, John and Noko knocked out six backing tracks, and I started working on them.”
The songs that later became ‘Holy Dotage’ and ‘Happening in English’, both on No Thyself, were duly forwarded to Adamson, whose solo career since the band’s demise had seen the bass player turned film soundtrack composer flourish.
“We waited a long, long time,” Devoto deadpans. “Barry had always been the most resistant of all of us to doing new material, and we eventually got the message that he was quitting to make his first film, which is not a task I would want to take on.”
Adamson’s replacement, Jon ‘Stan’ White, debuted with Magazine at the Hop Farm Festival in June this year, and, on record at least, retains his predecessor’s understated sense of John Barryesque noir. No Thyself as a whole is what the follow-up to The Correct Use Of Soap might have sounded like if McGeoch hadn’t left the band to join Siouxsie and the Banshees. Led by a largely upbeat mix of Formula’s science-fiction vintage synthesiser swirls and Noko’s scratchy guitar riffs, matters of life and death are as dramatically evident in Devoto’s words as they ever were. This is the case whether in the sexually explicit ‘Other Thematic Material’ or the knowingly self-referential ‘Of Course Howard (1979)’.
The words to the latter song are taken from an introduction Devoto wrote to a collection of lyrics penned for the first two Magazine albums, as well as during his brief tenure as vocalist for Buzzcocks, whose debut EP, Spiral Scratch, arguably invented DIY indie-pop as we know it. In both the introduction and the song, Devoto somewhat portentously declares that ‘I demand special consideration as the most human’.
“I re-read it, and I just thought, ‘Wow. You were really going for it, weren’t you, lad.’ I felt I wanted to interrogate my old self, and I wanted a dialogue.”
In this respect, such diary-like dissections have long-seen Devoto regarded as the Marcel Proust of pop, with each record a very succinct form of memoir.
“I keep notes, and I always have a special category for lyrics and song ideas. ‘Hello Mr Curtis’ actually goes back about ten years. But mortality is a big theme on the record. I don’t know how you can avoid it.”
Now just shy of entering his sixth decade, Devoto remains teasingly vague on the subject of just how long Magazine will continue beyond the band’s current reincarnation.
“Stop and smell the flowers,” he says. “I’m just living in the moment.”
Magazine played the O2 ABC, Glasgow, on Saturday November 5th 2011. No Thyself is
still available.
This article first appeared in The Herald on November 2 2011.
Magazine
O2 ABC, Glasgow
Saturday November 5th 2011
4 stars
“I don’t know,” says Howard Devoto, wearily wiping his palest of faces. “Have we done enough songs about the wrong kind of sex?” The band behind him launch into the icy menace of 1979 album Secondhand Daylight’s closing epic ‘Permafrost’ for good measure, anyway. Devoto has a point. As the archest man in pop entered wielding a Brechtian style placard bearing the legend, ‘Let’s Fly Away To The World’, the band he reformed after thirty years away strike up an opening rally of ‘Definitive Gaze’, ‘Give Me Everything’ and ‘Motorcade’. Heard in rapid-fire succession, the songs show off the light and shade of a canon that lays bare Devoto’s soul via an array of psycho-sexual baroque brutalist bon mots.
With new album No Thyself and bass player Jon ‘Stan’ White added to the fold to replace Barry Adamson since they first toured in 2009, Magazine sound more urgent than ever, with Devoto’s self-absorbed confessionals offset by a dirty white funk that sounds harder and looser than on record. Of the precious few songs from No Thyself included tonight, ‘Happening in English’ and ‘Holy Dotage’ fit seamlessly with material from their first, all too brief incarnation. With keyboardist Dave Formula and guitarist Noko carving out brittle soundscapes powered along by White and drummer John Doyle, Devoto is every inch the drama queen, conducting every flourish or else watching with aloof wonder at this thing he’s conjured up.
’Shot By Both Sides’ is brought bang up to date with part distressed, part fame-hungry references to flash-mobs. Magazine’s other classic, the Dostoyevsky-referencing ‘A Song From Under The Floorboards’ is there, but so is the lesser-sung but just as immense ‘Rhythm of Cruelty’. Crowd-pleasing this Magazine may be, but there still isn’t space for recent single, the rock and roll suicide of ‘Hello Mr Curtis’. Perverts.
This article first appeared in The Herald, November 7th 2011
