The lyric “Homosuperior, in my interior’ certainly raised a few eyebrows when Pete Shelley’s song Homosapien was released in 1981.
It led to the BBC banning its DJ’s from playing the song. But it didn’t stop the song from rushing up the charts around the world. Here in Australia it made it to number four.
The song was Shelley’s first solo release after his indie band Buzzocks called it quits. They’d made their mark with Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With), and were one of the most successful bands to emerge out of the British punk movement.
Shelley would later reveal the popular love song was about a man named Francis who he had lived with for several years.
For his solo album Shelley teamed up with Producer Martin Rushnet, who would later have success working with Human League, Altered Images and The Go-Gos.
Homosapien had originally been intended for the next album by Buzzcocks, but with the band breaking up, it transformed into a solo project for Shelley – and with a much more electronic sound than his band had ever produced.
While Shelley had spoken about being bisexual interviews prior to the release of the record, his sexuality became much more prominent following the release of Homosapien, and forty years ago there were not a huge amount of prominent LGBTIQA+ artists.
This month the song celebrates it’s 40th birthday.
Buzzcocks eventually reformed at the end of the 1980s and went on to record several albums after they got back together.
In a 2002 interview he spoke about his sexuality saying “tends to change as much as the weather”.
Pete Shelley passed away in December 2018 aged just 63. In 2012 he’d moved to Estonia where he lived with his second wife Greta, an Estonian born Canadian. He died of a suspected heart attack.
OIP Staff
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