How did Pete Shelley’s ‘Homosapien’ fail to be the defining hit of 1981? A great synthetic paean to otherness, laid down in a day as a would-be Buzzcocks demo, it was denied crucial daytime airplay by prickly BBC bosses who objected to its punning wordplay (“Homo superior/In my interior”) and missed the charts completely. It became an even bitterer pill to swallow when Dare!, recorded around the same time with the same producer (Martin Rushent), made stars of the Human League. Even further back, long before Buzzcocks spurt into punky life, the computer-literate Shelley built an oscillator to record 1974’s Sky Zen, an exploratory drone suite recorded on a two-track in his living room. Much later, 1983’s second solo album XL included a ZX Spectrum computer programme with accompanying visuals and lyrics. Given his slew of imperious B-sides for Buzzcocks (‘Why Can’t I Touch It’ is explored in B-Side), Shelley’s solo flips were never going to miss the mark. The parameters they worked were different though, from the fresh-as-daisies robotic pop thrust of ‘Witness The Change’ [‘I Don’t Know What It Is’, 1981] to the bass-slapping electro-acoustic persecutions of ‘Many A Time’ [‘Telephone Operator’, 1983], the latter even refitted with a 12-inch Dance Mix. Just shy of eight minutes, ‘Please Forgive Me…’ was more than a ponderous indulgence, as heavy drum beats cascaded around a subdued mechanistic pulse. As Shelley’s almost percussive keys tapped out a simple but effective motif, the waves of repetition betrayed subtle tonalities that only a serious fan of Can or Faust’s early kosmische could muster.