Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley dead, aged 63
Pete Shelley, the singer, songwriter and founding member of seminal UK band Buzzcocks has died of a suspected heart attack in Estonia.
The 63-year-old co-founded Buzzcocks in 1975 and they played their first show the next year supporting the Sex Pistols. The band released 10 studio albums and toured extensively. The group broke up in 1981 but reformed in 1989 and continued to record and tour until the present day with Shelley out front singing and playing guitar.
"It’s with great sadness that we confirm the death of Pete Shelley, one of the UK’s most influential and prolific songwriters and co-founder of the seminal original punk band Buzzcocks," the band said on Thursday evening.
"Pete’s music has inspired generations of musicians over a career that spanned five decades and with his band and as a solo artist, he was held in the highest regard by the music industry and by his fans around the world."
Shelley influenced countless musicians over a long career, including the Charlatans' Tim Burgess, who tweeted that Shelley "wrote perfect three minute pop songs" and was one of the UK's most influential songwriters.
Originally from Leigh in Lancashire, where he was born in 1955, Shelley has been living in Estonia.
He once described punk as being "about deciding to do something and then going out and doing it."
Shelley's most well known song with Buzzcocks was the 1978 track Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve), from their Love Bites album.
Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake took to Twitter to say Shelley's songs were "important to me as a young man and they still are" while many others from the music world paid their respects to Shelley on social media.