Why Can't I Touch It?

The B-side has no business being this good. Released in March 1979 as the flip of "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" — itself a perfectly crafted piece of Buzzcocks pop — Why Can't I Touch It? runs six and a half minutes at a time when punk songs were expected to be over in two. Pete Shelley had no interest in that expectation. The song locks into a hypnotic groove that reviewers have compared to Can's Tago Mago era Krautrock — circular, motorik, entirely unlike anything else the Buzzcocks released — and simply refuses to stop until it has done exactly what it set out to do.

Shelley's lyric is characteristic of his best work: desire expressed as frustration, the subject just out of reach, the narrator unable to close the distance between wanting and having. Why Can't I Touch It? could be about a person, an idea, a feeling — the deliberate ambiguity is the point. By 1979 Shelley had refined this approach across a remarkable run of singles — "What Do I Get?", "Ever Fallen in Love", "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" — each one treating adolescent longing with the seriousness it deserves but rarely receives. This song is the most expansive statement of that project. The groove gives the lyric room to breathe that three-minute pop rarely allows.

The song was later collected on Singles Going Steady (1979), the compilation that became the definitive Buzzcocks document — described by critic Ned Raggett as a "punk masterpiece." It appeared in the second episode of the sixth season of Entourage and in the opening segment of the 2017 Telltale game Guardians of the Galaxy. Pete Shelley died on December 6, 2018, at his home in Tallinn, Estonia. The catalog he left behind — in particular these singles — remains one of the most sustained achievements in British punk. Why Can't I Touch It? is the one that sounds least like its era and most like everything that came after.