Definitive Gaze: The Book Of Devoto

Of all the heroes of the post-punk era - Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Fall, the Cure, Simple Minds, the Associates - only Howard Devoto has so far failed to see his life and times immortalised between hard covers. This is an oversight waiting to be remedied, because of all the performers who transformed the British music scene in that crucial period of 1977-1982, Howard Devoto is arguably the most significant of all. As a founding member of Buzzcocks, orchestrator of Magazine, a solo performer and in collaboration with his old Buzzcocks partner Pete Shelley, he has blazed a trail for many a more commercial act to follow. A certain kind of British alternative music would look very different without his pioneering work.

DEFINITIVE GAZE is not Howard's autobiography, but a book that - with his sanction and active participation - brings together and reflects on great swathes of his output, from the original Buzzcocks recordings that made up Spiral Scratch (1977) to the highly successful Magazine reunion of 2009-2011 that realised the album No Thyself, with contributions from peers, acolytes and admirers including Damon Albarn (Blur), Duff McKagan (Guns 'n' Roses), Tom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead), Morrissey and Johnny Marr (The Smiths), Simple Minds, Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), John Frusciante (Red Hot Chilli Peppers), MGMT, Jeremy Vine and Louis Theroux (BBC), amongst others...

Howard has always had the reputation of a great pop enigma but he is also one of the finest pop lyricists who ever put pen to paper. DEFINITIVE GAZE intends to celebrate and analyse the legend of the man once characterised as 'the Orson Welles of punk.'