Buzzcocks / Spiral Scratch - EP / 1977
Time's Up
antsy, sardonic, comically exasperated
A jittery catalogue of mundane waiting -- supermarket queues, phone calls, cigarettes -- becomes a comic study in erotic frustration and impatience. The parenthetical asides act like a Greek chorus mocking the narrator's patience, until the accumulated waiting curdles into resignation and exit.
impatience and waiting sexual frustration consumer banality comic self-deprecation breakdown of a relationship
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an absent, unhurried lover; the voice is unreliable in its self-pity, undercut constantly by the bracketed interjections that seem to speak the truth he won't admit.
What happens
The song opens with ordinary queuing -- shops, post office -- before shifting into waiting on a partner who never seems ready. Rising chain-smoking and pacing through different rooms of the house track his mounting agitation. Phone calls to her mother and grandmother reveal she's perpetually still in bed, her voice alone enough to short-circuit him. By the end, the waiting tips into resolve: he declares both her time and his own patience finished, and he leaves.
How it's built
Verse-based with a recurring parenthetical rejoinder after nearly every line, functioning almost like a heckling backing vocal. Two structurally identical sections build in intensity (forty cigarettes becomes eighty; mother becomes grandmother), giving a sense of comic escalation rather than real development, before a short title-phrase chorus snaps the pattern and ends the cycle.
Section by section
Opening verses
Everyday errands establish a baseline of tedious waiting before the song narrows its focus onto romantic frustration, treating queuing for groceries and stamps as equivalent to romantic limbo.There's a flattening of significance -- postal errands and love both reduced to the same dull holding pattern.
First chorus-like turn
“is this what they mean by going steady”
The narrator briefly steps back to question the whole premise of coupledom, framing his frustration as a critique of the entire social ritual of dating rather than just this one relationship.
Domestic room catalogue
The march through named rooms of a house turns physical space into a metaphor for psychological stagnation, each room offering a slightly worse pun on his emotional state, ending in an admission that he's forgetting why he's even there.
Phone call verses
“your voice is thick and sexy”
The lover's voice, heard secondhand through relatives, becomes the object of desire, replacing any actual contact; the throwaway 'shut up' after this line comically punctures the swoon.
Escalation verse
Doubling the cigarette count from the earlier verse signals worsening endurance, played for absurd comic effect rather than genuine pathos, and prepares the abrupt shift into finality.
Closing chorus
The clipped declaration of an ending finally breaks the repetitive structure, delivering the exit that all the waiting had been building toward, with the narrator claiming his own release as much as hers.
Craft
- anaphora
- Repeated 'I've been waiting/standing/smoking' constructions across verses create a rhythm of accumulating tedium that mirrors the narrator's stalled state.
- ironic commentary via parentheses
- Each bracketed word or phrase functions as a sarcastic gloss on the preceding line, often contradicting or deflating the narrator's earnestness.
- comic hyperbole
- The doubling of cigarette counts and generational escalation from mother to grandmother exaggerates the absurdity of the wait for satirical effect.
- metonymy of domestic space
- Moving through waiting room, sitting room, dining room, and living room maps emotional deterioration onto ordinary household geography.
Reading it
Most persuasively, the song is a comic miniature about the absurdity of romantic patience, using consumer-line tedium as a deadpan analogue for relationship tedium; the parenthetical interjections work as a self-aware punk sneer at earnest pop-song pining. An alternative reading takes the frustration more sincerely, as a portrait of low-level obsessive desire and domestic entrapment, with the comic devices functioning as defense mechanisms rather than pure irony.
Context
This is one of the four songs on Buzzcocks' self-released 1977 Spiral Scratch EP, recorded with vocalist Howard Devoto before he left the band. The track predates the more polished pop-punk sound Pete Shelley would later develop, and its clipped, deadpan structure and DIY production are characteristic of the earliest wave of British punk's arch, wordy humor.
Listen for
- the timing and tone of the parenthetical words against the vocal line
- the shift in room names as a structural device tracking mood
- the doubling of details (cigarette counts, family members) between verses
- the abruptness of the final chorus compared to the repetitive verses
About Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks are an English punk rock band formed by singer-songwriter and guitarist Pete Shelley and singer-songwriter Howard Devoto in Bolton in 1976. They achieved commercial success with singles that fuse pop with rapid-fire punk energy, inspiring the power pop and pop punk movements; these singles were later collected on Singles Going Steady, an acclaimed compilation album music journalist and critic Ned Raggett described as a "punk masterpiece".
1976 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue