Songfacts®:

• "Boredom" is a song about the perils of complacency, serving as a kind of mission statement for the Buzzcocks, who were anything but dull. Released in 1977 on their debut EP, Spiral Scratch, it broke new ground in the UK punk rock scene by incorporating melodic pop sounds and thoughtful lyrics that you can actually understand. Spiral Scratch holds a place in history as one of the first successful self-released records. The band borrowed money to make it and somehow convinced record stores in Manchester, England to stock it. It formed a template for DIY punk, showing how bands could bypass record labels if they were willing to handle their own manufacture, distribution and promotion.
• Buzzcocks trivia: The band came together when Howard Trafford, then a student at the University of Bolton, placed an advertisement looking for musicians sharing a liking for The Velvet Underground's song "Sister Ray." If you listen to "Sister Ray," it's "a rambling, nodded-out account of sex and murder among junkies and transvestites," in the words of the book The Velvet Underground - An Illustrated History Of A Walk On The Wild Side.
• Check the guitar solo for punk authenticity. It's just two notes repeating 66 times, then ending with a single modulated seventh.
• Almost as if this song were a prophecy, frontman Howard Devoto left the band on the eve of the record's release, stating that he gets bored very easily and that punk rock had already become restrictive and stereotyped. While Pete Shelley filled in for Devoto as the new face of the Buzzcocks, Devoto went on to found the band Magazine and redo "Boredom" with a slower, more-sinister sounding beat.
• Pete Shelley told Reuters about the Spiral Scratch EP: "We wanted to wake people up. It was like Dada. We wanted to make something that would provoke people - to shock them, almost like Zen Buddhism where they'd come and hit you with a stick (keisaku). You think, 'No, no, this cannot be.' Then all of a sudden you see all the possibilities."
• When Buzzcocks first appeared on TV, they crossed paths with both comedian Peter Cook and actor Albert Finney, the latter approvingly noting in 1977, "Love that song 'Boredom,' lads."
• The EP title, Spiral Scratch, describes a vinyl recording - each side is one spiral groove scratched in to carry the sound. It's a reference to how the band had to press copies of the EP themselves.