The hilarious thing to do in schoolyards in Britain when ‘Homosapien’ came out in 1982 was to sing its title line as “you’re homosexual too”. Yet former Buzzcock Pete Shelley was way ahead of the mockers and rockers on this synth pop venture, ‘Homosapien’ being far queerer than playground masculinity patrollers – or the banning BBC – could imagine. It’s not just the lyric’s double entendre, “homo superior, in my interior” but the song’s expansion from the personal to the political: “I just hope and pray that the day of our love is at hand”. A love song hence becomes a demand for liberation, insisting that “homosapien” is the only label that matters: “I don’t want to classify you like an animal in the zoo”. But there was something equally queer about the sound…

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