Another Music in a Different Kitchen

The first album by the third Buzzcocks line-up, with Shelley singing after Devoto left and the bassist Garth Smith was dismissed. Steve Garvey played bass. It was recorded and mixed at Olympic Studios over December 1977 and January 1978 with Rushent producing and Doug Bennett engineering. United Artists released it in March 1978, and it reached number 15 on the UK chart. The title came from a collage by Linder Sterling. Shelley recalled that Devoto said another housewife stews in her own juice in a different kitchen, and that they shuffled the words around until it came out like this.

Malcolm Garrett designed the sleeve. The first copies came with a black cardboard inner sleeve and shipped in a silver plastic shopping bag printed with the word PRODUCT and the catalogue number UAG 30159. The album was meant to carry I Need on side one, but after a test pressing the band moved it to side two, and a mix-up at the pressing plant left some early copies without the song at all. The first pressing also credited Fast Cars to Shelley and Devoto because it reuses the riff from Boredom on Spiral Scratch, though Steve Diggle says he wrote most of it.

David Quantick of the BBC wrote that everything about it, from its silver, orange-lettered sleeve to Rushent's aluminium-sheen production, is right, and named it his favourite album ever. He called Autonomy motorik genius and the closing Moving Away from the Pulsebeat punk's greatest end-of-side-two track. Record Collector's Oregano Rathbone, reviewing the 2019 reissue, heard in it Shelley's debt to Can, and noted that Autonomy, Fiction Romance and Moving Away from the Pulsebeat sound E-based but are in F. Johnny Marr bought it on the day it came out and still has it in its plastic carrier bag. It appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

No Reply was covered by SS Decontrol on their 1983 EP Get It Away, and the Sub Pop act Love Battery took their name from the track. The Offspring covered Autonomy on the single Want You Bad. Rhino reissued the album in 2015 as a limited run of 6,200 copies on translucent orange vinyl for Black Friday Record Store Day.