Paul Hanley: 'Pete Shelley put himself into that teenage mindset'

That dearth is what inspired Paul Hanley, musician turned author, to pen his new book, Sixteen Again: How Pete Shelley & Buzzcocks Changed Manchester Music (and me), he explains to The Yorkshire Post. “The original thing was I didn’t think there was enough books about Pete Shelley,” he says. “Tony McGartland has got the complete Buzzcocks story and then Louie Shelley did the interviews with Pete, both of which are great books, but just by the sheer weight of numbers I didn’t think there was enough.

“Originally I was going to try to do a straight biography of Pete, which obviosuly would’ve told the Buzzcocks’ story as well, but the more I got into it, I found I was taking out the bits where I was a big fan because when you’re attempting to do an objective biography it gets in the way; I can’t be critical if I thought everything was great. But in the end I thought that was probably the most interesting bit, really – without being too pretentious, my kind of journey with the band, if you like.”

Hanley’s enthusiasm for the band started when he was 14 years old when his older brother Steve brought home a copy of their first album, Another Music in a Different Kitchen, and intensified over the next two years before the group broke up. “That’s a special relationship, a young person’s love of a band, that’s what I wanted to write about,” he says.

At the heart of that relationship was Hanley’s love of Shelley’s songwriting, which became the driving force of the band after the departure of original singer Howard Devoto after one EP, Spiral Scratch. He likens the way Shelley wrote about relationships to Taylor Swift. “When she’s talking about relationships she’s talking about her mental state and the way she perceives the world, which is something I thought Pete Shelley did… A lot of that got dismissed even by members of his band at the time as love songs, which they’re really not.

“They’re about relationships but they’re not about ‘I love you and you love me’. All the relationships he describes in his songs are fairly unhealthy and he articulates that weird headspace you’re into at a certain time in your life, and he continued to be able to do that and put himself into that teenage mindset, which is quite an ability, really, because it wasn’t condescending, he wasn’t talking down to anybody.”

Unusually at the time, Shelley was upfront about his bisexuality, and his songs avoided gender pronouns. “There’s interviews with him in 1978 saying, ‘I don’t label people by the genitals, my songs can be universal, gender is fluid’ which was unheard of then. People were scared of being perceived of as any kind of thing like that,” Hanley says. “He was ahead of his time. For him to say, ‘I’m bisexual and this is my sexuality and I’m going to write it from my point of view’ and then get on the bus to Bolton or wherever, it was quite brave in a way.”

Buzzcocks’s working-class approachability also chimed with Hanley, who in the 1980s went on to be a member of The Fall​​​​​​​ alongside his brother and their friends Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon. “The whole thing about punk was the gap between the fans and the performer was shrunk,” he says. “There’s a lot of nonsense talked about everything that went before was rubbish​​​​​, which was clearly not true​​​​​​​, everyone who was in a punk band was a massive music fan​​​​​​​, they weren’t sat around not listening to music waiting for punk to happen. But I think the important thing was people saw that Sex Pistols gig (which Shelley and Devoto promoted at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976) and thought, ‘I could do that’ – and they could.

“People will always join bands but I think it was quite difficult in 1976 or 1975 to make that leap to being a performer because, and I talk about it in the book, a lot of the music before 1976 was quite slick – disco, rock, even reggae, they were all quite seasoned performers, whereas punk said you don’t have to know what you’re doing and it’s equally valid to just get up there and do it. It’s a recipe for disaster a lot of the time but that’s what makes it exciting.”​​​​​​​

Today, after completing a degree in English Literature and penning two other books, Hanley has himself returned to performing with the band House of All, which is comprised of former members of The Fall. The group have just released their second album and toured the UK.

“Martin Bramah moved back to Manchester and then he came up with this idea of getting some of the people who used to be in The Fall and try and explore that unique way of working. We were in the band at different times but there’s a certain mindset there,” Hanley says.

“When he mentioned it to me, he talked about having two drummers with Simon (Wolstencroft) and that was kind of the key for me, I thought that would be a really interesting thing to do. We’ve all had different experiences. I loved playing with Karl (Burns) and Simon hated it, but we came into it open-minded.

“The interesting thing about it was we assembled the five people, and we got Pete Greenway, who was the last guitarist in The Fall who none of us knew at all. He was kind of like the last piece of the puzzle and it was brilliant. It was interesting to see someone who was in The Fall in 1976 and someone who was in The Fall in 2016 and exploring the differences and what was similar about the working practice.”

Sixteen Again is published by Route Publishing, priced £25. Paul Hanley will in conversation at Jumbo Records on Saturday May 25 at 12pm. https://www.jumborecords.co.uk/news-single.asp?news_id=716