We couldn’t help but25 Fall for the Buzzcocks
Drummer Paul tells of band’s influence
EVER fallen in love with a band? One you shouldn’t have fallen in love with?
Buzzcocks fan Paul Hanley knew all about it during his time as drummer with The Fall.
“The Fall just didn’t behave like big fans of anything, especially their contemporaries,” he writes in his new book Sixteen Again – How Pete Shelley & Buzzcocks Changed Manchester Music (and me).
Buzzcocks became household names with punk anthems like What Do I Get, Ever Fallen in Love and Everybody’s Happy Nowadays in 1977, 1978 and 1979.
Hanley was hooked and joined his brother Steve in The Fall in 1980. But before punk and post-punk there was The Dubliners.
Like the Gallagher brothers and members of The Smiths, Hanley’s parents were Irish emigrants who made Manchester their home.
Some of his earliest memories of music are of his uncle Gerard singing songs made famous by Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew. “He used to do a great version of Monto,” he says.
His parents, both called Pat, were from Dublin and playing there with The Fall was special. He recalls one particularly memorable Irish tour in October 1984 which included a date at the city’s TV Club.
“That was where [my parents] had one of their first dates,” he says. “We had something like 47 cousins who wanted to get on the guest list.
“My mum was one of 12. Of the 12, three of them moved to England, my mum and aunty Mary and my uncle Gerard and the rest of them stayed.”
The Fall were due to play in Belfast after the 1984 Dublin show but the gig coincided with the IRA bomb at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton and guitarist Brix Smith was reluctant to travel north.
“Brix refused to get in the van,” Paul says. “But I was completely happy to go anywhere.”
On arrival back in Dublin they met up with Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes to fill time before the ferry was due to leave. “We went to the wrong port,” he says, laughing.
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“We went to Dublin, but we should’ve been in Dun Laoghaire. So we sat in a pub for four hours with Gavin getting wrecked on Guinness and suddenly realised we had 25 minutes to get to the other port. It was a bit of a messy day, as I recall.”
Hanley’s new book documents the story of Buzzcocks’ rise from working class Manchester roots to chart success and influence.
Without them there may never have been Joy Division/new Order, The Smiths, Factory Records and even The Fall.
Not that late Fall frontman Mark E Smith would have admitted it at the time, even though it was The
Buzzcocks who paid for
The Fall’s first-ever studio recording.
“There was a real stand-offish thing about
The Fall,” says Hanley.
“It’s healthy in a way. It means you don’t fall into rock ’n’ roll cliche. But we
were a bit too aloof for our own good. It was very much a case of pretend to not like anything. Whenever anyone cited [Mark] or the band as an influence, the first thing he did was slag them off.
“He didn’t want to get lumped in with other bands in any way. That meant he didn’t want to be liked by them either.”
But Hanley was hugely influenced by Buzzcocks drummer
John Maher – another son of Irish emigrants. Hanley went to the same school as Maher and made anything seem possible.
“He was within reach. We could leave school and go around to his house and knock on his door and he’d engage with us, give us badges,” says Hanley.
But it was the actions of Shelley that had the biggest impact. Hanley outlines the famous story ofhow Buzzcocks’ founding members Shelley and Howard Devoto drove to London to seek out The Sex Pistols and convinced their manager Malcolm Mclaren to bring the then-unknown band to Manchester for two fabled shows in June and July 1976.
“I genuinely believe that the difference between Manchester
and other places was the fact that they brought up The
Sex Pistols to Manchester – twice,” says Hanley.
“You had Morrissey there, Tony Wilson who started Factory, Hooky and Barney out of Joy Division and New Order, they were there.
“Members of The Fall – Mark was there. My brother Steve was there and Marc Riley and Craig [Scanlon].”
Hanley is back on the road with former members of The Fall as part of House Of All. But he’s dismayed at the financial hurdles facing young working class bands today.
“The days of Oasis living on the dole for two years while they work out how to be in a band are gone.
“If you’re stifling working class voices like that, art suffers.
“You end up with the same middle-class stage school kind of voice. Which is fine and there’s some brilliant musicians who come
from that environment, but a whole raft of you’re missing talented people.”
Buzzcocks’ influence was farreaching, touring with bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the 1990s and they’re still on the road with Steve Diggle as frontman now.
Shelley, who died in 2018, was openly bisexual at a time when many musicians were afraid to discuss their sexuality but Hanley believes his real legacy is the triumph of the working class family.
It was Shelley’s dad who put up much of the money for the recording, pressing and distribution of Buzzcocks’ ground-breaking debut EP Spiral Scratch.
“It’s amazing. His father took a loan out to pay for Spiral Scratch,” says Hanley.
“I just find it wholly admirable.”