Excellent oral history of Manchester’s premier punk band. A teenage Buzzcocks fan, Hanley takes the story through to the late-80s reunions and beyond with interviews from all the major players and a sharp eye for punk historiography: his evaluation of sources is excellent, necessary in such a myth-encrusted topic. Hanley approvingly quotes Pete Shelley’s description of punk: ‘an attitude which was born out of ideas’. These ideas enabled Buzzcocks to surround themselves with talented conceptualists like Linder Sterling, Malcolm Garrett and Richard Boon – and in doing so to establish Manchester as a creative cultural environment for the non-privileged. Their unsung achievement was to subvert punk machismo with a softer masculinity: as Shelley states here, ‘Your sexuality is a moveable feast, isn’t it? And so is gender.’
