It's Not JUST About The Fall

With his superb new book, 'Not JUST About The Fall: 50 adventures in a post-punk paradise', Sunday Times best-selling author (well, ghostwriter) Paddy Shennan pays tribute to the forgotten heroes of the music industry - the fans! 

No one is JUST a music fan. Being a music fan is more than important, it's vital. Music fans are worth their weight in gold. They are needed by every musician who has ever written a song, entered a recording studio and taken to the stage. Just as football is nothing without fans, so is music - and so are musicians. 

And it's during your teenage years when music often matters more than anything else in life.

Paddy recalls the musical adventures of his adolescence, including classic (and not-so-classic) gigs by the likes of The Clash, Buzzcocks, The Jam, The Fall, Joy Division, The Cure, The Associates, U2, Dexys Midnight Runners, The Smiths, New Order and The Birthday Party. 

Read how The Fall and John Peel changed his life, how Bono and The Edge bored him witless backstage, how he helped pioneer the independent cassette scene of the early 1980s as one of the compilers of Sounds' Obscurist charts - launched by his good friend, Paul Platypus - and as leader of one of the worst/best bedroom bands of all time, The Ambitious Merchants, and founder of cassette label Apple Crumble Tapes. 

There are also appearances by the likes of future multi-millionaire Alan "Give me my quid back!" McGee, music journalist Garry "The Fall are shit!" Bushell, Preston's Blank Students, Blackpool's The Membranes, and - er, possibly - Lloyd Cole. 

All this and the best jukebox in the world! 

About the author:

Paddy spent 36 years as a journalist - 33 of them on the Liverpool Echo, where he was chief feature writer, after starting his career on the Lancashire Evening Post in his hometown (now a city) of Preston.  In 2022, his book The Talk of Liverpool was published by Mirror Books.  In 2024, he was the ghostwriter of The Radfords: Making Life Count, a Sunday Times best-seller, again published by Mirror Books. Now, late in 2025, his great new book ‘Not JUST about The Fall’ will be published by Earth Island Books.

'Not JUST About The Fall: 50 adventures in a post-punk paradise' by Paddy Shennan is officially publishing on 14^th November 2025 (and there'll be a launch event at The Ferret in Preston on 7th December) but you can pre-order your first-edition copy of this time-machine to the post-punk and new-wave of the eighties right now.