P-P Hartnett: 'I had that black suit on three times a week'

P-P Hartnett's novel about fandom and its frenzy took him into the dark heart of obsession and loss. As Jonathan Gibbs discovers, he's been there before

In the opening section of his new novel, P-P Hartnett gives us the blueprint for a publicity interview. Freelance journalist Oona Khan meets 19-year-old rock star Max at his record company's offices, and finds him stroppy, intense and disdainful. He has "a horrific glamour – broadly built, but frighteningly thin ... simultaneously bloody awful and bloody fantastic".

Though I meet Hartnett in the similarly corporate setting of his publishers' HQ, 15 flights above a grim, rainy London, the similarities end there. I am faced with a softly spoken, polite and well-turned-out man of 44, though his placid, unlined face knocks a decade off that age. He is wearing a sharp brown suit, impeccable charcoal-grey shirt and polished shoes. Is this the "uncompromising, provocative and downright shocking" author of books such as Call Me and I Want To Fuck You, detailing the world of gay contact ads and male prostitutes in London and Tokyo, respectively? Only a chunky pair of glittering, gold-and-silver cufflinks in the shape of skulls-and-crossbones suggests that it might be.

"Don't go all shy on us now," says his PR as she closes the door. She needn't worry. Hartnett speaks at times quite frankly about a novel that he describes as "my best book so far" and, later, "very damaging to write". Rock 'n' Roll Suicide (Sceptre, £14.99) is in part the story of Max, the archetypal leather-trousers-and-spiked-lyrics teen idol, who plans to celebrate the completion of a 40-date tour by opening his veins in his parents' bath. At the last moment, paring knife to forearm, he finds that he cannot go through with it, and goes into hiding in the flat of Angela, an obsessive fan in the habit of cutting and burning herself. The brief idyll of their "lost weekend", and its tragic aftermath, is the other half of the story.

An inquiry into what rock stars mean when they sing about suicide, and what fans take from those songs, could not be more timely. This month saw the release not only of Kurt Cobain's journals, but also Greatest Hits albums from both Nirvana and Manic Street Preachers, whose lyricist Richey Edwards famously carved "4 REAL" into his arm during an interview and then, on 1 February 1995, went missing.

His car was later found near the Severn Bridge, a popular destination for suicides. These sure-fire stocking fillers, with their songs such as "Lithium" and "From Despair to Where", are destined to provide the soundtrack to tens of thousands of family Christmases next month.

Max may be a fantasy amalgam of such figures as Edwards (whose lyrics pepper the novel) and Richard Ashcroft, but Hartnett is not interested in merely replicating their fashionable angst. He engaged in extensive research for the book – his hallmark as a writer. "I placed a series of adverts in the back of the NME, asking for people to contact me if they had erotic dreams or fantasies about a certain rock star celebrity," he explains. Each of the 50-odd e-mails he received each week got a reply, some grew into correspondences, and Hartnett eventually met some of his mailers, even visiting one girl in a specialist hospital unit for anorexics. His conscientiousness throughout the process is evident.

Although he admits to having been a fan himself ("the gloom of Joy Division filled my bedroom for three years"), Hartnett is more in thrall to the notion of fandom itself. It is a strange kind of curiosity that breeds confessions such as the one that starts: "In the Eighties I remember visiting the homes of Barry Manilow fans..."

Rewind to the Seventies, and there he was, one of five boys at a Bay City Rollers gig, despite not actually liking them, because "I couldn't believe this group was causing such hysteria all over the UK". And then, back again, to the original epiphany: aged six, he visited the friend of a sister, whose bedroom was a shrine to The Beatles. "I remember at the time being taken aback. I thought that kind of adoration only existed for Jesus Christ."

Even when Hartnett began to make a name for himself as a photographer on the punk scene, he was after something different to the usual guest-list liggers. "As a child," he says, "I was obsessed with Toulouse-Lautrec ... the idea that that little man could go off into the nightclub and be surrounded by all those people – because he was painting.

"And so, when at the age of 18 I realised how easy it was to have access to John Lydon or Siouxsie Sioux, going out on the club scene I was very quickly recognised as someone who was a photographer. There I was with a second-hand Nikon camera which I'd bought for 10 pounds in a jumble sale."

This voyeuristic desire to get close enough to the action to observe, yet still to hang back, might be a necessary condition of being a writer, but it is not a sufficient one. Something more is needed. "What I've always done is observe people and then represent them in some form or other," explains Hartnett, and his quiet voice drops to a level where a tape recorder will barely pick it up.

"The reason I moved into fiction was, the love of my life died. And Mr Right ain't easy to replace. For someone close to you to suddenly not be there had a devastating effect on me, and I found it difficult to continue the line of work that I was doing: documenting clubland. As well as that, a number of people who I had been documenting were dropping like flies. Not only because of Aids, but also heroin, suicide, bizarre accidents. 1986, 1987, I had that black suit on three times a week. My address book was just full of Tippex."

After the death of his Dutch boyfriend, Thon, Hartnett was "sitting at an old Remington typewriter banging out some observation of that day, or of me, and it shaped itself into a book". That book, augmented by research into the gay subcultures that flourish around contact ads, was Call Me, a surprise success both in the UK and US. Over the course of the books that followed, Hartnett established a routine. A period of research – which has involved correspondence with jailed male sex offenders, and with the murderer Dennis Nilsen – is followed by flight abroad, normally to Tunisia, to write in tranquillity.

This time was perhaps too tranquil. Arriving in Malta, he slipped and fell while helping an old lady retrieve her suitcase, and was rushed to hospital with a cracked rib and internal bleeding. He describes being stuck in his hotel for a month, eating cakes brought by his Iraqi maid, with postcards of Jesus on the wall and appropriately intense music on the stereo.

"It was a bit much. With the exception of about six days, I cried every single fucking day that I worked on this book. And it's amazing what moments moved me, and still move me. The writing of stuff like where Max is going on stage dragging his guitar behind him, or where he's preparing to commit suicide and going through the contents of his parents' home. That repeatedly upset me."

It is no surprise that Hartnett is not ready to embark on another novel. "At the moment I just want to get my house at the top of the hill decorated and sorted out," he says, talking with feeling about the river at the bottom of this street, of cycling over to Hebden Bridge.

Next year sees the publication of his first two books of photography. Couples is a selection of found images of same-sex couples, based around a shoebox-full of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and picture postcards that he unearthed in a flea market. Dressed Up, Messed Up is a selection of his own work documenting DIY cool, from punk to the present day.

They sound a world away from his fiction; straightforward celebrations of love and human ingenuity, where the novels return again and again to the darker impulses he divines behind them. There's documenting, and there's documenting, I can't help thinking, and the viewfinder of a Nikon camera is a very different proposition to a blank sheet of paper.

Biography

P-P Hartnett was born in 1958. He was brought up in a residential home for the elderly, which his mother ran, and educated by Benedictine monks. While studying for a Bachelor of Education to work with children with special needs, he began photographing London clubland. His photography has appeared in The Independent, The Sunday Times Magazine, i-D, Attitude and City Life. His first novel, Call Me, was published in 1996, and was followed by I Want To Fuck You, Mmm Yeah (a collection of stories), and Sixteen. He has also edited three collections of short fiction. Two books of photographs, Couples and Dressed Up, Messed Up, will be published by Thames and Hudson in 2003. Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, his new novel, is published by Sceptre. He lives in Colne, Lancashire.