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The creative behind the BBC Sounds podcast series that recalls one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent LGBTQ+ history sits down with Hadley Stewart to share the story behind the podcast and what drives him to tell queer stories.
Hugh Sheehan has asked me to meet him on a sunny Friday afternoon at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, east London, for our interview. He’s currently in rehearsals there, he tells me over text. But when I arrive at the theatre and tell the person on reception who I’m here to see, I’m met with a question that I should probably know the answer to. What does he do, she asks. I pause, wondering how to answer. In all fairness, her question is a tricky one. Sheehan is, afterall, a man of many talents: a musician, composer, sound designer, and audio producer. He’s also the creative behind ‘Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7’ a recently released BBC Sounds podcast exploring a little-known watershed moment in LGBTQ+ history.
As I look up from my phone, having just texted Sheehan that I’ve arrived, he appears. “Shall we go out somewhere?” he says, gesturing at sunlight beaming through the theatre’s front door. “I’m just scared this lovely weather is going to be snatched from us.” As we walk down the street, Sheehan tells me he’s currently in rehearsals for a radical reimagining of Simon Stephens’ play, Heisenberg, starring Olivier Award-winning Jenny Galloway and internationally acclaimed Faline England; Sheehan is serving as sound designer.
We arrive at the Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, the spot he’s chosen just around the corner from the theatre, having heard about it recently from one of the play’s crew. It’s a buzz with people enjoying the warmest day of the year so far. We find a table under one of the many trees and sit on red plastic chairs that remind me of school.
Sheehan only returned to live in the UK full-time last year, having spent a decade living in Finland, after a university tutor encouraged him to apply for an Erasmus exchange during his undergraduate degree that would end up being his sliding doors moment. “You know when someone sees you, before you see yourself?” he says of his tutor. When I tell him I went to Helsinki last summer, his eyes widen. “Nobody I speak to has ever been to Finland!” he laughs. “It’s great, I loved living there.”
Born in Birmingham to Irish parents, Sheehan first picked up an accordion at the age of five or six, “because there was just one in the house.” His father, who plays Irish traditional music, paid for young Sheehan to take accordion and piano lessons, before he parked the accordion for a while in favour of the drums, when he became a teenager. Sheehan transitioned from primary to secondary school during the repeal of Section 28, a piece of legislation brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools. Yet despite the repeal, homophobic language formed an accompaniment to Sheehan’s schooling. The all-boys state high school he attended was a place where the word ‘gay’ would be often used as an insult, pushing Sheehan further away from a place where he could accept his queerness.
He would go on to study composition at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. Although he credits the pastoral support of his university tutors, who Sheehan describes as “going above and beyond” to not only teach him and his fellow students music, but also how to make a career at the end of their course, he tells me it was a time when he was still wrestling with trying to figure out who he was. The experience of studying at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, however, stuck with twenty-year-old Sheehan, who would later return to study a masters in music technology there, before eventually settling in the Finnish capital. It was here that he’d come out as gay in his mid-twenties. “That’s what really saved me,” he says of coming out. “It allowed me to understand my own selfhood. I think so many of us crave that.”
During this pivotal time in his life, Sheehan developed a passion for telling LGBTQ+ stories. In 2019, Sheehan returned to Birmingham to speak with four members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community, to explore the notion of queer and trans people wishing they could have been themselves sooner in life. Commissioned as a New Creative by BBC Arts and Arts Council England, ‘Lost Time’ saw Sheehan writing, producing and composing for the audio short that explores the notion of having experiences later in life, once stigmatisation and self-acceptance are overcome. His 2023 album, ‘Shapes That Are Different’, delves deeper into the experiences of growing up as a queer person in Birmingham during the nineties, which Sheehan recorded in both Birmingham and Helsinki.
But for those in the LGBTQ+ community who may not have been familiar with Sheehan’s previous work, perhaps it is his most recent project exploring a seminal moment for LGBTQ+ history and rights, that has got people paying attention to his craft. ‘Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7’ is a BBC Sounds podcast series that recalls the stories of seven gay and bisexual men from Bolton, a former mill town north of Manchester, who were convicted of offences of gross indecency under the Sexual Offences Act 1967 in January 1998. The case has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent British LGBTQ+ history. The series came out in February, just in time for LGBT+ History Month – Sheehan produced, presented and composed music for the podcast.
I admit to Sheehan that, despite having gone to school in Bolton, I’d never heard of this case until I listened to the podcast. How did he learn of the Bolton 7? “I wish I had a better story for this,” he begins, saying that he believes he just happened to come across something about it online one day a couple of years ago. “More and more it was just sitting there, at the back of my mind. I was thinking, this seems bonkers and I want to know more about it, but there isn’t anything out there about it.”
Sheehan was living in Finland when he found out about the case, and had initially thought that the Bolton 7 could be adapted for a stage performance. “Composition is more my craft, really,” he explains. “I thought, seven men, seven male voices. There’s something so powerful about that.” He even pitched the idea for arts funding in Finland, but didn’t get anywhere with it. With hindsight, Sheehan tells me that he’s now somewhat grateful the idea was turned down. It gave him time to “incubate and think on things.”
Subsequently, whilst looking to return to live in the UK, he pitched the idea as part of BBC Sounds Audio Lab, a training and development programme for the next generation of podcast producers and audio creatives. He’d originally put forward a podcast series that explored multiple legal cases of significance to LGBTQ+ history. Once commissioned by the BBC, he moved to London within a month, with commissioners opting to focus on one of the legal cases he’d originally pitched.
Sheehan tells me he spent about two months researching the case. He got hold of court transcripts, police interview tapes and sentencing records for the seven men at the centre of the story. He then began reaching out to the barristers, solicitors, police officers and anyone else linked to the case. “It was like putting together pieces of the jigsaw,” he says of his initial research. He would later go on to interview the solicitor and barrister who defended these men for the podcast. “I wanted to have as wide and as vivid a picture as possible, as to what went on.” Sheehan also grappled with getting his head around the intricacies of the law at the time: “It was all about trying to get to grips with the case itself.”
Then came the task of trying to reach out to the men at the heart of this story. None of them are interviewed as part of the podcast, with actors’ voices recreating police interviews and moments from within the courtroom, the script adapted from police interview recordings and court transcripts. “Well, partly for the court transcripts, you can see that some of the men wouldn’t count themselves as part of the community, or may not be living their lives as out queer men anymore,” replies Sheehan, who says that he can understand why these may not have wanted to contribute to the podcast. “It’s been 25 years since the case, it’s been a huge part of their past lives,” he says. “So many of these men, they just wanted it to be done and over, which is understandable.”
Despite not being able to gain access to the Bolton 7 themselves, Sheehan says that it was important for him to ensure that their story was told in a way that did them justice, in addition to preserving it for generations to come. “I wanted to tell our stories and do it in a multifaceted way,” he says. “In a way that is rich and plural and multicolored, because it’s so frustrating sometimes just seeing queer stories being told in a really one-dimensional way.” Sheehan credits the BBC for allowing him to explore this story “in not only a really in-depth way, but also to contemplate the social and cultural ramifications.”
Was there any pushback from the BBC when it came to the content of each episode? He says not, “They were very open to me being able to really examine it from so many angles. Like what does it mean for it from a class perspective? How does the criminalisation of sex between men impact on the sex that people have? And speaking to trans people about how it affects them too.”
I mention to Sheehan that the podcast format felt like the perfect way to tell this story, because it felt like a more intimate experience, than say, a documentary series. The content of each episode, along with the subject matter, really forced people to stop and listen to the experiences of these seven men and the people around them involved with the case. “In audio, it’s so personal. It’s in your ears, it’s people’s voices in your ears,” replies Sheehan. “You can dive deeper to examine things in a more granular way.” The format also gave him the freedom to “chop and change” between interviews with different people. “You can stitch them back together again,” he says, interlocking his fingers. “ I think about it in a musical sense – the rhythm and the cadence, and how these voices sit in harmony with one another.”
The response on social media has been overwhelmingly positive, which feels rare at the moment for an LGBTQ+ project. “I was half expecting a [tabloid newspaper] article, but that hasn’t happened yet,” laughs Sheehan, who says he has been humbled by reading comments from people of all generations under the podcast’s social media posts. “There are wonderful people contemplating what this case meant and what these laws meant, and how that affects us now,” he says of some of the feedback. Sheehan too has received messages from various people within the LGBTQ+ community. “It’s been really, really touching.”
It’s also vital, I venture, to hear a local LGBTQ+ story that doesn’t take place in a city with a big queer scene, like London or Manchester. Sheehan agrees, adding that the podcast highlights the entanglements with homophobia and class. “I think there’s a definite link between how those men were criminalised and potentially felt it more strongly, because of where they were from and who they were,” he argues. “I think metropolitan queers were still absolutely marginalised and oppressed, but maybe didn’t feel it as much as those who lived in smaller, more working class places. I think it’s the same now – metropolitan gays stories are told, whereas it’s so rare to have the stories of people told from these sorts of areas.”
To his point about which stories are told, versus those that aren’t, I ask him if he believes this has something to do with who is telling these stories in the first place. “Absolutely,” he replies, saying that having diverse voices in media ultimately diversifies the stories being told. He also believes that it is vital for these stories to be told by voices from these local communities. “How many Bolton voices do you hear telling these sorts of stories on the BBC? How many Birmingham voices do you hear telling them on the BBC?” he points out. “I wanted to be able to use language to discuss things in ways that are big and colorful, sometimes complex and sometimes not, but in my own voice and the voices of people from Bolton.”
On our way back to the Arcola Theatre, Sheehan tells me he’s looking forward to people seeing the play he’s currently working on. The relationship in ‘Heisenberg’ was originally between a man and a woman, yet in the play’s latest queer reimagining, it is between two women. Sheehan is also sound designer for ‘High Value Man’ a new play by Olivier Award-winning playwright, Igor Memic, that is currently in development at The Big House, a charity transforming the lives of care leavers and at-risk young people through the power of performance.
As for more podcasts like ‘Criminally Queer’, it’s clear to me that Sheehan has fallen for the podcast format when it comes to telling queer stories. “With podcasts, it’s like this tapestry that you can assemble from different materials,” he says rather poetically. “They’re quite disparate in texture and colour, and you weave them together to make something that sits as a whole.”
Hugh Sheehan is a musician, composer, sound designer, and audio producer from Birmingham. He is the creative behind the podcast series ‘Criminally Queer: The Bolton 7’ on BBC Sounds, and is Sound Designer for Heisenberg, a play by Simon Stephens currently on stage at the Arcola Theatre in London.
