‘There was me,’ says Gilbert, ‘later on there was Lindsey Reid, Tony’s ex-wife, and then Tina Simmons took over, and Tina was a person who should’ve been there from the start because she was industry-based and super-super-efficient and on the ball. It was chaos. Although I don’t think it was really that much of a problem, records still got released, things got done.’
Tina Simmons had become familiar with Factory through working with Alan Erasmus. In contrast to Wilson’s permanent on-camera charisma and Gretton’s steeliness, Erasmus was a quiet member in the Factory partnership. Spending much of his time following up leads, Erasmus had met Simmons as a contact at one of the manufacturing companies Factory used in London, getting to know one another over the phone while trying to turn Saville’s sleeve designs into Pantone and cardboard reality.
Rather than ignoring the intricacies of Saville’s sleeve designs, Simmons had tried to accommodate them as best as possible. Impressed by her commitment and thoroughness Erasmus invited Simmons for an interview at Palatine Road where, true to form, she found Wilson, Gretton and Erasmus deep in their directorial obligations – vehemently disagreeing with one another in a haze of blue smoke.
‘It was the most bizarre interview,’ says Simmons. ‘They spent most of the time arguing amongst themselves as to why I should be there … Wilson said “There’s queues of people in Manchester wanting this job – why should I give it to you, ’cause you’re a southerner?” Everything was Manchester, Manchester.’ Wilson was outvoted and Simmons moved up to Manchester and started to try to make sense of the various strands of the Factory business.
Recently the label had set up Factory Benelux and Factory USA. Though giving the impression of international reach, the reality was an elegantly designed Factory Communications logo subtly projecting a corporate identity from some friends’ desks in Brussels and New York.
The ubiquitous Michel Duval, who had been an early partner in Blanco y Negro, along with his own Les Disques du Crépuscule label, ran Factory Benelux in Belgium. Michael Shamberg, a film-maker friend of Wilson with excellent connections in Eighties downtown Manhattan, was nominally in charge of Factory USA in New York. Though Shamberg had easy access to all the best clubs and fun New York had to offer, there was an inherent problem with the arrangements of Factory USA that was characteristic of Wilson’s priorities.
‘Michael Shamberg set up Factory New York,’ say Simmons, ‘but the distribution and licensing was being done through Rough Trade San Francisco, so all the monies went from San Francisco into New York and then out from New York to us, or not as the case may be.’
Factory Benelux was a reasonably serious proposition. Duval’s background in sleeve design and attention to detail ensured Factory unsurprisingly gained a serious reputation in Belgium, to such an extent that many of the label’s smaller bands played to the biggest crowds of their lives in Brussels. Duval was able to operate his own release schedule featuring one-off Factory Benelux releases by the label’s roster that included New Order. While the tracks in question may have been little more than off-cuts or spare recordings, they were nevertheless an example of Wilson’s largesse.
In the UK with barely any promotion other than a Peter Saville sleeve appearing in the racks of the record shops, some sessions and spot plays for John Peel and a cursory announcement in the music press, New Order were effortlessly selling increasing numbers of records.
‘There were somewhere between 50–70,000 people,’ says Saville, ‘usually young men who would buy everything and anything that they released, so it meant that New Order could continue without a record company, without advertising, without promotions, without ever joining the industry, because that 50 or 60,000 sales, concentrated usually within one week of release, would force the release into the playlist, where we didn’t want it.’
New Order’s anti-career business model suited both the band and the label, allowing them to operate entirely at their own pace and within their own framework. It also validated Wilson’s ideas about the meaning of Factory. New Order entering the charts without recourse to interviews or videos featuring the band, proved its ability to be an ideas-first organisation, more a think-tank for a new northern creative identity rather than anything as prosaic as an indie label.
Tina Simmons arrived in 1983, after the release of New Order’s third single, ‘Blue Monday’. Had she been there as the record was being put into production she would have witnessed Factory’s working methods – an incredibly detailed sleeve, a stand-alone single release with little promotion and no attention to any of the record’s costs – blow up internationally, as the single became an enormous worldwide hit and Factory’s finances, for the first time, took a huge loss.
‘“Blue Monday” was us getting into Euro disco,’ says Stephen Morris, New Order’s drummer. ‘It was driven by Giorgio Moroder and then going to New York. It was in that kind of order and doing “Blue Monday” was trying to glue those things together.’
Immersing themselves in the production of their first album Movement – while an unravelling Martin Hannett tried unsuccessfully to finish the record with them – had been an introspective but productive process, one during which the band’s Bernard Sumner had changed some of his habits.
‘I guess for a long time after Ian [Curtis] died I was really depressed and sad,’ says Sumner. ‘Then I started smoking draw and I found when I was smoking draw that electronic music sounded great, and I started taking acid. Electro music: E=MC2 by Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer albums, early Italian disco records – it had a wonderful effect on me. I loved the precision of it, the precise little blips.’
Recorded at the same sessions for the band’s second album, Power, Corruption & Lies, ‘Blue Monday’ was New Order making expressive use of precise little blips with an economy and elegance to which they added a seductive English dourness. While it might have been inspired by the erotic assertiveness of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, ‘Blue Monday’ replaced Summer’s euphoric declaration with a question, ‘How Does It Feel to Treat Me Like You Do?’ Thanks to ‘Blue Monday’ the dance floor underwent an intervention of passive-aggressive northern introspection.
The single gained an unstoppable commercial momentum due to the combination of it being playlisted on daytime radio and it reaching a hitherto oblivious Club Med 18–30 demograph for whom ‘Blue Monday’ had become the soundtrack to their fortnight away in the sunshine, where the local Mediterranean DJs playing the song relentlessly, mixing it together with its Italian disco source material.
The single’s floppy-disk-inspired sleeve – the most widely known and purchased Factory artefact – was Saville at his most creative and innovative, incorporating the technology at the heart of the music into his design, all at a cost that ensured Factory and the band lost money on every unit sold. ‘When I finally did “Blue Monday”, the famous bone of contention, nobody at Factory saw the design,’ says Saville. ‘It went from me to the printer. Who would see it? Tony couldn’t approve it, New Order didn’t approve it. I would talk to Rob, because I felt that that was responsible. I said, “Have they seen it?” He said, “Yeah …” This was typical Rob. He said, “Hooky hates it, Stephen really likes it.” “And Bernard?” … “Don’t mind really.” And that was it.’
‘The sleeve is fantastic,’ say Morris, ‘but we were absorbed in making music, and Saville did his thing. He would mention the Futurists’ work and we just thought, “Marinetti, who’s he play for?”’
The band’s continuing disregard for the conventions of the industry were maintained throughout the run of ‘Blue Monday’ in the charts. The band insisted playing live for the supporting Top of the Pops appearance, a feat that put them beyond the technical expertise of the show’s engineers. The result was an awkward performance that sounded completely out of character on the programme, only adding to the band’s detached reputation.
With a single taking up residence in the Top Ten, Gretton as usual asked Richard Thomas to book them a
London show. Rather than capitalising on their crossover momentum by playing Brixton Academy or the Town & Country club, New Order promoted ‘Blue Monday’ with a concert near Surbiton. ‘We did Tolworth Recreation Centre for “Blue Monday”,’ says Thomas. New Order may have become multiplatinum pop stars with ‘Blue Monday’, but their total indifference towards the capital only grew stronger.
While never really interested in succeeding in London, now the band, Gretton and Wilson had even turned their attention away from their home town and were spending as much time as possible in New York.
‘I got the idea for the bass drum sound on “Blue Monday” from going to Heaven,’ says Sumner. ‘Then the next step was, we went to play in New York a lot, the Fun House and Paradise Garage, and there was a New York version of that electro, Puerto Rican sound, with a gay disco influence, a mixture of dope, acid and clubs.’
‘It was very refreshing to go over there and see people having a good time with a total sense of innocence about it,’ says Morris. ‘There were no preconceptions about, it was just having a good time.’
The band at every level was absorbing the gentle sense of hedonism, the infectious thrill of the clubs. ‘We’d sleep during the day. We’d get an alarm call for half past eleven at night, meet in someone’s room – we’d all drop a tab of acid except for Rob,’ says Sumner, ‘and Michael Shamberg would drive. We’d go to about five clubs in a night, and we’d all just go mad. Very much how E turned on people later. It happened with us with acid in 1982.’
New Order’s image also changed. The raincoats and shirt sleeves of Joy Division were replaced by polo shirts and slip-on shoes. The band now dressed with a hint of the casual or Perry Boy look; a Manchester City Eighties terrace mix of French and Italian high-end tennis clothes, polo shirts and pastel colours (although they continued to wear leather jackets as a punk badge of honour).
‘Rob always dressed like that anyway,’ says Morris. ‘He was into the casual thing, and bought shirts for us and I suppose he styled us. We had to get rid of the fucking raincoats; it was a semi-unconscious thing – you’re getting away from the raincoats with the music and you’re getting away from that with the clothes as well.’
The band recorded the follow-up to ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Confusion’, in New York with Arthur Baker, a producer at the heart of the city’s club scene. The video, a narrative of the song being mixed to quarter-inch tape then played in the Funhouse by Jellybean Benitez as the band, Baker and the DJ gauge the crowd’s reaction on the dance floor, is highly evocative of the New York culture in which the band and label were now immersed: kids of all races straight off the street in sneakers and high socks break-dancing to the Funhouse’s enormous bass bins.
Such a seductive environment caused ideas to ferment in Gretton, Wilson and the band’s heads. Wilson and Gretton in particular started having a series of after-hours conversations all based around the question, what if we could repeat this experience in Manchester?
‘It wasn’t straightforward,’ says Morris, ‘and it still isn’t straightforward. We got into going to clubs and doing music to play in clubs and it had a big effect on us. Tony and Rob saw lots of big warehouse spaces and thought, “What have we got a lot of in Manchester?”’
If a combination of Factory and New Order were going to entertain opening a club, Gretton had a clear idea of whom he’d like to run it. Mike Pickering, a friend of Gretton through a shared passion for Manchester City away-days had left Manchester for Europe, odd-jobbing his way around kitchens and had settled in a large disused space in Rotterdam. ‘I met these people who’d squatted in an old disused waterworks on the banks of the river Maas,’ says Pickering, ‘and they had this big hall, Hall 4, which was full of pigeon shit, and each person that squatted there was either an artist, musician, electrician or a sound engineer.’
Hall 4 became a contemporary performance space and Pickering, using some of his Manchester connections, started booking No Wave bands who had made it out of the Lower East Side, along with some of his friends from home and the odd legend. ‘We put on loads of stuff. I don’t know how the fuck we did it to be honest. We had Captain Beefheart. Tuxedomoon lived there for a while. James White and the Blacks, Arto Lindsay and DNA – and I got a Factory night with A Certain Ratio and Section 25 and I started DJing a lot.’
Gretton, who had chosen dates in Belgium as a water-testing exercise for New Order to start performing again away from the glare of Manchester or London, was impressed by the scope of Pickering’s booking policy and its broad-church functionality.
‘Rob saw it,’ says Pickering, ‘and he said, “You’ve got to come home, ’cause I want to do a club.” So I almost immediately went back and lived with him and Lesley in Chorlton.’
The loosening up of Factory through its exposure to NYC clubs was reflected in its release schedule. Alongside staples like New Order, Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio were 52nd Street and Pickering’s own band, Quando Quango, all of whom were more interested in the free expression of the dance floor rather than the introspection of the bedsit.
‘We all loved electro music and the NME hated us, absolutely hated all of us,’ says Pickering. ‘They thought we were soul boys, but we didn’t give a fuck. We could go to New York and Quando Quango played two nights at Paradise Garage as guests of Larry Levan and New Order.’ And if Quando Quango were dismissed at home, the club audiences of New York voted with their feet sending the band’s second single, ‘Love Tempo’, to no. 4 on the Billboard Dance chart.
A growing release schedule and a raft of new signings meant that for the first time, whatever NME might make of them, Factory were willing to consider hiring a London PR company. Dave Harper, who was about to quit Rough Trade and go freelance, was recommended to Gretton by Richard Thomas, who was now managing The Fall and had been impressed by Harper’s ability to cope with Mark E. Smith’s fluctuations in mood.
‘I had to go up to Factory and meet Tony and Rob and Alan Erasmus,’ says Harper. ‘I was intimidated, obviously. Tony Wilson was his usual charming self. Alan Erasmus was odd and Gretton was … he was a very clever man, Rob Gretton, but he could have had a job in human resources … “Let’s cut through the crap … Why the fuck should you do the press for Factory?” So I made up some nonsense and he went, “Uh.” He still had that old punk attitude. Rob was one of the funniest people in the world and was able to stare down the barrel of a gun. Compared to anything else, particularly Rough Trade, it felt so exciting and completely untutored.’
The notion of opening a New York-style club was no longer fermenting but being discussed as a possibility as Wilson and Gretton started scouting the city for premises. With New Order permanently in the position of being Factory’s main creditors, Gretton approached the band for their approval to invest in the idea. ‘The downside of no contracts was that it also meant no accounting,’ says Morris, ‘and so there was a lot of money around. The way it was explained to me by Rob was that, we’re going to do a club, and the reason we’re going to do this club is because it would be a good way of getting money out of Factory … and we all said, “Yeah, I can see that.”’
Factory had started as a club before it became a record company, and had found early success in doing so. Back in Manchester, Wilson and Gretton’s ideas for the club were now far more ambitious and on an altogether larger scale. The band had seen the idea germinate from a stoned conversation into an ambitious project involving bricks and mortar, one that was producing in Wilson, even by his standards, new levels of empirical grandeur. Although still positive about the idea, New Order were growing a little sceptical.
‘I imagined it would be like The Factory,’ says Morris. ‘Go and rent a space and do the same sort of thing. Then Rob said they had a building in mind, International Marine. I knew International Marine. I’d been driving past this place for years, so this place had this element of mystery. I didn’t feel like I should go in, in case someone expected me to be a potential boat buyer, which I clearly w
asn’t. But one thing I did know was that it was bloody massive.’
A space large enough to accommodate gin palaces and ocean-going yachts, International Marine was as large as any of the buildings on Whitworth Street West, which was in 1982 a series of mainly empty warehouses that backed on to the Rochdale Canal. Even for the recession-ravaged property market of early Eighties Manchester, the building’s wholesale renovation was a substantial investment in real estate, an investment that was given added risk by the fact the label had only secured the leasehold on the promises.
The Funhouse and Danceteria both used space to encourage the interaction between the crowd and the dynamics of the music played in the clubs. Wilson and Gretton’s New York epiphany grew into the conviction that a wide-open space in Manchester for the city to experience freedom of movement and no dress restrictions would be a revelatory break with the basement dives and late-licence watering holes that represented the city’s nightlife, a point that many of the city’s DJs and clubbers, who enjoyed the vibrancy of venues like Legends, would find contentious. The club’s design by Ben Kelly combined the utilitarianism of Factory’s early sleeves with a similar re-imagining of functional objects – traffic beacons, cat’s eyes, galvanised steel. The mix of industry and sense of airy possibility spreading upwards across its three storeys was Factory’s identity in three-dimensional form.
However, two crucial elements of the New York clubbing experience were missing in Manchester. ‘I remember going to The Loft and just thinking, “Wow”,’ says Pickering, who was now firmly part of the New Order inner circle. ‘I didn’t really feel a total part of that ’cause I didn’t know what Ecstasy was and a lot of them were on it and it was very gay, but the very fact that clubs were built round sound systems rather than drink culture was amazing. At Danceteria I met Mark Kamins and heard him play the Anne Clark record on Rough Trade and mix it in with Afrika Bambaataa, and I’d never heard anything like that and I thought, this is how it’s gotta be, this is just amazing.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 18
