In Play at Home, as a tracking shot starts in the Pennines and sweeps across the city, New Order start playing ‘Thieves Like Us’ to a sold-out Haçienda. As the camera shifts through disused mills and feeder roads, one of the band’s most tender melodies soundtracks a cityscape: Manchester in the sunshine, glowing with a battered yet burnished self-confidence. The optimism of the Factory project, the ability to make things happen and the belief that anything is possible, echoes out from the high notes of Peter Hook’s bass line and up into the Manchester sky.
‘There’s a pub called the Peveril of the Peak round the back of what was the Haçienda,’ says Harper, ‘this ancient, tiled, wedge shape. It’s where ACR and Pickering used to drink in this dark industrial area, this lovely Victorian pub. It’s now surrounded by executive housing. You’d go in there and they’d all be talking about music – it was hip as hell, and it had this wonderful sense of resilience.’
The juxtaposition of civic pride with pop culture was not confined to Wilson and Manchester. In February 1986 the Royal Court in Liverpool hosted a benefit for Derek Hatton’s Liverpool City Council – With Love from Manchester. Featuring their neighbouring city’s favourite sons the evening comprised The Fall, John Cooper Clarke and The Smiths, with New Order headlining. The evening was curated by Wilson, having been approached by Hatton, who was by then six months into his illegal ‘deficit budget’ campaign against the government’s squeeze on the city’s finances. Hatton was also in need of as much assistance – and cash – as he could find. Advised by Wilson to go direct to Gretton, Hatton, with an advisor in tow, duly invited Gretton and Pickering for a meeting in Liverpool at the Adelphi Hotel. ‘Rob kept asking the bloke with Hatton, “Are you a gangster?”,’ says Pickering. ‘Hatton ignored him and kept asking if New Order could play for free. Rob kept replying, “Is he a gangster?” Rob went to the toilet and I turned to the bloke with Hatton and said, “Just say ‘Yes’, he’ll agree to do it.” Rob came back, sat down and straight away asked the bloke, “Are you a gangster?” He said, “Yes,” and Rob said, “All right then, we’ll do it.”’
‘There was this do with Derek Hatton,’ says Harper, ‘and there was this whole “Liverpool loves Manchester” that Tony created, so Hatton’s involved, Wilson’s involved, these two monstrous egos both making ridiculous claims on behalf of the north-west.’ With Love from Manchester was a mere taster for what was to follow five months later when the Festival of the Tenth Summer, a week-long celebration of the anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ visit to Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the root of Factory’s sense of its destiny, was held at the newly opened GMEX, the Greater Manchester Exhibition centre, on 19 July.
‘The massive GMEX show was poncy as hell,’ says Dave Harper. ‘It was completely and utterly a Factory wank, but spectacular.’ Featuring over a dozen acts that encapsulated Factory’s conception of Manchester’s punk heritage, the concert was a celebratory launch for the city’s newest, largest venue that placed Factory squarely at the heart of the city’s cultural life. During the day everyone from Wayne Fonda and the Mindbenders, John Cale, OMD and Pete Shelley joined The Fall, ACR and New Order. Headlining the bill were The Smiths, whose appearance was one of the many gestures of bonhomie between the band and Factory that gives the impression that their rivalry was largely theatrical. Rising to the occasion, Morrissey raised a placard during an incendiary version of ‘The Queen Is Dead’ bearing the legend, Two Light Ales Please.
The Festival of the Tenth Summer featured ten multimedia events from fashion shows at the Haçienda to a book written by Richard Boon, Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll and a seminar on the music business. The week also marked something of a high point in the Factory fetishisation of the object: Saville designed ten numerical sculptures for an installation at the Manchester City Art Gallery, along with an accompanying range of merchandise involving badges, posters and a boiler suit. The city also hosted a photography exhibition by Kevin Cummins and a mini film and TV festival. Firing on all cylinders in terms of mapping the city’s cultural landscape, the Festival of the Tenth Summer signalled the beginning of Factory’s over-use of the definite article. Nearly every event involved the word ‘the’ a habit that would begin to stick, and start to grate as the label began to be defined by its style rather than its content. In a witty and knowing gesture, Bill Grundy, the TV presenter who had fallen foul of the regulators after his interview with the Sex Pistols had disintegrated into a tea-time swearing competition, was chosen as the Festival of the Tenth Summer’s lead compère.
The NME, aware of the playful significance of Grundy coming out of retirement for the Festival, dispatched a journalist, accompanied by Harper, to Grundy’s home in Hebden Bridge. ‘Obviously no one had interviewed or heard of Bill Grundy since ’76,’ says Harper. ‘No mobile phone, we’re an hour or two late and we start walking up the garden path to this cottage and Bill Grundy comes barrelling down shouting, “Fuck off, fuck off, you cunts!” So we go into this cottage and his wife makes us cups of tea and more or less the first question is, “So Bill, seeing how your TV career ended the moment you interviewed the Sex Pistols, what have you been up to?” And he went absolutely fucking mental, “You fucking wanker, you don’t know anything about my career, how dare you! You fucking kids, you don’t know anything. I used to be in the navy, you know. I’ve had more prostitutes …”’
*
For all the grand-scale events and totemic products being planned in Palatine Road, by the summer of 1986 the esprit de corps at Factory was faltering. Behind the media narrative of Britain’s most innovative and stylish record label, it was clear to all involved that New Order had reached a point where Factory needed the band more than the band needed the label.
Simultaneously Wilson was exploring more highbrow assignments at Granada and trying to escape the pigeonhole of local news reporter. ‘He’d changed from being Tony Wilson to Anthony H. Wilson,’ says Tina Simmons. ‘I can’t remember exactly, but he started signing Christmas cards AHW … and he did a lot more journalistic-type stuff.’
Rob Gretton was also undergoing changes; his health was deteriorating, as was his relationship with Wilson. Towards the end of 1985 he resigned as a director of Factory and hired an assistant, Rebecca Boulton a colleague from the Haçienda. ‘When I started working with Rob, I think it was clear there were probably a few misunderstandings between Factory, Rob and New Order,’ she says. ‘I think everybody believed that it wouldn’t just be New Order making money in the future. Because New Order was so successful, Factory seemed to be so successful, so they’d have somebody else coming along that would be equally as good and it didn’t really happen.’
Having often come quite close to losing his and Lesley Gilbert’s home in Chorlton, Gretton had, for almost a decade, regularly put everything on the line for both Joy Division/New Order and, by proxy, Factory. The stress of maintaining the band’s momentum, along with permanently having to share, whether he was willing to or not, in a large part of Factory’s workload had stated to take its toll.
‘It all got to him,’ says Gilbert. ‘It was a combination of lifestyle, worry about becoming a father, drugs – it was a mixture of all those things.’
Gretton still maintained his co-directorship of the Haçienda, but a fissure had opened up between him and Wilson that went beyond their customary squabbling. Factory was still only on a semi-legal footing in terms of its accounting obligations and Wilson was permanently uninterested in such back-office mundanity. The question was, who was motivated to take responsibility for the actual running of the record company? Without New Order’s record sales there would be no Factory, but if New Order were on any other label they would have none of the freedom around which they had now built a career. It was a typical Factoryesque impasse, a Catch 22 of commerce and creativity that was too seductive, and too exhausting, to try to resolve.
In his more carefree moments it was exactly the sort of thing that brought a smile to Wilson’s face. Gretton, on the other ha
nd, was starting to develop some premature grey hairs.
‘There’d been an escalation of issues between the two of them,’ says Boulton. ‘Rob had been ill but was pretty calm when I started working for him, but I got the impression that they were standing away from each other a lot more than they had.’
With Gretton withdrawing from Factory and Wilson concentrating on his media career, Simmons and Erasmus were focused more on the day-to-day running of the label. ‘Tina Simmons was very much in charge and everyone felt quite confident in her abilities,’ says Boulton. ‘She was quite a forceful character. I think she struggled a bit, being a woman, in that it was quite a male-dominated environment, even though they treated her with a lot of respect.’
Simmons’s first major decision was to put an end to Wilson’s chaotic magnanimity and instil a degree of technical professionalism in the company. The days of signing bands in blood or shaking hands were over. ‘Factory didn’t have contracts,’ she says. ‘We had to sort it out. I said to Tony, “You do know that what we’re doing is actually illegal … ’cause we don’t actually own this?” Even Tony had to admit that and we were actually giving advances, which they’d never done before.’
Even if he was resigned to submitting to the industry’s standard practice, Wilson acquiesced in the Factory style. Contracts with bands were contained in a bespoke binder involving two sheets of Perspex and three or four bolts; the package was completed with the lightly embossed, over-specified title, ‘The Factory Contract’, and a designated serial number. Neither the paper on which the contract was artfully typed, the packaging conceit or the legal contents would be of much use or validity when Factory ran into financial trouble. For now Wilson, who rarely drew any money for himself from Factory, was not going to let the fiscal side of Factory interfere with his capriciousness, particularly as his own circumstances remained unaffected by Factory’s finances. ‘Tony didn’t need a wage because he was freelance and got quite a lot of money doing his work for TV,’ says Simmons. ‘The only people that took a wage as such was Alan and myself, and I was on less than half of what I’d been earning in London.’
*
Along with Boulton another new character joined the New Order circle. If the band had previously been given the keys to Manhattan, the aristocracy of the LA music industry was now courting them.
‘Rob walked in one day,’ says Simmons, ‘and said to New Order, “How’d you like to be signed to Quincy Jones’ label?” He was absolutely bowled over about Quincy and that’s the only reason they went through Warner Brothers. It was absolutely out of this world.’
Quincy Jones had three years earlier produced Thriller, the most successful album of all time, which duly made him one of the most powerful men in the global music industry and ensured he was given a label by the head of Warners, Mo Austin, called Qwest. Although delighted to be approached, Gretton was not prepared to let his guard down, and he summoned Jones to fly into Manchester to discuss his motives. ‘We picked him up at the airport in Rob’s Audi Quattro,’ says Pickering, ‘and took him out to lunch at the self-service restaurant at Knutsford services. Quincy loved it. He was made up.’
The deal had been structured by Tom Atencio, an LA music executive with a more refined sensibility than many of his rivals. Aware that Factory technically had an office in New York with Michael Shamberg, he had also seen the problems inherent in the band being distributed from Rough Trade America in San Francisco. Observing that the potential in New Order was being seriously underestimated in a burgeoning Anglophile market, he was determined to fund a serious American career for the band beyond the amateurish attempts of Rough Trade’s hand-to-mouth networks.
For the band, which had developed a fondness for the States having toured there frequently, the break into the upper echelons of Hollywood was equally attractive. ‘It was originally a combination of Tom Atencio in LA and Michael Shamberg in New York,’ says Morris. ‘Then through Tom, via Mo Austin, we ended up with Quincy Jones. He had got a record label and then we were all very interested.’
‘Michael Shamberg knew these artists,’ says Atencio. ‘It was such an interesting time in NYC in the early Eighties, when you could go to Danceteria and you could go to the Mudd Club and go downtown and sit at a bar with Russell Simmons and David Byrne. It was very fertile, this crush of ideas, this excitement. The stock market was blowing up, NYC was terribly decadent. I spent a week there every month because it was the centre of the world. I could go to England, come back with a stack of records, get them mixed with local beats and get them on the radio.’
A long queue of the cream of the American record industry had formed around New Order from their first recordings but once ‘Blue Monday’ had spent thirty weeks in the UK charts they were deemed a red-hot must-sign act. Every mogul in corporate American entertainment had attempted to penetrate the band’s detached mystique, whether by offering untold riches or attempting to bond with them in the time-honoured fashion.
‘I’d heard the stories that everyone had tried to sign them,’ says Atencio. ‘Bob Krasnow had literally offered them a blank cheque. David Geffen had come in famously and smoked a joint backstage with the band – only problem is, it’s the band’s joint and dope is hard to get on the road. I get that they’re punk. I understand there’s something at the core of this in Factory and the band but I’d never met them. I call up Tony. He says, “You got to talk to Rob.” So the combination of the time difference, the hard-wire transatlantic cable which meant there was a terrible connection, the fact the Rob had been in the pub since 11 a.m., probably been smoking draw since 3 p.m., and his Mancunian accent meant I couldn’t understand every third word. I swear to God. I just said, “Yeah … right … fantastic … Well, I should come over.”’
In deferring to Gretton, Wilson both displayed his disinterest in the business affairs of the band and realised that New Order would now be embarking on a new stage of a more professional career, one that necessitated them signing to a major label in America.
If Wilson had a fault, it was that he wore his learning rather heavily – something that was put into sharp relief when he attempted to act out the role of a record industry player with a head for figures and something that a cursory look a the state of Factory finances revealed to be questionable. With Gretton and Atencio in partnership with New Order in America, Wilson recognised a more comfortable position to inhabit, that of the eloquent and hip Brit in LA.
‘Our relationship with Tom was kind of a three-way thing,’ says Morris, ‘because you couldn’t stop Tony talking to Atencio, because Tony just wanted to be in LA and be driven around with the top down. But all the business was done between Rob and Tom.’
‘Tony was extremely idealistic,’ says Atencio, ‘but he saw that corporations could extend your mental brand. He was fascinated with the level of executives that were out here. It’s the exact opposite in the UK – the guys who tended to take the corporate jobs in the UK you rightly didn’t want to hang out with, but the guys who were running The Cartel were really cool, really interesting, but they didn’t have any money. They hated corporate money, there were no private jets. So here was a revelation to Tony, that cool guys could take corporate money – what a barn burning idea. It possibly elevated the thinking on Tony’s part and on Rob’s as well, of possibilities that hadn’t occurred before, for good or bad.’
One cool guy whose nose was put out of joint by the New Order Qwest deal was Seymour Stein. As someone who had had first choice on virtually every British act to have been distributed by Rough Trade, and who had had considerable success (and a great deal of fun) with a few of them, he felt it understood that he should have been Wilson and Gretton’s first port of call. As Sire, like Qwest, was financed by Mo Austin at Warners, however, Austin was happy to see two of his executives scrap over the hottest band in the UK.
‘Seymour had co-opted a lot of great UK music,’ says Atencio, ‘and I think that’s why it was so exciting to Mo when I said, “Let’s sig
n them to Quincy’s label.” He was probably beside himself, I know he was, “Oh God, I can take some leverage off Seymour and put some money into Quincy’s account.”’
Stein, thirty years later, still rather flinches at just for once being beaten in his own back yard. ‘I really wanted New Order,’ says Stein, ‘but I think that Mo was trying to make Qwest look hip. Quincy Jones is a true legend but Qwest records never got off the ground. It’s very hard for a producer who’s producing all the time to run a record company and I could cite up a lot of other examples, nothing against Tom Atencio or anything. I think they would’ve fared better had they been on Sire but, who knows, that’s just the way it went down.’
Having been the subject of a classic West Coast power struggle, New Order were for the first time joining the ranks of the professional music industry. In America at least, they were now a band in the corporate mainframe and were expected to undertake the rigours of lengthy tours of the heartlands.
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 20
