How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by King, Richard

  ‘It was Tony’s ego gone mad,’ says Simmons. ‘The first q[uantity] s[urveyor’s] report came in and it was going to cost over [£]400,000, just to refurbish it. The commercial estate agents said a fully functional building that size as offices would be worth [£]150,000 – this is when I started having alarm bells. Tony had gone on a jaunt to see Tom Atencio in LA, so Alan spoke to Ben Kelly and said, “Right, you’re going to have to rethink all these specifications. All these materials have to change.” Tony’s come back and is furious with Alan and I.’

  Kelly’s design, which included such early Nineties signifiers as exposed brickwork and aluminium girders, was certainly elegant. It made use of the building’s three floors by creating a triple-height space for a floor-to-ceiling atrium and featured details such as bespoke slate roofing and a series of interior gutters that contained treated pebbles. It was a space that would have been highly coveted by any media or advertising company, or the kind of thrusting property developer that wished to appear culturally relevant. Whoever the building’s occupants, they would certainly have to have been solvent to meet its running costs. Factory’s precarious cash flow was not guaranteed even to cover the costs of the building’s brushed steel gates that featured in their design a perforated rendering of the label’s new corporate logo.

  Factory’s income stream remained impressive, but its outgoings consumed the label’s monies as soon as they had been collected. ‘The first cheque for a million pounds from Pinnacle arrived one Christmas,’ says Simmons. ‘I think it was after Substance. Then it was, “Here’s another one,” and then another one. We were getting these big cheques in but everything was still costing a lot of money and Tony wouldn’t ever look at the balance.’

  In his heightened self-confidence Wilson was also increasingly impulsive. One of Factory’s final signings was the former Miaow! singer and City Fun co-editor, Cath Carroll. Since disbanding Miaow! Carroll had married Big Black guitarist Joey Santiago and emigrated to São Paolo, where she had explored Brazilian rhythms and songwriting. The resulting album, England Made Me, was along with the debut by Electronic one of the few highlights of Factory’s final release schedule. Its recording costs were exorbitant and included studios and session musicians in Chicago, São Paolo, Sheffield and London,‡ all of which had been agreed by Wilson without informing his partners.

  ‘We were having a meeting one night with Cath Carroll’s management to discuss her future contract,’ says Simmons, ‘and Alan and I were somewhat surprised to find that they’d actually already been offered an advance of £70,000. This is the first time we’ve heard about this. We said, “Where’d you get this from?” and Tony came out with, “I made an executive decision whilst at Glastonbury, in the car park, talking to Cath Carroll” … and Alan went absolutely berserk. It was very embarrassing, ’cause, typical Factory, they start having a row in front of this manager.’

  Simmons finally tired of arguing over Factory’s finances and decided to resign. Before her departure she had noticed a possible lifeline for the company’s cash flow. Factory’s agreement with its distribution company, Pinnacle, had elapsed and was due for renegotiation. ‘I mentioned that the Pinnacle contract was coming up,’ she says. ‘We were paying ridiculous amounts of distribution, so I said, “You could save a lot of money by renegotiating the deal,” and at the end of that day I handed in my notice but I had to stay until these negotiations were over with Pinnacle. Rob was in hospital, so I went with Alan to tell Rob I’d resigned; Alan wanted Rob to tell me not to go. Rob said, “I can’t ask you to stay, and I don’t think you should get yourself into being as ill as I am,”’ cause he was very ill at that point, very poorly indeed.’

  ‘Rob had a major problem with his thyroid,’ says his partner Lesley Gilbert. ‘The medication he had to take for that played a big part in Rob’s health and probably the stresses he went through, especially with the Haçienda, added to it all. We came so close, twice, to losing our house, so close. I was more philosophical about that than Rob, but he took it harder. And I think that obviously played a part in his bad health.’

  Gretton had suffered through the ups and downs and complicated emotions that ran through the thread of Joy Division, New Order and Factory and was paying a heavy price. He could also see that Simmons, having been made a partner, was being dragged into the volatility of Factory’s finances and advised her against taking up such an insecure and perilous position, one that he had always tried to maintain with no small degree of common sense and nous. After a long illness, Gretton died in 1999. Perhaps due to his nonchalance and occasional diffidence towards the media, Gretton’s role in Factory has been misunderstood and occasionally downplayed, but his contribution to the company and his belief in the Factory project, to say nothing of the energies and finance he invested in it, cannot be overstated. ‘I get calls from people at Manchester City Council asking me if I’ll go back and open a street if they named it after Tony Wilson,’ says Mike Pickering, ‘and I always tell them, “Call me back when you open Rob Gretton Way.”’

  Factory’s renegotiations with Pinnacle were a disaster. The label was one of the jewels in the crown of the distributor’s catalogue. Along with enjoying healthy Top Ten sales, Factory flattered Pinnacle’s reputation, anointing a rather workaday company with a little of its iconic Mancunian aura. Having not changed the terms of their agreement for several years, Factory was negotiating from a position of strength, and the company’s boss, Steve Mason, was expecting to have to make an impossible-to-turn-down offer to remain as the distributor; but Wilson and his team left Pinnacle having agreed a percentage that was only marginally better. While he would have been the first to admit that figures were never his strong point, Wilson had let an opportunity to turn around the label’s fortunes go begging.

  ‘The following January I went to MIDEM,’ says Simmons. ‘I bumped into someone from Pinnacle who said, “Steve Mason was laughing all the way to the bank. You could have got distribution at 10 or 12 per cent.” I think they settled for 16 per cent, or something ridiculous. When you’re doing that volume of records, that’s a lot of money. Then the rest is history; later on that year they had the receivers in.’

  In one lasting moment of ignominy that has entered Factory mythology, Happy Mondays posed for a photograph on a newly commissioned meeting table, which promptly collapsed under the group’s weight. The table was suspended from the ceiling by thin metal wires, and had been given a Fac catalogue number along with a title, ‘Temporary Contemporary’. As a metaphor for the folly of the Charles Street offices it is unsurpassable. It also illustrates the breakdown in communication between the partners that blighted the end of the company. The table cost around £2,000 to make, but Erasmus and Gretton had understood from Wilson that the figure was nearer £18,000. ‘Temporary Contemporary’ may have been produced under its budget by £16,000, but every other piece of furniture and objet d’art in the building was wildly over budget, and Wilson had hidden his excesses in the table’s price. ‘That bloody table,’ says Gilbert. ‘God, Rob went ballistic at the money, utterly ballistic.’

  Mike Pickering, along with Erasmus, Gretton and New Order, had been sanguine about the need for new offices, but Pickering was, along with his colleagues, dismayed by the scale and grandiloquence of the building. ‘We were never about having flash offices,’ he says. ‘We always had Lesley sat in the middle of a load of cardboard boxes in Palatine Road. Rob was Factory, he kept Factory going. He was really sharp, Rob, and he was the driving force, and even when he got ill he helped so many people, everyone loved him.’

  The voluminous Charles Street space required an increased number of Factory staff to fill its open-plan design. Along with employing a set of chartered accountants, for the first time in its history Factory ran a dedicated A&R department. Many of the newer signings had long-term Factory associates scratching their heads. The label had often been accused of being insular or esoteric, but the Adventure Babies, Northside and the Wendys could only
be accused of being a little pedestrian. ‘The thing that really was the nail in the coffin for Factory for me’, says Morris, ‘was, as soon as they moved into that bloody office on Charles Street and started taking on accountants, and pursuing this sort of A&R and signing bands, I just thought, “It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?”’

  For New Order the situation was becoming increasingly difficult. Once the disastrous Happy Mondays Barbados recording sessions had been written off, it became obvious that Republic, their forthcoming album, was Factory’s only serious asset. In a bid to alleviate the pressures on Factory’s cash flow, the band’s international rights were sold to London Records. The label subsequently went into discussion about London buying a controlling stake in Factory, an idea that had once been unthinkable. Factory may have moved into a new corporate headquarters but apart from New Order it lacked any corporate finance. ‘Are you an indie pretending to be a major label?’ says Morris. ‘Or a major label pretending to be an indie? It was, “The London deal, the London deal will save us all.”’

  In LA Tom Atencio could just look on. He managed New Order for the States only, where his expertise and industry experience had seen the band reach the pinnacle of critical and commercial success. He was unable to influence any decisions being considered in Charles Street. ‘When things started to unravel, the idea that there was a lack of professionalism, or astuteness financially, was making itself clear,’ he says. ‘That was disappointing because these were friends, and it hurt.’

  Unsure whether they had a record company to release their next album or not, New Order were again coming to the financial aid of Factory. The profits of the band’s tours and recordings had always financed a stay of execution for the Haçienda, and they were now doing the same for the label. ‘We should have just downed tools, walked off and said, “Well, we’re not finishing this record until you sort yourself out,”’ says Morris. ‘’Cause how can you make a record when you’re just making the record to finance the edifice of your own misery? Nobody was happy. We were getting out of our heads and being miserable.’

  Once London had audited Factory and undertaken due diligence on the proposed purchase of the label, the common knowledge about the company – that without New Order it was insolvent – became a matter of financial record. Rather than buying into a bankrupt record company, London bought the rights to the band’s forthcoming album Republic and New Order’s future recordings instead.

  ‘The thing that was going to save Factory was the London deal,’ says Morris. ‘It was dragging on and on. Gillian and me had never been on holiday and we went to the Seychelles to get away from it all. We’d go to the beach, come back, and there’d just be a pile of faxes waiting for us.’

  Having made the record in difficult circumstances, the band’s only real option was to release it on London, a move that Gretton in particular regretted. ‘Rob couldn’t stand Roger Ames and London,’ says Morris.

  At that point New Order were now signed to a major label whose name represented everything that Gretton and Factory had always ridiculed about the music business. ‘They ended up having to sign to London really,’ says Boulton. ‘For the first time ever they were a little bit hands-tied-behind-their-back.’

  Despite increasingly strained and difficult relations, particularly between the members of New Order and Wilson, Factory’s closure was treated with a sanguine inevitability. Many outside the label had assumed that, in its love of grand projects and in Wilson’s intellectual capriciousness, Factory had, from day one, been on a trajectory that could only lead to bankruptcy – which is to deny the fun, adventure and peerless music that the label created by exploring Wilson’s ideas about ‘the art of the playground’.

  ‘The thing was, we were having a bloody great time,’ says Stephen Morris. ‘Nobody was sitting around weeping gallons. We were very happy. We were having the time of our lives, really, doing what we bloody wanted. I can’t turn round and say it’s his fault, or it’s his fault we were all there, we could all at any time have fucked off. And we didn’t.’

  Few creative people are lucky enough to see their ideas fulfilled. That Wilson managed to see so many of his become reality is testament to his enthusiasm, intelligence and indefatigable self-confidence. Factory played a large part in Wilson’s life, but he was, perhaps, above all a Granada man, one of Manchester’s proudest sons who had firm ideas about the city’s cultural life, in which he had a definitive and significant role. Wherever his flights of fancy might lead, Wilson insisted that the city he loved go with him, even if it meant that the mundane aspects of running a company like Factory – its accounts, legal documents and deeds – be neglected or forgotten.

  ‘Who wants to be sober with financial responsibility?’ says Atencio, who observed the Factory project from the perspective of America. ‘It kind of kills the muse. The fact that it was around for so long is a miracle. I’m sure millions were squandered in not even being collected. You can see the number of accounts people that it takes to do a proper job in modern labels, and they probably had one guy out the back, with an abacus.’

  Wilson, Gretton and Factory’s civic pride is indisputable. Manchester’s civil servants, property developers and new creative class busily align themselves with the established Factory narrative that places music and culture at the heart of the city’s regeneration. Others more closely involved with the label still smart from what they perceive as its amateur attempts at bookkeeping. Rebecca Bolton has managed New Order since the death of Rob Gretton and supervised the ongoing and canonical interest in Joy Division, a project that is occasionally hindered by Factory’s legacy of clerical lassitude. ‘There are people who’ve been involved that I think have a bitter side, and feel that they have been hard done to by the whole Factory experience,’ she says. ‘Still, even now, I come across loose ends that are a problem for New Order and Joy Division, that we can’t really properly tie up because nothing was written down.’

  * In a typical act of boosterism Dave Haslam, in his NME review, thought the record as impressive a debut as Marquee Moon. One of only a handful of records ever to receive a 10/10 rating from NME, Marquee Moon was joined on its full-marks pedestal by another Shaun Ryder record released in 1995: Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight, Yeah.

  † Anthony was misspelt Antony, and didn’t include the usual middle initial, H., making it a unique written example of Wilson’s name and a likely candidate for a Fac number, although the fact the record already had a catalogue number is likely to have ruled it out.

  ‡ The album’s credits included the line ‘Paid for in Manchester by Factory’

  14 Trancentral Lost in My Mind

  The KLF – Justified and Ancient (photograph by Kevin Westerberg used by kind permission of the photographer)

  Over the Christmas holidays of 1986, six months after releasing his solo album, The Man, and nine months after leaving the industry, Bill Drummond was out for a walk in the countryside. Looking back on the year drawing to an end, memories of a visit from a larger-than-life character to his Warners office were looming large in his reflections.

  ‘One day Pete Waterman comes into my office,’ says Drummond. ‘I didn’t know who the fuck he was. He goes, “I’m a producer, have you got any acts for me to produce?” I said, “Well, I’ve got this act they’re on tonight, at the Wag club.” So he came along and said, “Sack the band, we’ll do a track with the singer.” I explained to him, “Well, we can’t sack the band because it’s the guitarist Jimmy Cauty’s band, and he makes it work.” So he said, “OK, we’ll sack the rest, we’ll keep the guitarist and bass player, as long as they understand they’re not going to play on the records.”’

  Pete Waterman’s production and songwriting company Stock Aitken Waterman were in the flush of early success. After several false starts they had, in the previous year, achieved their first no. 1 single Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’. Dead or Alive’s singer Pete Burns was a veteran of the Zoo Liverpo
ol scene and had in passing mentioned to Waterman that an ex-colleague was now an A&R at Warners. Waterman was permanently alert to industry openings. SAW’s finances were on a knife edge and Waterman followed any lead that might drum up business. His vision of SAW as an out-and-out pop production company had taken some unexpected turns; his first songwriting and production project had been the Cyprus Eurovision Song Contest entry in 1984. Waterman, delighted he now had a contact within Warners, wrote down Drummond’s details in his Filofax and demanded a meeting. ‘He walked in, and the first thing he said to me was that he’d made “You Spin Me” with Pete Burns,’ says Drummond, ‘and I just thought, who the fuck is this madman?’

  Sufficiently charmed by Waterman’s bravado and fast-talking hustle, Drummond’s interest was aroused and he accepted an invitation to the newly built SAW studios in Borough, which Waterman had christened the Hit Factory, home to, as they would inscribe on the sleeve of their singles, ‘the sound of a bright young Britain’.

  ‘Pete invited me to meet Mike [Scott] and Matt [Aitken] down at his studio,’ says Drummond. ‘They’ve got the bank manager there. Pete introduced me as a record mogul, and he got the band to come down and it was all just to impress the bank manager – obviously, he was getting his loan. And there’s no real studio there just some samplers, but Jimmy and I learnt just how to go out on a limb, to really go out on a limb with something, through Pete Waterman.’

  The band Drummond had taken Waterman to see were Brilliant, a trio of vocalist June Montana, Jimmy Cauty and former Killing Joke bassist Youth, who were managed by former Teardrop Explodes keyboardist and Drummond’s former partner in Zoo, Dave Balfe, who had duly signed the band with Drummond. The arrival of SAW, and their own take on Motown production-line, High Street pop, was an idea too simple yet ambitious for Balfe and Drummond, with their mutual distrust of the orthodoxies of record companies and the multi-album careers of the bands they promoted, to ignore. Brilliant were taken out of the Warners demo studios and started making their debut album at SAW studios with, in the minds of its partners at least, the UK’s hottest production team. ‘In Pete’s head it was like a Motown ethos,’ says Drummond, ‘or a Jam and Lewis type production style, but for a British audience. I think he thought they were making Jam and Lewis records they were that slick, but they were more of a Woolworth’s version.’