by Alex; Ogg
Factory’s decadence, meanwhile, continued unabated. Having opened both a bar (The Dry Bar, FAC 201) and retail outlet (The Area, FAC 281) in Manchester, they moved offices to a new headquarters on Charles Street, close to the BBC’s Oxford Road building, in September 1990. Although it was the Haçienda that would continue to be the principal drain on resources, the extravagance of the build quality and furnishings at Charles Street are the trappings with which most associate Wilson’s naivete. With design again by Ben Kelly, the Arne Jacobson chairs and boardroom table (“the most brilliant table in history”) hung by wires from the ceiling, at a cost of £30,000, have passed into Manchester folklore. So too Gretton’s exasperated attempts to chase Wilson round said table to throttle him on learning of the price tag. And that’s not even to mention the zinc roof, only visible, so Wilson claimed, by helicopter.
In April 1991, Factory’s totemic production genius, Martin Hannett died. Having rejoined the label following the legal disputes, he was behind Happy Mondays’ second album Bummed, but most testimony suggested he was now becoming so erratic artists, even those desperate to be touched by his ‘genius’, were finding him increasingly difficult to work with. He remained possibly most haunted of all the Factory personnel by Curtis’s death, and had put on a huge amount of weight due to his heroin addiction – so much so that, it was said, he was too big for his designated coffin.
But Factory’s problems really accelerated through 1992. In terms of sales, New Order and The Happy Mondays dwarfed the rest of their catalogue, and there were problems with both. After having taken time out with various solo projects (Electronic, Revenge and The Other Two), New Order put great store – and finance – by their comeback album; £400,000 was expended on Republic, recorded in Ibiza. The Happy Mondays, meanwhile, were living the high-life at Eddy Grant’s studio in Barbados. Ostensibly recording a new album, Yes Please, they were in reality attempting to ingest their own body weights in drugs on a daily basis. Manager Nathan McGough had sold the idea to Wilson on the basis that the island was heroin free and that might get Ryder ‘off the brown’. It may have been heroin free, but Barbados was also, it turned out, home to a vibrant crack cocaine culture. Cue high jinx on an island in the sun at Factory’s expense, with numerous hire car write-offs, broken bones and general thievery. The zenith of the madness came when, according to legend, Ryder attempted to sell Grant’s studio sofas to local dealers. The bills were soaring and even Wilson became alarmed.
London Records, under the auspices of Roger Ames, started circling the increasingly debt-laden label, but that deal fell through when it emerged that Joy Division/New Order’s prestigious back catalogue was not in actuality owned by Factory, due to their early non-contract relationship. “It was always presumed by London Records that we had no contracts,” Wilson would explain to Paulo Sedazzari of G Spot magazine in 1994. “But there was a contract drawn up in ’79 to say there was no contract, which I signed in blood. It was just a page and a half and I’d forgotten it existed. It turned up in the tax investigation. We faxed it to the solicitor, he got very upset and said to us, ‘Don’t you realise – if you don’t have a contract, you don’t own the group’s future, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘But you do own the back catalogue which you paid for the production of. Unless… you have a piece of paper like this that specifically says you don’t.’ And we went, ‘Oh, sorry’. But another major reason, that people don’t realise, was the property collapse. Peter Saville now says he told me the collapse was coming but I can hardly remember it, it must have been late in the day.” Indeed, as the recession gripped at the start of the 90s, as well as escalating costs at the Haçienda and confounded expectations of new product from their two major artists, Factory was attempting to grapple with a massive write-down of property assets. At one time with an estate valued in the region of £2.5m, they were now worth only a fraction of that amount, and that, more than anything else, was the hole Factory had dug.
Bankruptcy was declared in 1992. London – the indignity of that label’s name not lost for one minute on Wilson – was able to pick up the cream of the artists they wanted without having to bail out the stricken label. At the time Factory’s head of A&R Phil Saxe was desperately trying to sign two bands – Pulp and Oasis. The Haçienda struggled on until 1997, but was seriously damaged by both drug scares and violence. Driving the story ever onward to high farce, a £10,000 metal detector installed to deter knife and gun carriers failed due to the metal floors underpinning the venue. By 2003 it had become a luxury apartment block, and a huge part of Manchester’s musical history was entombed in its foundations.
Gretton quickly set up his own Rob’s Records imprint in 1993, and enjoyed a Top 3 hit almost immediately with Sub Sub’s ‘Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)’. He continued to work with New Order, persuading them to reform in 1998 after a five-year hiatus, but would die, aged 46, from a heart attack in May of the following year. Erasmus kept clear of the limelight. “Alan doesn’t want the attention,” suggests Vini Reilly, “he refuses to have anything to do with any public stuff, he’s very private. That’s the way he likes it. It’s a bit frustrating for me, because he deserves a lot of praise for everything he did.”
An attempt to revive the label – Factory Too aka Factory 2 – was made in 1994, in collaboration with London Records. The first release came from the Durutti Column. “I thought it would be a lovely way to start,” stated Wilson, “Vini Reilly of Durutti Column has been loyal and stayed with me.” Yes, Tony. But no-one else would have him, would they? But none of Wilson’s new signings would scale the heights he was expectant of (though he helped caretake a reissue programme under the billing Factory Once). But finding the economic imperatives of London unsurprisingly divergent from his own, he severed ties and formed first the short-lived Factory Records LTD then, in 2006, F4 Records. The latter was put on hold when Wilson discovered he had cancer. Several friends gathered round to raise funds when, by dint of the NHS postal code lottery, it was revealed he was denied stocks of the Pfizer drug Sutent, which he believed was prolonging his life.
When Wilson died of a heart attack, at the age of 57, in August 2007, there was an outpouring of public emotion that revealed both the affection in which he was held and the enemies he had made. In an implausibly mean-spirited obituary, The Telegraph noted that he had a “monstrous ego”, was surrounded by cronies, and variously described him as “arrogant”, “smug”, “preening” a “pretentious loudmouth” and possessed of “overweening vanity” and “total self-obsession”. It also, naturally, prefigured mention of ‘Manchester’ with ‘windswept’ as all good metropolitan journalists must do. It’s illustrative of the degree to which Wilson alienated some. But most Mancunians were happy to line up behind his unremitting advocacy of their city. While he was undergoing cancer treatment, there was vague talk about organising a benefit festival. The title “Tony Wilson’s a cunt” was mooted. And would have been an appropriate and affectionate choice.
Some tried to intervene directly. “Thank you for your email dated 1st August 2007 regarding our medicine SUTENT® (sunitinib) and funding for you friend Tony Wilson,” came the reply from Pfizer’s Hannah Roberts. “I am sorry to hear that Mr Wilson’s local primary care trust (PCT) has denied him funding for Sutent therapy. Pfizer takes very seriously its shared ethical responsibility with the NHS to make its medicines available to patients who need them. Unfortunately Pfizer is unable to sponsor Mr Wilson’s continued treatment by offering compassionate supplies of Sutent… As you will appreciate, decisions by the NHS to deny patients funding to treatment places us in an ethically very difficult position, and as a company we are fighting for a better system of evaluation for new cancer drugs within the NHS. I hope this letter explains the steps Pfizer UK has already taken to play our part in making this treatment available. On a personal note, I would like to offer my sympathy for Mr Wilson’s current situation.”
On an ever more personal note, Tony Wilson died 10 August 2007.
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sp; As Steve Shy remembers, speaking before his death, slating Wilson was a favoured Mancunian pastime – though woe betide anyone from outside the city who tried it. “Tony, as everyone will tell you – everyone loves him to death, but no-one will tell him to his face. Everyone tells him how much they hate him. He’s done so much for Manchester, but you must never, ever let him know. I can remember once, they were filming for So It Goes, either a Clash or Magazine show, and he said, ‘Do you want a drink?’ ‘Yeah.’ There were about three of us. He went to the bar and went straight to the front. The woman said, ‘I don’t give a shit who you are, you get to the back of the queue’. So he went to the back of the queue. By the time he got to the front, I think he was buying a round for about 30 people. Nobody says thank you to Tony, everyone just takes.” Or, as Rick Goldstraw remembers; “When Tony was working at Granada, all us junkies would wait outside. And he’d let us into the green room so we could have something to eat and drink, before we got chased away.” Fittingly, Tony Wilson’s coffin was emblazoned with its own catalogue number – FAC 501.
“Tony would say ridiculously inflated things,” remembers Carroll, “but he never stuck me as an egotist; a lot of the time he appeared to be parodying himself. He took criticism very seriously and he was surprisingly vulnerable. Tony had a lot of stuff to sell and had a keen sense of responsibility towards the label and the town of Manchester; it was like the family he had to support. He was a showman and appeared successful, so having set himself up as the font from whence much of value and importance flowed, he had to say ‘no’ a lot, That’s difficult and we don’t like hearing it. People would be persistent; it had to be quite wearing.”
“Just how lucky I am that I knew him,” adds Vini Reilly. “He was quite something. He taught me an awful lot; he was a very educated guy. I had a lot of guidance from people – I didn’t have a good education, I was expelled. So a lot of my education, if I’ve got any, came from other people. Tony was one of those people. He was very good at communicating information and ideas and concepts and stimulating your imagination. He was just a very, very close friend. I used to baby-sit his little son, and change his nappy. It was very family-orientated. We talked about anything, there were no no-go areas. You always got the truth and a bit of wisdom and a bit of philosophy thrown in with Tony. It was just an unspoken friendship. We got on from the moment we saw each other. Tony and Bruce [Mitchell; Durutti Column percussionist] have always been my mentors. My own father died when I was 16, at exactly the time when you need a dad to look up to, I didn’t have one. So Tony and Bruce have both given me focus and got me away from… unhealthy people? Just great friends.”
Some commentators, like writer Mick Middles, have stated that they are not “particularly comfortable with the Tony Wilson industry that has sprung forth… because they are transforming him into some kind of saint which, with respect, is something he most definitely wasn’t.” Others, like Tosh Ryan, speaking to me prior to Wilson’s death, though his comments are still applicable, are suspicious of the way the label’s whole iconography has been constructed. “It’s that whole thing about rehashing a past that really wasn’t that valuable. I find that quite odd. I’m going out at the moment with a woman who used to be involved in Factory Records, and she’s involved in writing a book about Ian Curtis – how many more FUCKING BOOKS DO WE NEED ABOUT IAN CURTIS! I just find it’s really sad that a lot of people are living in the past when there are some really interesting things going on and some interesting things to do. There’s a planet to save! Instead, we’re concerned about rehashing idiotic music from the 70s and 80s.”
But Wilson’s legacy endures. He may have blanched at the indulgent nature of 2008’s Tony Wilson Experience – a 24-hour talk-a-thon on the subject of his, and Factory’s, legacy. More likely he would have warmed to the preposterous ambition of the enterprise, just as he eventually came round to his non-spiteful but acute portrayal by Steve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People (his ruminations on the ‘additional commentary’ DVD are as amusing as the main feature). Speaking to the BBC in 2001 he said, “In a sense Factory’s two great bands were Joy Division/New Order and the Mondays. Although I think a lot of people actually, unlike me, like Factory for the really weird, really interesting bands, I’m an elitist. I’m proud of the fact that two of the greatest bands in history… they both changed music. Joy Division/New Order changed music twice, and the Mondays changed music to create acid house. They’re my kind of bands. It would have been wonderful to have Oasis or in the previous generation The Smiths. Except they weren’t bands that changed music; they were brilliant, but they didn’t change things …”
Eric’s, Liverpool’s first punk era label, grew out of Roger Eagle’s eponymous club in Matthew Street, formerly home of The Cavern. Opened in October 1976, it became a haven for the city’s punk community; most of whom, seemingly, were members of the Big In Japan clique that appeared on Eric’s first release. Absorbed as much by fashion and style as music, the roots of Liverpool’s most mythical band stretch back to connections made at local hairdressers A Cut Above The Rest. Jayne Casey, shortly to become Liverpool punk’s ‘It Girl’, caused a stir when she decided to shave off all her hair – which added to the salon’s mystique and magnetised it for similarly wayward youngsters. She was soon joined by both Pete Burns – sacked within weeks for being abrupt and rude to customers, then re-hired – as well as his future wife Lynne Cortlett and eventually Holly Johnson.
Casey would subsequently set up a market stall, Aunt Twacky’s, also in Matthew Street, taking on Paul Rutherford as her assistant. It was while serving there that she came into the orbit of Eagle, a revered Northern Soul DJ at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel and promoter at The Liverpool Stadium, a pre-war indoor boxing ring that hosted some of the north-west’s most notable 70s rock gigs. Eric’s was started in partnership with Liverpool University graduate Pete Fulwell and Deaf School road manager Ken Testi. Eagle considered Casey and her bizarre coterie of associates natural allies. They were invited, en masse, to the opening round of gigs in October 1976 and quickly made the club their own. Eric’s downtown New York vibe is remembered as akin to CBGB’s in terms of the affected cool of its clientele and the squalor of its toilets. There was also a slight whiff of Paris Left Bank radicalism in the air; partially due to the art school clientele but also augmented by the leftover leftist detritus of its previous incarnation as The Revolution, which ran to papier-mâché busts of Castro and Guevara.
It was, also, notoriously snobby. The Accelerators were one of the local bands who never got to play there. “Roger came across as a hard-nosed business type who refused to help us out,” remembers Accelerators guitarist, Kathy Freeman. “Yet I remember once he invited me to his flat – no ulterior motive – and played me all his favourite fifties obscurities and gave me a cassette, I think it was called Basement at Eric’s or something. It included some wild instrumentals.” Many others attest to Eagle’s paternalistic Music 101 lectures. “Roger was always teaching you,” Casey would tell Paul Du Noyer in Liverpool. Wondrous Place, “but in a way that was not oppressive to a young person.” The imposing scale of his record collection and zealotry in distributing compilation tapes drawn from its contents remain key to the subsequent development of popular music in the north west. “Towering and glowering,” Bill Drummond would record in his book, 45, “the third-greatest visionary in rock ‘n’ roll. Anyone from my generation out of Liverpool who ever made a record is eternally in his debt – or can blame him for the mess we have made of our lives.”
Formed in May 1977, Big In Japan started life as a trio of Bill Drummond, Phil Allen and Kevin Ward, playing their first show two days after seeing The Clash gig at Eric’s. Drummond, born in South Africa to a Church Of Scotland preacher but a native of Galloway since childhood, had arrived in Liverpool to take a job designing for the Everyman Theatre, He’d fallen under Eagle’s spell after attending one of his final Liverpool Stadium promotions, Dr Feelgood. Soon he was helping out as a handyma
n at Eric’s. “Yeah, that’s what I did,” Drummond confirms. “If a wall needed putting up, I’d put up a wall. If the bar needed moving, I’d move the bar. I’d do the get-ins for bands as well, and stage security.” A secondary catalyst came after Ken Campbell staged his 24-hour ‘happening’, Illuminati, at The Liverpool School Of Music, Dream, Art And Pun, based in an arts complex in Matthew Street. “That was the Armadillo Tea Rooms,” Drummond explains. “It used to be O’Hanagan’s tea rooms. That was the hang out. All the rival gangs in terms of what was going on musically or creatively in Liverpool had their own tables in the tea rooms. It was like a triangle between Eric’s and Probe [Records] and The Armadillo.” Campbell had persuaded Jayne Casey to join the Illuminati cast while Drummond busied himself on the set. She insisted Holly Johnson should be enrolled in the fledgling group before she’d continue. The expansion eventually led to Ian Broudie, drummer Peter ‘Budgie’ Clark and Dave Balfe swelling the ranks. Initially they had a three-song repertoire, one of which featured Casey reading out that week’s Top 20.
