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Growing up in Manchester, there were two Tony Wilsons. As shown in the film, there was the one on Granada Reports, a cheesy regional news presenter who also turned up on local late-night stuff pontificating with a view of Manchester in the background. And there was the other one, intimidatingly cool, who ran Factory Records and the Hacienda and Dry Bar and brought us all our favourite bands. As I progressed into my teens the two images moved together, overlapped and eventually became one. A person with many metaphorical mansions.
There was a Tony Wilson quote I've struggled to find about Madchester being the first British musical movement to be authentically working class, in contrast to punk (among others) which was led by middle-class art school students. It's a statement which sounds good but I can't imagine stands up to investigation. Nonetheless, what made Factory different was Wilson's abiding faith in the working classes of Manchester. Joy Division might have been given a chance by somebody else, but the poetry of Shaun Ryder's lyrics and bludgeoning, raw singing wouldn't have been appreciated so quickly by any major labels. Wilson stayed true to his belief that working-class lads, bands who weren't afraid of squaring up to their audience, were the geniuses he was looking for and for the most part he was right.
We liked Factory bands more than the others at my school. Not because we were obsessive labelheads but because there was something in the aesthetic. Older brothers were into the Smiths or the Stone Roses. We, at a comprehensive in an undistinguished area, were all into New Order and the Mondays. Wrote For Luck was one of our anthems. We liked these bands from the grim urban sprawl of Manchester who didn't dress up their music, who knew how to make danceable songs that still sounded bastard hard, who took drugs and who had no intention of losing their grounding in the city. Manchester has always been very proud of Manchester. Factory's bands expressed that.
Or some of them did. Because it would be unjust to remember Tony Wilson, a visionary and a pioneer, without remembering the massive amount of crap that Factory produced. The names haven't stuck with me, but he signed some awful, awful bands and believed in them for album after album. He had a particular penchant for fey, delicate female singers whose ethereality was totally at odds with his more successful signings and whose music performed accordingly. It all used to get played on local radio and an entire city suffered.
So: Tony Wilson. Genius, legend, pompous and pretentious, who did more to make the city he loved what it is today than will ever be recognised. RIP. |
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