Tony Wilson 1994
July 2008ZANI Remembers the great man
ZANI
remembers the one of the most enigmatic men in music, love him or loathe him,
Mr Wilson certainly made a mark. Success, suicide, bankruptcy, libel - and re-invention, Paolo Sedazzari meets one-man soap opera Tony Wilson.
Tony Wilson is a man with a compelling urge to wind people up. “I started presenting Granada in the mid-seventies and being a Salford lad, I used to really enjoy winding the Scousers up, who throughout the Seventies had a much better football than us. But after a while, Granada thought this baiting was getting out of hand. Liverpool had a big game against Bruges in the European Cup and a formal message came down from the top : ‘WILSON WILL NOT MENTION TONIGHT’S GAME ON THE SHOW – ON PAIN OF DISMISSAL.’
I did the whole show without mentioning the game, but with a great big Bruges rosette on my lapel. Even now when I go to Liverpool, I get the cabbies rolling down the window (adopting a scouse accent) ‘Bruges rosette, nice one Tone. Yeah, yeah…ya cunt.”
Tony Wilson is not just another motor mouth music biz mogul. The man is a pioneer, one of a kind. A wonderful knot of apparent contradictions - he’s a socialist in a designer suit, a business man who talks more about art than figures. While Wilson had no part in the making of Joy Division’s music, would they have reached the status of music legends had they signed to a major label and been treated as just another new wave band? Almost definitely not. No stylish expensive Peter Saville sleeves, no enigmatic press image. When we talk about cool independent labels today, Tony Wilson created that archetype with Factory.
And it all started way back in 1978 at a Battle of the Bands gig in Manchester. A drunken youth spotted Tony Wilson by the bar. Recognising him as the presenter on Granada’s show So It Goes, the youth staggered over to him. Tony Wilson remembers that he wore a raincoat, was very aggressive and very, very angry. “You bastard,” the youth blurted “you put Buzzcocks and Sex Pistols and Magazine and all those others on the telly. WHAT ABOUT US THEN?” The youth’s name was Ian Curtis and his band, due on next, were called Joy Division. And so began the Joy Division/New Order phenomenon.
Sixteen years on, and Factory in its first incarnation is no more. I find Tony Wilson – he prefers to be called Anthony, but I can’t help calling him Tony – in a bare room that in a few weeks will be decorated and transformed into the offices of Factory 2. Some pictures are on the floor waiting to be framed and put up. Two early Factory concert posters, a Certain Ratio picture and a photograph of Sean Ryder chewing a beer can. As well as launching a new record label, Tony is frantically busy with preparations for the In The City International Music Convention, to take place in Manchester in late September.
But In The City is no dreary industry convention. As well as established venues, in September it seemed that every bar, college refectory and bingo hall in Manchester was being used to stage some band or other. “The way it worked last year was just fantastic – Urban Glastonbury. Next year we’re hoping to take over the Students halls of residence. So you can get cheap accommodation, thrity quid for four nights. We want people to come to Manchester for that purpose, not just industry. To see the best collection of bands you can see anywhere. Instead of splashing out sixty quid for a Glastonbury ticket, you come to Manchester and see more bands for less. That’s the vision.”
There is one fundamental difference between the original Factory and Factory 2. While Factory was completely independent, Factory 2 is owned by London Records. “I always said that Factory was an experiment, so here’s another experiment – can you be an intelligent record company when you’re owned by a major? Compared to doing it again the same way and being the person individually responsible for working out the producer’s 3% and making sure he gets it – I think I might like this experiment a bit more. The first release will come in October – an album by Durutti Column. I thought it would be a lovely way to start, Vinni Reilly of Durutti Column has been loyal and stayed with me. After that we want to sign two or three young bands. London trust our judgement totally, they’ve given us full artistic control. That’s why we’re working with them. London are a brilliant dance label and a brilliant pop label but they know they’ve never really had a rock’n’roll career band. They thought they were getting two with Factory but unfortunately one of them exploded after four albums – thank you, Sean. That (pointing to the picture of Ryder) is a career act, even though they destroyed themselves.” The picture of Sean Ryder grins back at us…
“I’m quite in love with the new technology. It turns out that Factory 2 and Geffen are the only two companies thinking exactly the same thing about CD-ROM. We’re doing a Durutti Column CD-ROM, on one level it’s just the return of the sleeve. The sleeve used to be this wonderful image twelve inch square, an image that you liked and some sleeve notes that you read, but for the last ten years it’s just been this little CD case. On CD-ROM the sleeve becomes like a screen saver which changes and allows you to customise and play with it. The back side is the sleeve notes. One of the greaest applications of CD-ROM is encyclopaedias – so it’s absolutely perfect for a history of the band. Every single band worth its salt will have its history on CD-ROM very soon.” So a history of Joy Division on CD-ROM perhaps? “You’ve got it, that’s what I want to do. There is enough video footage to do that.”
As we all know, there is nothing like a dead rock star to boost record sales. But it is to the lasting credit of Tony Wilson and Factory, that there was no commercial exploitation in the years directly after Ian Curtis’s suicide. In fact, no other rock star’s death has been veiled with such secrecy. The reasons or motivations behind his suicide have never been made clear. This only served to intensify the aura of mystique that surrounded Factory and the remaining members of Joy Division who became New Order. This mystique, it seems may be blown forever when Ian Curtis’s ex-wife, Debbie, publishes a book on Ian next year.
Tony Wilson knows that in the book he is portrayed with little sympathy. “But that’s fine. I actually like Debbie. Nathalie – Ian’s daughter – wants to study Media so she asked me about Granada. I was filming a documentary so I took Nathalie out filming for a few days. Nathalie had a great time. It was very disconcerting for everyone because she looks very much like her father.”
In January 1990, in an article in The Face, Tony Wilson was quoted as saying “Ian Curtis dying on me was the greatest thing that’s happened to my life. Death sells.” Another example of Tony’s love for a wind-up or did he really mean it? “The truth is I never said anything of the kind. It was a figment of Nick Kent’s imagination.”
Does it bother you that some people really hate you? “No – you can’t let things like that worry you. That person they are talking about. That’s not me. That’s just some image, and quotes like that are just despicable because I would never say anything like that.”
Do you listen to Joy Division these days? “I go through an Unknown Pleasures phase every six months. I still think it’s among the greatest music made in the last forty years. Joy Division was such an amazing group, it’s wonderful they can still touch people.”
Do you ever wonder what Joy Division would have sounded like if Ian Curtis had carried on? “No, never. I’m thinking about it now. I presume that some of it would have gone on the way it did. Synthesisers were already coming in and dance was already an influence. It was Ian, after all, who got the rest listening to Kraftwerk. I still think you would have got Blue Monday, butit would have been different. It is one of the great traits of Manchester musicians that they do not treat Dance and Rock as two separate institutions. And Ian was a part of that as much as anybody.”
The fact that all the best dance tunes of the day were being played at Factory’s own club the Hacienda, and yet Factory never got properly involved in promoting dance is a favourite reason cited for the fall of Factory. Another favourite reason is the Happy Mondays, who lived so close to the edge they eventually fell off it, leaving Tony Wilson with the bill. And when the album came out no-one bought it. But Wilson waves these two explanations aside as irrelevant. “I think we made some A&R mistakes towards the end, but that’s all,” he concedes.
According to Wilson, it was Factory’s eccentric arrangement with their artists that partly explains it. Until the last few years, Factory did not have contracts with any of their artists, but a bit of paper signed in 1979 turned out to be their undoing. “It was always presumed by London Records that we had no contracts with any of their artists. 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 investigations. We faxed it to the solicitor. He got very upset and said – ‘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 specifically says that 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 that he told me the collapse was coming, but I hardly remember it, it must have been late in the day.
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Tony Wilson in 1994 – survivor of the slings and arrows of outrageous libel and bankruptcy. Still in the obligatory designer suit, still with lots to say and still with a very obvious enthusiasm for the music industry. A self-centred and arrogant sod he may be, but a very disarming one. What I did find disconcerting was that throughout our interview, which took place indoors on an overcast afternoon, he wore dark glasses – making eye contact impossible.
Tony Wilson is still a major character in the story Manchester’s music scene, a story more fascinating and absorbing than Coronation Street and probably with longer to run. The Dry Bar is the scene Rover’s Return, where the participants pass in and out to big up and bitch about each other, and Tony Wilson is still in thick of it all and a frequent topic of conversation.
My last question was one I thought would be impossible to answer. To try to explain the Manchester music phenomenon. Why Manchester, and not Birmingham, not Nottingham, not Newcastle, or Southend? Tony Wilson of course has an answer. “Dave Ambrose the A&R guy who you’d always see scouting around her summed it up when he said ‘Manchester kids have the best record collections.’ This is Immigrant City. We’ve always been hospitable, from the Flemish weavers in the 14th Century, to the Germans in the 19th Century – it’s open. When a community comes it thrives, there’s an open hospitality about it. Music is all about tributaries. And that’s why In the City works here so spectacularly well. When people say to me ‘Manchester’s over isn’t it’, I say ‘it’s not fucking over. Look around, look at Take That, look at Oasis. So don’t tell me Manchester’s over. It will be over when it’s over and I haven’t noticed it yet.
Words – Paolo Sedazzari
Article originally appeared in G Spot Magazine 1994
