New dawn fades: Tony Wilson

Tony Wilson, record label owner, journalist, nightclub entrepreneur and much much more, has died, leaving a hole in the lives of his family and friends, the cultural life of Britain and the music scene worldwide. Wilson died yesterday (August 10th) in Manchester’s Christie Hospital from complications arising from kidney cancer. He was 57.

Tony Wilson is not a man to be remembered in a hospital bed; his life was characterised by energy and wild enthusiasm. He was a passionate music lover, a chaotic label manager, a talented journalist, a “self-confessed wanker,” a proud Mancunian and the best kind of English eccentric.

Amongst music fans, he’s best known as the founder of Factory Records, the label that gave us Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio and Durutti Column. Factory was undoubtedly mismanaged, as much through idealism as incompetence. But it was a glorious, blazing label, fueled by passion and a real, excitable love for music. He insisted the artists, not the label owned the rights to everything they did and was rumoured to have written the early contracts in his own blood (he never dispelled any gossip, stating that myth was probably better than reality.) He, along with New Order and their manager and Factory partner Rob Gretton, opened the Hacienda; one of the great British nightclubs, responsible for spreading house music throughout this country and getting a generation onto the dancefloor. ESG, Cabaret Voltaire and New Order played the opening night and Madonna played her first ever British gig there.

Wilson, along with his wife, the former Miss UK Yvette Livesey, also set up the annual music conference In The City in 1992. The conference broke some of the UK’s best known acts, including Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, Oasis and Pulp. Throughout all of this musical mayhem, he continued to work at his original career, journalism: for local Manchester company Granada Television and for the BBC.

Like eMusic, Wilson was a true believer in the independent music scene. Factory Records, with it’s commitment to artists and passion for cripplingly expensive yet beautiful design, was Wilson’s way of trying to make a difference, a new dawn for the music industry. He was also one of the first to set up a legal download service, Music 33, in 1999. He was a visionary and a maniac, sometimes wildly over-confident, but determined that there must be a better way to do things.

I saw Wilson in the flesh a handful of times, at gigs and in the lobbies of magazine offices. I spoke to him twice. Once was via email, wanting his input for a piece on ESG. Throughout his response he mis-spelled the name of producer Martin Hannet as Martian. Given Hannet’s well-documented eccentricities, I couldn’t quite be sure if this was a genuine typo or a wilful non-error. The second time he was interviewing me. The Hacienda building was about to be demolished and turned into, no surprise, luxury flats. At the time I was employed by Mixmag, a leading UK club culture magazine and Wilson, in his role as a Granada Television journalist, was speaking to London-based me via satellite from Manchester. I waited alone in a small room; all of a sudden his voice flooded my headphones.
“Just before we go on air,” he said. “What do you really think of all this?”
“It’s a terrible shame; actually it’s a bloody disgrace!” I said.
“Exactly Anna, exactly. I loved the Hac. Anyway, live in three.”
From then on in he was all professionalism, whereas I was a nervous wreck, after all TONY WILSON had just called me by my name, like we’d known each other for years.

I never made it to Tony’s beloved Hac, being not quite 18 and looking younger when the doors shut for the last time. But I’ve always been a bit of a Factory girl and my life would be much poorer without ‘Bizarre Love Triangle,’ ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Step On;’ without many of the artists he promoted, without seeing Peter Saville’s wonderful graphics and without knowing he was out there, strident and funny, staking out a corner of the musical world that was forever Manchester.

Nice one Tony, you played a blinder.

For more about Factory Records on eMusic, read Joe Keyes’ Factory Records Dozen.