Four weeks ago Tony Wilson somehow summoned the energy to attend a
performance at the Manchester International Festival of Joy Division’s Love
Will Tear us Apart. He was terribly ill by that stage, but it was the
sort of thing Wilson would not miss – a rendition in complete darkness by
June Tabor of arguably one of the best songs ever written by a band which he
discovered.
A few days before he had also taken part in a festival debate. Afterwards the
festival director Alex Poots remembers escorting a frail Wilson to his car.
“You know, I love this f****** city,” he said to Poots.
This was classic Wilson: passionate, sentimental, generous, dramatic and
always head over heels in love with Manchester. In the days after his death
on August 10, the extent to which that romance was reciprocated is obvious.
The Union Flag flies at half-mast over the town hall, tender tributes are
still flooding in and, according to a local evening newspaper poll,
three-quarters of its readers think there should be a concert, a statue and
a music prize in his honour.
The city knows that it owes him a massive debt. Yesterday Kevin Cummins, the
original photographer of Joy Division – whose brief was never to picture the
band’s leader, Ian Curtis, smiling – described Wilson, the founder of the
Haçienda nightclub and Factory Records label through which he championed
iconic bands such as New Order and the Happy Mondays, as “the catalyst for
everything that happened in Manchester music.
“His legacy will continue,” said Cummins, “because most bands will still cite
Factory bands as their inspiration.”
Cummins, who attended the same school as Wilson in Salford and moved to London
in 1987, added: “The thing with Tony was that he thought anyone who left
Manchester had betrayed the city. But he would still introduce me as the
greatest photographer to come out of Manchester: he was very proud of what
we had achieved. I think he liked being Mr Manchester, he liked walking
round the city with everyone knowing him – even when they were shouting
abuse at him.”
This, of course, is a reference to some locals seeing him as a pretentious git
– an image which was played up hugely in the film 24 Hour Party
People. Wilson didn’t particularly mind being skitted. Cummins remembers
that, in the early days of the Haçienda, Wilson bought a Mercedes Benz and
would often come outside to find it scratched or with “twat” scrawled down
the side. He laughed it off. “Manchester the general public paid for it,” he
said. “So Manchester the general public can do what the f*** they like with
it.”
Cummins spoke to him a few days before he died last Friday. Cummins is working
on a book, to be published next year, about Manchester music from the
Buzzcocks onwards, entitled Looking for the Light in the Pouring Rain.
Wilson was due to contribute an essay to it. “He rang me a couple of weeks
ago and said: ‘It’s all in my head, I’m just about to download it.’ He asked
for an extension to the deadline.”
Of course, he never did download it, succumbing at the age of 57 to a heart
attack as he fought kidney cancer. The gap he leaves, both for the book and
the music industry at large, will be immense. As Tim Burgess of the
Charlatans said: “It’s like losing a musical dad.”
Bernard Sumner, the guitarist with Joy Division and lead singer with New
Order, the band that succeeded it, got married a month ago and Wilson,
despite being so ill, attended the wedding. It was the last time Sumner saw
the man who he describes as “an eternal teenager”, “an incredible optimist”
and a massive creative inspiration. Asked what he would like to say to
Wilson, he said: “I’d like to say thank you for completely changing my life
and allowing me the opportunity to haul myself out of my working-class
background. Thanks for allowing Joy Division and New Order to develop in
their own way and letting us retain our individuality. And to do it all in
Manchester.”
It was Wilson’s relaxed management style that allowed the bands not to be
shackled by corporate demands. “There was a fun side to Tony’s flippancy
with money,” said Sumner. “We didn’t have a record company breathing down
our necks for hit singles. It allowed us to express ourselves in our own
way.”
He said the love-hate relationship that some people in Manchester had with
Wilson was just the Mancunian way. “People would like to say they hated him,
but they loved him really. It’s Manchester humour: you greet people you like
with an insult and you expect one back.”
Shaun Ryder, the lead singer of the Happy Mondays, has said he is “f******
gutted” by Wilson’s death. At his home in Manchester Gaz Whelan, the band’s
drummer, said simply: “I am heartbroken. Everyone is devastated. It’s hard
to talk about it, really. People see Tony as that figure in 24 Hour Party
People and he wasn’t like that. Yes, he could be pedantic; he always
took things personally. If you didn’t e-mail back immediately, he wanted to
know why. But he was brilliant. He showed that you can be a provincial
loudmouth and fight above your weight. A couple of weeks ago he was still
saying that Shaun was the greatest poet in the greatest band.”
Whelan said Wilson had a paternal, schoolteacherish quality about him. “He was
so clever that sometimes you wondered whether he was toying with you.”
But, apart from being a great TV broadcaster, Wilson’s gift was being able to
see potential talent and predict trends in music. After attending Cambridge
University he became a TV presenter, but music was his real love. He founded
Factory Records in 1978 and four years later set up the Haçienda nightclub,
which in time would give birth to the “Mad-chester” scene with its acid
house club nights. Problems with the drug scene forced its closure in 1997.
But Wilson was always thinking ahead to the next thing. In 1992, with his
long-term partner Yvette Livesey, he set up the characteristically
uncorporate In the City conference, a forum for finding new talent and
discussing the future of the music industry. Even in his fifties the eternal
adolescent was still at the cutting edge. In 2002 he forecast, correctly,
that the future of music would be kids in hooded tops with samplers and
guitars.
Just so we are clear on his tastes he once described Coldplay as “utter
middle-class s***” and added: “If I hear any UK garage or Craig David again
I will f****** throw up." One of his favourite songs was Sunday
Morning by the Velvet Underground.
The Mondays have no doubt that they owe everything to him – as the band’s
guitarist, Paul Ryder, said: “I would still be working at the post office if
it wasn’t for Tony. He was the one that gave working kids like me and Shaun
[his brother] their chance.”
Whelan said that in the early days a couple of record companies had been to
see the band but declined to sign them, saying: “You have got potential but
you haven’t got style. You need an image.”
“Tony saw us and immediately said: ‘You have got a great image.’ We said: ‘But
we haven't got one.’ ‘ Exactly,’ he said.”
The esteem in which Wilson is held was demonstrated when members of the Happy
Mondays and other musicians Wilson worked with over three decades set up a
fund to pay for Sutent, a £3,500-a month-drug used to treat kidney cancer
which the Manchester NHS
Primary Care Trust had refused to finance. Wilson may have had “genius”
qualities but he was no great businessman, famously making little money out
of his ventures. In 1983 New Order's Blue Monday became the
best-selling 12in single of all but, thanks to the intricate packaging,
Factory lost money on every copy sold. “You either make money,” he once
said, “or you make history.”
Alex Poots knew Wilson from 1990, when he was a student working for a classics
offshoot of Factory in London and nervously rang the “big boss” to ask for a
fax machine. “He said, ‘You leave that to me, son’.”
A week later he met Wilson for lunch in L’Escargot. “In walked Tony in his
Armani suit and trainers and he had this huge box under his arm. ‘Here’s the
fax,’ he said. He was a can-do guy. He got things done. And he believed in
what he did.”
I too had spoken to Wilson recently and had arranged to interview him. About
three weeks before he died he was in good spirits, despite being back in
hospital with a clot on his lung. “I’ve just had the results of a scan,” he
said. “The tumour has shrunk.”
This meant that Sutent was working for him – a great relief, not least because
he was campaigning for more health trusts to fund it for kidney cancer
patients on the NHS. He sent me a text. “I have been worrying that being the
poster boy for Sutent would look pretty dim if it didn’t work for me,” he
wrote. “But it does.”
He was right. His oncologist Professor Robert Hawkins told me this week that
Wilson had been responding well to the drug. Though his body was clearly
weakened by the cancer, it was a heart attack that killed him. I think
Wilson would have wanted that made clear, lest it detracted from his
campaign. However, the next time we spoke, ten days before he died, his
voice was desperately weak. “What I’ve got is a bleeding blood clot on my
lung,” he texted later. “Completely debilitating. Could take two weeks to
clear, or longer. Talk when stronger. X.”
Gaz Whelan tells a story about Peter Hook, the New Order bassist, driving past
the Haçienda long after it had closed and was being sold off to property
developers, and seeing that New Order material had been thrown in the bins.
He telephoned Wilson to tell him. “It’s over, darling,” said Wilson.
Sadly, it is now.
