An audience with Tony Wilson
Half the world thinks Tony Wilson is a visionary; the other half thinks he is a prat. He helped to reshape Manchester in the 1980s, thanks to the success of Factory Records and the fame of the Hacienda Club, but his beloved home town refuses to massage his large ego. “We’re not very big on gratitude and appreciation in Manchester,” he says. “We don’t go in for that very much.”
Wilson was a journalist at Granada in the mid-70s when the punk revolution broke. He was one of 42 people at a seminal Sex Pistols gig in Manchester and decided that the revolution should be televised. He put the band on So It Goes, the arts programme he fronted, and gave an early airing to a lot of other talent too – Blondie, the Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello, the Jam.
Never a man to downplay his achievements, he says he never once called it wrong. “I hope this doesn’t sound too arrogant,” he says ingenuously, “because I don’t want to be the José Mourinho of music, but I have a reputation for the 40 or 50 bands I put on television for the first time. Yet I always say if there are 50 amazing bands that I put on television for the first time, my real achievement is the 270 I didn’t, because I was right about them as well.” OK, José.
Factory Records was born when Granada suddenly decided that So It Goes had to go. There had been a falling out over Granada’s desire to excise the odd F-word from an Iggy Pop song and Wilson, never a man to compromise, refused to back down. “I was on my high horse claiming this was art,” he recalls. “You wouldn’t play with Mozart, how dare you play with an Iggy Pop performance. My bosses got more and more pissed off. I can understand it, I must have been a real pain the arse.” The programme was axed and Wilson went back to doing straight reporting.
But not for long. He had been bitten by the music bug and soon embarked on a dual career – journalist by day, rock impresario by night. “Having touched this world that had been my obsession from afar and been suddenly connected to it – Malcolm McLaren had given me a ‘Weird Sex’ T-shirt, Elvis Costello used to wink at me going on stage at a gig – I was part of this dream world and I didn’t want to lose it.”
Factory’s breakthrough came almost immediately with the signing of Joy Division, and Wilson’s description of how he spotted them sums up his thinking on what talent really is. “There used to be a night in Manchester arranged by the London labels Stiff and Chiswick, which went round the country doing talent nights,” he recalls. “Twelve bands played at Rafters that night. Every band in Manchester who was any good, or even halfway good, was playing. I watched the whole night and all these bands were quite good, then suddenly at the very end of the night – at five past two, they only played three numbers – came Joy Division, and it was chalk and cheese.
“It was a completely different experience. Every other band that was on stage that night was there because they wanted to be pop stars. They wanted to be in rock and roll. You could see it in the way they stood on stage and the look in their eyes. When Joy Division came on stage, they were on that stage because they had no fucking choice. They were driven and that is the difference: 99.9% of bands are there because they want to be pop stars; 0.1% are there because they have no choice. And the ones I love are the ones that have no choice, that are driven by their talent. I realised it that night and that has always been my definition ever since.”
Joy Division, who quickly developed a cult following and became hugely influential, were nothing if not driven. Too driven, in fact. Two days before their US tour was due to begin in 1980, their totemic lead singer Ian Curtis hanged himself, the first of a series of deaths of key figures associated with Factory – Wilson’s partner, Rob Gretton, and producer Martin Hannett also died young. Talent can, it seems, sometimes exact a heavy price.
Joy Division survived the trauma of Curtis’s death and reformed as New Order, who underpinned the growing success of Factory in the 80s. Wilson has overseen the fortunes of 40 bands and says his reasons for signing them were idiosyncratic. “I’ll sign a band just because of the way they stand in a room. It’s in their eyes. About five years ago I was driving along in my car and Sir George Martin was on Desert Island Discs, and Sue Lawley goes, ‘So Sir George, when Brian Epstein was hawking tapes of the Beatles around London, no one in the music business liked the tapes, did they?’ And George goes ‘No, they all hated them.’ And she said: ‘But you loved them.’ And he said: ‘No, I hated them too.’ And you could hear Sue Lawley almost fall off her chair. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I hated them, I thought they were dreadful tapes.’ ‘So why did you sign them?’ ‘It was because of the way they stood in the room.’ I pulled over, jumped out of my car and shouted with joy. George Martin had exactly the same attitude as me.’ ”
The X factor, the thing that record executives go to dingy basements and back rooms in pubs in search of. In the late 80s, Wilson hit the jackpot again with the Happy Mondays. “They were a working-class band, but my A&R [artists and repertoire] man discovered them playing in the middle-class suburb of Bramall. We got them to play as support at the Hacienda [the club Wilson had opened in the centre of Manchester]. Normally A&R men will say ‘this band is like a cross between Led Zeppelin and the Sundays’ but you couldn’t say that about the Mondays. We had no idea what they were but we loved them.”
So did everyone else. They, along with the Hacienda, symbolised “Madchester” in the late 80s and early 90s, and transformed the image of the city from tough, declining industrial city to the hippest, most happening place in Britain. It was of course too good to last: drugs took their toll on the Mondays and played their part in the decline of the Hacienda too, which became associated with ecstasy and gang warfare. Factory went bust in 1992, the victim of its own overexpansion and the property collapse, and the Hacienda closed in 1997.
Wilson is 54 now, running a new label called Red Cellars, organising an international music conference called In the City, enthusing about a new band – a “grime” outfit called Raw-T – and still doing some work for Granada, though he lost his regular gig on the station last year when a couple of “fucks” slipped out during the afternoon news. This time he, rather than Iggy Pop, had uttered them and he paid the price. Sitting in the Fat Cat café, this professed anti-fat cat is unrepentant about the poor business sense that cost him his company.
“We never wanted to make money. We never had a publishing company precisely because that’s where all the money is. The real money in the record business isn’t in the record company or the artist performing on record. The real money, quite rightly, is for the people who write the songs. That’s why Liam Gallagher [of Oasis] is rich and Noel Gallagher is mega-rich… That’s the difference. But because we were so ideological, we didn’t want to make any money. Normally at the same time as having a record company, you would also have a publishing company. You give the writers X thousand pounds in return for the right to collect their royalties for them, skimming 20-30% off what you collect for yourselves. We didn’t do that because it would have made money.”
It was hard because I went into it as a kind of Catholic idealist/communist, but I survived. I’m still here and I have a band I’m in love with, so I can’t complain. They wouldn’t have made a film about me if I’d been sucessful.” The film is Twenty Four Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s funny and affectionate 2002 portrait of Wilson (brilliantly played by Steve Coogan) and the rise and fall of Factory. The film, too, makes much of Wilson prattishness, but it also shows his passionate faith in his artists and his preference for art over mere money. He clearly loves the movie and sees it as a vindication of his cheerfully anarchic business philosophy.
Wilson is first and foremost a fan. When Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone comes on in the bar, his flow is interrupted. “I love this song,” he says. It’s followed by While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Again an aside: “The power of music – every song is fantastic.” Music was a passion which became a business. “The music industry”, he says, “is the most fascinating example of where art and money meet in the middle. That’s why it’s such a great business.”
He believes record executives have always to lead musical taastes. “Human beings are creatures of habit. They only like what they’ve heard before. Human beings don’t like the shock of the new – and if it’s great art it’s always going to be new. If you’re a great artist, when your art first comes out people will shit on it. As Proust observes, Beethoven’s last quartets spent their first 50 years in the world creating an audience for Beethoven’s last quartets.” Wilson, who did English at Cambridge, quotes Proust and James Joyce extensively; he also brackets Beethoven and the Happy Mondays in the same breeath; he has what might be called an all-encompassing view of art and genius.
He draws a thick line between the worlds of rock and pop, and insists he is a denizen of the former. “Ice-T has got a lovely definition, which is: pop is ‘oh goody, it’s school tomorrow’; rock is ‘fuck school’. That’s probably the easiest way to define it. Since the Beatles, by and large rock also means you write your own songs – it’s auteur stuff and has greater longevity. In pop a record company is very creative, because in pop you find a front man, a Will Young, you find the right producer, you find the right songwriter – you’ve done all these things. In rock it’s just one person – you’ve got that person and the band, so let them get on with it. The only thing we do in rock, for better or for worse, is we point our musicians towards the right or the wrong producer.”
Wilson insists that, unlike a pop producer, he would never seek to mould an artist; his only function is to attempt to provide them with an environment in which their talent can flourish. He was offered a role on Fame Academy, one of the many TV programmes premised on the belief that you could create pop stars. He declined because, he says, he had no experience of telling artists how they should project themselves. “If I told my musician to do this or do that, he would tell me to fuck off. Very occasionally you can push them in a certain direction but hardly at all.” Again the fan and thee man who wants to believe in the purity of art.
Wilson says he is terrified of not spotting a great band – of his much-vaunted ears failing him. It was suggested in Twenty Four Hour Party People that he had missed the chance to sign thee Smiths, another mould-breaking Manchester band, but he claims that was deliberate. Factory, he explains, was going through a rocky period and would have inhibited them. He also says he “passed on” Madonna, but he may be joking.
Failing to spot talent would, for Wilson, be a personal affront. “Every time I go into a dirty basement and there’s a bunch of kids on a stage, it’s life or death for me, because the idea of getting it wrong, the idea of seeing a band and thinking they’re shite and them turning out to be great artists is unthinkable. I made a mistake in the past: when I was editor of my university newspaper I gave a Neil Young album a bad review. I think it was Harvest – looking back, it was a rather sacchariny album. However, within three months I felt a profound sense of regret and anger that I got it wrong. I couldn’t bear to get it wrong and that’s lasted to this day.”
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