Tony Wilson

The Night That Changed Everything

On the 4th of June 1976, a band called the Sex Pistols played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The audience was tiny, but it included people who would go on to reshape British music: Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Morrissey, and a young Granada TV presenter called Anthony H. Wilson.

Wilson had been presenting the news and a music show called So It Goes on Granada Television. He was Cambridge-educated, articulate, and deeply uninterested in following the rules of broadcasting. When punk arrived in Manchester, he didn't just report on it. He threw himself into the middle of it.

That gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall is now one of the most mythologised events in music history. A few dozen people in a half-empty room, and most of them went on to build the Manchester music scene from scratch. Wilson was one of them.

Factory Records: Signed on a Napkin

In 1978, Wilson co-founded Factory Records with Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton, Peter Saville, and producer Martin Hannett. The label would become one of the most influential in music history, but it began in chaos and stayed there.

Factory was unlike any other record label. The contracts were famously artist-friendly because, in most cases, there were no contracts at all. The famous napkin contract is from the film 24 Hour Party People. The real Factory arrangement was reportedly sealed with a contract written in Wilson's own blood, giving the artists total ownership of their work. When New Order wanted to leave, they could. When Happy Mondays needed to record in Barbados, they went. The label never owned the rights to anything its artists produced.

This was deliberate. Wilson believed that the relationship between label and artist should be a partnership, not ownership. It was idealistic, possibly naive, and utterly Manchester. It also meant that when the label collapsed financially, there was nothing to sell.

Factory's catalogue number system became legendary. Every release, every poster, every piece of stationery got a number. FAC 1 was a poster for the first Factory night. FAC 51 was the Hacienda. Wilson's coffin was FAC 501.

Joy Division and the Weight of Tragedy

Of all the acts on Factory Records, Joy Division were the most significant. Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris created a sound that was unlike anything before it: dark, atmospheric, intense, and unmistakably rooted in the post-industrial landscape of Salford and Manchester.

Wilson championed them from the beginning. He put them on his Granada TV show when nobody else would touch them. He gave them creative freedom that no major label would have offered. Their albums Unknown Pleasures and Closer are now considered two of the greatest records ever made.

On the 18th of May 1980, the night before the band were due to fly to America for their first US tour, Ian Curtis took his own life at his home in Macclesfield. He was 23 years old.

The surviving members formed New Order and, with Wilson's support, went on to become pioneers of electronic music. Their single Blue Monday, released on Factory in 1983, is widely reported as the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. The die-cut sleeve, designed by Peter Saville, was famously expensive to produce. Wilson claimed Factory lost 5p on every copy sold, though Saville later called that story part of Wilson "printing the myth."

The Hacienda: A Club That Lost Money and Changed the World

FAC 51. The Hacienda. It opened on Whitworth Street West on the 21st of May 1982 and became the most famous nightclub in the world. It also lost money almost every single year it was open.

In the early years, it was half-empty most nights. Wilson and New Order poured their own money into keeping it alive. Then, in the late 1980s, acid house arrived from Chicago and Ibiza, and everything changed. The Hacienda became ground zero for the rave revolution. Ecstasy, strobe lights, and a sound system that could be heard three streets away.

The Madchester movement exploded. The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, 808 State, A Guy Called Gerald. Manchester was suddenly the centre of the musical universe, and the Hacienda was its headquarters. Every Friday and Saturday night, thousands of people queued around the block to get in.

But the drug culture that fuelled the scene also destroyed it. Gang violence escalated. Security became impossible. The police leaned on the council. The Hacienda closed its doors for the last time in June 1997. The building was demolished in 2002 and replaced by flats. They called them "The Hacienda Apartments." Wilson reportedly found this both tragic and hilarious.

Mr Manchester

Tony Wilson was never just a music man. He was a broadcaster, a TV presenter, a cultural provocateur, and a relentless champion of Manchester. He helped create In The City, the UK's leading music convention. He was involved in the regeneration of the city centre after the 1996 IRA bomb. He never stopped believing that Manchester was the most important city in the world, and he said so to anyone who would listen.

In early 2007, he underwent emergency surgery to remove a kidney after being diagnosed with cancer. He died on the 10th of August 2007 at the Christie Hospital in Manchester. He was 57 years old.

His funeral was held at St Mary's RC Church on Mulberry Street on 20 August 2007. His coffin, catalogue number FAC 501, was laid to rest at Southern Cemetery.

His headstone in Southern Cemetery, designed by Peter Saville, reads: "Anthony H Wilson. Broadcaster. Cultural Catalyst" - with a quotation from Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks's The Manchester Man beneath it. That last role is the one that mattered most to him.

Without Tony Wilson, there is no Factory Records. Without Factory, there is no Joy Division, no New Order, no Happy Mondays on a major stage. Without the Hacienda, there is no Madchester. Without Madchester, there are no Stone Roses at Spike Island, no Oasis at Maine Road, no Manchester as the global music capital it became in the 1990s.

He lost money on almost everything he did. He didn't care. He was building something that mattered more than profit. He was building Manchester.