Tony Wilson: Driven by music and Manchester
Former Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, who died at the age of 57, kept up his two major passions until the very end
Sunday, 12 August 2007
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Tony Wilson was a twat. The poster for the film about his life, 24 Hour Party People, said so right under a picture of his face.
Actually it was comedian Steve Coogan, who played the founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub in the semi-autobiographical movie. But Wilson approved the image, saying: "I found it very funny."
Abrasive, acerbic and well aware of his own legend, Wilson would have laughed, too, at some of the more fulsome tributes paid to him yesterday, after his death at the Christie hospital in his home city on Friday night, aged 57. Pop stars and politicians alike praised a man who remade Manchester, crediting him with inspiring a cultural renaissance that began with the post-punk sound of Joy Division and resulted in a confident modern city.
"He had two driving passions," said Stephen Morris of New Order and Joy Division. "One was the music and the other was the city that he lived in. In later life he was a campaigner for devolution for the North-west. I strongly suspect this was so that he could become Prime Minister of Manchester." Hacienda regular and writer John Harris said Wilson showed Mancunians that they did not have to leave, and "sowed the seeds of the cultural regeneration of Manchester which has now come to pass".
But Wilson knew that his abrasive, fast-talking personality got up some people's noses. "People have treated me with contempt," he said in his last television interview. "Quiet rightly."
That was recorded in June, by which time he was dying of cancer of the kidney and amused by how nicely people were treating him. "Now everyone loves me. It's like, 'Oh, are you all right?' I'm going, 'Yeah. Fuck off!'" The film 24 Hour Party People based on his life was released in 2002. In it the Wilson character – at the centre of a maelstrom of music, drugs and chaotic business adventures – is asked by his future lover what job he does. "How do you mean?" he says, perplexed. "I'm Tony Wilson."
A son of Salford, he went to Cambridge University but came home again to work as a journalist for Granada television. From local news reports to serious political shows and World in Action, he was a good broadcaster and, as he put it, "minor local celebrity". But Wilson also became an impresario, after the "epiphany" of seeing the Sex Pistols in 1976.
Factory Records was set up two years later. It produced some of the greatest music of the 1980s but made Wilson hardly any money at all. When he needed £3,500 a month to pay for cancer drugs that would keep him alive, Wilson was touched to be helped out by his former musical protégés. Typically, he also started a campaign to make the NHS pay for the drugs for other people.
"I used to joke in my early 50s that I'd had such a fantastic life I'd be happy to die," he told the BBC in June. "Then suddenly, just as I'd found some other reasons for living and I'd got excited again about life, this [cancer] comes along." It seemed to irritate him, as much as anything. "I was annoyed at my own presumption for thinking I would be happy to die."
He was a champion of Manchester right to the end. In his last interview he said: "In the North-west it rains and it rains. And yet we managed to produce the industrial revolution, trade union movement, the Communist Manifesto and even the goddam computer. Down south, where the sun never sets, you took all our money and what did you produce? Chas and fucking Dave."
