Celebrating Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records

To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation that came of age in the late 20th century he was a guide to the future. We have him to thank for ushering in the strangest, most revelatory pop music to the cultural mainstream. Wilson was among the first to spot the significance of catalytic bands such as the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Happy Mondays and to champion them through his countless media projects.

Factory, the scrappy record label he co-founded in 1978, produced some of the biggest-selling records of the 1980s, with a spirit of ‘subversion through inefficiency’. Wilson opened the Hacienda in 1982, the best nightclub in the city. If you went to a Manchester gig, there he would be, always observing. Relentlessly confident, verbose, resourceful, slightly irritating: he accelerated popular culture with a combination of praxis and journalistic skill. And he took it seriously, at a time when most intellectuals didn’t.

Fourteen years after his death, he belongs to a distant age of pop culture shaped by taste-makers: scheduled broadcast television, a management-led music industry and sequential youth trends. Today, that culture is mostly self-selecting. Yet Wilson is still everywhere, from the soon-to-be opened Factory arts venue in Manchester, named after his label, to a major exhibition in that city on Factory’s formative years. Paul Morley’s biography is as illuminating on Wilson’s strange ability to hold others in his orbit, even after his death, as it is on the story of his life.

Morley is no cool, objective eye. The former NME writer was a teenage fanzine contributor in 1977 when he first met Wilson. He was in awe of him (‘he threw razzle-dazzle all over me’), and says he was his subject’s ‘elected choice’ of biographer, though the commission was never discussed.