Tony Wilson Interview

IF THE Factory experiment in marketing strategy is intermittently working and its branching out into video (Ikon) and club (Hacienda) adventurous, as an experiment in art it is less successful. Outside New Order they have nothing to j match the early aloof fervour of A Certain Ratio's inspired fusion of funk and industrial epitomised by 'Flight' and their cover of 'Shack Up'. Their ignoble slide into a disinterested jazz hybrid Jim Shelley astutely described as JUNK marked Factory's branching out into dance. But the anonymity of the present generation of Factory guitar groups is most alarming. 

Tony's faith in them pulling through is almost convincing until you go back and listen to the singles. Stockholm Monsters' pair have the spunk of early Ratio, but the overall impression is dreariness. Ditto The Wake, though they suggest they might go beyond their glamorously bleak guitar visions to something truly moving.

If Factory once led the field, it would seem they've taken it up a cul de sac. Their refusal to get involved in the machinations of the industry is moral and right, but their disengagement presently lends them an aura of impotence, as if they were leaving their destiny in the hands of others where they once grasped it firmly in their own hands.

Where Factory once looked set to conquer the world, they seem to have shrunken into a small provincial label based around their noblest investment, Manchester's Hacienda Club. Tony argues against this, pointing to offices around the world, foreign releases (the Lowlands’ Minny Pops, The Names, America's Ike Yard). But the thrust forward must come from home. 

Factory have been hit hard by the swing towards what Tony describes as the Pauline Kael Raiders Of The Lost Ark box office ethic, rendering his label an unhealthy proposition to groups more attracted by the fake shine of music industry money.

So what will they do to reshape the future? Walt, apparently;

Tony: “The processes of making a hit record have reverted back to form, back to hype and plugging. I'm not being moralistic about it, in fact other members of the Cartel plug their records, but it’s my optimism about the nature of people that a resurgence must come where the force of public tastes will mean they’ll listen to stuff other than what they’re spoonfed by the system.”

THOUGH TRUTH is the ultimate goal of both art and journalism, the two faculties are rarely reconciled in its pursuit.

Tony Wilson, however, represents an exception. His careers generally run parallel, but they occasionally cross. Just as his experience of the music industry informed World In Action's investigation of chart rigging and hype, so his experience in journalism and television alert him to the more destructive possibilities of language.

Tony: “Essentially, it’s the remarkable use of language in British journalism which allows propaganda to function so well.

“For example, you can’t get away from the fact that a person reporting on a strike is a reporter who, however wonderful he may be, however honest or good he is, still earns £20,000 a year. The status quo treats him well. And as he has no choice other than to look through his own eyes, he must be looking through the eyes of the status quo. That’s the reality of daily news reporting.

“It's like, unions demand, managements offer. Scargill is arrogant, Geoffrey Howe is confident. It’s those loose, variable adjectives, right, they can both apply to the same thing but they have value judgements implicit in them.

“I notice them in terms of the criticism I get, I've had them used often enough about me, but I don't mind, I get used to it.”

Potentially the most damaging adjective applied to Factory or Tony Wilson is 'fascist'.

“That's a case in point. It arose from a short review in NME in fact, which said that A Certain Ratio got their name from 'a certain ratio of jewish blood...’ blah blah blah. Well, the name comes from an Eno song ‘A True Wheel’, but anyway it is such a case of complete ridiculousness....

“The question of politics should really arise out of your personal every second activity. And the whole point about Factory is that in its activity it behaves with what I would call an egalitarian anarchic expression of anti-business or whatever. In our actual moments of working in the market place we make that stand every single day. The stand one makes against business and its commodity fetishism.

“And the whole think is informed by a tradition in my case of academic far left thought and in Erasmus and Rob Gretton’s case by a Manchester working class naive kick-the-bastards-in-the-bollocks attitude to life. Gretton says Factory is still a punk label, and that is a very astute comment.

“Julie Burchill once had a line about Factory’s silence being a dangerous silence. I’d accept that if it wasn’t so long after the event. It’s been going on so long now and we’d never perceived any danger at all. And in the safe knowledge that what we are doing is not dangerous, it allowed the opportunity to amuse ourselves by annoying the press, in letting them chase their own tails and make fools of themselves.

“Ultimately,” concludes Tony, “you can't help but laugh at a press taking a high moral tone when they're living hand in glove with a particularly despicable form of social control — the way the record business is run. Yet the only company I know which refuses to get involved in that world — and then to our loss—is seen as the one which most represents the furthest excesses of that world.”

I WAS going to ask him to strip naked, prove he had nothing to hide and say it all again without blushing. But with the knowledge that witch hunts went out with McCarthy and the naked truth of his emotions had spoken with an honesty beyond words, I let it pass.