2007 08 12 Paul Morley on Tony Wilson, The Observer
Idealist, chancer, loyal friend: why I will miss Tony Wilson
Paul Morley pays tribute to his mentor, the man who shaped Manchester's culture from punk to the Happy Mondays and who died on Friday at the age of 57
Sometimes I loved the fact that there was no one quite like him, that he could be at any given time Jerry Springer and/or Malcolm McLaren, Melvyn Bragg and/or Andrew Loog Oldham, a fiercely smart hybrid of bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, insatiable publicity seeker. How could you not love this freewheeling, freethinking bundle of contradictions, even as he drove you up the wall with his non-stop need for adventure and his loathing for mental and moral inertia?
There was so much of him, and so many of him, from the slick, charming television host to the seditious impresario, from the surreal activist to the baroque loudmouth. This was what people had trouble with: there was no precedent for such a combination of unlikely driven personalities to be so compressed into one mind and one body. Ultimately people tended to suspect it was all about his ego. His ego, though, was part of his genius, and his genius consisted of the way he could flatten everything in front of him with sheer force of personality, and sweetly, sternly persuade the world to become what he wanted it to become. A place where talent and imagination and ideas could thrive, and make the world not just better, but more beautiful.
From the very first moment I became aware as a teenager of this loud, ebullient and slightly unsettling man on the telly, it was obvious he was so full of life, and so full of himself. In the early and mid-1970s he became well known in the north west as a slightly naughty young Granada TV newsreader with longish hair and flapping flares. He was a vaguely hip alternative to the BBC's traditionally madcap Stuart Hall.
At the time it would have seemed more logical that the breezy Wilson would have gone on to present It's a Knockout rather than be inspired by the Sex Pistols and avant-garde social theory. But then we didn't know at the time, with that insubordinate, even sinister twinkle in his eyes, Wilson's background in anarchic politics, his knowledgable passion for Shakespeare and his proud appreciation of Manchester's radical, reforming, progressive history. He had decided it was his duty to ensure Manchester's intellectual tradition was not toppled by the emergence of popular culture but enriched by it. This was not what you expected from newsreaders.
Those of us who spotted the curious Wilson at those early Sex Pistols shows at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 1976 couldn't quite believe what we were seeing. A few of us there might have remembered the time he turned up at a Rory Gallagher concert a couple of years before and was cheerfully jeered by the entire audience. It seemed inappropriate that the clumsy, slightly camp man from the telly should infiltrate the rock world, and then even more impertinently the new, anti-cliche punk world, and this was the source of the suspicion that somehow Tony was a dilettante, an outsider. Even at his most triumphant and groundbreaking, this made him something of an underdog, a misfit, but he liked it that way, constantly identifying with the marginalised, unloved and isolated.
When he merged the two sides of his character, the brazen cultural theorist with the slick television presenter, and created the magnificently pretentious pop programme So It Goes, putting punk music on TV before anyone else, the clash was so far ahead of its time there still wouldn't be a place for it now. After the demise of So It Goes, he withdrew, wounded, and worked out how to keep his two lives together yet separate, maintaining his light-hearted Granada presence even as he was organising and inspiring the subversive Factory Records collective. Somehow he managed to be related to both Joy Division and Coronation Street. How Manchester was that?
He seemed driven by the feeling that if he wasn't as dark as he was light, as profound as he was trivial, or as aggressive as he was gentle and patient, he couldn't complete his mission - which seemed to be nothing less than the modernisation of Manchester in a way that reflected his Situationist-inspired belief in a kind of urban utopia, the idea of a city as much made up by poetry, pleasure, philosophy and dreams as politics, business and architecture.
It seemed as though all along he was destined to become known as Mr Manchester. He accepted the role with ridiculous gusto, happy as always to sacrifice dignity as long as he was the catalyst for change and excitement. He became the personality most identified with the changes the city had gone through since the Sex Pistols' 1976 visit. There was no one better - there was no one else at all - to play this role, and the vigour with which he did never dampened the suspicion that he had manipulated history and exaggerated his own role in proceedings to ensure his own notoriety.
He relished the confusion people felt about his manner and motives, and was totally pragmatic about, even flattered by, the often extreme, occasionally violent, vitriol directed his way.
When Joy Division's Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980, Wilson was already a monstrous master of mixing fact and fiction to produce the truth of history. He approached the turmoil surrounding the death of Curtis as if it were raw material he could play around with, already planning how he could bend history to his purpose. It sometimes seemed callous, but he was ahead of everyone else in understanding the cultural impact the suicide would have.
He had marked me out as the man who would write the history of Joy Division. I initially resisted the role, annoyed that he was putting me in a place where he wanted me to be. His presumption that everyone would fall in with his version of events could make him seem like a bully. Even as it was happening, he seemed to know that 25 years later there would be films, and documentaries, and books about this story, which was both his story, and not his story. He realised more than I did that I would be writing about this period, from the Sex Pistols in Manchester to the death of Ian Curtis, for the rest of my life, hunting down the meaning of it all, following the clues that Wilson alone seemed to leave. If he didn't actually know then that this period of Manchester life as it revolved around his galvanising presence would become history, he was convinced he could make it happen, by making enough noise, by willing it to happen.
He willed it to happen, because he believed that what happened, directly and indirectly, because of him, as he tore through Manchester, launching TV shows, clubs, labels, bands, bars, events, creating scandal sometimes for the sheer sake of it, was important, and that everyone should know about it - both as a major part of rock history and as an important new part of the history of the radical, progressive north.
Wilson was frustrated that he could not follow up Factory Records or the Hacienda with what always interested him the most - the new, the next, the unexpected - and anxious, yet flattered, that everyone was fixing him in time as the man who multiplied Marx with Warhol and the Sex Pistols to make Madchester. He hated to be fixed, to be pinned down, to be filed away in the past, even as he fought to make sure the history of his extraordinary times was properly recorded. Death may quieten him down a bit, but it won't slow him down. He appears as fiction in Anton Corbijn's film about Ian Curtis, Control, and as, to some extent, himself in Grant Gee's Joy Division documentary and Chris Rodley's BBC4 film about Factory. The history he helped set up moves more and more into the mainstream.
In all of the years I've been involved in the music business and journalism - and I would not have been as involved without his generous, constant, inspiring and occasionally annoying mentoring - I've never come across anyone so energetically brilliant. Without Wilson there may well have been in some form Joy Division, and Factory, and New Order, and the Hacienda, and Happy Mondays. There may well have been Peter Saville's dream designs, and Martin Hannett's timeless production, and a Manchester that managed to move on from its sad post-industrial decline. But none of it would have been so far-fetched, so dramatic and so fantastic. It took courage to be Tony Wilson, to then become, in the face of certain derision, Anthony H Wilson. Only he knew how much.
A Maverick's Life:
1950 Born in Salford.
1961 Wins a scholarship to De La Salle Grammar in Salford. Later studies at Cambridge University before joining Granada Television.
1976 Sees the Sex Pistols in Manchester, an experience he describes as 'an epiphany'.
1978 Sets up Factory Records, a label that spawns Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays.
1982 Opens the Hacienda nightclub, which becomes the heart of the 'Madchester' scene, playing host to bands such as New Order, the Smiths, the Stone Roses and Oasis. In the same year he sets up the annual Manchester music conference, In the City, with his partner Yvette Livesey.
1997 Police close the Hacienda due to its out-of-control ecstasy problem and gang violence. Wilson continues to work on TV and radio.
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