1990 03 Tony Wilson The Face

MANCHESTER Tony Wilson argues that small is beautiful

It's a village. It's a village. It's a village.

It usually is. When it goes off, when cultures collide and explode and get to figure in the export figures, it's usually a village that came up with the goods. Even the last one, the one that threw up Guns'N Roses, was that part of Los Angeles where the pavements are filled with blond hair and black leather. It was Hollywood, it was a village. As was the first one. I've never been to Memphis, but it must have been a village because how else would Sam and Elvis have met? And what's special about my village — Manchester — other than the fact it is a village?

Well, it's a friendly village. In some villages, outsiders feel like outsiders. In my village outsiders are welcomed, made to feel at home. Sure, in 1915 they threw bricks at my grandfather's watchmaker's shop, but they were tough days and anyway my grandfather, Herman Maximilian Knupfer, loved this village and never left ...

And his blood and all the other blood in Little Germany — which is what they called Whalley Range in the 1890s - became part of the general blood of this village, just as the Jewish blood of the Thirties, the West Indian of the Fifties, the Asian of the Sixties, and the Chinese of the moment became the blood of the village. So in my village the blood ran easily from black gay clubs in mid-West America through techno arenas in the Mediterranean to the heart of rock.

People who were not born in the village are more Mancophile than Mancunians themselves. Ask them where they're from and they say "from Bristol and Manchester", "from Sussex and Manchester", meaning they came to university here and it became part of them. A village is where you know everybody, know the shops and the shopkeepers, know the bars and the salesmen, know the groups and their midweek chart positions. A popular art form — yo! let's get academic here — a popular art form thrives in a village. Of course. Of course.

Peter Seville Associates, that design firm from the ultimate non-village 200 miles south of here, have happily thieved the central concept from Apple Corps, but let's all plagiarise together. What we're talking about is the shift of emphasis from the multi-national to the multi-local. That's why my village feels so modern, and so alive. Look at the people you get to drink with. Look at the people you get to think with.

The energy point at the heart of the universe (in 1989 New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Rio, Kuala Lumpur and the rest were DULL, it's as simple as that folks) may shift away from my village: next week, next year, next century. But when it does ... it'll probably be your village. What we can be sure of is this: it won't be anyone's town.

Village concept courtesy of PSA, Charterhouse Square, the Big City. Tony Wilson presents The Other Side Of Midnight for Granada TV, and is chairman and cofounder of Factory Records