2006 03 Q Classic Morrissey and The Story of Manchester - Part 14 - 24 Hour Party People

A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

With 24 Hour Party People, director Michael Winterbottom set out to re-create the Factory myth in celluloid. Yet he hadn't banked on a nightmare of drugs, frayed tempers and madness to equal the real story. By Damon Wise

ON FRIDAY 2 March 2001, Tony Wilson arrived at the Hacienda and found the place in chaos. Actually, he was lucky to find it standing; it had, after all, been demolished some six months previously, three years after various cash crises and public-order concerns had conspired to close it for good. He was actually in a warehouse in Ancoats, looking at FAC 451, an extraordinarily detailed re-creation of the Manchester nightclub.

The original Hacienda was part of local history, built in a former yacht showroom in 1982 with the profits from Factory Records as a thank-you to the city and rewarded in its early days with almost total ingratitude as the local clientele stayed away in droves. By the late ’80s, however, the rubbish stage set-up that had thwarted every band that played there was no longer a problem. As acid house took hold, no bands were needed, just a roster of DJs and a supply of pills, and the Hacienda blossomed into the venue that everyone now remembers: the venue that Wilson now saw meticulously brought back to life from original sketches and drawings, a copy so perfect that its designer, Ben Kelly, decided to sue (successfully) the people who had done so.

The Hacienda was being revived to play itself in one of the key scenes in Michael Winterbottom’s extraordinary 2002 biopic of two music revolutions that took root in the city, both under the wing ofWilson, local media personality and entrepreneur. Wilson was there to check up on the filming of the last ever night at the club, an event drenched in civic lore.Though it would take place on a film set, Winterbottom was determined to run the scene like an old-school club night, with DJ sets by Hacienda stalwarts Mike Pickering, Graeme Park and Jon Da Silva.

Wilson had already been pissed off about the number of old friends who’d rung up saying they couldn’t get an invite because they were “too old”, starting a feud between him and de facto organiser Dave Haslam that lasts to this day. In response, he had an extra 1,200 tickets designed and printed by Factory's Trevor Johnson, and though Wilson himself wouldn’t be there (for personal reasons, which we’ll discuss later), he knew this was going to be the ultimate reunion, the last party.

That was, until the fire officers turned up.

On that Friday afternoon Wilson saw his plans fall perilously close to total collapse. The film’s producer, Andrew Eaton, was ashen-faced, having been served a warning, called a Provisional 10, that would send him to prison if filming went ahead without the correct safeguards. All the movie people were in turmoil, but the music crowd thought it was hilarious. Mike Pickering was sat in the corner, pissing himself with laughter. He roared across the room to Wilson, “Tony! Tony! Tell ’em, man, tell ’em. It’s Factory . It’ll be alright, duck. It’s Factory !”

Wilson knew exactly what he meant; everybody except the movie people and the fire officers knew what he meant. Factory, thought Wilson, means this: it’ll be a fucking disaster, it will all fall apart , but whatever it is, somehow, and in some way, it will happen. So phone calls were made to the resident fix-its, and within a matter of hours two 50-foot fireproof corridors were installed and FAC 451 was given the go-ahead. The fire officers had a point; the place would be rammed, not only by extras and cast, or the people being played by the extras and cast, but by the gangsters who had hitherto left the film in peace (unlike the real Hacienda) and hundreds of ‘real’ clubbers muttering things like “they don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for” as drugs changed hands in the portable toilets.

Apart from a couple of dips in sound levels to get some dialogue scenes in the bag, the night was a note-perfect re-creation of the Hacienda in its prime, a seamless flow of house, techno and all their subsequent variations. As was usual for a big night at the club, nobody wanted it to end, not least New Order’s Barney Sumner, who was the last man dancing, out on the floor with Arthur Baker. In the old days, on such nights, Barney would be banging on the door of the DJ booth door, yelling,“Play Blue Monday! Play Blue Monday.” The night of Friday 2 March 2001 was no exception.

At the film’s wrap party later, the production manager went over to Wilson and tapped him on the shoulder. “Tony,” he said, “I just want to tell you that when you printed those extra 1,200 tickets for that party, I wanted to fucking kill you. I thought you would destroy the whole fucking thing. Instead, you created the most wonderful thing ever.” At least that’s what Tony Wilson says. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

OR WOULD HE? Tony Wilson, as played by Steve Coogan, emerges in 24 Hour Party People as a mass of contradictions: smart and stupid, considerate and thoughtless, altruistic and megalomaniacal. Those who think they know him would say that Wilson is simply all those latters, but, ironically for such a seemingly rampant self-publicist, Wilson spent the first two hours of his initial meeting with Eaton, Winterbottom and scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce telling them he was not interested in their project in the slightest.

The idea first came to the trio as Winterbottom and Eaton sat in a bar in Quinnell, a logging town in British Columbia. They were prepping a western, of sorts, called The Claim, and finding locations in the area’s frozen wastes was proving tough. And since no film is ever easy, they decided the next one they made would be about something they loved: music. Coming from Blackburn, near Manchester, Winterbottom was 15 when punk broke in 1976, and though he’d left the area by the Hacienda’s heyday, he was intrigued by the Factory story and asked Boyce to look into it. While he should have been working on rewrites for The Claim, Boyce responded with 40 pages of a draft script, assuring the director,“If you do this with anyone else, I’ll kill you.”

At Wilson’s home, Boyce,Winterbottom and Eaton tried their best to draw him into the project, but he refused.“Guys,” he kept saying, “it’s the fucking past now. Who cares about the fucking past? Get on with the future.” He tried to sell them instead on the idea of a Manchester gangland story, quoting his business partner Peter Saville, who’d said to him, “Why has no one done the Gunchester story?” His great line was,“We all know it happens, but now the reality needs the confirmation of fiction.’ What Wilson was telling them would later come in handy for the project he was rejecting: no one believes anything is real — until it becomes a legend.

So the meeting went on until someone, Wilson doesn’t remember who, said, “It’ll cover quite a long period. It’s Boogie Nights for Manchester.”

And that caught Wilson’s attention. He can still remember exactly where he was sitting, on the far side of his big table, in his loft. “OK,” he said, “what years are you talking?” Winterbottom replied, ‘It’s ’76-’92. From the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall to the first time the Hacienda closed down.” 

Wilson was hooked, there and then, he recalls. “I thought, ‘My God, these aren’t just a bunch of fucking idiots — they know what they’re talking about.This is actually interesting.’And if you look back on it, the bravery of the movie is that it takes on two youth revolutions and manages to cover them both brilliantly.”

Winterbottom explained that what was interesting to him was that though the film seemed to tell two distinct stories, it was actually one.“You have the Happy Mondays, and Joy Division,” he says now, “who were the start of Factory. They’re two different generations, musically, but actually they’re not different generations as people. Joy Division were big when they were 18, but when Happy Mondays came along they were in their late 20s, so they’re roughly the same age. It’s all one generation, which is my generation, so it was quite nice to be making a film about where I come from, about that time, because Britain changed a lot in that era.”

Once on board,Wilson’s first question was inevitable: “Who’s playing me?” They told him they didn’t know but they hoped Roy Barraclough, aka Alec Gilroy in Coronation Street, would be playing Bob Greaves, a fixture in Wilson’s non-rock’n’roll life as a Granada TV presenter, doing daft news reports for the early evening news. Wilson exploded. “Excuse me? What the fuck has Bob Greaves got to do with this?” At which point it was Frank Cottrell Boyce’s turn to be offended — his turn to play the generation card and talk about his own introduction to punk. He said,“Don’t you understand ,Tony? There’s me, having me tea with me mum and dad, I’m watching the television, and there’s you and Bob Greaves and you’re going, ‘Here’s Elvis Costello, here’s the Sex Pistols.. .’’’ Wilson still laughs at the recollection. “It was as though I was some great epiphany in Frank’s childhood.” 

Wilson wasn’t surprised when Steve Coogan was drafted in to play him; after all, any impressionist from the North can, and does, ‘do’ him. But Winterbottom argues that making Wilson risible was not the attraction. “Besides being a performer, Steve’s also a brilliant observer of people,” he says, “which is why his writing is so sharp and funny. I think I was most aware of the naturalism of his comedy. With characters like Alan Partridge, he can make them sad, almost tragic, and yet he still makes you laugh.” 

But Tony Wilson did not laugh when he read the first draft of the script. In fact he was shocked. He’d thought it was going to be about Manchester music, and had wanted Ian Curtis to be the focus, but in the end it was about the music as seen through the eyes of a pratty local news presenter who does items about dwarf-elephant trainers and badger-watching. What was particularly galling to him was a fictitious scene in which he was shown being “sucked off by two prostitutes”, as he still recalls with theatrical outrage. The more Wilson protested, the more that scene stayed. “The great thing about Michael and Andrew,” he laughs, “is that they are even more arrogant and give even less of a fuck than me and my mates ever did.”

WHAT WILSON WAS learning was that, after talking to the original Mondays, New Order, the Factory guys and the local press, Winterbottom and his team realised there was no definitive version of the truth. “It was the first time we’d made a film about such recent history,” says Eaton, “and what was interesting about doing the interviews was that, even though they’d been in the same room and had the same experience, everyone’s version was always slightly different. And we began to realise how myths develop.”

The myths became an integral part of the script, as Boyce correctly, and perhaps accidentally, began to recognise that rock’n’roll is a culture built on apocrypha. Or, as Wilson puts it, “The essential dynamic is the famous quote by John Ford, the movie director: ‘When people prefer the myth to the truth, print the myth.’ Michael’s film is completely full of lies, and yet it manages to tell the exact truth.” Just how much the boundaries were blurred is evinced in a scene where Howard Devoto has sex with Wilson’s second wife in the toilets of Hulme’s Russell Club on the first Factory club night. Devoto read the script and asked to appear in the scene too, as a toilet cleaner who looks to the camera and says, quizzically, “That never happened.” Which he duly did.

Meanwhile the production was generating Chinese whispers of its own. Winterbottom wanted the film to feel the way Factory did as it gradually spun out of control, and he and his partners were secretly proud of the trouble they were getting into. They were banned from Maine Road for filming a mini riot outside the stadium after promising not to. They were banned from a Granada service station because the actors playing Paul and Shaun Ryder ran inside in their underpants and the woman behind the counter hit the panic button. But best of all, they were banned from Manchester airport because the actors playing the Happy Mondays were pretending to snort up methadone off the floor. Afterwards they received a letter forwarded by airport authorities from a man who claimed to be so traumatised that he’d missed his flight and was charging the filmmakers for his flight and a meal. It was signed by a Mr Ian Brown from Belfast.

The drug rumours are inevitable and legitimate, though who was actually taking or smoking what, and who’s just good at faking it, remains a matter for our lawyers. Needless to say, at the press conference following the Hacienda night there were a lot of dark glasses and sore heads, with Paul Ryder (aka Paul Popplewell) falling off his chair, shouting,“Wheee! ” and later being told to “Shut up, man!” by Barney Sumner (aka John Simm) after shouting incoherently and describing Ian Curtis as “freaky”.

Producer Andrew Eaton refuses to confirm or deny any stories, other than to insist that Wilson says he never does coke - “He says it’s a suits’ drug, and I do believe him” — and to reveal that Mark E Smith made off with the ’70s flares he was asked to wear.

“Nothing delights me more than hearing stories about how mad that film was when it was being made,” Eaton says, “but I don’t think anybody went as mad as people think. They’re actors, and they want to go on to the next job, you know? I think the person who threw themselves into the part with the greatest conviction was Sean Harris, who played Ian Curtis. He dressed like Ian Curtis right the way through the shoot. And the thing about the guys playing the Mondays is that they were actually quite a good band by the time they finished.”

And a pretty good mirror of the Mondays, too. After shooting wrapped they travelled to the Cannes film festival to promote the film to prospective buyers. Having been booted out of several bars for apparent drug use and an alleged Ozzy Osbourne ‘tribute’ incident involving a straw and some ants, the Mondays gathered on the front of the Majestic hotel one afternoon to re-enact the scene in which the Ryder brothers drugged (and unwittingly killed) the city’s pigeons. Fake stuffed pigeons rained down on horrified diners, much to the amusement of the Coen brothers, who were lunching there, and security guards were called.

LUCKILY THIS WAS forgotten when Cannes invited the film to premiere in competition there the following year, and suddenly the Russell Club, Oxford Road and all those Salford smoky tops seemed very far away indeed as Wilson walked along the famous red carpet, up the stairs and past the garde d’honneur to take his seat in the Theatre Lumiere.“Then it hit me,” he says.“I was walking up the red carpet to watch a film about a lot of my friends, and most of them were dead. I began to cry a bit.” 

Afterwards it was even worse. The party had been hijacked by a Parisian promoter, and the pandemonium at the door was like a scene from Hamburger Hill. Wilson didn’t notice; he was lying on the floor of the party, trying to roll a joint. Then he caught himself. Should he be doing it? “That’s right,” he thought. “Live up to everyone’s expectations: roll a joint in public.” But then he thought, “Fuck it, I don’t care.” Because there had been a human cost to all the madness: the reason he hadn’t attended the Hacienda night was that his first wife had been invited too, which his then-wife Yvette wasn’t too pleased about. Wilson had struggled to keep his private life separate, but that night in Cannes it occurred to him that his marriage to the former Miss UK was in serious trouble. “That part of my life was a nightmare,” he says. “My partner of the last 15 years hated the whole process, and no one ever noticed that.”

Wilson is philosophical about the subsequent break-up (“If life was easy, we wouldn’t be doing it”), but 24 Hour Party People is a project still dear to his heart.“The reason I want to talk to you about this is because I’m so proud of my involvement with it,” he says.“Film people always fuck up when they touch music. Invariably. I can remember one time sitting on a train with a producer friend of mine. We got on at Euston, and he began to tell me about his new movie. We hadn’t got to Watford before I knew that Absolute Beginners was going to be absolute shite. And Absolute Beginners, despite its best intentions, put back the cause of British youth movies by 20 years.”

That’s not to say he thinks the film is perfect. Don’t mention the scene with the gold discs hanging in the Factory boardroom (“We’d never, ever have gold discs on the wall. That’s tacky.”) or the town crier announcing the death of Ian Curtis (“Never fucking happened”) and please, please, dear God, keep schtum about the blowjob and the two prostitutes. But he loves the way the film became “a Factory Records thing”, how the philosophy affected everyone, and he adores the last scene on the rooftop, with Shaun Ryder and Rob Gretton: the fact that it ends with Rob saying, “Fucking good dope, this.” But most of all he’s relieved that, for all the circus surrounding the movie — “Manchester’s biggest cunt played by its second biggest cunt”, as Hooky said at its hometown premiere - he actually got off lightly. “Steve Coogan played me as an affable clown,” he laughs. “The great thing is that, actually, I’m a complete fucking twat. And the fact that there was none of that in the film at all was very nice for me.” ■