Cuttings

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL TV presenter and Factory Records guru Tony Wilson is probably as famous as the bands he signed. Andy Fyfe digs beneath the motormouth persona to uncover a thwarted actor with a seam of steely determination. TONY WILSON IS very much the public face of Manchester. Born in 1950, the former Granada arts-programme presenter found himself at the centre of the city’s rise as the hub of British youth culture after co-founding the Factory label. He is also the man behind Manchester’s annual music-business conference In The City, and currently runs F4, the latest incarnation of Factory, to which he has signed what he hopes is the future of British hip hop, Raw-T. Since the original Factory disappeared, Wilson has had his fingers in many pies. He has made documentaries about famous Mancunians and travelling to Peru to take strong jungle hallucinogens, and is now embarking on a new career as a building regeneration consultant. H...

Before I embark on the next stage of this blog, namely posts on concerts I attended with relevant clips, etc, I've taken the opportunity to update the following posts with better quality scans: New Order 1982 Feature Mist 1983 07 23 NME Feature 1983 07 The Face Feature 1984 06 Zigzag Feature 1984 08 23 Radio Times  1985 05 17 Powerhouse Melbourne 1985 11 16 NME Feature 1986 04 12 Sounds Feature 1986 09 06 Sounds Feature 1986 10 04 Melody Maker 1986 10 18 NME Feature 1986 10 Mix Feature 1986 11 The Face Feature 1986 Record Mirror Feature 1987 12 19 NME Feature 1987 12 19 Wembley Arena NME 1988 07 Sky Feature 1988 12 03 Melody Maker 1989 01 07 NME 1989 01 28 "Technique" NME Review 1989 01 28 NME Feature 1989 02 04 NME Feature 1989 04 01 Sounds Feature 1989 07 01 NME Cover Referring to FAC 227 1990 05 NME England Poster 1990 08 04 NME Hacienda 1992 01 Vox Tony Wilson 1993 05 08 Melody Maker 1993 05 Q Feature 1993 05 Q "Republic" Revie...

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, love...

MADHATTAN'S TEA PARTY NEW MUSIC SEMINAR 90 • A freeloader’s paradise or a valuable talkshop for new ideas depending on what time you get up, New York’s NEW MUSIC SEMINAR is certainly the biggest, strangest, funniest gathering in the music biz calendar. Lured by tales of eight live bands a night and a chance to ‘schmooze’ STEVE LAMACQ gamely took a look. In search of the perfect pitcher (of margueritas): KEVIN CUMMINS Vicar of that quaint English parish The Hacienda, Tony Wilson talks in the type of reverent tones you last heard in a school assembly. Sitting, centrally, twixt a panel of nominated celebs, he looks down from his pulpit on a conference room full of 200 expectant music biz folk and announces: “Welcome to the New Music Seminar. The rest of the shit going on in this building this week is the OLD Music Seminar. This is the NMS.” Wilson, casually dressed, hair slightly unkempt, takes charge of this year’s first (most?) interesting discussion panel at the 11th New Music Se...

MAD MAD MADCHESTER • “ Oh Manchester, so much to answer for ", crooned Morrissey, the Bard of Whalley Bridge, in his more productive days. Who could have guessed that as Britain rolled into its annual binge of creative and festive banality that the STONE ROSES, MORRISSEY and 808 STATE would all be up there at the Top Of The Pops battling it out with the tinsel tedium of Cliff Richard, Jive Bunny and Max Bygraves. In a move that some would describe as being as fast and shocking as the events in the Eastern Bloc MANCHESTER has re-asserted itself as Britain’s musical capital. Covering and kicking basses across all musical styles from pure dance to hippy house to indie pop, the Mancunians have proved that no other metropolis can pump out new talent quite like themselves. Other cities like Glasgow, Sheffield, Leeds, Edinburgh and Coventry have had their moments over the last decade but none have managed to constantly redefine the way people make and dance to music like they have in the...

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 wo...

FASCIST! Yeah you heard me and I’m talking about Tony Wilson. The evidence is painfully obvious. My case for the prosecution: 1) Joy Division is the name of a concentration camp. 2) New Order - Another name for the Third Reich. 3) A Certain Ratio - A term used for a Certain Ratio of Jewish blood. 4) Sector 25 - Another concentration camp perhaps? The rest of my evidence is the Certain Ratio LP sleeve with the two neo-Nazis on the inside and the propaganda style painting on the outside. The first Joy Division single sleeve and the undeniably Nazi overtones of the little drummer boy picture. Your honour, I rest my case here. So why has he the right to criticise our media when he outlandishly flirts with the imagery of the most evil force in the world’s history? Chris Clisset, Knebworth. PS We’re not all village idiots even if we do come from the sticks. Chris Bohn replies: “The answer to your argument is in the article ; check Factory's everyday behaviour...

AT FIRST GLANCE Factory boss Tony Wilson always prompts the question: what is he doing in this business? The answer might come back, “playing it like a game ot Russian roulette". But even such rapier reflexes and the knowledge that he first put The Sex Pistols. Buzzcocks, Blondie and countless others on television does not disguise the fact he has always looked painfully out of place in the world of pop. TV being a cruel medium — and that goes especially for pop TV — his awkwardness was highlighted when he devised and presented Granada's groundbreaking So It Goes , which followed the tradition of Manchester's magazine programme What's On  in documenting and spreading the word of punk. Yet, standing dead centre ot all this screen chaos he was encouraging, in his mid-20s and so obviously a Granada man was Tony Wilson, his straw coloured hair parted to one side and unfashionably covering his ears — then the best ears in TV pop — wearing a godawful murky coloured...