How Tony Wilson changed our city
TEN YEARS AFTER THE DEATH OF MUSIC MOGUL, WE LOOK AT HOW HE CHANGED MANCHESTER
IF you walk through First Street, one of Manchester’s newest neighbourhoods, you’ll probably notice a swanky apartment block called Vita.
It’s student accommodation for the modern age. Fresh orange juice and croissants at the breakfast bar. Wallmounted flatscreen TVs in every room. A laundry system you can control via an app. Opposite is HOME, the contemporary arts and culture centre that replaced the Cornerhouse a few years back. In between them sits a recently installed statue of Frederich Engels – the German philosopher who came to Manchester and co-wrote the Communist Manifesto. Manchester’s past, present and future. An incongruous but oddly satisfying mix.
Connecting all of it, fittingly, is Tony Wilson Place.
“He’d have loved all of that,” says Shaun Ryder, Happy Mondays and Black Grape frontman, and one of Wilson’s Factory protégés. ”Tony was like a dog. He used to like to lie back and let you tickle his belly. And his ego.”
Thursday marks 10 years since the death of Tony Wilson – a man whose unconventional approach to just about everything saw his place cemented in the history of Manchester’s development as a city but also in UK pop culture.
This was a man who, in his passport, simply had the word ‘entrepreneur.’ Who was born in Salford and educated at Cambridge but who was firmly rooted in Manchester when the glitterati only wanted to talk about London.
The former Factory Records boss who also presented local TV news, held raves in swimming pools and turned down the Stone Roses. Ryder and the Mondays were among his discoveries though, along with the likes of Joy Division and latterly New Order.
Wilson described the Little Hulton frontman – whose band possibly cost Factory more money than they made it – as one of the finest poets to have ever lived. High praise, but Ryder recalls a difficult first encounter with Wilson.
“Our first meeting wasn’t really a meeting,” he says. “I saw him at a Buzzcocks gig in 1978 at Belle Vue. I wanted to get his attention so I chucked a beer at him. It didn’t work. He just blanked me.”
A decade after the death of ‘Mr Manchester,’ his indomitable spirit still runs through the city and its attitude. The younger generation though, may not have heard of him. They may, however, have visited the first office of his record label, Factory, on Charles Street although it’s now a club called Fac251. They may have rented an apartment in the Hacienda on Whitworth Street West or walked past his stencilled image on the back of the building. They may have gone into Dry Bar as they explore the Northern Quarter or bought a Factory vinyl pressing in one of the area’s record shops. Or maybe just a Joy Division T-shirt. They may have seen or heard the Wilson edict that ‘we do things differently here.’ They may, ultimately – unwittingly – have come to Manchester because of him. Moving from Salford to Marple as a young boy, Wilson would go on to attend De La Salle Grammar school, just a few hundred yards from his birthplace of Hope Hospital. At 17, he took a job as a drama teacher at the Blue Coat School in Oldham but following graduation from Jesus College, Cambridge, Wilson decided to ply a trade in the TV business, working as a trainee reporter with ITN in London in 1971 before heading to Granada two years later. He would anchor Granada Reports through the 1970s and 80s but Wilson also had an edge – and a desire to satisfy his creative side. He presented Granada’s music and culture show, So It Goes, which was where he got to showcase the up and coming bands he was eager to
He empowered us to believe that Manchester was far more exciting and glamorous than we previously thought Andy Spinoza
back, and position Manchester as the world’s most vibrant musical city. Wilson put The Sex Pistols on TV, as well as The Jam, The Clash and Siouxsie and The Banshees.
Andy Spinoza was CityLife editor at the Manchester Evening News when Wilson, Factory and the Hacienda were in their prime. He now owns and runs SKV Communications, and remembers Wilson as ‘a complicated man.’
“He became a man of the people in death but he was actually quite elitist in life,” says Spinoza.
“He had that fantastic punk ethic though – take it or leave it. There was an arrogance there. He could be quite cruel to people who didn’t come up to his standards.
“But we should really value the way he empowered us to believe that Manchester was far more exciting and glamorous than we previously thought it was.”
Factory eventually went down in 1992 with debts of £2m. The Hacienda followed five years later owing £500,000.
Throughout all of that, Wilson had a partner – in business and in life. Yvette Livesey. What was Tony like at home? “He was exactly the same person as he was in public. He never stopped,” she says. “He was honest. Probably the most honest person I’ve even known, and he taught me that was the best way to be. He put more into one week than most people put into six months but he just wanted to do so much for the city – to put it on a world stage.”
In 1992, the pair launched In the City, an annual music industry convention. Bands that played before getting deals include Coldplay, Elbow and Placebo.
Livesey says Wilson was desperate for Manchester’s physical environment to be as daring and feted as the cultural scene he was helping to create.
He was diagnosed with cancer and had a kidney removed, treated at The Christie Hospital. The hospital recommended a drug which has doubled the life expectancy of some patients – but which would cost Wilson £3,500 a month. In typically sardonic fashion, Wilson told the M.E.N. at the time: “I used to say some people make money and some make history – which is funny until you find you can’t afford to keep yourself alive.” Friends rallied round to help pay for the treatment.
Anthony Howard ‘Tony’ Wilson died of a heart attack on August 10, 2007. He was aged 57. He left two children, son Oli and daughter Isabel. He was laid to rest in Southern Cemetery in Chorlton, south Manchester.
Livesey reckons Wilson would be ‘amazed and proud, stunned’ to know that his personality still flows through the city, right down to the square it named after him. For her, Wilson’s love for Manchester came from his fondness for the people who live here.
“After the bomb, I watched the Ariana Grande concert and I felt like a proud mother,” she says. “All of Manchester, coming together in front of the world and basically saying ‘screw you‘ to terrorists. That spirit you find in Mancunians has never really changed.
“It was a very Tony way of doing things too.”