FROM MANCHESTER WITH LOVE

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TONY WILSON PAUL MORLEY

Faber, 603pp, £20

‘Wilson, who died in 2007, aged 57, of a heart attack was a Manchester star,’ said Miranda Sawyer in the Observer. ‘A local TV presenter, non-moneymaking entrepreneur, relaxed music manager and, as it says on his gravestone, “cultural catalyst”.’

Other people had other words for him. ‘ “Tony Wilson is a wanker,” read the graffiti that started to proliferate around Manchester city centre in 1982,’ said Victoria Segal in the

Sunday Times. ‘Richard Madeley, who at the time was Wilson’s co-presenter at his day job with Granada TV, asked his colleague if the insults upset him. “It doesn’t bother me,” Wilson said, “because I am.”’

Wilson created the legendary Factory Records (the label that featured bands such as Joy Division and New Order) and the equally legendary Hacienda nightclub (which went from a music lover’s dream to a place awash with drugs and guns). He also hosted cult TV music show So It

Goes which introduced viewers to a band called the Sex Pistols.

Cultural historian Audrey J Golden, writing on music website Louder Than War, recognised the book as ‘a glorious and amusing homage to Laurence Sterne’s (in) famous novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Yet it’s also a work unto itself, solidifying Tony Wilson as a postmodern hero.’

Sawyer also saw ‘intelligence, bloody-mindedness [and] a romantic, revolutionary soul’ in the book. She said: ‘It requires concentration, mixing, as it does, careful interviewing with flights of fancy, revealing detail with time-travelling description. The book’s peculiarity and expanse and, yes, love means it becomes an immersive experience... very moving indeed.’