How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (5 page)

‘
M
y dad’s a poet,’ says Nathan, son of Roger McGough, ‘and Wilson was posted at the
Liverpool Daily Post
in Liverpool as a journalist just after Cambridge and he was a fan of my dad’s poetry. My dad had bought this stucco townhouse built by the Earl of Sefton in the early 1800s, but it was basically in the postcode of Liverpool 8, which the outside world knows as Toxteth, and because of that people didn’t want to live there. Wilson used to come and knock on the door; my mum used to hate people calling round, so she just used to be very rude to this guy who turned up on the doorstep. He’d start saying God knows what and she’d just close the door on him. He kept persisting and one day, when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I came downstairs; and by this time Tony Wilson was a young broadcaster on Granada TV, and he was sat in our front room.’

The young Tony Wilson, perfecting the mix of provincial but urbane, louche but culturally thrusting, that was to define his media person for the decades to come, made a big impression on the teenage McGough. ‘There was this dude off the TV sat in a blue velvet armchair with a denim shirt on and a white tuxedo jacket, and he was rolling this spliff. He was very charismatic and kind of became a friend of the family and he turned me on to Kurt Vonnegut and Shakespeare and music. At that time, it was about ’74, ’75, and Tony was a bit of a hippie.’

Wilson worked at Granada TV, which, before the advent of Channel 4 in November 1982, could easily compete with LWT
as the leading independent televisual cultural voice of the age. As well as reading the local news Wilson had aspirations to be a more authentically northern, and much more streetwise, Melvyn Bragg. One thing he particularly coveted was the chance to put contemporary music in front of a television audience, something with which he initially struggled. ‘When I started putting music on the TV in ’74,’ said Wilson, ‘I thought it would be appreciated by my generation, but it was hated and detested by my generation then and I just couldn’t understand it.’

Once punk broke through into the mainstream, Wilson’s attempts to put the bands in front of the camera resulted in his temporary resignation from Granada. ‘Wilson was the only one of the intelligentsia, or even the pot-smoking hippie lot, who embraced punk immediately,’ says McGough. ‘He saw its power and its radicalism, and all his mates were, like, “This is rubbish,” so he stuck up for it.’

Wilson’s in-tray filled up with correspondence from punk bands keen to gain some access and exposure. The pile included an envelope from Buzzcocks, inviting him to the first of the Sex Pistols Lesser Free Trade Hall concerts. Wilson recalled, ‘I got a letter and a cassette from a guy called Howard Trafford, and he said, “This is a really wonderful group, just started up in London, they’re coming to Manchester on June 2nd, Lesser Free Trade Hall,” and I went, of course, and apparently 18,000 people attended that first gig. Something I found very interesting about pop music was that it was a genuinely popular, i.e. classless, art form, in a way that television isn’t. There’s a demographic to people who watch
Coronation Street
, to a degree. There is no class demographic to the received experience of being a Sex Pistols fan. It has the same intellectual content for a Cambridge undergraduate, and a kid on the dole.’

Wilson’s ability to distance himself from the editorial protocols of Granada allowed him a unique perspective, one he would hold
on to throughout Factory. As well as the free-for-all experience of being a member in the Sex Pistols audience, he also noticed a distinct sensibility developing among the crowds at Manchester concerts. Behind the aggression and theatricality of punk, a more thoughtful, if no less intense, space was opening up. ‘One of the great achievements of Manchester,’ he said, ‘was that when Suicide supported the Clash the following year, they were bottled and canned and fucked over at every gig in the country, including London, except when they played The Factory. Fifteen hundred people went berserk, loved it. We were that advanced. There was a subculture there; the Residents and Suicide seemed to go together with a certain bunch of people.’

Jon Savage had recently moved to Manchester and was now a colleague of Wilson’s at Granada and was equally seduced by Suicide and the burgeoning new electronic sensibility. ‘It was kind of dark, electronic, psychedelic and it was very comforting,’ he says. ‘During that period there was a lot of bombing around in a crap car all over the north of England … late at night, listening to this analogue electronic music and it was sounding very warm and although it was alienating, it was very pleasurable.’

Wilson had been the only UK broadcaster to book the Sex Pistols on to live television on his late-night music and culture programme
So It Goes
. He had planned to cover the group in depth and film their appearance at Eric’s club in Liverpool on the band’s ill-fated Anarchy tour. Granada had tired of what his producers considered to be his obsession with the band and decided against the idea, a decision that led to Wilson’s resignation. ‘I resigned at Granada over the Anarchy tour,’ he recalled, ‘I’d had a documentary I was making on the Pistols cancelled on the morning I was to start shooting it, because my producer had called Granada and said, “Don’t give Wilson his crew.” This was four or five weeks after Grundy – things are going
around in the press.
*
The next day Roger Eagle rang me to say the police had been down to Eric’s and said, ‘If you put this group on, you will not get your licence next time it comes up.’

The late Roger Eagle was a totemic presence in Liverpool and the north-west throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Having cut his teeth on the northern soul circuit, he brought Dr. Feelgood and Captain Beefheart to mid-Seventies Lancashire before opening Eric’s on Mathew Street in Liverpool. Preceding The Factory Club by nearly two years, Eric’s was quite possibly, and certainly in the eyes of its clientele, the hippest club in Britain. It was undoubtedly a peerless seedbed for post-punk and a bohemian watering hole, where the juke box played 7-inches by Howlin’ Wolf, Ornette Coleman and the Seeds.

Wilson and Eagle, friends since Wilson’s posting on the
Liverpool Echo
, had been mutually supportive as punk spread across the north, Wilson making sure Eric’s received its fair share of listings in the Manchester media. ‘I prepared for the
What’s On
show that week. What’s Not On is the Sex Pistols, and I then got a memo saying, “There will be no mention of the Sex Pistols in this programme,” and I walked out. Same day my accountant is saying to me, “You don’t make any fucking money at Granada, do you?” And my daughter says, “You put groups on television and three months later they’re big stars, is this true?” Yeah. “Well there’s a lot of money in that.”’

Wilson decided to develop his interest in punk further, and he and his friend Alan Erasmus, whom Wilson had met through a lifelong love of marijuana, launched The Factory Club, a regular live music night at the Russell Club in Manchester’s Hulme estate.

*

‘I didn’t know Tony, but by virtue of his regular, almost daily, television appearance, I felt that I did,’ says Peter Saville. ‘Everybody in Manchester, and most of the north-west, felt that they knew Tony Wilson and he was accessible and I would imagine that to a certain extent he got a certain ego thrill out of that. The downside is that people also can be quite rude or critical as well.’

Saville was a student at Manchester Polytechnic where he was studying graphic design. A school friend, Malcolm Garrett, was on the same course; the pair of them had grown up with a hunger to be involved in the seductive process of record sleeve design, a process Garrett was now engaged in through his work with Buzzcocks, whose United Artists sleeve he was designing.

‘I was not that connected to the scene,’ says Saville. ‘I didn’t live in the city, I lived in the kind of greenbelt stockbroker area outside, in Cheshire. I was a dreamer out in the semi-rural belt around those industrial cities, where the whole notion of the city and of industry has a kind of romantic dimension to it.’

Saville’s dreaminess would combine perfectly with an elegant and detached aesthetic that would define the Factory style. His inspiration also came from the discourse and photography he was discovering in upmarket magazines which enabled him to go on flights of fancy that were something of a contrast to the realities of inner-city Manchester.

‘At art college I started reading Peter York’s essays in
Harpers
,’ he says, ‘which were really, really, influential, and I eventually discovered Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdain in Paris
Vogue
, but that was not an easy thing to discover in Manchester in 1976, ’77. You had to have a bit of a mission to start seeking out Paris
Vogue
: the only tangible reality in your existence that expressed alternative visual culture that was there for you was the record cover.’

Saville met Richard Boon through Garrett’s work with
Buzzcocks
. While Boon was unable to offer Saville any sleeve design work, he suggested he contact Wilson about the broadcaster’s plans for opening a club. ‘I had a friend who knew him,’ says Saville, ‘and somehow it was arranged that I would go to Granada television one afternoon and meet Mr Wilson in the lobby.’

Although he didn’t yet have a portfolio Saville had a head full of ideas that he was keen to explain to Wilson; he was particularly interested in typography and the possibility of exploring new avenues for the uses of lettering in graphic design.

‘I knew what I wanted,’ he says, ‘which was to go somewhere much harder. In the work of Jan Tschichold I discovered a manifesto that he’d done in 1919 called
Die Neue Typographie
and that was brutal – it was very refined, but it was brutal, and Malcolm hadn’t been there, Barney Bubbles hadn’t been there, none of the people who were doing the groovy new work had gone anywhere as cold as Tschichold.’

Wilson was impressed with the young designer’s creativity and, although he didn’t understand his references to modernist typography, he suggested Saville design a poster for the club. To Saville’s surprise, the next commission he received from Wilson was not for further concert posters but ideas for a record sleeve. The nights at The Factory had prompted Wilson into taking a further step towards embracing the DIY ethos and releasing a single. ‘We got together Christmas ’78 at Alan’s flat,’ he says, ‘and, very surprisingly to both Alan and I, Tony said, “Let’s do a record from the club – I’ve got five grand or so my mother left me – some of the bands that have played the club don’t have record deals yet.’

Having seen Buzzcocks sign to United Artists and the immediate wave of Mancunian bands that had followed them become the subject of major-label interest, Wilson felt it was necessary to intervene. ‘I remember Wilson saying to me, “We
can’t keep losing bands out of Manchester,” ‘says Richard Boon. ‘He was definitely one for civic chauvinism.’ Boon had had long conversations with Wilson over the morality or otherwise of Buzzcocks’ departure to a London record company. ‘Pride is one thing,’ he says. ‘I’d sit down and talk to Tony and he’d say, “Why have you done that, love?” Manchester is full of men who call each other ‘love’ and sometimes mean it.’

Wilson had become aware of the groundswell of new independent labels through promoting the concerts at The Factory. He realised that many of the bands were beginning to release their own music and sensed that, having made an initial DIY move, most bands were hoping to sign to a major. Still convinced of the broader possibilities of seizing control that had been suggested by punk, he started to consider whether The Factory could become some form of record company.

‘I was in the car’, he said, ‘thinking, this guy does it, that guy does it. Everyone thinks of Factory as the arty label but Fast Product was the first arty label. I had got around to the point of view that you merely take your artist on to the major label. Bob Last had done it with Fast. At the time it seemed like a good idea; looking back it seemed like a terrible mistake. Joy Division were getting really hot, and Andrew Lauder became interested in them.’

Along with Cabaret Voltaire, John Dowie and Durutti Column, Joy Division were one of four bands featured on
A Factory Sample
, the first Factory release. Inspired by the sleeve of an imported Asian copy of Santana’s
Abraxas
, in which he’d been absorbed while tripping one night, Wilson suggested
A Factory Sample
should be housed in rice paper.

Saville duly obliged and produced a minimal design which featured clean lines against a silver tone and used numbers to indicate the bands and their track listing. ‘It seemed appropriate that this first record, which was a collective of different people,
should just basically echo that … so the numbering system crept in – we like numbers … numbers were Kraftwerk, industry, technologies, the reductive notion of model numbers as opposed to the kitsch of names. I mean BMW 3 series, compared to Ford … Capri!’

The Factory numbering system, although playful and innovative, would become something of an albatross around the label’s neck. Dental work, unfinished projects and drug deals would all be assigned individual Factory catalogue numbers. ‘It was the kind of coolly abstract element of numerology that was appealing’, says Saville, ‘but it became a bad habit; it became banal, I’m afraid … this notion of giving numbers to everything, and that was it really.’

Jon Savage, newly relocated to Manchester, found himself duly summoned to what would be the Factory premises for the next twelve years: Alan Erasmus’s flat on Palatine Road, in leafy Didsbury.

‘It was very much quid pro quo with Tony,’ says Savage. ‘He got me the gig at Granada, and one of my first tasks when I went up to Manchester was sitting in Alan Erasmus’s flat, spending several evenings bagging up this ridiculous package.’

Once
A Factory Sample
had recouped, Wilson, Erasmus and Saville started releasing a series of singles and cassettes that suggested, in their black-and-white photographic artwork featuring images of cropped hair and overalls, a post-industrial, Mancunian Bauhaus. As an identity started to form around the label, Factory’s design sense and aesthetic were fixed in the minds of the record-buying public as distinctive and elegant, gaining the label a reputation for individuality and quality. To fulfil its ambitions to become an independent northern counterpoint to the London music business, Factory needed to start releasing albums.