by Alex; Ogg
At this stage, however, there was no real indication that Factory would shoot to pre-eminence. “As I remember it,” says Marc Riley, then a member of The Fall, “we didn’t really see Factory Records as anything but ‘another Manchester label’ – particularly at the beginning. It was an extension of the Factory promotions set-up. At that time, the Warsaw/Joy Division stock wasn’t particularly high. They played a lot of gigs around the town and Dave McCullough had started to champion them. But in Manchester (and beyond) they were definitely one rung below The Fall in the credibility/profile stakes (not for long – obviously). They also signed A Certain Ratio and The Durutti Column, who had supported us on several occasions, so at the beginning it didn’t look like Factory Records was going to be a serious player in the music industry. It appeared to be sweeping up the better Manchester bands apart from The Fall.”
“The key difference between New Hormones and Factory,” ponders Cath Carroll, “was most of all about ‘Identity in Location’. Richard was about art; that was central for New Hormones. But Factory began as a place to go. The Factory nights at the PSV were sold in a very iconic way by Tony. The club was commonly referred to as the West Indian Busmen’s Association back then and you had to cross the footbridge into bleakest Hulme to get there, to this lonely little brick box by the Mancunian Way, just outside the Crescents. ‘This is real Manchester’ was the selling point – and it was. It wasn’t a sometime disco like Rafters, on Oxford Road, traditional nightlife that could have been anywhere. Factory’s records were an extension of this theme of place. The product was very high end and substantial, the physical presence mattered, it was as much a part of the bricks and industry of the city as it was entertainment. In releasing its first record, Factory was really announcing its entry into the history of the city. While everyone still fixates on Tony as the key to the label, he was always turning the attention back to the city, away from himself. You had to move a lot of hot air to shift the centre of the universe from London to Manchester in those days.”
By the end of 1979 Rob Gretton, Joy Division’s manager, had become the fifth member of the core Factory team, as the club closed (to re-open briefly the following year). He, like Wilson, had first encountered Joy Division playing at the Stiff/Chiswick Challenge in April 1978, though he’d made the acquaintance of Wilson much earlier, through DJ-ing at hip pre-punk bar Rafters. A former insurance clerk and baggage handler, his first loves were Manchester City (in contrast to Wilson’s Old Trafford allegiances) and music – he was an early roadie for Slaughter & The Dogs and published their fanzine, Manchester Rains. Liking what he saw at that performance, Gretton approached Bernard Sumner at a phone box outside Manchester’s central post office and asked them if he could manage the band. Various stories, meanwhile, have been put forward about the nature of the band’s ‘contract’ with Factory. Bass player Barney Sumner maintains it was a single sheet promising the return of the band’s masters after six months if all didn’t work out. The more tickling legend has it that the deal was signed in Wilson’s blood and contained only the following wording: “The musicians own everything, the company owns nothing. All our bands have the freedom to fuck off.”
It was Gretton’s masterstroke that the band’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, released in June 1979, should be housed by Factory rather than handing the masters to a major (or just as acutely, southern) record label. After abortive attempts at recording a debut album funded by RCA (the tapes eventually handed back and the label reimbursed its £1,500 investment), Joy Division had briefly hooked up with Martin Rushent’s WEA/Radar-backed subsidiary Genetic to record demos. But ultimately Gretton persuaded them that it would be better to stick with Factory, on the basis that they were local and approachable, and had backed the band from the outset.
Reflecting on his maverick approach in an interview with Sean O’Hagan in 2002, Wilson, with the benefit of hindsight, acknowledged how unconventional the situation was. “It was the greatest deal any band ever had. Everyone says we were idiots, and in a way, I guess, we were. We had a heroic attitude to artistic freedom, and we thought normal contracts were a bit vulgar – somehow not punk. But that was the whole point – we weren’t a regular record label.”
“I loved that facet of Factory,” concurs Vini Reilly, “that it was so, if you like, unprofessional. You could call it incompetent. It was run in such a way that gave space for human beings to be themselves, and not geared up to some corporate idea or scheduled. By then there was a bigger picture for me with Factory. I’d realised it was special. I didn’t feel Factory was a record company. It didn’t feel like a record company. I’d had talks with record companies, and found they were bloody awful and I hated them. So Factory wasn’t a record company, it was just a group of people with some mad ideas, the imagination to have the mad ideas, and the balls to commit themselves to the things they’d dreamt up.”
The sessions for Unknown Pleasures began at Hannett’s Strawberry Studios in April 1979. Their producer delighted in behaviour that tested both the band’s patience (insisting, for example, that Stephen Morris take apart and reassemble his entire drum kit because of a ‘rattle’ he had detected) and Wilson’s wallet. But in insisting on calibrating each and every aspect of the music to his own personal satisfaction, and the introduction of digital delay through his binary echo invention, Hannett gave the recordings their unique, sterile beauty. Yet for all the press plaudits the lack of adequate independent distribution meant that half the 10,000 pressings were still being stored in a garage by year’s end.
Joy Division, forever to be cast in the public mind as the broody, doomed romantics framed by Kevin Cummins’ stark photography (the choice of black and white media at least partially a function of economics), were rapidly becoming a music press cause célèbre. With their debut Peel session booked, they graced the cover of the NME in January 1979; a placing writer and camp confidante Paul Morley had tried and failed to secure earlier. He’d previously posited the question ‘How much longer before an aware label will commit themselves to this group?’ in his review of ‘A Factory Sample’. On the surface it seemed the upsurge in his band’s fortunes was irreversible. But it’s worth noting that for all the press fanfare, November 1979 single ‘Transmission’ had sold only 3,000 copies. With his girlfriend Deborah pregnant and recently diagnosed with epilepsy while still trying to hold down employment with the Job Centre, Ian Curtis was beginning to live life at a pace that would ultimately see his demise at his own hand.
The legend of Joy Division, though, had a legitimate musical rationale too, and it was Hannett that produced the spark. “His ability to translate their thoughts and needs into a co-ordinated work of art was the catalyst Joy Division needed,” Deborah Curtis would later recall. Leaving Pete Hook’s knee-slung bass to provide not just bottom end but melody, Hannett’s laborious energetic was both claustrophobic and spare; as chill and spectral as a Mervyn Peake charcoal. The band, Curtis apart, hated the finished production, feeling Hannett had wrung the life out of their live sound. And both Deborah Curtis and the press, were startled at the maudlin, downcast lyrics, not least the revelation contained in ‘Insight’ that, at the age of just 23, Curtis was already feeling old and nostalgic for his youth. She sought confirmation from her father’s GP about his prognosis; the doctor was ambivalent, then shot himself a few weeks later. That sense of fatality and resignation that always shrouded Joy Division was reflected in the obtuse, impersonal packaging – featuring an ‘Outside’ and ‘Inside’ rather than side one or two, with the track listing and credits absent entirely from the outer sleeve.
The impact of Unknown Pleasures was huge. Though it didn’t chart, it did prove to others that an independently recorded and released album could be successful without taking London’s shilling. And the dynamics of the sound that the band and Hannett had fashioned suddenly became ubiquitous, as would-be copyists formed by angst-ridden young men tapped into Curtis’s somehow legitimising desolation as fuel for their own viny
l exorcisms. For two years, John Peel once recalled, all he ever seemed to receive in the post were JD-soundalike demos.
The label’s second album, The Return Of The Durutti Column, effectively a collaboration between Vini Reilly and Hannett, further cemented Factory’s reputation. While a variety of avenues had been explored under the guise of post-punk, The Return was arguably the most free-spirited record of its time, featuring styles ranging from jazz to classical, while Hannett’s studio wizardry included everything up to and including the addition of bird song. In fact, the ever flappable Reilly had been absent for two of the three days of recording. The record, built around his bewitching guitar arpeggios and Hannett’s synthesizer, was devoid of vocals. “I’d seen the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks,” Reilly recalls, “and I thought – this is really exciting. I hated progressive rock and the way jazz had gone. It seemed to me that punk was saying you can do absolutely anything at all musically. You can break all the barriers. I thought that would be an avenue for experimental music, which is what I wanted to do.”
“I didn’t really believe it was going to be an album!” he continues. “I’d done the Nosebleeds single and nothing really came of that. I just did it because I loved music. I didn’t know if it was going to be an album or not, it was just the case of jumping at the chance of being in the studio. I actually didn’t get up in time, Martin had to physically get me out of bed to get me to the studio – that’s how little I believed it would happen. I was still doing late night petrol station shifts. But we had two days in the studio, and Martin spent a day with these old black sequencers and synthesizers and strange pieces of equipment in big cardboard boxes. I didn’t know what on earth they were – but he was getting these noises from them and fiddling about. I didn’t really appreciate what he was doing. I shouted at him and had a bit of a rant – ‘I want to play my guitar!’ I was very vociferous about venting my frustration about sitting around. It didn’t phase him at all, he just looked at me over his funny glasses and said (quietly) ‘Don’t worry about it, Vini.’”
And naturally, that’s when the ‘magic’ happened. “Then he made what sounded like bird noises, just after that outburst,” continues Reilly. “And I started to play along. He said, wait a minute. And he made a beat on his mega-synthesizer things. And I just played a tune that came out of my head, ‘Sketch For Summer’. It just wrote itself. Martin turned a few things on and told me to stop and then start again and he recorded it. Then he recorded an overdubbed guitar and it was finished. And the whole album was like that. I had maybe 30 little guitar pieces, sketches really. I didn’t think they would be accepted as full, finished pieces of music. I was even more amazed when Tony presented me with a white label. I was completely baffled. ‘What, this is really going to be an album? You must be insane! No-one’s going to buy this!’ Tony asked me who my favourite artist was And my favourite artist was, and to an extent still is, Raoul Dufy. So I just picked three prints from one of the books I had about Dufy and that became the sleeve.”
Initial copies, however, also featured a sandpaper sleeve, inspired by Guy Debord’s The Society Of The Spectacle, whose cover, made of similar materials, was intended to wear against its neighbours on a book shelf. “Tony got the idea from the situationists about the sandpaper sleeve. It was Joy Division that stuck the sandpaper onto the card. I was mortified. I didn’t really know them. I went to the Factory office, which was one room in Alan Erasmus’s house, but I had to walk out. I couldn’t bear to join in. When it was presented to me as a finished album, I couldn’t relate to it. I didn’t know what to think – it was beyond my experience. I was really shocked. And about six weeks later Tony told me I could quit my day jobs [he was working both at the late-night petrol station and as a council gardener], and I was earning enough money to just do music, which was incredible. And the next thing is, what kind of guitar would you like – you can afford a decent guitar now. Yeah, I want one like Jimmy Page! A Gibson Les Paul!”
The other major cornerstone of early Factory would be A Certain Ratio, whose agit-funk slant on the post-punk dialectic betrayed similarities to Bristol’s Pop Group (whom Wilson admired and had booked for a show at the Russell Club previously). But their early fervour was eventually lost to a smoothed-out soul-jazz pop that saw Wilson’s interest wane, though he would, at their insistence, buy them the ‘Sixth Army’ shorts they wore at their prestigious London Lyceum show. All of which encouraged further accusations of Nazi fixations that afflicted Joy Division and Factory by proxy. Joy Division’s name had been taken from Yehiel De-Nur’s 1955 novella House Of Dolls, which (partially) fictionalised the brothels run in Nazi extermination camps for guards and to reward good behaviour by inmates. The name A Certain Ratio was taken from the lyrics to Brian Eno’s song ‘The True Wheel’, but the ultimate source was a quote by Hitler concerning the classification of ‘Jews’ based on blood ethnicity. When reported in the NME, John Peel made an on-air announcement that he would not play their records any more. Years later, Wilson was still displeased. “Dear John,” he would write as a sidebar on the event of the DJ’s 50th birthday, “something in the sweet, wonderful charm of the man that on occasions descends into gullibility… ‘I read it in NME’ and ‘Anfield is Heaven’.”
A Certain Ratio themselves withdrew from the media and announced no further interviews after Paul Morley’s cover story for the NME; a feature that, it has to be said, Wilson did a good job of hogging. “When a journalist writes a piece on a Factory group he is inevitably met at Manchester’s Piccadilly Station by Factory’s wizard Tony Wilson (to Hannett’s mad professor, Gretton’s hooligan, Erasmus’ tramp and Saville’s executive). And sure enough as we burst through the ticket barrier of platform nine there’s the grinning Wilson, pushing loose hair out of his face, striding towards us in pathetic khaki balloons, happily sockless. He’s skiving off more time from Granada Television.” Indeed, Wilson did temporarily have more time on his hands, having been jettisoned from a promising anchor role on World In Action after turning up hours late, and stoned, for an interview with Conservative minister Keith Joseph after his car broke down. In the NME piece, ACR laid the blame for the khaki shorts (and fake suntan to hide their pale chicken legs) at Wilson’s door. ‘Factory’ was referenced on no less than 30 occasions in the article – a ‘breakthrough’ band spending so much time discussing themselves in relation to their record label said everything about the intimidating stature of Factory already. A label whose roster had now expanded to include Section 25 from Blackpool, the immensely talented but ill-fated Distractions, Crawling Chaos from the north-east and Crispy Ambulance.
Another recruit was Kevin Hewick, albeit one more rooted in a traditional singer-songwriter vein. “How I got in on it all amazes me,” reflects Hewick. “If the wind had blown a different way, I’d have been one of the hundreds of never to be heard tapes in the pile of bin bags Alan Erasmus kept in the corner of the lounge at Palatine Road. But I did stumble into their extraordinary scene, clueless and totally unprepared. I never did quite work out quite what the hell was going on but I guess that’s how the great innovations and genius failures happened, they were born out of that chaos. Not being a Manc I was a real outsider for much of it, though Tony Wilson constantly kept me up to speed with the city’s scene and its happenings and gossip – as according to him! Whereas Alan Erasmus seemed laid back about the madness; he was chilled before people called it chilled. With Tony it was a bit like a love affair with acts. For a time he was clearly very excited about me, filling my head with stuff like I was ‘the best British songwriter since Elvis Costello’. But as it became painfully clear that I wasn’t, he cooled, and the regular lengthy phone calls – him calling me – went down to a trickle. In the end they turned to me calling him and getting a piss-taking [future Happy Mondays manager] Nathan McGough on the other end.”
Everything, however, was overshadowed by the death of Curtis in May 1980, a mere day before a planned tour of the US. The prophecy, which many would see
his brief life leading to, was complete. The ‘weight on their shoulders’ proving too much, just as Joy Division looked set to break through with both second album Closer and devastatingly beautiful single ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in the can. That the latter became a Top 20 hit in the hysteria following Curtis’s death was of no consolation whatsoever. Indeed, it deepened the wound to know that, at the time the troubled singer had reached a plateau of poignant expression, he was hoisting a rope around an overhead clothes hanger in his Macclesfield kitchen. “I’d been warned on a train to London two weeks earlier by Annik [Honoré, Curtis’s lover],” Tony Wilson would later tell the 2007 Factory documentary. “I asked her, ‘What do you think of the new album.’ She goes, ‘I’m terrified.’ I said, ‘What are you terrified of?’ She replies, ‘Don’t you understand? He means it.’ And I go, ‘No, he doesn’t mean it – it’s art.’ And guess what? He fucking meant it.”
In a low point for the British music press, eulogies saw writers abandon prose for poetics, as if to ghoulishly corner some of the myth for themselves. Dave McCullough’s Sounds piece, which feverishly proclaimed “That man cared for you, that man died for you, that man saw the madness in your area,” was undoubtedly the nadir. Meanwhile, Wilson switched between despair and flippancy – though a later Face story by Nick Kent, where he was quoted as saying “La Curtis dying on me was the greatest thing that’s happened in my life – death sells”, he vehemently denied. Further, he claimed he’d had it confirmed by that magazine’s editor that no such quote existed on tape or transcription. Talking to Len Brown of the NME in 1980, in addition to profound sadness at what had occurred, there was also resignation. “It was an altruistic suicide – a very emotional and stressed, Romantic thing, meant to help people.” We should credit Wilson here with not trying to imbue Curtis with superhuman powers to heal the universal psyche as some clearly had. Earlier in the same article he’d discussed the way in which Curtis had felt himself becoming a burden on both his friends and family. “How he thought it was helping is perhaps a moot point, but somewhere in that very wild romanticism you’ll find the seeds of why he fucked off.”