Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  So the begrudging compromises begin. You are a fish out of water in somebody else’s pond. Trying to pretend it’s a gig at the same time as trying hard not to fuck up. Sometimes having a dozen or so guests or extras that make up the pretend audience helps, gives things a bit of a vibe, but they are usually as flummoxed by what’s going on as you.

  ‘And three-two-one, go!’

  ‘Hold it, hold it!!’

  ‘Ready camera and three-two-one. No, hold on! Sound’s not ready, there’s a buzz coming from somewhere.’

  The tension and unease mount. Still, it will all be worth it when your mum sees you on the telly or the man behind the bar banters ‘Saw you last night on’t box. What the fuck was that about then, eh? Jesus, what’s that singer on?’

  You’re a band, after all. Why should you understand the whys and wherefores of a television studio?

  Tony did though. He understood the game and he was very good at it. When I wrote this not quite begging/nagging letter, it was with the hope that he would perhaps mention us, say that we had a record out or a gig or something, maybe turn up at a Joy Division gig himself. I like the pompous bit about recommencing gigging as if there was some organisation or great plan involved, not just me ringing up randomly and saying, ‘Give us a gig will ya?’

  What I didn’t expect was that in two months’ time a pissed-up Ian would be haranguing Tony in Rafters, calling him a cunt for not putting us on TV. In short, making the sort of impression that my whiny letter fails to do.

  That night at the Stiff/Chiswick show in April 1978 was the real start of my relationship with Tony Wilson. A month later, we played at one of his first ‘Factory’ nights at the Russell Club, Hulme, and from that point on the story of Joy Division/New Order, and that of Tony/Factory, would be entwined.

  Tony gave the impression of being always on the move, either off to interview someone with an important-sounding name or just coming back from some far-flung meeting. He possessed an infectious enthusiasm, laughed like a seal and saw solutions not problems. He was a great conduit or catalyst for putting people together in situ ations they would not normally think of venturing into.

  I suspect he liked the idea of being a rock star but did not want to have to go through the hassle of writing, playing and hanging around with other musicians in the messy arena of band life. No, let others do that shit, he would direct and channel like some benevolent emperor. I always thought he would have liked to end up as the Emperor of a twenty-first-century Manchester structured like a Modernist version of ancient Rome, with grand buildings, civic pride and Latin mottos carved in Helvetica and designed by Peter Saville or Ben Kelly.

  Tony was intelligent (as I’ve said, and as he said himself many, many times), and like Rob was a Great Thinker. Those terrifying words, usually Rob’s: ‘I’ve been thinking . . .’ The doing was generally down to someone else.

  Tony became friendly with people in the biz whom he felt trod a parallel path – Mo Ostin, Seymour Stein, Malcolm McLaren, Geffen – and he loved to name-drop.

  ‘As P. J. O’Rourke said to me just the other week . . .’

  Or,

  ‘As A. J. P. Taylor said . . .’

  Or, famously,

  ‘As Trotsky once said, “Though we fight to change life, let us not forget the reasons for living.”’

  Did Trotsky actually say that or was Tony putting words into his mouth?

  Tony borrowed ideas and references from Guy Debord and the Situationists. Books on them decorated his coffee table. At the time, I thought they were just another bunch of French performance artists with groovy posters and clever slogans.

  I asked him about the Durutti Column, the name of Vini Reilly’s band, which Alan Erasmus and Tony were managing.

  ‘It’s from the Situationist manifesto, darling. They were roving anarchists in the Spanish Civil War.’

  I had a hard time imagining Vini and Bruce Mitchell roaming Catalonia, armed with rifles, with maybe Orwell and his missus in tow.

  Mostly I found Tony’s intelligence intimidating. He came from a world I had avoided. He had been to university. I bet he was good at games too. He used words that I only half understood and did that thing called ‘oozing’ confidence. That he was articulate was not surprising. He was a journalist, and his ability to talk while juggling a biro, with which he would write notes on the back of his left hand (Tony’s personal organiser), combined with boyish floppy-haired youthful looks, made him a natural for TV.

  Me and most of the Factory music co-workers were not lexicological maestros, but we were all – what’s the word? – dedicated. And Tony needed us to be dedicated, to give it everything so his Factory vision actually had some content and could be writ large.

  Maybe an uneasy division of labour developed because of that. To carry on further in the life of a band meant giving up the financial security of the day job. That moment comes to every fledgling band: fly or fall. Initially, at least, the trajectory takes a downward path and many a disgruntled Factory musician would say to Wilson, as he was becoming known by the staff, ‘It’s OK for you, you’ve still got a job with Granada while I’m fuckin’ signing on.’

  Tony always came across as a benevolent Svengali, though, and a Situationist-inspired catalyst. He would come up with some apparently crazy suggestions that you went along with just because he was Tony. You knew it was bound to be OK.

  An early example was in summer 1978. Tony called me and Ian out of the blue and asked if we could play cricket. Being unerringly noncommittal I answered, ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Good,’ he replied.

  He’d promised to field a cricket team for a local village match: celebrity friends of Tony’s versus the village regulars. I along, with Bernard and Ian, had been ‘volunteered’ to play a game that, even on my best days, I found confusing and boring beyond words.

  TW: What happened was . . . I had to . . . the local village cricket . . . in fact it’s like tomorrow, I’ve got to play a charity cricket game. For weeks I’d agreed, six months ago, to do a . . . to get a charity team together for my local village and I’d forgotten all about it and I’d been ill the week before and I started panicking and these lot came along and er . . .

  BS: Almost won the game.

  (Hooky arrives after parking up the car.)

  TW: Almost won the game . . . Let’s go this way . . . I’ll try and hide the boots . . . don’t mention ’em.

  RG: Ask him where he wants to go for something to eat.

  IC: Don’t ask him, tell him!

  MH: Did he offer to get you the meal as a thank you?

  IC: Yeah, ha ha.

  TW: Where we going? You don’t want to go?

  MH: What?

  TW: Do you?

  PH: I don’t like tomatoes.

  MH: Have something without tomatoes.

  PH: There isn’t anything at an Italian restaurant!

  RG: What about chicken? They do things like . . . yeah, wait a minute . . .

  MH: Yeah, you can get a steak.

  RG: They do things like chicken and . . .

  MH: Get a steak or chicken or something.

  RG: Steak?

  TW: Let’s have a look at the . . . Let’s have a look at . . . oh my God.

  IC: He doesn’t like tomatoes

  MH: I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t like tomato.

  IC: Causes a lot of problems.

  As well as being clever and intelligent and a bottomless font of knowledge, Tony knew people, important people in Manchester. People who in the normal course of events would not give Joy Division the time of day, but for Tony? That was different. But he never could persuade Hooky to eat tomatoes.

  Or play cricket.

  The cricket match, predictably, was awful. We were all out for a duck except for Bernard who surprisingly managed to hit the ball and almost saved the day. Almost.

  Full of surprises, Bernard.

  Many years later, Tony had his own radio show, Sunday Roast, and he invited
me to be part of it. He confessed that he loved Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’, which pleasantly surprised me. He then went on to confess that he hated Bowie’s Low, which was a complete shock. How could anyone not like Low or at least realise that it was a fabulous and innovative record. I never would have thought that of Tony.

  But back in the 1980s . . .

  GG (Gillian Gilbert): Factory Records, what’s it all about? The truth.

  TW: I could give you eighteen different truths or loads of different stories. But they all come down to praxis. You know what praxis is?

  GGL Praxis? No.

  TW: You ever heard praxis makes perfect? Praxis is the idea that you do something because you want to do it. And after you’ve done it, you find out all the reasons why you did it. I could give you a hundred great reasons – political, ideological, aesthetic. I mean, I liked the friends I made in punk working as a journalist in ’76 and ’77, didn’t want to lose them. I’m trained as an academic, I wanted to do experiments – laboratory experiments – in popular art. Experiment with people like you, you see. You’re experimenting with me in the bath. I wanted to make political experiments as to how you could function politically in the marketplace. All those things which I might say were the reasons. I’ve only found out they were the reasons for doing it by doing it. You just do it. I mean everything we did, everything you’ve done, everything we’ve all done – just cos you wanted to do it. I can think of great reasons afterwards but it’d be dishonest . . .

  GG: What are your ambitions? Where do you see Factory going in the future?

  TW: To do more Factory. To be Factory in more places. I mean every year, it’s rather like farming, in that every year we have a crop, which normally includes your album and then there’s Vini’s album and A Certain Ratio album, whatever. Every year there’s a crop of albums and after we’ve struggled to get there and get them all out, then three months later the money comes in and we pay all the bills. Then for another couple of months there’s a bit more money and every time we have a bit of money then we can do something interesting, like we did the Haçienda last year, the video unit the year before that. Next thing I’d like to do is get the office in New York buzzing. Thing after that, I’d like to build lofts in Manchester. The year after that Gretton wants to buy Manchester. There’re millions of things one could do, but to do things that are valid in the marketplace and valid in the political textbook and moral textbook at the same time. And also valid as art, in terms of style, all those things which we’ve done already, but to do them in other areas.

  Play at Home (1983)

  19

  A FACTORY SAMPLE

  Rob took up the baton of persuading anyone who might listen to give us a gig. The obvious first port of call was Tony, who had finally given An Ideal for Living a TV plug on ‘What’s On’. He was now beginning to look more like an OK sort of guy instead of some trendy pseud and member of the Manchester Music Mafia. Who were basically anybody else in Manchester who were not part of our slightly dysfunctional musical gang.

  Rob, being Rob, got on well with Tony. They had a Catholic upbringing in common, and Rob’s fuck-you attitude impressed Tony the same way it impressed me.

  The Russell Club, Hulme.

  I found the Cold War dystopian edifices of Hulme fascinating. The area was sandwiched between leafy old-world Didsbury, Moss Side, Trafford and the empty warehouses of Manchester city centre. It was a herald of the future city. A city that, like jetpacks and flying cars, never materialised. Still, Hulme had an atmosphere that came to be indelibly associated with Joy Division, largely through Kevin Cummins’s snowy photo of us on the bridge over Princess Parkway for the NME. It would become, whether we liked it or not, part of our image . . . an image that we denied existed, of course.

  Nestling somewhere in this brutalist concrete fortress was the Aaben, an independent arthouse cinema – an oasis of culture (in many ways the forerunner of the Cornerhouse and now Home). It showed the best films, unseeable elsewhere. WR: Mysteries of the Organism was nearly always being screened, as was I Am Curious (Yellow). I saw Steppenwolf, Siddhartha (bit of a Hermann Hesse season), Herzog’s Nosferatu, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Fitzcarraldo and Lynch’s Eraserhead – all the greats. Joy Division loved weird films. Ian particularly loved the films of Herzog and Lynch, and Bernard liked The Tin Drum. We went for anything with an unusual atmosphere or story. This was when seeing a film was a bit of an event. We were all regular moviegoers – Lindsay Anderson’s If was a perennial favourite, as was A Clockwork Orange, despite its ban. But the all-time movie classic by a mile was Apocalypse Now. The soundtrack is a masterpiece.

  Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus wanted to do a series of new wave nights, called ‘The Factory’, at the Russell Club in Hulme, an entertainment appendix to the brutalist tower-block fortress of the Hulme Crescents that dominated the landscape.

  At the start, Factory wasn’t just Tony. It was Tony (the thinking) and Alan Erasmus (the actual doing), to be joined later by Peter Saville (the overall look) and by Martin Hannett (the sound), and let’s not forget Manchester music legend Alan Wise, who took care of the door at the Factory.

  I liked Alan Wise. He claimed to be a doctor (of theology). A true Mancunian character – he was a larger-than-life Manchester music veteran and knew all the greats, so he said. His tales of the acts he had worked with were always extremely entertaining if occasionally implausible. He was the only promoter who ever let me in to gigs for free. He also ran the other gig nights at the Russell that weren’t specifically ‘Factory nights’ – it was the other Alan (Erasmus) who first came up with name. He was always a bit of a blur, Alan Erasmus. Never stopping in one place for very long, always on the move. In later years he would take to doing a Sunday-morning bagel run.

  Suddenly and without warning, he would appear on my doorstep for a chat, a smoke and an update before leaving as abruptly as he’d arrived.

  The four initial Factory gigs in May and June 1978 were a success and it became a regular gig for us. Alan and Tony, spurred on by this success, came up with the idea to do a record.

  ‘Hey, let’s start a record label!’

  Everyone was doing it – Rabid, Stiff, Bob Last’s Fast Product. Post-punk indie labels were springing up everywhere. How hard could it be?

  Even Joy Division had had a go.

  Tony had been hanging out at Rabid Records in Withington, making friends and getting ideas. Forging a blueprint.

  The whats and the whos of what would become Factory’s first record were a bit nebulous at first. Roger Eagle from Eric’s in Liverpool had been mentioned, and the idea of doing a London/Manchester EP had also been mentioned but that never worked out.

  In the end three bands, Joy Division, the Durutti Column and Cabaret Voltaire, would end up contributing two tracks each, along with three by comedian John Dowie, presumably for light relief. Martin Hannett would produce both us and the Durutti Column.

  The sampler EP was not a new thing. Stiff, Chiswick, Sire and Berserkley had all used the format. Not quite a single and not quite an album. A bit like brunch. The sampler EP was an ideal halfway solution.

  Martin had produced Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP on New Hormones, and Slaughter and the Dogs’ single ‘Cranked Up Really High’, not forgetting 1978’s Manchester pop smash hit ‘Gordon Is a Moron’ by Jilted John for Rabid, where he was the resident producer. He was the obvious choice for producing. Being the only producer in town helped. Rob had a connection with Martin though Rabid and from his Wythenshawe days with Slaughter and the Dogs.

  We’d had a bit of a run-in with Martin previously when he was part of the Music Force collective responsible for occasionally booking bands at Rafters and the Band on the Wall.

  Song wise we were in pretty good shape and we were on a bit of a roll songwriting-wise. Latest additions to the set were:

  ‘Digital’ – this one came about through the suggestion of doing a four-on-the-floor kind of disco beat, like ‘I
Feel Love’. Horrified by the D-word, I played it in a jerky, stilted manner, which I thought would put most people off the scent of disco. At the time I had no idea what syncopation actually meant but I was damned if I was going to do it. But ‘Digital’ was the future – we all knew that, as did most fools at the time.

  ‘Glass’ – the title may have been one of Rob’s suggestions but most likely Ian’s. It was made up of two or three bits, which we shifted between, going off Ian’s vocal cues. This was one of the first 16s hi-hat songs that usually came about by my trying to get a bit of an Isaac Hayes ‘Shaft’ vibe going (first started with ‘Interzone’). This was pretty much a jam thing at the time, though me and Hooky were a particularly tight rhythm section and we were all good at musical telepathy.

  The Germanic one later titled ‘Exercise One’ – this came about from Bernard’s idea of doing something a bit like Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. I know this sounds like we were listening to highbrow classical music, but the tune was widely known at the time as the music from the Old Spice aftershave TV ad and was used in The Exorcist. Anyway, it is dark, weird and scary. The title came from Bernard too. The ever-innovative Bernard couldn’t see why we had to keep coming up with different titles for the songs. Why couldn’t we just give them numbers instead – 1, 2, 3 or 4 for example? Just as an experiment. ‘Might get boring after a bit,’ said Ian tactfully. ‘Exercise One’ was a compromise. There was never an ‘Exercise Two’.

  ‘Wilderness’ – this featured ‘I’ve got a lot of toms so I’m going to use them but not all at the same time’ drumming. I tried using a tom as a ride cymbal. I think Rob thought this one was a bit cornball – maybe it was the stop-start instrumental bit. He liked the lyrics though.

  These, then, were our shortlist of songs for recording for the A Factory Sample EP.

  Rob brought Martin Hannett and Lawrence Beedle – another partner in Rabid Records – down to T. J.’s practice rooms to get acquainted, which we did over a couple of spliffs. This meeting was speculative in a couple of areas.