To some he was just that bloke off the news on the telly. To others he was partially responsible for drawing attention to some of the best music to come out of Britain. I think to really appreciate the true Anthony Wilson, you've got to have grown up in the North West during the 70s & 80s, as it was here in Grandaland that we truly saw to the two sides of AHW.
Wilson worked for Granada TV graduating to the role of newsreader/cum anchorman on "Granada Reports" in the mid 70s. Now when I was a kid, come six o'clock in the evening once the kids stuff had finished and the news came on, I had to choose between the BBC's Look North with the eccentric ramblings of Stuart "It's a Knockout" Hall, or on ITV Granada Reports (or more realistically "Grandad Reports" with the likes of Bobs Greaves & Smithies on board). On the latter, the young energetic Tony stood out a mile, so much so that the bosses took on board his enthusiasm for the local arts scene by giving him his own weekly "What's On" slot on the show.
Somehow the success of this convinced Granada to give him a late-night, arts-based show called So It Goes in 1975. Initially it featured the run of the mill bands that were around at that time. Bored with the dull bands he had to feature, and always on the look-out for new talent, Wilson went to the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976 to see a London group who were part of the new "punk" movement and called themselves The Sex Pistols. He was one of 42 people in an audience that also included amongst others Peter Shelley and Howard Trafford (soon to become Howard Devoto) who would immediately form the Buzzcocks, as well as Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, who would later form Joy Division. (Also present was Mick Hucknall who, inexplicably, as if punk never happened, would later form Simply Red.)'It was,' said Wilson, 'nothing short of an epiphany.' He immediately booked the Pistols on the last show of So It Goes. The second series was also shown in London, and became the only place on British television where you could see this strange new music. "The twats at BBC Music just didn't get it" he commented some years later.
In 1978, Wilson formally entered the music business by launching the Factory night at the Russel club in Manchester's Hulme district, and shortly after with the aid of his savings founded Factory records. He was aided and abetted by designer Peter Saville, the producer Martin Hannett, actor and manager Alan Erasmus and Joy Division manager Rob Gretton. The rest is history. Factory records was very much in the style of it's creator - distinctly northern, stylish, stubborn - with the emphasis of art over commerce. Indeed the bands he signed owned everything they did, and Factory had no rights at all over the work, which would come to bite Factory on the arse in the end.
Factory's success was initially due to the output of Joy Division, possibly even more so after lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980 on the verge of US success. It is said that Joy Division could have been as big as U2 had Curtis not taken his own life. This is unlikely, but it has to be said that the potential was never fully realised.
That seems to be the way it was with Wilson and Factory. Defeat snatched away from the jaws of victory. Take the example of New Order, the band that formed from the remains of Joy Division, whose 12 inch single "Blue Monday" remains the biggest-selling 12-inch single of all time. Unbelievably, it cost Factory Records two pence every time someone bought a copy. Wilson said "We thought, it's a 12-inch format, it's not going to sell, so it may as well look good. It was an utterly contemporary and utterly timeless piece of design, and it was hideously expensive because excellence always is. It looked so good, it actually cost us money to sell it. Which is fine when you're talking a couple of hundred copies, but a bit of a problem when you hit 100,000."
"Blue Monday" was probably the first time I really took notice of NewOrder, and certainly the first point where I made the link between them and that gobshite on the box. Over the years I began to admire what he was achieving with the label, and any record on the Factory label was something to cherish (with perhaps the exception of "Shall We Take A Trip" by Northside). Every release had a individual "Fac" number (well, actually everything Factory did had a number, from the first club might down to the office cat), and owning one of their records felt special.
Wilson continued in his dual role of TV presenter and record company boss through the 80's, and with the money made from Joy Division & New Order opened a night club "The Hacienda" in 1982, based on the glamorous clubs of New York yet set in a old Manchester Yacht showroom. Unfortunately the city never mind the world wasn't ready for this, and so the half empty club hemorrhaged cash for five years until the House music explosion of the late 80's, when the Hacienda and club culture collided and it became the heart of the "Madchester" scene. Wilson's extreme vision for the club anticipated the look of the 21st century Manchester by some 20 years. The ultimate irony being it closed before the redevelopment of the rest of the city got into full swing. In the early 1990s the Hacienda became unwittingly embroiled in the gun culture that began to appear in the city and after a couple of closures, closed for good in 1997.
Tony also became known as Anthony H Wilson around the end of the 80s partly in tribute to his hero novelist Anthony Burgess and partly because he knew it would wind people up. That was one of the delightful things about Wilson - he had an uncanny knack of getting people's backs up but the strength of his persona was such that he was forgivable. Being a staunch United fan he would sneak in sarky comments about the city down the other end of the East Lancs Road in Liverpool, and took great delight in United's success during the 90's, purely because of the stick he took during Liverpool's 80's heyday. He returned to his "So It Goes" roots in 1988 with the late night Granada series "The Other Side Of Midnight" giving TV debuts to the likes of the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays amongst others.
The Mondays gave Factory records another unlikely hit band on their books, becoming the band of the "Madchester" scene. This didn't stop the label being blighted by cash flow problems. Wilson's business sense was legendary for all the wrong reasons, but there were several major factors that brought down the house of Factory. The members of it's main cash cow New Order were sick of each other and of having to bail out Factory, so were not rushing to complete their latest album in the studio. Factory paid well over the odds for new record company premises just before a property crash. In a major schoolboy error Wilson sent the already drug addled Happy Mondays to Barbados to record an album without realising that it was crack central. Only disaster could ensue.
Add to all this, when trying to sell the record label to a major it was suddenly realised that due to the aforementioned "artists own everything" contract, there was nothing to sell. Factory farcically collapsed in 1991 with debts of £2m.
This left Wilson slightly more humbled but not beaten. He still had television and radio to fall back on, and increasingly became a self appointed spokesman for the North West and Manchester in particular, becoming a key player in local politics and supporting a campaign for a regional assembly for the North West, going as far as to set up an unofficial coalition calling for regional devolution, called The Necessary Group. He still was pushing new music, setting up the annual Manchester music conference, In The City, with long-term partner and former Miss England Yvette Livesey. Also a couple of attempts at setting up a new Factory label were made albeit to little commercial success.
Bizarrely the whole Wilson/Factory story was laid out as cinematic entertainment in 2003 with Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, which represented his life as chaotic comedy and Wilson as some sort of situationist impresario-cum-newsreading stuntman, Steve Coogan capturing the essence of the man with only a hint of Alan Partridge.
Wilson unexpectedly fell ill in 2006, before undergoing emergency surgery to have a kidney removed in January 2007. Doctors then diagnosed him with cancer and he started a chemotherapy course at Manchester's Christie Hospital. The chemotherapy failed to beat the disease and he was recommended to take the drug Sutent, which unbelievably is not funded by the NHS in Manchester.Friends and acts he supported over the years such as members of the Happy Mondays had started a fund to help pay for this treatment. Typically Wilson didn't take the illness lying down working to the end campaigning to stop the NHS treatment postcode lottery, and at the same time helping with the scheme for the regeneration of East Lancashire.
He passed away on 10th August 2007. His funeral was fittingly, like everything else Factory related, given it's own Factory number.
"I'm basically a nice ordinary Salford Catholic boy who was surrounded by this maelstrom of madness. That's the real story of my life. I had the virtue of wanting to hang out with people who were more talented than me. I can't write songs, I can't perform, I can't design clubs, but I was an enthusiast. My gift was that I said yes to everybody.'
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