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.)
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.
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.'
e likes of the aspirational GQ, Arena, and a formative FHM but these were full of expensive fashion, fads and fiction, and stuffy as hell. Great if you're on £40k a year working in the city, flying off every Winter for a skiing holiday in Switzerland and wearing Armani suits, but not really saying a great deal to me, a bloke in average job, who doesn’t give a shit what the best fountain pen is to be seen with. These were refined titles, without the broad appeal that is seemed to be so effortlessly achieved in Women's magazines. All that "New Man" bollocks didn't do it for me. There were newspapers for your sport and current affairs, the likes of Q, Select or the NME catered for your music, and The Face or Sky for anything else. Oh, and Viz. That basically was it. Unless you looked higher up the shelves in the newsagents.
I read in the Guardian (look at me, all highbrow) that ex-NME editor James Brown was setting up his own magazine. I made a note to keep an eye out for that one, since I considered that Brown was a very good writer and his passion shone through in his articles, especially around the Madchester-era when his hedonistic outlook matched well with the subject matter. He could walk the walk and talk the talk. His creation, "Loaded" was that rare type of magazine - one that created a genre, and one that suddenly made the aforementioned men's titles that were around look very archaic indeed.
sion on our consciousness for the next 5 years. This, if I might be pretentious for a moment, was the magazine that rode the zeitgeist, albeit whilst trying not to spill it’s pint. In the media, the same laddish element was increasingly seen in BBC TV programmes such as sitcom “Men Behaving Badly” and the comedy sports quiz “They Think It's All Over”, in music with Oasis, Blur, and the Britpop movement, and in the world of football, which was now fashionable again post-Hillsborough/Italia 90 and due to Sky and the Premier League, Nick Hornby and Baddiel & Skinner's Fantasy Football. These latter two were part of the new wave of 90’s comedians who often trod an un-PC line, along with contemporaries such as Paul Whitehouse, Steve Coogan and Vic & Bob.
In short "For men who should know better." which became the cover strap line for years.
Thus each issue usually celebrated some up and coming starlet or model over a couple of pages. That first issue did have photographer John Stoddart's rather revealing black and white images of “actress” Elizabeth Hurley (see above), who we must remember at that point wasn't a big celebrity - yes she'd done "Passenger 57" and a memorable episode of “Sharpe”, but Hugh Grant wasn’t a star name then, and she hadn't yet made the appearance in that dress at the premiere of “Four Weddings”. Loaded was quite good at catching them early.
man, Ben Sherman shirts, hard drinking women, Anna Friel, George Best, Pot Noodles, hedonism, Jo Guest, crisps, Phil Tufnell, havin' a LARF, “good work fella!”, sorted, Dodgy, large-ing it up, Keith Allen, Country House, Damien Hirst, lager lager lager, Champagne Supernova, Office Pest, Vindaloo, Dr Mick, bottled beers with complicated tops, Ian Wright, Fat Les, Des Lynam, Vic and Bob, Ulrika-ka-ka-ka, Alex Higgins, Beavis & Butthead, Michael Caine, 5 a side footy, Paul Calf, Louise Wener, Paul Weller, the Mini…
eing British, it also took the piss out of it relentlessly – but we were in on the joke. You can’t beat them interviewing Kevin Keegan (see right) and telling him he’d be on the cover, which he was, only with a drawn on ‘tasche and glasses.., which they forgot to mention.
he block Maxim were playing catch up. However in 1996, FHM’s subtle update immediately got the formula right, with a fine balance of girls, fashion, celebrity, bad jokes and importantly, reports, working on a formula of "if our readers couldn't do it, we won't feature it". FHM’s core belief was that men are not noble or heroic, and are better off not trying to be. The idea that it was all right to be funny and self-deprecating about, say, failure in the pursuit of women came as an enormous relief to readers.
Plus, they hit upon the genius idea of the readers voting for the FHM Top 100 Sexiest Women each year, banishing male celebrities from the cover (we shall never see Rupert Everett and Mickey Rourke again! Hurrah!) and celebrating the biggest female stars of the day, usually by depicting them in states of half dress wherever possible (but not essential).
Less obvious figures of desire like Gillian Anderson became the face of 1996. Popstress Louise Nurding came out of the shadows of Eternal to become the hot babe du jour, and TV presenters like Gail Porter (below) went from Saturday morning kids telly to nationwide notoriety after flashing her bum on the cover. By the end of the nineties, FHM had overtaken Loaded in sales and became the top UK men's magazine.
e shot, lit, made up, clothed and photoshopped to the nines in order to make them make them more appealing to look at, but in the midst of the heady days of Britpop and New Labour, society had now deemed such images acceptable, and the buying public were lapping them up. There was a clear difference back then between what FHM and the others were doing and what you needed to resort to the top shelf for, and similar images were commonplace in advertising, film and television, music videos, even women's magazines. The acid test seemed to be “could people read it openly on the bus”? At this point, yes.
Celeb culture also became dull. It didn't use to matter whether actors and actresses were talented or not, but it did matter that they were interesting. Publicists now make sure that a glimpse of any stars weirdness is a rare occurrence. An interview with a sportsman like Beckham or film-star like Matt Damon is just PR puff, with nothing to be learned about such celebs and no insight into what makes them tick (if they do at all). They can’t be seen to spoil the “brand”. And if you did get an article that might be of interest it’d be
so dumbed down it’s practically unreadable.
han a tit mag for someone with the attention span of a gnat. And sadly, most of the others are the same. This hasn’t been helped by the arrival in 2004 of the lads weeklies; Nuts and Zoo were the product of feverish market research, based on a hybrid of the girls ”Heat” mag and the lad’s monthlies, with all the sport, bizarre photos, and topless lovelies you'd normally get plus a “Heat-esque” TV guide and more up to date "news". Although they won’t admit it, the publishers seem to be aiming these at the 14 to 22-age bracket. Basically, schoolboy porn. And this again hit the circulations of the monthlies badly. Their reaction? To try and compete with the weeklies, rather than offer an alternative. Hence an already dumbed down men’s magazine market became mostly barely readable semi-porn.
at can be found on the middle shelves of your local newsagent. The line between porn and lad's mag is now a very fine one. There are still a few magazines I can tolerate such as Esquire (right), which is still very much aimed at the £45k income man, but the articles are good, and Arena (below), which for years was a bit up it’s own arse, as you’d expect from a magazine from The Face’s Nick Logan, but although it’s one of the lowest selling men's mags, it's now actually the best.
