FROM MANCHESTER WITH LOVE

A warts-and-all biography of Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson (1950-2007).

As the co-founder of Factory Records in 1978, Wilson had a singular role in putting the British industrial city on the global stage thanks to acts like Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays. Veteran music journalist and friend Morley frames Wilson’s success as a function of his intelligence (he was an avid enthusiast of art theory, especially situationism), showmanship (he was a Granada Television presenter while getting the label off the ground), and sheer luck. As a businessman, he could be clumsy: He was so design-obsessed that the bespoke sleeve for New Order’s hit “Blue Monday” wound up losing money, his Haçienda nightclub struggled financially and became a haven for mobsters, and bad contracts flung Factory Records into bankruptcy. “Wilson’s show-off grandstanding, which made Factory such a great game for self-styled anti-capitalist heroes, was always destined to backfire,” writes the author. Drugs didn’t help either: Wilson struggled with cocaine addiction for much of his life, and drugs also sank the Happy Mondays, his most promising 1990s act. For a casual music fan looking for a just-the-facts accounting of Factory’s history, Morley’s take will read as excessively rambling, with extended riffs on the history of situationism and Granada and an investigation of who was (or wasn’t) at a 1976 Sex Pistols gig that crystallized the Manchester scene. But Morley has a deep understanding of that scene’s history, and he recognizes that understanding Wilson means understanding Manchester, as well. The digressive, zigzagging, logorrheic style seems to fit Wilson’s persona; he was constantly chatty and working a hustle. He was a “stubborn self-conscious myth-maker who used social media techniques to generate attention and distort reality decades before there was social media.” A chaotic pioneer, but a pioneer all the same.

Everything you wanted to know (and more) about a critical punk/new wave hub and its favorite son.