From Manchester with Love: The Life and Opinions of Tony Wilson

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There was never a moment where he said, oh, write my book. It would be more… rumours. I knew he desperately didn’t want him writing my book, or him writing my book, so it was through a process of elimination that I was the last man standing, and the only one prepared to take him on.

It took Morley 10 years to complete this book and there’s a lot in it. Fifty-one chapters, three sections: the central, shortest part is, cleverly, about the Sex Pistols’ 1976 gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, the one attended by around 40 people, whose lives were changed because of it. Morley was there. Wilson said he was there, too, though Morley doesn’t remember him. It doesn’t matter. Morley has a way with a list, and starts each chapter with one that describes Wilson at that moment He was also, Morley’s book makes clear, now and then a total arse, someone who used people to his own ends, who was a poor husband (twice) and not the greatest father, who took too many drugs and was too fond of his own voice. Which makes him what? Human, I guess. Tony Wilson Place is the large, public-private square which introduces Manchester’s city centre if you’re walking into the city from the edge of Hulme, nestled between the canalside Haçienda apartments and the Manchester Central conference centre which in 1986 hosted Factory’s Festival of the Tenth Summer concert and this week hosted Conservative Party Conference. Look around: the large HOME cinema and arts complex is a physically domineering but altogether lonely presence in the company of a handful of chain restaurants, a dismal American-themed bar, and the typically new Manchester One Tony Wilson Place offices.

Language

Morley is great at capturing the almost incomprehensible power of a single gig, of how, six weeks later, when the Pistols play again, the audience have all cut their hair, tightened their trousers, altered their attitude. He understands how punk changed Wilson’s life, diverted him from becoming, as he says, “an amiable mainstream national figure, even a treasure”; how it “rekindled the radical teenage rebel inside him, and it never really let him go”. He’s also fantastic at evoking the atmosphere of a time (especially the grim 1970s) and how a city’s history affects all those who live there. He has a way with a list, and starts each chapter with one that describes Wilson at that moment. He writes as only he can, in long, descriptive, flowery sentences, each a mind map in itself.

Morley’s biography is as illuminating on Wilson’s strange ability to hold others in his orbit, even after his death, as it is on the story of his life.’

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Needless to say, having Paul Morley, a respected veteran music writer and contemporary of Wilson, at the helm of putting the story together, paired with the fact that he meticulously researched the subject for over a decade, results in a comprehensive coverage of Wilson’s life and how it was influenced by the emergence of punk, which subsequently fundamentally changed the course of his career and outlook on life. Announcing 'Manchester With Love' compilation album: an outpouring of love from the Manchester music community celebrating our diversity and unity. p.450. 'Factory record sleeves were as much descriptions of experience, of the experience of experience, as they were seductive designs and sophisticated visual codes transmitting elegiac or dynamic information, sleeves that often had at their heart a kind of high-Romantic yearning for wholeness, which sometimes reflected the music's own longing for something missing or unattainable, and sometimes didn't.'

Yes, the contradictions of Tony Wilson are now Manchester’s contradictions. Here’s one: the city that beats its chest loudly about its cultural dominance, but who missed the boat on all significant pop music innovations this side of the city’s IRA bombing. As Owen Hatherley wrote of modern Manchester, “regenerated cities produce no more great pop music, great films or great art than they do industrial product. What they do produce is property developers.” This has been brought under closer inspection by recent debates about who does and who doesn’t get to benefit from Manchester’s largest funded arts institutions. Tony Wilson was a man who became synonymous with his beloved city. As the co-founder of the legendary Factory Records and the Haçienda, he appointed himself a custodian of Manchester's legacy of innovation and change, becoming a cultural pioneer for the North. force of personality. In the cultural theatre of Manchester, Tony Wilson broke in and took centre stage. Like the man, From Manchester with Love is astute, discursive, unconventional, passionate, intelligent, wide ranging, interesting, questioning, insightful, and fun.... and ten years well spent. But what did he actually do? Cut Magazine (another dead music paper – this time Scottish) once described him as a “TV talking head, pop culture conceptualist, entrepreneur and bullshitter”.

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According to Paul Morley he was the only person authorised by "cultural catalyst" Tony Wilson to write his biography. It took Paul Morley over ten years. As circumstances changed he felt compelled to revise it. Eventually he realised he had to finish it. The result is spectacular, and really does Tony Wilson justice, capturing his intelligence, charm, personal history, the social history of his era, loyalty to Manchester, complexity and energy - along with some of his less attractive traits. It's dazzling and inspiring. To Paul Morley, he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, inventive broadcaster, self-deprecating chancer, publicity seeker, loyal friend. It was Morley to whom Wilson left a daunting final request: to write this book. He can be a broadcaster but it’s still not the same, because it isn’t combined with these other odd things. Now, we can see that it’s leading up to his life coming to an end and we can see the shape of it. Every time I had a conversation with him he was always grumbling about talking too much about the past, he wanted to talk about what he was doing, what he was up to. There was a tragedy about him, to some extent. All of his contemporaries in broadcasting went onto become world leaders in broadcasting – including many people he’d given their first chances to. Tony stays at the same level as a broadcaster, as much as he’s got this grandness about him. He isn’t seen to have developed. He could have become a Jeremy Paxman in one area of his life, but he sacrificed himself for this dual existence. Factory pulled down Granada, and Granada pulled down Factory. The entire Factory history is based on the capital that is Ian’s life,” Saville tells Morley at one point in From Manchester with Love. “I once said to Howard Bernstein, the chief executive of Manchester City Council, that I believe modern Manchester stands on the investment of Ian Curtis’s life. I feel that very strongly.”