ANTHONY H WILSON

Okay this is a lengthy read....I was sad to hear about Anthony H Wilson's passing.

He was a Manchester legend - both influential in music and culture and he founded a record company with a free attitude and a club -Fac 51 the Haçienda - that became a world famous music institution - many memorable late night haunts for most.

He bought in the likes of Joy Divison, new order and the Happy Mondays to name a few.

Some of you may have seen the semi fictional humourous film "24hr Party people".. it just about sums up the MADchester music scene.

for those of you who aren't familiar, here's an article on him from the MEN.

Tony Wilson put Manchester on the map

Paul Taylor

10/ 8/2007

WHEN the story of Tony Wilson and Madchester burst forth in the movie 24 Hour Party People, a poster campaign sprang up across the country.

Beneath a photograph of the late Ian Curtis of Joy Division ran the legend "Artist". Beneath an image of the Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder was the accolade "Poet". But the poster of Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson carried the simple caption "Prat". And that was the more polite version.

Could Wilson possibly have approved such an ad campaign?

"The answer is yes. I found it very funny," he said at the time.

It was one of Tony Wilson's most endearing characteristics that we laughed with him, we sometimes laughed at him, and he laughed too.

If you totted up his genuine achievements, he would have earned the right to act the big "I am".

He captured nascent punk rock for a gobsmacked TV audience.

He fostered enduring musical talents through Manchester's independent Factory Records at a time when the music industry barely existed outside London.

He had a stake in the Hacienda, a club which was not only the touchstone for Manchester's most inventive period of popular music, but also, briefly, the coolest place to be in the entire world.

He even persuaded the music business to decamp to Manchester annually for the In The City convention - proof positive of a Wilson philosophy that Manchester is the centre of the universe.

Meanwhile Wilson also remained, for much of the time, that man on Granada Reports.

But he combined a tremendous pride in all these achievements with a joy at the frequent ridiculousness of life. That would be the journalist in him. There was a time when he asked to be called Anthony H Wilson in print. Affectation? Too big for his no doubt designer-name boots? It was never that simple with Tony.

Flash

He later confessed he just wanted to "wind up all the people in Manchester who think I'm a flash ****."

And you would need a plentiful supply of those asterisks when quoting the words of Wilson, an aesthete who thought Shakespeare and Shaun Ryder were cut from the same cloth.

The hilarious opening scene of 24 Hour Party People saw Coogan as Wilson the TV reporter, soaring perilously in a hang glider. This was Manchester's answer to Icarus of Greek legend, who flew too near to the sun on wings held together with wax. Like Icarus, Wilson had the odd downfall, but it was still a glorious flight.

Anthony Howard Wilson was born on February 20, 1950 in Salford. When he was aged five, the family moved to leafy Marple, but Wilson would return to Salford daily after passing his 11-plus and gaining a place at boys' grammar school De La Salle.

He would also later marvel at just how many of his fellow movers and shakers in Manchester music were products of the local Catholic grammar schools. Wilson was put in the A stream and later discovered that, of 1,000 entrants for De La Salle, he had been top.

Wilson's ambition had been to become a nuclear physicist, but then he saw Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon and fell in love with literature.

Studying English at Jesus College, Cambridge, Wilson was delighted to discover he was being taught in rooms once used by the poet Coleridge, a slave to opium. How very rock `n' roll. Having joined the student paper and decided that his future lay in journalism, Wilson exited with, for him, a disappointing 2.2 degree.

"I've been a minor celebrity since I was 23 years old," he once said. That celebrity began with his work as a news reporter for Granada TV in the 1970s. In the cosy world of regional telly, he was a long-haired maverick famed for his unscrīpted asides. When he had a chance to present a culture and what's on programme, So It Goes, Wilson found himself documenting a music revolution, with punk sweeping aside progressive rock and putting guitars in the hands of kids who could muster only three chords but bags of attitude. Many people first saw the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Elvis Costello and the like on So It Goes.

Wilson was one of the tiny number of people who saw the Sex Pistols at Manchester's Free Trade Hall in June 1976. Practically everyone in the audience went off to form a band of their own, while Wilson said the experience was `nothing short of an epiphany'.

In 1978, the Factory name was minted, firstly as a club night, then as a record label, Wilson forming a partnership with band manager Alan Erasmus and drawing in designer Peter Saville, producer Martin Hannett and Joy Division manager Rob Gretton. Factory's name was burnished with tragedy in 1980 when Joy Division front man Ian Curtis committed suicide just before the band's planned tour of the USA.

In May 1982, the Factory empire extended to a club. Housed in a former textile factory turned yacht showroom, the Hacienda was a triumph of understated, industrial design. The early years were lean, and the club lost thousands of pounds a month. Even when the Hacienda was thronged, the money was still not rolling in as the punters often preferred ecstasy to drinks from the bar. By 1985, married for a second time to Hilary, living in Withington and with a family on the way, Wilson was still professing to earn `virtually nothing' from Factory, and even used the annual holiday from his TV day job to produce the latest Durutti Column album.

But it was in the middle of the 1980s that the Hacienda caught its wave, with DJs such as Mike Pickering being the first in Britain to play club music coming out of Detroit and New York. When dance rhythms were welded to rock and suffused with the grimy Manc poetry of Shaun Ryder, a movement was afoot and its name was Madchester. Factory was renowned for inspired yet not necessarily business-like strategies. In 14 years, not one decision was ever made with an eye to profit, Saville once said.

Durutti Column's first album had a sandpaper sleeve which scratched adjoining records in the record store racks. New Order's Blue Monday was the biggest selling 12 inch single ever, yet, legend has it, the sleeve design was so lavish that money was lost on every copy sold.

There was an unwise £750,000 refurbishment of Factory's building on the corner of Charles Street and Princess Street.

Agreements

More music evangelist than hard-nosed businessman, Wilson had not even tied Factory's bands to conventional contracts, preferring gentlemen's agreements.

Most crucially, the Happy Mondays failed to provide a follow-up to the successful Pills `n' Thrills & Bellyaches album in time to plug the gap in Factory's finances. So began torrid times. In 1991, Wilson had parted company with Hilary, mother of his children Oliver and Isabel, and fallen for Yvette Livesey, a former Miss England 18 years his junior. They became the original loft-livers in Manchester city centre, their home being a cavernous two-story conversion of an industrial building at Knott Mill. They were partners not just in life but also in work. The In The City conference made Manchester the music business's talking shop once a year. "I am the boss. He's just the mouth," Livesey joked of their respective In The City roles. Together they did their bit to put Manchester on a world stage at a time when Manchester's regeneration was gathering pace.

In 1992, Factory crashed with debts of £2m. The Hacienda faltered when Greater Manchester Police tried to revoke its licence because of drug-taking. Then it closed voluntarily in the face of gun-toting gangs, opened yet again but closed for good in 1997 with debts of £500,000.

The name of Factory continued to ebb and flow. By 2005, Wilson was on to the fourth incarnation, F4, singing the praises of Hulme drum and bass collective Raw-T.

When 24 Hour Party People told Wilson's story in 2002, he did not just take those prat' posters in his stride, he smiled benignly on a film which he admitted hadlots of untruths' in it. "There's that line about the choice between truth and legend{hellip}always pick the legend," he said.

In January this year, Wilson underwent emergency surgery to remove a cancerous kidney and then began chemotherapy at Christie Hospital. He wrote, courageously, of his ordeal in a feature for the Manchester Evening News, crediting a long list of doctors and nurses by name.

"Strange how everyone has a complaint about the NHS except for people who actually use it," he said. "When you actually come face to face with its care and concern, it is little short of wonderful."

When he discovered that the NHS in Greater Manchester would not fund a pioneering new drug called Sutent, a group of showbusiness friends joined together to fund the £3,500-a-month cost of having the treatment privately.

But Wilson found another new mission' in his final days - campaigning on behalf of those others who were not fortunate enough to have wealthy benefactors and were losing out on the treatment because of apostcode lottery.'

"I'm lucky I have this fund and my friends have been very generous, but some people needing these drugs are cashing in life savings, some are selling their homes", he said."You can get tummy tucks and cosmetic surgery on the NHS but not the drugs I need to stay alive. It is a scandal."