A Brief History of Manchester

In the beginning, there was Manchester, and it was a bit shit. Then Factory Records happened, and it was glorious for a few sparkling years, and then it all went wrong, and and it was back to being shit again.

A Less Brief History of Manchester

There are cities with a certain indefatigable spirit, one that can overcome all adversity. And then there are others so long on their backs that they know little except how to punch up. That sums up Manchester, a small Roman settlement that is now a conurbation of 2.5 million people in England’s North West, wedged between the Irish Sea and the Pennine Hills, and somehow always perpetually under a rain cloud.

Maybe it’s that constant threat of a downpour that has made Manchester such a uniquely vibrant yet gloomy environment. It’s how come proto-goths Joy Division could, after the death by suicide of front man Ian Curtis, become the often breezily poppy New Order. Or how scumbag junkies the Happy Mondays could, through a cloud of hash and a lake of heroin, fuse Northern Soul, indie rock, and Dub into irresistible dance choons. Or how none of this could have happened – or rather, had the impact it did – without Tony Wilson.

Who?

Know how, on local TV news, there’s that “and finally” bit, where you’ll find out about the newest trends in hats for dogs, or meet the only 90-year-old knife thrower? Tony Wilson was the guy who hosted those. But he was also an erudite and ambitious Mancunian (as the residents of Manchester are called).

Born in the Greater Manchester community of Salford, educated at Cambridge, he had an intellectual prickliness, and would go on to host political and debate shows as Anthony H. Wilson. But as Tony Wilson he was TV’s answer to legendary radio taste maker John Peel, hosting the Vonnegut-referencing show And So It Goes, where Muddy Waters rubbed shoulders with the Sex Pistols.

And it’s the infamous Londoners who spur the events of 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s history of Wilson’s greatest creation and greatest folly: Factory Records.

There’s something profoundly Mancunian about its rise and fall. Manchester is a city that has never seemed comfortable with untrammeled success because it knows that life can be brutal. In the shared memory is the Peterloo Massacre: in 1819, cavalry troops of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry smashed into a peaceful gathering of 60,000 protestors campaigning for the right to vote – or at least be heard – butchering 15 people and mutilating around 600 more.

At the same time, Manchester was the true hub of the British industrial revolution: its proximity to coal fields and waterways, its soggy but temperate weather, and its distance from the forces of governance in London. No Manchester, you might say, no modernity.

Put those elements together, and what Manchester has could be seen as a chip on its shoulder. But it’s also always had the leeway to get away with something. Mancunians will strive, with the expectation of failure. What liberation. For the very act of doing to be the success.

So, suitably, the fall of Factory Records was sealed into its very foundations. Wilson was a bundle of hubristic and heartfelt dichotomies, part of a generation of Northern middle class kids who grew up reading Yeats and Keats while The Who played in the background. At the same time, they rubbed shoulders with teens and twenty- somethings working shite jobs for pennies in the shadow of empty cotton mills. Factory and its wholly- owned money pit of a club, the Haçienda, was the intersection: the musicians would make deliberately obtuse references that the audience may or may not get intellectually (they weren’t exactly asking you about the exploits of Buenaventura Durruti in your GCSE school tests) but there was an emotional connection. Then throw some ecstasy into the mix – the drug of choice for the rising rave generation – and Factory became home to avant garde post punks, classical side projects, and club bangers. If Wilson liked it, it happened.

Of course, such arrogance will inevitably implode, and 24 Hour Party People is a glimpse at those 16 glorious years between the Sex Pistols’ gamechanging gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall to Wilson and his cohorts standing in the bankrupt tatters of a dream.

Wisely, director Michael Winterbottom used comedy actors for this farce. Steve Coogan is pitch-perfect as Wilson, while his long time producing and writing partner, John Thomson, is toe-curlingly accurate as an old school TV producer. It’s not just focused on the famous names like Ian Curtis (although Sean Harris gets his harried self-destruction). Factory was a label, so it’s accurate that you have Paddy Considine as New Order manager Rob Gretton, and Andy Srkis as bloated producer and dangerous madman Martin Hannett (the one true genius of the story, as a fourth-wall-shattering Wilson points out). It’s also a purposefully and admittedly unreliable history, even if so many of the figures who were actually there make brief cameos. After all, who could dare imitate walking smokers cough Mark E. Smith of the Fall, or Rowetta, the smooth soul counterpoint in the Mondays to Sean Ryder’s looping wobble of a voice?

And I was there. Or, at least, close by. Living in the miserable, soggy, town of Macclesfield, forever in Manchester’s glowing shadow, this was all baked into the day-to-day. Even if you didn’t go, you knew all about the Haçienda. You shopped for cheap clothes and import records at the same stalls in indoor market Affleck’s Palace as the Inspiral Carpets did. Ian Curtis is literally buried behind my mate’s house (he’s been known to heckle the mourning goths as they place flowers).

And everyone had a good laugh about how the stupid sleeve for Blue Monday meant the label lost money on every copy sold. Because it was so … Mancunian. Only we could lose money on the best-selling 12” of all time.

But what was it that let this all happen? Was it a generational reaction to post-war melancholia? Was it the democratizing influence of TV and radio access? Was it cheap flights on discount airlines from Ringway to Ibiza and its clubs? Tony Wilson would just say: it was Manchester.

• 24 Hour Party People
• Directed by Michael Winterbottom
• Starring Steve Coogan, Paddy Considine, Shirley Henderson, Lennie James, Andy Serkis, John Simm
• 2002
• 117 mins.

Playlist

• Love Will Tear Us Apart Again by Joy Division
• Step On by The Happy Mondays
• Pacific by 808 State
• Blue Monday by New Order
• Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald
  

Further Reading

• The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club by Peter Hook
• Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division by Deborah Curtis
• The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson
  

Further Watching

• Control (2007) D: Anton Corbijn
• Love on the Dole (1941) D: John Baxter
• Oasis: Supersonic (2016) D: Mat Whitecross