Nobody Beats Gravity

Tony Wilson, who was famously called Manchester’s biggest cunt (or something) by Peter Hook, was also one of its most devoted sons. Lost in the shuffle many times when speaking of Wilson is the fact that his beloved Factory was, among other things, a testament to his hometown, what many call the world’s first industrialized city. Factory was also thorougly ironic, a piss-take on the fact that the record label itself operated in a manner opposite to an assembly line, and a nod to Warhol’s own New York monument to Warhol. Factory was, in large part, also a monument to Wilson himself, but more than anything, as Steve Coogan-as-Wilson phrased it at the close of 24 Hour Party People, “Most of all, I love Manchester…That’s what did it in the end. Not the money, not the music, not even the guns. That is my heroic flaw. My excess of civic pride.”

Party People was also, as Elvis Mitchell put it in his NYT review of the film, a work of “fact-free fabulous fabulism,” which is why it’s so great. It’s easily one of my favorite movies of the past 10 years, partially to do with the music, partially Coogan and Sean Harris (stunning as Ian Curtis), but mostly because of scenes that directly address the complete and utter bullshit involved in autobiography, or for that matter, eulogy. Glossing, hyperbole, embellishment, etc., all in the name of posthumous glorification. Best of all, of course, it’s the same activity that Wilson himself engages in when he has a town crier announce Curtis’ death in the film. Wilson was nobody’s fool, but he was also a complete and total fool. And he knew it, and reveled in it. He reveled in joyous, ridiculous, financially frivolous excess all in the name of art, the music label equivalent of an ice sculpture under a heat lamp. But not only art, or at least we should say visual art. Much of Factory was theoretical, and part of why Party People was so great is that it showcases Wilson as a curmudgeonly, okay dickheadedly curmudgeonly, public intellectual prone to flights of Barthesian fancy with hacky newspaper reporters.

All of which adds up to why his management of Factory is such a work of genius, never to be duplicated. Decades before corporate synergy was the first line in entertainment corporations’ statements of purpose, Wilson was hiring a wide variety of local eccentrics, independent of their particular acumen in, I don’t know, working well with others in the interest of making money. Martin Hannett, whom Joy Division hated; Peter Saville, who worked up Rube Goldbergian album covers; fucking Bez. These days, it’s business as usual for a corporation to spread itself as thin as a wafer in the interest of maximizing profit, often at the expense of quality. Not, as Wilson did so well, producing wonderful, public works of Manchester art that weren’t necessarily commisioned by the city, but might as well have been.

A Certain Ratio “Do the Du” (mp3) (The Graveyard & the Ballroom, 1979, Factory | buy)