How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (22 page)

The reality, once the cameras disappeared, was that the Haçienda and the label were still struggling under the weight of their ambitions. ‘Factory were adrift,’ says Harper, ‘living off New Order. The Durutti Column and ACR were doing what they were doing. The rest of it felt like
The Face
in Manchester, but no one outside Manchester, and certainly in London, really cared.’

One of Factory’s releases that was met with a wall of indifference was Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’, an exemplary piece of modern soul music that had been produced by Be
Music, the production company that the members of New Order had set up to put their newly found studio smarts to use.

‘We’d explored studio technology through parting company with Martin, and all done the production to a great or lesser degree,’ says Stephen Morris. ‘Hooky ended up going into what used to be Cargo Studios and buying into it and that became Suite Sixteen in Rochdale. Bernard and Donald out of A Certain Ratio got together, and then if anybody had deep psychological problems they’d be foisted on to me and Gillian.’ Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’ came out of this loose affiliation: a track that combines heartbreak and, in its refrain of ‘We’ve got to keep on struggling’, inner-city frustration. “Reach for Love” was Bernard and Donald and it is absolutely fantastic,’ says Morris.

For a city that was feeling the full force of Thatcher’s local spending-cuts programme and a police force run by an evangelical Christian whose draconian application of licensing law would be a long-term problem for the Haçienda, ‘Reach for Love’ felt like a rallying call of resistance from the heart of the city. The track also sounded as urgent, funky and melodic as anything played on Radio 1 in 1984.

‘Reach for Love’, however, was destined to follow the usual Factory code of anti-promotion: very little or no advertising and the belief that the legend that was Factory Communications and a cutting-edge sleeve would secure it an audience. Such a tough-sounding piece of dance-floor soul was a stretch even for New Order’s audience, but none of this as such should have prevented ‘Reach for Love’ being a hit: it was as smart and direct a piece of pop music as Factory would ever release.

‘It’s intrinsic in the downfall of Factory,’ says Morris. ‘It wasn’t that it was good at cool – it was good at a certain shambolic coolness – but when it actually had a genuine pop moment like “Reach for Love”, it couldn’t translate those things to the extent it 
should have been. It should’ve been a massive record and it was Factory’s fault, because it couldn’t get beyond that wall of cool.’

Wilson still enjoyed the gamesmanship of taking a stance against the industry, insisting that Factory was above the
orthodoxies
of trying to promote records. Factory advertised only subtly and reluctantly (whereas the Haçienda had a weekly advert in
NME
events/live section), a policy that was placed in a far more mundane context by the fact Alan Erasmus was adept at keeping the city’s fly-posters happy and engaging in the low-level kind of quid pro quo arrangements that had been synonymous with achieving radio play since DJs first appeared on the airwaves.

‘There was a heated debate that me and Gillian had with Tony once, as we were sitting in the studio for hours waiting for Bernard to redo his guitar for the umpteenth time,’ says Morris. ‘We said. “It’s all right for you, Tony, this not promotion, no promotion,” – there were plenty of backdoor promotions that were going on – “you’re letting the bands down.” We were told, “The trouble with you two, you’re money-minded, that’s your bloody problem.” But “Reach for Love” is a case in point, it’s a fantastic record’.

The tension between running a business and running a creative, at times almost borderline absurdist, project was encapsulated by the newly introduced concept of Factory board meetings. The fact that Factory Communications didn’t have a board was not going to prevent Wilson and his colleagues enjoying a good opportunity to argue over the finer points of whatever agenda was in their heads. ‘Martin Hannett turned up at one and pulled out his gun,’ says Pickering. ‘It usually ended with Wilson and Gretton on the floor trying to land a punch on each other. Random people would be invited but no one knew why. They spent the whole time slagging Factory off, the whole thing was ridiculous.’

*

‘Tony’s personality kept Factory driving forward,’ says Harper. ‘He had bullet-proof skin. I met him once in Liverpool when Granada had moved out to Albert Dock. We met at the studios and he drove us back to Palatine Road. They were all so poncy about their cars – he was driving a Merc that was dechromed and had been resprayed matt black, everything was matt black. He gets in his car with his Armani saddleback and he says, “Right, Harper, we’re going to drive out of Liverpool now so be prepared, because everyone calls me a cunt and calls me a wanker.” He was so recognisable and the car was recognisable. We’re driving out of Liverpool and everyone’s going “Wanker” and he turns to me and says, “They love me,” and he waves at them like the queen.’

Thanks to Wilson’s regional media profile and Granada’s willingness to make culturally enriching programmes on a regular basis, Factory and Wilson were almost permanently on the north’s television screens. From schools and colleges broadcasts, featuring Wilson giving lessons on running a business and how a recording studio works, to Wilson interviewing The Fall and The Smiths early in their career for the evening news supplements, Factory had a presentational advantage over all its rivals. It received a disproportionate amount of television coverage that located the label and its front person at the head of a finely tuned cultural project. Wilson was a natural in front of the camera; the more nonsensical his monologues on the essence of Factory, the more sure-footed and beguiling he and it, whatever ‘it’ was, seemed.

But to dismiss Factory and Wilson as merely media savvy is to neglect the fact that Factory, amid the gestures and the postures, was making incredible creative decisions.

Along with the decor of the Haçienda and the sound of many of its records, the label glistened with a modernity that was streets ahead of its counterparts, particularly its London major-label 
rivals, to Wilson and Gretton’s ongoing delight. While shunning miming on
Top of the Pops
, New Order were slowly compiling a series of videos which belonged as much in an installation space as on late-night MTV.

For ‘The Perfect Kiss’, film-maker Jonathan Demme, a year after finishing Talking Heads’ ‘Stop Making Sense’, shot the band playing the track live in their rehearsal space. The 35-mm
cinéma-vérité
performance is around eleven minutes long and captures the band’s instrumental alchemy at a creative peak. Demme’s use of almost hyper-naturalistic lighting gives New Order and their equipment a luminous depth as one of their most epic songs weaves into a dense groove of Hooky’s bass notes, hand percussion and the track’s famous frog samples. Though on paper the treatment might have looked ominously banal, ‘Band play song in rehearsal space’, the film shimmies with the
high-end
cutting-edge aesthetic which was Factory at its very best.
Low-Life
, the album from which ‘The Perfect Kiss’ was taken, was promoted with a poster, ‘It isn’t only Low Life who record for Factory’. The strapline was more or less an admission that apart from New Order there was very little interest in the label’s other releases. The sales figures of the records listed – Section 25, Thick Pigeon and the Royal Family and the Poor – reflect a lingering sense that, however well-designed and executed a sleeve, not everything connected with the record buying public.

A large TV audience was given an insight into the Factory modus operandi by the film
New Order Play at Home
. Commissioned by Channel 4,
Play at Home
was a six-part series in which bands were asked to make documentaries about
themselves
and their home towns. With many of the bands enjoying the lack of editorial constraint, the series was at the vanguard of what made Channel 4 a creative powerhouse in the period.

An American voice-over reads the opening credits: ‘Factory 
Records, a partnership, a business, a joke,’ setting the tone for the programme’s witty self-analysis and deadpan character assassination. Alongside a photo of Wilson, who is shortly to be interviewed naked in the bath by Gillian Gilbert (who is wearing a dress) is the introductory line, ‘He thinks he runs a record company in his spare time.’ What follows is an insightful and hilarious series of interviews and monologues as Hannett and Liz Naylor tear into Factory’s current thinking – most noticeably the Haçienda. Rob Gretton appears interviewing himself, regularly saying, ‘That’s a good question.’ Alan Erasmus is interviewed on the back of Hooky’s motorbike and a narrative develops in which all three of the company’s directors openly contradict and blame each other for the chaos of Factory.
†

In the Haçienda’s Gay Traitor bar Wilson is interrogated by members of Durutti Column, Section 25 and ACR as to where the accounts are and why Wilson is so hard to get hold of. For a band and record label offered a prime-time window to their audience, the programme takes Factory’s anti-promotion strategy to new levels of self-deflation. However, the brio and candour of the cast and the unassailable sense that whatever the grievances (nearly) all concerned are having incredible fun, makes Factory and Manchester look like one of the most exciting places in the world. Asked of his future plans Wilson mentions he ‘wants to do lofts in Manchester’. Having been exposed to Soho loft-living in the mornings after the nights before in the downtown clubs, Wilson was clearly inspired by the downtown scene’s living quarters as well as their working conditions, so much so that the idea was given a Fac number – Fac 101 Lofts Concept. The empty
warehouses around the Haçienda that feature as an interview backdrop in
Play at Home
would all be developed in time, and Wilson and Saville would decades later become ambassadors and consultants for the regeneration of Manchester. Just as the artists who colonised lower Manhattan and lived cheaply in its
run-down
warehouses were dangled as aspirant and edgy neighbours offering the frisson of cool to Wall Street bankers, Manchester developers would consistently present Factory, and particularly the Haçienda, as a template for New Emerging Manchester, the Richard Florida metropolis
in excelsis
– though neither Wilson nor Saville would enjoy a part in the regeneration riches offered to the developers as the totemic Factory founders added a curatorial sheen to Manchester’s creative class property gold rush.

In
Play at Home
, as a tracking shot starts in the Pennines and sweeps across the city, New Order start playing ‘Thieves Like Us’ to a sold-out Haçienda. As the camera shifts through disused mills and feeder roads, one of the band’s most tender melodies soundtracks a cityscape: Manchester in the sunshine, glowing with a battered yet burnished self-confidence. The optimism of the Factory project, the ability to make things happen and the belief that anything is possible, echoes out from the high notes of Peter Hook’s bass line and up into the Manchester sky.

‘There’s a pub called the Peveril of the Peak round the back of what was the Haçienda,’ says Harper, ‘this ancient, tiled, wedge shape. It’s where ACR and Pickering used to drink in this dark industrial area, this lovely Victorian pub. It’s now surrounded by executive housing. You’d go in there and they’d all be talking about music – it was hip as hell, and it had this wonderful sense of resilience.’

The juxtaposition of civic pride with pop culture was not confined to Wilson and Manchester. In February 1986 the Royal Court in Liverpool hosted a benefit for Derek Hatton’s 
Liverpool City Council –
With Love from Manchester
. Featuring their neighbouring city’s favourite sons the evening comprised The Fall, John Cooper Clarke and The Smiths, with New Order headlining. The evening was curated by Wilson, having been
approached
by Hatton, who was by then six months into his illegal ‘deficit budget’ campaign against the government’s squeeze on the city’s finances. Hatton was also in need of as much assistance – and cash – as he could find. Advised by Wilson to go direct to Gretton, Hatton, with an advisor in tow, duly invited Gretton and Pickering for a meeting in Liverpool at the Adelphi Hotel. ‘Rob kept asking the bloke with Hatton, “Are you a gangster?”,’ says Pickering. ‘Hatton ignored him and kept asking if New Order could play for free. Rob kept replying, “Is he a gangster?” Rob went to the toilet and I turned to the bloke with Hatton and said, “Just say ‘Yes’, he’ll agree to do it.” Rob came back, sat down and straight away asked the bloke, “Are you a gangster?” He said, “Yes,” and Rob said, “All right then, we’ll do it.”’

‘There was this do with Derek Hatton,’ says Harper, ‘and there was this whole “Liverpool loves Manchester” that Tony created, so Hatton’s involved, Wilson’s involved, these two monstrous egos both making ridiculous claims on behalf of the north-west.’
With Love from Manchester
was a mere taster for what was to follow five months later when the Festival of the Tenth Summer, a week-long celebration of the anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ visit to Lesser Free Trade Hall, and the root of Factory’s sense of its destiny, was held at the newly opened GMEX, the Greater Manchester Exhibition centre, on 19 July.

‘The massive GMEX show was poncy as hell,’ says Dave Harper. ‘It was completely and utterly a Factory wank, but spectacular.’ Featuring over a dozen acts that encapsulated Factory’s conception of Manchester’s punk heritage, the concert was a celebratory launch for the city’s newest, largest venue 
that placed Factory squarely at the heart of the city’s cultural life. During the day everyone from Wayne Fonda and the Mindbenders, John Cale, OMD and Pete Shelley joined The Fall, ACR and New Order. Headlining the bill were The Smiths, whose appearance was one of the many gestures of bonhomie between the band and Factory that gives the impression that their rivalry was largely theatrical. Rising to the occasion, Morrissey raised a placard during an incendiary version of ‘The Queen Is Dead’ bearing the legend, Two Light Ales Please.