Tony Wilson Dies

Anthony Wilson, the British music impresario who founded Manchester’s Factory Records and its Hacienda nightclub, died August 10 surrounded by family, ending his 18-month and sometimes very public battle against cancer.

He had surgery to remove a kidney earlier this year.

The Manchester Evening News reported the cause of death as a heart attack that was not connected with his illness.

Doctors had recommended he take the drug Sutent after chemotherapy failed to beat his cancer, but the United Kingdom’s National Health Service refuses to fund the £3,500-a-month treatment.

Members of Happy Mondays and other acts he’s helped pitched in to start a fund to help their 57-year-old mentor pay for it.

"I used to say some people make money and some make history – which is very funny until you find you can’t afford to keep yourself alive," he said a month ago as he campaigned for the drug to be made freely available to all.

Wilson was born in Salford and educated at Cambridge University’s Jesus College, where he edited its newspaper, before returning to Manchester to enter media journalism with the regional Granada TV.

He was noticed by the city’s music scene in the late ’70s when he championed punk while hosting Granada’s music show "So it Goes."

By 1978 he had founded Factory Records and taken on Joy Division, which later became New Order, before moving on to find other acts such as The Happy Mondays and The Durutti Column.

The label built up a cult following and, along with The Hacienda, was at the center of what was a very rapidly growing Manchester dance music scene.

The success continued through the ’80s and the city became the hub of a youth culture phenomenon, as Wilson proudly demonstrated that acts didn’t need to leave the city to make something of themselves.

The success of the acts looked to have secured Factory’s future but the lack of long-term contracts and the sometimes extravagant marketing campaigns and packaging led to bankruptcy in 1992.

Several of the label’s first signings, including The Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio, were also personally managed by Wilson, which – according to The Times – might have led to claims of conflict of interest.

With Ecstasy culture at its height, The Hacienda became the object of intense pressure from the tabloid press, which cited it – with some justification – as a hotbed of illicit drug taking.

A firearms offense, reportedly drug-related, led to the club’s temporary closure when it lost its license for six months in 1991.

By then, Factory Records was also in trouble, allegedly because much of the cash that the label was still seeing was once spent on an infamous three-month drug-addled recording session in the Caribbean.

The era has since been commemorated in the 2002 film "24 Hour Party People," a semi-fictional biopic in which Wilson was played by comedian Steve Coogan.

"He had two driving passions," Stephen Morris of New Order and Joy Division said in The Independent.

"One was the music and the other was the city that he lived in. In later life he was a campaigner for devolution for the Northwest. I strongly suspect this was so that he could become Prime Minister of Manchester."

Music writer John Harris told the same paper that Wilson showed Mancunians that they did not have to leave the city to prosper and he "sowed the seeds of the cultural regeneration of Manchester which has now come to pass."

He championed the city right to the end. In his last interview he said, "In the northwest it rains and it rains. And yet we managed to produce the industrial revolution, trade union movement, the Communist Manifesto and even the goddamn computer. Down south, where the sun never sets, you took all our money and what did you produce? Chas and fucking Dave."

The obituary column in The Times said, "The musical scene that coalesced in Manchester in the 1980s was arguably the most significant non-London-based development in British popular culture since The Beatles had emerged from Liverpool two decades earlier."

Wilson, who was twice married, also leaves a son and a daughter.