Bookmarks: The Durutti Column

Hardformat lovingly unpacks the packaging of the first Durutti Column album:

For some of us this album approaches the status of a secular holy relic because, in addition to the beauty of the object and the music, Vini Reilly states that Joy Division were paid by Tony Wilson to assemble the sandpaper sleeves to earn some extra money. In another report, Ian Curtis allegedly did most of the work while the other three sat watching television in the next room.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Tony Wilson

Creative Review have got a sad-but-engrossing feature on the design of Tony Wilson's grave. It is, really, what he would have wanted:

The black granite headstone carries a quote, chosen by Wilson's family, from The Manchester Man, the 1876 novel by Mrs G Linnaeus Banks (aka Isabella Varley Banks), the story of one Jabez Clegg and his life in Victorian Manchester. The quote is set in Rotis.

Embed and breakfast man: I Am Kurious Oranj

A spot of ballet for the weekend. Back in 1988, The Fall entered into a didn't-see-that-coming collaboration with Michael Clark to create a ballet marking the tricentenary of the Glorious Revolution. The finished work featured Brix Smith sitting on a giant hamburger and a title punning on I Am Curious Yellow.

Back when the album came out, most reviewers would describe I Am Curious Yellow as a "porno", or words to that effect; I sometimes wonder if anyone was inspired by that to get hold of the film and a big box of tissues only to find they were going to spend their evening trying to make out subtitles detailing 1960s Scandinavian gender politics. Or if they just fast forwarded a lot.

And, while we're wandering off the point a little:



So, then, this weekend we'll be working through the album track-by-track, or as close to it as the internet will let us (I'm suspecting there's going to be a spot of skipping around the middle of side one.)

The first track wasn't the Overture, which is just to show what a counter-revolutionary old stick Mark E Smith can be, but Big New Prinz. Taken here from legendary Grandaland-only Wilson-arts-circus The Other Side Of Midnight:



In the comments on that on YouTube, someone suggests it's a mix of The Sweeney and The Glitter Band's Rock And Roll, to which somebody else replies "yeah, it's a total rip-off", as if simply everyone was doing that sort of thing back in 1988.

Mind you, AllMusic only gives the 2.5, which suggests the internet really doesn't know what it's talking about.

Buy
I Am Kurious Oranj

More to come across the weekend
Overture From I Am Kurious Oranj
Dog Is Life/Jerusalem
Kurious Oranj
Wrong Place, Right Time
CD Win Fall 2080 AD
Yes O Yes
Van Plague?
Bad News Girl
Cab It Up
Last Nacht

Venuewatch: Jillys And Music Box

Grim news from Manchester, where long-running twin venues Jillys Rockworld And The Music Box have gone into liquidation and are closing. Their farewell statement:

AS OF TUESDAY 13th APRIL 2010 JILLY'S ROCKWORLD HAS CLOSED.

THE CLUB THAT HAS BROUGHT MANCHESTER THE BEST ROCK NIGHTS EVER FINALLY CLOSED ITS DOORS FOR THE LAST NIGHT ON SATURDAY 10th APRIL 2010.

WE THANK ALL OUR CUSTOMERS AND SUPPORTERS FOR THE GOOD TIMES THAT WERE HAD OVER MANY MANY YEARS.

WE KNOW WE WILL BE SORELY MISSED.

TODAY THE ROCK DIED AND MANCHESTER'S ALTERNATIVE COMMUNITY MOURNS

JILLY'S WE LOVED YA!!!

R.I.P.

The club had a run of nearly forty years, first under the names Fagans and Rafters, and has offered a home to any number of awkward, developing and downright weird clubnights and performers. There can't be many places which gave a stage to both Tommy Cooper and Mr Scruff. Music historians will know this as the place where Tony Wilson discovered Joy Division, but they provided countless smaller discoveries for thousands of people down the years.

Rumours on Twitter suggest the places are going to be turned into a Tesco; the buildings surely deserve better than that.

[Thanks to Morag for the alert]

Courtney explains the Coogan affair

In an odd life lived in an odd world, even then Courtney Love dating Steve Coogan stood out as especially strange. Now, though Courtney has tried to explain what happened:

"I've seen 24 Hour Party People and my theory on why the whole thing happened is that I had a kind of daddy crush on Tony Wilson. And I transferred to Coogan because he plays WIlson."

It raises the horrific possibility that when they had sex, Love would make Coogan run through a list of options if you've just got back your exam results and they're not what you were hoping for.

Talking for Tony

Could there be any more apt a memorial for Tony Wilson than non-stop talking?

Steve Coogan, Tim Burgess, Irvine Welsh and - you'd have to hope - others are currently taking part in a round-the-clock talking event that's designed to inspire the next generation of creative people in Manchester.

They've called it The Tony Wilson Experience, though, which is great as it implies that it's going to be some sort of three-piece pub band instead.

Wilson goes West?

Manchester's city fathers are considering renaming Whitworth Street West - the place where the Hacienda stands, its heart ripped out and converted into overpriced flats - in honour of Tony Wilson. We'd have thought a ring road might have been a bit more apt, circling round Manchester, never quite leaving but making it possible for the start of thousands of exciting journeys.

Twenty Years On

Dedicated to Tony Wilson, and worth your attention: Little 015 - NineteenEightyySeven. Nineteen bands from 2007 doing 19 tracks from 1987. One each, of course, it's not 361 tracks. Amongst those taking part are The Leatherettes and Beki & The Bullets; amongst the acts being updated are A-Ha, The Vaselines and - eek - Men Without Hats.

And so he goes

Tony Wilson has been buried in a private ceremony in Manchester this afternoon. Amongst the floral tributes was a £400 wreath, paid for by seemingly everybody on the Liverpool music scene clubbing together.

Although today's event was family and close friends, plans are being made for a more public celebration of Wilson's life and achievements; councillors in Manchester are discussing plans for a permanent memorial.

TW on the TV

Tony Wilson's last music TV programme, The New Friday, is getting a tribute broadcast this evening. Originally a pilto for a series that, in the end, Wilson was too ill to make, The New Friday was filmed at Urbis and includes Brian Molko, Enter Shakari and The Silent Parade. It airs on Channel M (Sky Digital 203) at 8pm tonight.

More Wilson tributes

Amongst those adding their memories of Tony Wilson are John Cooper Clarke:

"He gave me my first television gig, actually. On his Granada show. He came out to see The Buzzcocks, and I was third on the bill, and ended up getting chucked out of the venue for something or other, but he noticed me and said 'No, give him a chance'. It really gave me a leg up - in those days it was really hard to get on TV, and it tripled my audiences overnight."

.. and Tim Burgess:

"(Wilson) put out records by my favourite bands - Joy Division and New Order - which made me believe I could be in a band and put out records," Burgess said.

"I feel like I felt when Joe Strummer died. It's like losing a musical dad."

Tony Wilson's world: Durutti Column

The Durutti Column turned up on every iteration of Factory Records, which makes them either very, very patient or locked-in to some sort of soul-centred contract.

This is a BBC 2 performance of Jacqueline from 1988:

Tony Wilson's world: Northside

We liked Northside - we saw them, on that slightly mismatched package tour they did with the Pale Saints, the night they actually signed for Factory, and they were alight. They were never going to change the world, but neither were they Flowered Up. And for that we should be offering a silent prayer.

Tony Wilson's world: The Railway Children

Their very early stuff - including Brighter - came out on Factory; before they were tempted to head off to Virgin. Virgin, it's fair to say, were never quite sure what to do with the band, hoping that their poppy sound and Gary Newby's cheekbones would be enough for them to carve out a kind of Haircut One Hundred style niche for themselves - certainly, Newby would pop up in Jackie magazine from time to time. Had they stayed on Factory, of course, the lurching crises in the label's finances might have sunk them just as surely as a marketing team which didn't understand them, but better, surely, to die on your feet as a British Go-Betweens than fade away as Modern Romance with A-Levels?

Tony Wilson's world: The Wendys

Some saw The Wendys as being the vital bridge between the Thames Valley Scene and Madchester. Others, as a band which couldn't decide quite what bandwagon they were trying to jump.

Embed and breakfast man: Tony Wilson

It seems appropriate this weekend to spend some time looking at some of the more obscure corners of Tony Wilson's legacy.

First, here's a slice of Remote Control:



More video stuff will appear over the weekend; a small menu will, as ever, appear here
The Wendys
The Railway Children
Northside
Durutti Column

Impressobit: Tony Wilson

There will be, of course, much written about Tony Wilson elsewhere today, focusing - we guess - heavily on Factory, New Order and Joy Division, Granada Reports; perhaps In The City.

Here's some of them:
BBC News Online
Wired
Manchester Evening News
Associated Press
This Is Cheshire manages to get his name wrong. Three times. But they were working at 1.11am
The Independent
NME

Paul Morley writes in The Guardian:

We used to make fun of Wilson and the mantle of grandeur he often assumed, but we knew that in his idiosyncratic and subversive way he was a great and important figure. Good things happened because he was around. This flamboyant, infuriating, pushy hybrid of light entertainer and anarchic Situationist was so in love with life, with music, with ideas, that he infected you with his passion.

It's not often when we're writing one of these where we have much in the way of a personal angle to add, but we did - just the once - break bread with Tony Wilson. He sat himself down at a table where a few of us were fortifying ourselves before a day talking about the digital future of music, and it was immediately apparent how he was able to carry so many people with him on the most hare-brained of schemes. He didn't just sit down, he held court, making a (seemingly) convincing case that to stay in business, record companies would need to embrace the obsessive fan - he used an example of somebody who wanted to be sure the resins used on reproduction covers were the same as the ones used on the original. And then he was off again. Working the room. Running the show.

In a way, he was the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of the music industry, in that his spectacular victories were made possible by the same sense of experimentation that created terrible failures. And like Brunel, it was those flops which meant that he never got to enjoy the fruits of his successes.

So while the American press raises its toast to "the man they based 24 Hour Party People on", let's remember some of Wilson's other work:

Factory Too: 1994's attempt to revive Factory, using money from London Records. Curiously, it was London who almost saved Factory when it had gone into receivership with debts of two and a half million. That deal had foundered at the last minute when it discovered buying the label didn't bring rights to the New Order catalogue with it - although they would have got a lovely table.

Factory Once: The third coming of Factory, in a form dedicated to releasing material from the original Factory records.

F4: Never being afraid to tread over old ground, Wilson revived Factory again in 2005 - the main fruits of this short-lived effort being a Durutti Column album and some compliment slips.

Remote Control: Channel 4's reworking of MTV's game show. It does make you wonder what Wilson could have done with a more mainstream game show - it's surely not inconceivable the man who happily voicedover The Richard Hillman Story could have found a niche as a twenty-first century Countdown helmsman.

What Now?: We're not entirely sure this was called What Now, but it probably was. Back in the 1980s, when exam results were generally a private affair and not merely an excuse for the Telegraph to print pictures of blonde teenagers jumping in the air alongside thinkpieces decrying the slump in standards, Granada would contribute a daytime phone-in to the ITV network. The idea would be young people who had suddenly discovered their lives had collapsed could call-in, Swap Shop style, and discover there was still a chance they could go to Loughborough University or get a career in the twine-manufacturing industry. We imagine that Wilson's contract with Granada and his role presenting pop programmes put him in the frame for talking to Britain's youth, rather than an executive enjoying the irony of Tony giving careers advice.

Northside: But at least he stood by them.

Anthony H Wilson is dead

Tony Wilson, cantankerous anchorman, unsuccessful businessman, inspired A&R talent, tireless enthusiast, died this evening at 6.05pm. He'd been diagnosed with kidney cancer and had one kidney removed back in January.

A spokesperson for Christie Hospital, where Wilson died, said:

"Tony Wilson died peacefully at the Christie Hospital at 6.05pm this evening with his family by his bedside.

"Tony was a very great supporter of the Christie and this is extremely sad news.

"We would like to extend our sympathy to Tony's family."

Happy Mondays buying drugs

Tony Wilson's cancer is under control - which is good news - but he believes its down to a drug called Sutent. That's bad news, because until its given formal approval, it's down to individual health authorities if they want to fund it or not. And Wilson's local health authority don't pay.

So for the next eighteen months, Wilson is having to fund the £3,500 a month cost of the drug himself. Music industry friends - including the Mondays - are rallying round:

Mr Wilson said his friends had been very generous and he was lucky to have the fund, "but some people needing these drugs are cashing in their life savings, some are selling their homes".

Nathan McGough, the former manager of the Mondays, teamed up with Elliot Rashman, the band's current manager, to set up the fund after they heard about Mr Wilson's plight.

Now, there's a cause worth supporting. Wilson is probably the only bloke who hasn't made a fortune out of the Manchester music scene - or, at least, the only person who should have done who didn't.

Wilson crosses the Atlantic

Moving location, as seasoned Jump The Shark watchers will know, is a sign of an attempt to pep up a dead horse. A thought that may or may not be in the back of our minds as Tony Wilson announces plans to do this year's In The City in New York.

Frankly, it looked a bit wobbly when it biked thirty miles up the M62 to Liverpool a few years back, and is New York really going to be as excited by what, to them, is yet another music festival. Only this time with the British involved?

Sure, everyone talks about the British Invasion, and its impact on US popular culture, but it wasn't really an invasion, it was more the Americans co-opting a few British acts who'd already turned themselves into acceptable fare for American teens. The Beatles didn't get onto Ed Sullivan because they'd tied his wife to a chair and threatened slapping sessions unless they got a slot. British invasion? American invitation, surely?

Since then, periodically, British music gets the urge to go and repeat an invasion that's never happened. You suspect this latest effort is somehow hoping to piggyback on Lil and Amy's stateside adventure. But does New York really need some British hoodrats?

"The fact that [the Sex] Pistols were never taken to any of the major markets, I've always regretted especially because punk is my love," Wilson says. "They just went to minor markets like San Francisco, never to L.A. or New York. So for me, taking a major new British band to New York is very exciting."

The bands?

Enter Shikari, the Pigeon Detectives, Blood Red Shoes alongside the Rakes, Biffy Clyro, and the Happy Mondays.

The Pigeon Detectives? Why not get the whole thing sponsored by Marmite and have done with?

Next time: A Very Special In The City, with Ted McGinley interviewing Howard Marks.

[EDIT/UPDATE: In The City have been in touch and pointed out that they're not relocating to New York; this is an extra event which is part of an international expansion - with an event in Perth next year. And it would somewhat churlish of me not to add that while the bands might not have been who I'd have taken to New York, the planned panels chime pretty much in tune with the sort of things we bang on about here, day-in, day-out.]