British music mogul Tony Wilson Dead at 57

[Fuggle]

British music mogul Tony Wilson Dead at 57



HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today/AFP) 8/11/07

Anthony Wilson, co-founder of the British record label which launched the careers of seminal bands including Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays died Friday at the age of 57, a hospital spokesman said.

His TV shows gave life to such early punk acts as the Sex Pistols, the Jam and Elvis Costello.

Wilson, whose name is synonymous with the rise of the 1980s “Madchester” pop music scene in Manchester, northern England, announced earlier this year that he had kidney cancer.

“Tony Wilson died peacefully at the Christie Hospital at 6:05 pm (1705 GMT) this evening with his family by his bedside,” a spokesman for the city’s cancer hospital said.

[Fuggle]

Idealist, chancer, loyal friend: why I will miss Tony Wilson


Paul Morley pays tribute to his mentor, the man who shaped Manchester's culture from punk to the Happy Mondays and who died on Friday at the age of 57

Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer


Sometimes, Tony Wilson was just too much. Perhaps he was just too much all of the time. Sometimes I hated that he was too much, too sure of himself, too convinced that his ways were the right ways, rampant with self-assurance, self-belief, self-confidence, self-indulgence, a man crammed with busy, swashbuckling selves to the extent you were never quite sure what he was up to, and what he was. Could someone so forward, so garrulous, so indiscreet be trusted? Was he really the idealistic northern philanthropist determined to fight a lazy, complacent and derelict south, discovering and enabling all kinds of local talent to help in his battle for an absurdist form of north-west independence? Or was he the pompous, tricky TV buffoon exploiting musicians, fans, viewers, colleagues and Manchester, while he talked up his own place in social and music history?

Sometimes I loved the fact that there was no one quite like him, that he could be at any given time Jerry Springer and/or Malcolm McLaren, Melvyn Bragg and/or Andrew Loog Oldham, a fiercely smart hybrid of bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, insatiable publicity seeker. How could you not love this freewheeling, freethinking bundle of contradictions, even as he drove you up the wall with his non-stop need for adventure and his loathing for mental and moral inertia?
There was so much of him, and so many of him, from the slick, charming television host to the seditious impresario, from the surreal activist to the baroque loudmouth. This was what people had trouble with: there was no precedent for such a combination of unlikely driven personalities to be so compressed into one mind and one body. Ultimately people tended to suspect it was all about his ego. His ego, though, was part of his genius, and his genius consisted of the way he could flatten everything in front of him with sheer force of personality, and sweetly, sternly persuade the world to become what he wanted it to become. A place where talent and imagination and ideas could thrive, and make the world not just better, but more beautiful

From the very first moment I became aware as a teenager of this loud, ebullient and slightly unsettling man on the telly, it was obvious he was so full of life, and so full of himself. In the early and mid-1970s he became well known in the north west as a slightly naughty young Granada TV newsreader with longish hair and flapping flares. He was a vaguely hip alternative to the BBC's traditionally madcap Stuart Hall.

At the time it would have seemed more logical that the breezy Wilson would have gone on to present It's a Knockout rather than be inspired by the Sex Pistols and avant-garde social theory. But then we didn't know at the time, with that insubordinate, even sinister twinkle in his eyes, Wilson's background in anarchic politics, his knowledgable passion for Shakespeare and his proud appreciation of Manchester's radical, reforming, progressive history. He had decided it was his duty to ensure Manchester's intellectual tradition was not toppled by the emergence of popular culture but enriched by it. This was not what you expected from newsreaders.

Those of us who spotted the curious Wilson at those early Sex Pistols shows at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 1976 couldn't quite believe what we were seeing. A few of us there might have remembered the time he turned up at a Rory Gallagher concert a couple of years before and was cheerfully jeered by the entire audience. It seemed inappropriate that the clumsy, slightly camp man from the telly should infiltrate the rock world, and then even more impertinently the new, anti-cliche punk world, and this was the source of the suspicion that somehow Tony was a dilettante, an outsider. Even at his most triumphant and groundbreaking, this made him something of an underdog, a misfit, but he liked it that way, constantly identifying with the marginalised, unloved and isolated.

When he merged the two sides of his character, the brazen cultural theorist with the slick television presenter, and created the magnificently pretentious pop programme So It Goes, putting punk music on TV before anyone else, the clash was so far ahead of its time there still wouldn't be a place for it now. After the demise of So It Goes, he withdrew, wounded, and worked out how to keep his two lives together yet separate, maintaining his light-hearted Granada presence even as he was organising and inspiring the subversive Factory Records collective. Somehow he managed to be related to both Joy Division and Coronation Street. How Manchester was that?

He seemed driven by the feeling that if he wasn't as dark as he was light, as profound as he was trivial, or as aggressive as he was gentle and patient, he couldn't complete his mission - which seemed to be nothing less than the modernisation of Manchester in a way that reflected his Situationist-inspired belief in a kind of urban utopia, the idea of a city as much made up by poetry, pleasure, philosophy and dreams as politics, business and architecture.

It seemed as though all along he was destined to become known as Mr Manchester. He accepted the role with ridiculous gusto, happy as always to sacrifice dignity as long as he was the catalyst for change and excitement. He became the personality most identified with the changes the city had gone through since the Sex Pistols' 1976 visit. There was no one better - there was no one else at all - to play this role, and the vigour with which he did never dampened the suspicion that he had manipulated history and exaggerated his own role in proceedings to ensure his own notoriety.

He relished the confusion people felt about his manner and motives, and was totally pragmatic about, even flattered by, the often extreme, occasionally violent, vitriol directed his way.

When Joy Division's Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980, Wilson was already a monstrous master of mixing fact and fiction to produce the truth of history. He approached the turmoil surrounding the death of Curtis as if it were raw material he could play around with, already planning how he could bend history to his purpose. It sometimes seemed callous, but he was ahead of everyone else in understanding the cultural impact the suicide would have.

He had marked me out as the man who would write the history of Joy Division. I initially resisted the role, annoyed that he was putting me in a place where he wanted me to be. His presumption that everyone would fall in with his version of events could make him seem like a bully. Even as it was happening, he seemed to know that 25 years later there would be films, and documentaries, and books about this story, which was both his story, and not his story. He realised more than I did that I would be writing about this period, from the Sex Pistols in Manchester to the death of Ian Curtis, for the rest of my life, hunting down the meaning of it all, following the clues that Wilson alone seemed to leave. If he didn't actually know then that this period of Manchester life as it revolved around his galvanising presence would become history, he was convinced he could make it happen, by making enough noise, by willing it to happen.

He willed it to happen, because he believed that what happened, directly and indirectly, because of him, as he tore through Manchester, launching TV shows, clubs, labels, bands, bars, events, creating scandal sometimes for the sheer sake of it, was important, and that everyone should know about it - both as a major part of rock history and as an important new part of the history of the radical, progressive north.

Wilson was frustrated that he could not follow up Factory Records or the Hacienda with what always interested him the most - the new, the next, the unexpected - and anxious, yet flattered, that everyone was fixing him in time as the man who multiplied Marx with Warhol and the Sex Pistols to make Madchester. He hated to be fixed, to be pinned down, to be filed away in the past, even as he fought to make sure the history of his extraordinary times was properly recorded. Death may quieten him down a bit, but it won't slow him down. He appears as fiction in Anton Corbijn's film about Ian Curtis, Control, and as, to some extent, himself in Grant Gee's Joy Division documentary and Chris Rodley's BBC4 film about Factory. The history he helped set up moves more and more into the mainstream.

In all of the years I've been involved in the music business and journalism - and I would not have been as involved without his generous, constant, inspiring and occasionally annoying mentoring - I've never come across anyone so energetically brilliant. Without Wilson there may well have been in some form Joy Division, and Factory, and New Order, and the Hacienda, and Happy Mondays. There may well have been Peter Saville's dream designs, and Martin Hannett's timeless production, and a Manchester that managed to move on from its sad post-industrial decline. But none of it would have been so far-fetched, so dramatic and so fantastic. It took courage to be Tony Wilson, to then become, in the face of certain derision, Anthony H Wilson. Only he knew how much.

An idealist's life:

1950 Born in Salford.

1961 Wins a scholarship to De La Salle Grammar in Salford. Later studies at Cambridge University before joining Granada Television.

1976 Sees the Sex Pistols in Manchester, an experience he describes as 'an epiphany'.

1978 Sets up Factory Records, a label that spawns Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays.

1982 Opens the Hacienda nightclub, which becomes the heart of the 'Madchester' scene, playing host to bands such as New Order, the Smiths, the Stone Roses and Oasis. In the same year he sets up the annual Manchester music conference, In the City, with his partner Yvette Livesey.

1997 Police close the Hacienda due to its out-of-control ecstasy problem and gang violence. Wilson continues to work on TV and radio.

[Fuggle]

"Young Hearts Fail": The Death Of Tony Wilson

"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."

Tony Wilson is gone. A man who did so much for civic pride in Manchester, basically re-inventing the city as a hip place to be in the eighties and nineties, has died. In his last days he could not afford 3500 pounds a month for the drug to treat his cancer, and was denied coverage for same under the UKs National Health Service.

Yes, this is the true face of capital.

Working as band manager and label owner of iconic Factory Records would seem an odd profession for a man unable to bring himself to make a proper contract with his bands.

"The musicians own everything. The company owns nothing. All our bands have the freedom to fuck off."

So read the only agreement, famously signed in his own blood.

In his book 24 Hour Party People he conflates myth and reality. "Between the truth and the legend, print the legend" he quotes someone as saying. (Yes, Tony, it was from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence".)

This blurring of the principle that separates truth from fiction makes him great in our imaginings. But we can put the "entertainment" aside (if we like) and look at some facts.

Tony Wilson was the first to put the Sex Pistols on television, one of the first to start an independent label in Britain, released the first single from OMD, let Peter Saville recreate graphic design for an era, and was possibly the biggest Vini Reilly fan ever.

Furthermore he allowed Joy Division to be who they wanted to be. Against all expectations and logic.

Somewhere I have that first release on his new label. A Factory Sample was four artists with two songs each: the influential Cabaret Voltaire, the odd John Dowie, the only recordings from the original Durutti Column band, and two tracks that would change every life they came into contact with.

"I need you here today.
Don't ever fade away
Don't ever fade away
Don't ever fade away
Don't ever fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away
Fade away"

That's what Ian sang on the first song, "Digital".

A line from the second, "Glass", I quote in the title of this entry. Perhaps this glass cuts too close to the bone. But then again sometimes bone is all we have.

Tony Wilson died 10 August 2007 at age 57, of a heart attack. He was a young heart always who did what he could for his city.

I've never even been to Manchester. But I will remember.

[Fuggle]

Tony Wilson 1950-2007
John Harris
August 11, 2007




Sentimentality is some obituarists' stock-in trade, and Tony Wilson loathed that quality more than most. He would probably have winced at today's widespread claim that he was known as 'Mr Manchester' - a nickname I certainly never heard anyone use - and given an embarrassed shrug at the countless quotes crediting him with being a pop-cultural pioneer, de facto Mancunian Mayor, inventor of the superclub, and much more besides. Self-deprecation was always a part of his brand of super-confidence: we are, after all, talking about the man who gave his blessing to a poster campaign for 24 Hour Party People in which two of his protégés were described as a 'genius' and 'poet' (respectively, Ian Curtis and Shaun Ryder), while by way of a punchline, he was hailed as a "twat".

At the time, I thought that was a little misplaced, and told him so, but Wilson shrugged off the implied compliment, having long since come to conclusion that for all its buffoonish aspects, Steve Coogan's portrayal of him made for a great story, and great stories were always worth it. There is, let us not forget, a faintly epic subtext to that film, embodied in the final sequence in which the camera scans the nocturnal cityscape, and Coogan/Wilson tells us that the essential feature of just about everything he did was "an excess of civic pride". All told, it rendered him heroic, but with enough affectionate mockery to render that heroism completely believable.

And therein lies the important thing; that this most unlikely story actually happened, and is still doing so. At a time when the British music industry - as now - was absurdly London-centred and establishing an independent record label in Manchester was a fantastically foolhardy move, he and his friends did it. When Manchester was on its economic uppers, they really did think that turning an old dry-dock into a vast club-cum-venue - The Haçienda, for those too young to remember - was a good idea, and endured vast losses, before it became world-renowned. In the high days of 1988-90, Manchester really was the centre of the UK's pop culture. And these days, you really can draw lines from Manchester's reinvention as a culture-driven urban success story to the visions Wilson and co were outlining - and putting into practice - two decades ago.

Moreover, let us not forget that even if the word 'indie' these days denotes a certain kind of marketing strategy, Wilson really was one of a few people who cleaved to the absurdly idealistic notion that in putting out records that you loved, you could somehow implicity attack corporate chicanery, and build a fragile little microcosm of the ideal society. Flipping through an interview I did with him circa 2002, it's all there: "We were being profoundly political by not owning our groups," he told me. "'The company owns nothing, the musicians own their music and everything they do, and all artists have the freedom to fuck off.' That was the famous Joy Division contract that I signed in blood. And our other political act, throughout the '80s, was to never have a publishing arm. Because that would have made a lot of money. That was the reason we didn't want to do it. It seemed correctly anarchistic not to want to be rich."

"The other thing," he said, "was that in its first two years, Factory had this non-promotion thing: 'We don't promote. No press officers.' It was all about not treating the music as a commodity." Scoff if you want, but he meant it: the Factory mini-empire's serial business failures, culminating in the final meltdown of 1992, were the proof.

That said, it'd be as wrong to characterise him as some dreamy romantic as it would to be to reduce his story to the three or four components that are still being parroted over the wires and airwaves. In 1998 or thereabouts, I can remember Wilson telling me that Shaun Ryder could be compared to Yeats and Mozart, and then correctly lecturing a gathering of the music industry about the digital future it was trying to pretend it could somehow fend off (he started an above-board music download website not long after, which foundered thanks to a lack of music-biz interest). He was a self-described anarchist, but I have clear memories of arguing with him about his charitable-sum-supportive feelings about New Labour.

Most of all, if anyone gets too carried away with the idea that all his hyperbole and myth-making somehow served to diminish him, they should consider this. The records came out. The Haçienda got built. Things happened. The glorifying stories came later, which he was fond of describing as a proof of the Marxist idea of praxis: "You learn why you do something by actually doing it." Though making the point comes dangerously close to the sentimentality he so despised, that can surely stand as some kind of epitaph.

[Fuggle]

Tony Wilson


Record label boss and broadcaster with twin passions: music and Manchester

Paul Morley
Monday August 13, 2007
The Guardian


If you lived in the north-west at any time after 1973, it was impossible to ignore the indefatigable broadcaster, music mogul, social activist, proud northerner, football fan, writer and exhibitionist Tony Wilson, who has died aged 57 of a heart attack after being diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. For years, he was known as plain Tony Wilson, both as an extremely opinionated, populist Granada television presenter and as an idiosyncratic Manchester music impresario who dedicated his life to making the city internationally famous for its music, nightlife and pop culture. From the moment he appeared on television, and especially after he combined his daily Granada duties with his antics as self-appointed ringleader of the Manchester music business, he was someone you loved, or hated, or loved and hated at the same time.

In the 1990s, typically writing his own history as he went along, he made it clear he preferred to be known as Anthony H Wilson. The pompous self-publicist part of him, enjoying the fact that the bigger name sounded grander and would take up more space, announced that this was because he wanted "to wind up all the people in Manchester who think I'm a flash cunt". The more reflective Wilson admitted to me that: "I never liked Tony. I was always Anthony to my mum. I just wanted to be Anthony again."
Wilson was born in Salford, Lancashire. His German grandfather came to Salford in 1901, and his family ran three jewellers' shops before moving, when he was five, to the leafier Marple, near Stockport. His mother felt it would be a better place to bring him up, but he kept in contact with the grittier, more darkly romantic Salford. After passing his 11-plus, Wilson won a place at the Catholic boys De La Salle grammar school in Salford. He developed a love of literature and language after he saw a performance of Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon.

He felt, as someone who understood the accelerating importance of popular culture, that he was always in the right place at the right time. He was 13 "in the school playground when the Beatles happened" and he was studying English at Jesus College, Cambridge, "when the revolution in drugs happened". A flirtation with anarchic politics possibly contributed to his underperforming 2.2 degree, but certainly infected his unique, often haywire approach to life, work, art, music, family and business; the way he would take everything ridiculously seriously, and not seriously at all.

After Cambridge, he began his career in journalism as a news reporter for Granada television. Granada was at the time one of the great northern institutions, and he found a home there, one that could, occasionally - only just - indulge his tendency for a naughtiness that in the bland context of a tea-time magazine show was almost dangerous. With schoolboy long hair and a hippy/glam twist to his newsreading suit, he exploited his sweet side and became a teenybop hit and grandma's favourite. Many in the north never forgot when he was a cross between David Cassidy and David Frost, when he would be not so goodnaturedly booed as he arrived at rock concerts, and this contributed to suspicions later when he pursued more provocative activities.

Wilson, though, quick to adopt new personas, and adapt to new circumstances, adored the attention, and shrewdly exploited his role as local minor celebrity when it came to what he was really interested in - helping Manchester to recreate itself as a major city, with its radical, inventive and progressive traditions intact.

As a now respected mainstream broadcaster, in 1975 he accepted a job on the BBC's Nationwide magazine show. He was driving down to London to a new life when he had misgivings. A few miles outside the capital he rang his boss at Granada and asked if his old job was still open. It was. He turned back. He would never entertain the idea of leaving the north again.

The first sign of Wilson's interest in the counterculture and in radical ideas was when Granada allowed him to present his own What's On section of Granada Reports. This covered the local arts and music scene, and in 1976 it turned into his own pop music show, So It Goes. His suit replaced by a leather jacket, his hair still heart-throb long, the overeager Wilson looked out of place, as he did as one of the 40 or so people who turned up to see the Sex Pistols play at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976.

Everyone in the audience was inspired by this incendiary performance to react in some creative way. Many formed bands - Buzzcocks, Magazine, Fall, Smiths, Simply Red, Joy Division members were all present. Others became designers, writers or took up roles in the music business. Wilson was galvanised by the event, by the combination of anarchy and music, philosophy and pop, danger and delight, image and protest, and it changed his life, as it did Manchester itself. He immediately invited the Sex Pistols on to the second and final series of So It Goes, which was never shown in more than three ITV regions. Taking pop culture seriously as a social and political force, it was ahead of its time. It still would be today.

By 1978, still a grinning Granada personality, Wilson formally entered the music business by opening the Factory Club in Hulme to showcase new local music talent. Factory then became a record label. Wilson ran it with fellow northern Catholic grammar school boys, the designer Peter Saville, the producer Martin Hannett, actor and manager Alan Erasmus and Joy Division manager Rob Gretton. Inevitably the label was like no other; deeply northern, stubborn and disorganised, it released records with a reckless anarcho-capitalist verve and an indifference toward profit that verged on performance art. It became the great Manchester label despite not signing Buzzcocks, Magazine, The Smiths, The Fall or The Stone Roses. What it did have was Wilson, part glib newsreader, part cultural curator, part exuberant nuisance, part revolutionary warrior, inspiring, or needling, those around him. The subversive Factory Records became the link between Manchester's reforming radical past, the Sex Pistols' legendary performance and the new modernised Manchester that Wilson had in mind.

Factory's best-known group, Joy Division, became New Order after the 1980 suicide of singer Ian Curtis. Wilson fed off even this dark energy, confirming the views of those doubting his motives. He blithely carried on with his great plan. With Joy Division/New Order money, Factory "gave back to the community" by opening the Hacienda Club in a textile showroom turned yacht salesroom. Beautifully and wittily designed by Ben Kelly, it looked like something you found only in New York, and anticipated a new, bold 21st-century Manchester filled with canalside apartments and boutique hotels. After a shaky few years, by the mid 80s it found its function as a dance club importing experimental house music from Detroit and New York.

Factory's Happy Mondays bound together the exotic new dance rhythms with a groggy Lancastrian verse, and in the movement known as Madchester was born the commercialisation of the abstract, agitating spirit of Factory, and the spirited postmodern skittishness of Wilson. Wilson, as the self-appointed public face of the movement, became the tabloids' Mr Manchester, and enthusiastically presided as militant marketing mastermind over the transformation of the city into a global brand.

Factory farcically collapsed in 1991 with debts of £2m. The Hacienda was eventually shut down in 1997 by order of the police after a frenetic decade of being the night-time home of hedonism and a magnet for thrill-seekers. Wilson was still a now slightly more weather-beaten Granada pin-up. He claimed to be the man who bought loft living to the city. He became increasingly vocal in his only slightly ironic call for regional self-government in the north-west, fancying himself as chairman of the north, to the horror of Liverpudlians. He was played by Steve Coogan in the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, which represented his life as chaotic comedy and Wilson as daft Dada daredevil. He attempted new versions of Factory, endlessly curious for the next new thing, the next pop-culture revolution, but he never managed to follow his great innovations, Factory, or the Hacienda, or So It Goes. The history he had written for himself as post-punk saviour of Manchester was too powerful to improve upon.

He lived out his final months after having a cancerous kidney removed with typical restlessness, curiosity, anger, good humour and fearlessness. His enormous impact on his beloved Manchester over the last 35 years is undeniable. To some extent, even if he did say so himself, this compelling, unique hybrid of selfish visionary, TV hack, charming bully, generous tyrant, commissioning editor, playful philosopher, inconsistent genius and down-to-earth intellectual regenerated a declining city both economically and culturally.

He was married twice, to Lindsay, and Hilary, who was the mother of his two children, Oliver and Isabel. In 1991, with his partner, Yvette Livesey, who also survives him, he set up the In The City Music Conference, another enterprising attempt to put Manchester on the world map. "I am the boss," joked Yvette. "He's just the mouth."

· Anthony Howard Wilson, record label boss, broadcaster and impresario, born February 20 1950; died August 10 2007

[Fuggle]

I blame Tony Wilson: Joy Division, New Order and those who were - ahem - ‘influenced’ by them…

August 12, 2007



I don't want to expand upon smiffy’s fine tribute to Tony Wilson. But I’d like to note that Tony Wilson is responsible at least in part for a lifetime of purchasing music by bands that ‘owed’ something to Joy Division and New Order.

I should explain that I’ve always been fascinated by ‘xerox’s’ of original bands. What I mean by that is when a band adopts another’s sound in whole or part. Sometimes this is an appalled fascination, sometimes something approach admiration. A good example would be the relationship between Bowie (and perhaps the Sex Pistols) and the Psychedelic Furs. But a better example would be the relationship between the Psychedelic Furs and the Immaculate Fools.

In the years since I first heard Joy Division and early New Order I’ve always been interested in bands which utilised some aspect of their particular styles. And I’ve spent good money - and bad - on albums which broadly speaking don’t come close to the originators of the sound.

It’s not difficult to determine which were the key elements, from the basslines to the vocals to the guitars. Now let’s not get carried away. Listen to much of Unknown Pleasures and one can hear echoes of the Stooges, or Bowie or indeed krautrock in the mix. It’s a simple template, at least on paper, but one which allows for multiple interpretations and reinterpretations.

And that simplicity was one which attracted a number of contemporaries of Joy Division, Wire being the most obvious example of a band who developed a similar sound simultaneously. But the Cure seemed to ‘borrow’ elements - it’s hard to listen to “All Cats are Gray”, or most of the later material on Pornography and not see at least some stylistic influence. Robert Smith at that stage of his career (and I write that as someone who would not be a huge fan of the Cure) was astute enough to manage to transcend the influence and inhabit a particular and idiosyncratic niche in the style. Arguably even Echo and the Bunnymen had a hint of that in their sound - whatever the witterings about the Doors being their major influence. U2 in the early days had a similar stark sound, but that may have been the influence of Martin Hannett. The Chameleons, who started recording as early as 1981, perhaps nodded towards them.

All well and good. Of course, if we look closer to Joy Division we can see a range of bands which used a very similar sound. The Stockholm Monsters spring to mind most readily. Their music was almost a check list writ large. Rapid bassline? Check. Tinny guitar? Check. Baritone vocals? Check. And to be honest there is something about their material which is really attractive. Vini Reilly of Durutti Column had a hint of the glacial aspects of Joy Division. But that I’d ascribe to a similar aesthetic and again one Mr. Hannett.

Then there were the other bands in the Factory stable, such as Crispy Ambulance, the Wake and Section 25 who ploughed a similar furrow.

Beyond that were bands who were part of post-punk, such as Siglo XX who bought into the sound. I remember John Peel once bemoaning the fact that around 1981 every second band that sent sessions into him sounded like Joy Division.

An interesting splintering occurred about this point where elements of post-punk detached to what would later become Goth. Early Bauhaus, and one thinks of their cover of Eno’s Third Uncle, or even more clearly “Terror Couple Kill Colonel” (which even today is a genius song) used aspects of the Joy Division sound. The March Violets despite having both female and male lead vocals were remarkably similar in sound, as were Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. And naturally it’s impossible to ignore the Sisters of Mercy who looped back to Bowie but with more than a nod to Curtis and Hook. Bands like Clan of Xymox in their earliest incarnations - before they found dance - also utilised a strong element of the sound.

Industrial was also open to the influence. Granted not particularly people like Front 242. But later as it mixed with dance hints of both Joy Division and New Order enter the picture. We can blame the vastly more commercial Depeche Mode in part for this process. When they decided to go all doomy and introspective in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was already a path for them to follow.

This arguably reached it’s high point with Electronic Body Music (EBM) and bands such as VNV Nation and Pride and Fall who reference the sound of Joy Division but recontextualise it within trance and techno sequenced patterns. So there perhaps it is a case of both Joy Division and New Order influencing a sound jointly.

And here it’s worth pointing out that New Order always tussled with the Joy Division legacy themselves. For my money New Orders first album Movement is a criminally underrated. Why so? The band itself detested it, which is curious because it marries keyboards and synthesised bass lines in a way that NO fans would come to know and love. But I suspect the reason for that is that Bernard Sumners vocals were treated in order to get a more Ian Curtis like baritone. The only thing missing from future albums is a sequencer. But listen to Low-Life, Brotherhood and subsequent albums and it is clear that the experimentation on Power Corruption and Lies was - as it were - only part of the New Order palette and the less electronic influenced sound was pivotal to their identity (exemplified by the experience of seeing them live where the two ’sides’ of their sound are quite distinct). Incidentally, on a slight side issue, it always strikes me that Gillian Gilbert provided a huge element of their sound, that of the lush keyboard sweeps, and yet her profile is remarkably low - and speaking of Movement, it is impossible to conceive of the synth arrangement on Thieves Like Us in the absence of “Doubts even here” on Movement.

Meanwhile we’ve been treated over the past decade by a plethora of bands which have taken elements of the sound, or even appropriated it wholesale (actually anyone remember a version of Smells Like Teen Spirit that Nirvana did on the BBC which according to Cobain was an emulation of Morrissey, but sounds a lot more like Ian Curtis to me?) . As early as 1996 Mansun on “Wide Open Space” hinted at the sound. More recently Interpol blend the Chameleons and Joy Division. I love you but I’ve chosen Darkness likewise. The Editors…well the Editors. The less said the better. Primal Scream perhaps carried it off most classily by inviting Bernard Sumner to contribute to Shoot Speed/Kill Light on the XTRMNTR album… kudos.

Some unlikely bands have paid homage to them. Take the Pernice Brothers, better known as fey folksters, whose “Sometimes I remember” starts with a flourish of guitars near identical to that heard on “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. Or what of Dead Can Dance and their track ‘Spirit’? Meanwhile Irish bands were in no way shy about hiding the influence of the band. Blue in Heaven gave it a go on their first album before scurrying back to a more Iggy and the Stooges sound. Some may remember Guernica who tried the same (Joe Rooney from same went on to greater things). And later Into Paradise. There are more, no doubt.

Lest you are curious about such things, naturally I don’t have all the above mentioned tracks. No, definitely not. I don’t think I’ve got any March Violets. I mistakenly downloaded The Editors, but I never bought a Guernica single, and my copies of Blue in Heaven and Into Paradise were stolen long ago. But so much money Mr. Wilson. So much money, when in truth most of the time I might have been better sticking with the originals!

Finally and oddly enough while there has been a clear influence from Joy Division/New Order on dance and electronica it has rarely been as specific as this from Colder… check it out.