Freaky dancing: Tony Wilson's life as a never-ending party

I was threatening to do it. And now I have. I've read Tony Wilson's 24 Hour Party People: What The Sleeve Notes Never Tell You (2002). Yep, in quick succession I've now battered my way through Peter Hook's Hacienda: How Not To Run A Club (blog here) and now Wilson's little classic. And what - I hear you ask - did I make of Wilson's effort? Excellent question. Here's my answer - it's genuinely good. Extremely good, actually. I expected it to be "intelligent" (or pseudo-intelligent). With lots of - probably slightly annoying - posturing and pleased-with-itself stuff. And oodles of Manchester boosterism. It does indeed have all of these, but they're rather brilliantly mixed together with lashings of humour, some of it genuinely funny (to me, anyway). And it's got class - which I'll come back to shortly.

Manchester United fan Wilson adopts an unconventional 4-2-4 formation

First of all, the book in general. It works very largely because of the "voice". The narrator - Anthony H Wilson, Wilson, Tony, To, the "prima donna" - is really well constructed. Conveyor of spare, almost aphoristic prose that's drenched in irony - the narrator is endlessly knowing and amused-with-himself (amused with everything). The voice provides the ironic distance, the jokes, the expletives (a fucking shit-ton of them you stupid cunt of a reader, sit the fuck up properly when you're reading Wilson's book). It leads you to believe that the whole thing - music, business, violence, drugs, financial losses, relationships, property, hit records, jobs, material possessions - are all simply part of the great Manchester in the 1970s/80s adventure. Not to be taken too seriously. Or, as Wilson-the-narrator would probably also say, they're to be taken very seriously. Yes, we're in a world of irony, paradox, of delicious fun. Fine. Let's go with it. What kind of thing do I mean? Well, here's an example - on page 90 when our man gets a telephone call from Rob Gretton one Sunday afternoon telling him that Ian Curtis has hanged himself:

"It is perhaps some credit to Wilson's sense of delicacy or even journalistic professionalism that he turned to his colleagues in the cutting room [in the Granada Studios offices], explained he had a slight problem and would need to go out for an hour, and ran off down the corridor. Without another word. If it is strange to mention good taste on the part of our hero, that's because in a couple of paragraphs' time the process is reversed, so bear with us."

Third-person Wilson, a character in his own book, is doing the ironic stuff even here when death and personal tragedy have rudely interrupted the good times. But it's typical. There's to be no mawkish stuff even with Curtis' death. Instead, there's a brief (now well-known) mention of how Curtis spent his last evening watching Herzog's Stroszek (spelt Stroczcek in the book). And how he'd apparently been playing Iggy Pop in his final moments ("they say that Iggy Pop's The Idiot was still spinning, aimlessly, pointlessly on the record deck. The stylus arm had fully retracted. Hadn't it just.") "They say". Wilson (or "Wilson") yet again providing a bit of distance. In fact, in the real world it appears that Curtis' death became for a while an albatross on Wilson's back. A page or two later he mentions how The Face magazine would later publish an article claiming he'd said after Curtis's demise that, "Ian Curtis's death is the best thing that ever happened to me". The magazine maintained it had a tape recording of Wilson uttering these words in an interview. Yet when Wilson asked for a copy of the incriminating tape he was repeatedly fobbed off. So for years we can only presume that Curtis' family (who were reported to be understandably upset about the remarks) very likely believed this shameless TV celebrity-cum-music manager was some kind of heartless publicity-crazed ghoul.

"A couple of weeks stretch to five years and three months, at which point the former editor of The Face told Wilson ... that in fact there had been no tape recording, it had been made up."

Ffs. A lesser man would have combusted. Maybe he did in real life, but in the book he's ... cool. Like a Peter Saville record sleeve. Here, as always, when he could easily have entered into a long "I was vindicated" passage, he remains heroically brief. Sparing of the cluttered detail. Defying gravity. Self-conscious, phlegmatically knowing. This languid style is the key motif of the book. And it surely belies the reality, because the book also shows you (but of course doesn't dwell on the fact) that Wilson must have been working tremendously hard to keep all the balls in the air. For years, he was holding down his Granada presenter job as well as running around the country with Joy Division or New Order or Durutti Column (and later trying to pick up the pieces when the drug-addled Happy Mondays were wrecking studios in Barbados). At times he worked in Liverpool (Albert Docks) by day, before blasting back to Manchester in one of his cars (Peugeot, Escort, "bespoilered Jag") to get to the Haçienda at night. And spliffing his way through night after night, gig after gig, rave after rave. In one chapter (entitled "I'm sorry, I've had a long day") the two worlds collide rather memorably: a fateful Manchester-London road trip on snow- and accident-affected roads that starts at 6am and ends ... badly. It was quite a serious TV career reverse. There was to be no top presenter job at Granada Television's jewel-in-the-crown World In Action programme for Tony. But - once again - he's pretty relaxed about it (at least a few years later he is). Mr Insouciant. And of course one of the reasons he'd come unstuck that day was that he'd been trying to juggle the music side as well - going by car (not train) because he had A Certain Ratio masters and other heavyweight music recording stuff in the back of the car that he was trying (unrealistically) to get down to a London studio the same day he was supposed to be doing a high-profile TV interview with Sir Keith Joseph. In any sensible world you'd stick to one thing or the other - the television or the music stuff. But one of Wilson's maxims is "never give up your day job", and that's ... how he rolled. 

Anyway, so much for Tony 'Hardest-Working Man In Music Management' Wilson - what about the class element I mentioned earlier? Ah, yes. This is a big thing, I think. Wilson was clearly something of a provocateur, a would-be Malcolm McClaren ("but too much of a has-been altar boy to really get down there like Malcolm"). He revelled in big gestures, sometimes fuck-off ones, and clearly responded to people who were er, spirited. Or so it seems. He certainly places people, matching socio-economic background with temperaments. Gretton, like Alan Erasmus, is "from Wythenshawe", a sprawling council estate that Wilson references repeatedly (possibly to the point of class fetishisation). The Ryders are from Little Hulton (aka "outer space, the space on the outer limits of Salford"). These are the people he either bonds with or (in Shaun Ryder's case) invests with a sometimes dubious cargo of poetic/creative meaning. Ryder is compared to WB Yeats with an insistence that is surely self-satirising (though a lot of Wilson's book is self-satirising, even the sincere bits). But yes, it works. We get a sense of the profundity below the surface, but we don't get beaten around the head with it. Wilson/"Wilson" can airily muse on Manchester's industrial-mercantile history, refer to Engels' life in the city, dash off a few thoughts on Jewish (and other) immigration into the area, place Manchester in a pantheon of great cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, never the hated London) and still find room in a six-sentence paragraph to crack a joke or mention how Howard Devoto was a "beautiful mekon":

"Dear Mr Wilson,

This is a tape by a new band from London, who I think you should like. I am arranging a gig for them at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in early June and hope you can come.

Yours,

Howard Trafford"

And the lesser said about that, the better! Actually, there is a point to be made about the Sex Pistols' gig. Because, 12 years later, Wilson claims to have identified the same "bright as fuck" look in the eyes of 200 E'd-up dancers at the Hacienda in the summer of 1988 (harbingers of the coming acid/rave boom) that he says saw in the eyes of his fellow audience members as they stood, transfixed, watching Lydon screaming his disgust at them in June '76. Mythologising? Yes, but forgivably so I reckon. Not least as it's done with delicacy, with irony and ... with something that's as close to being heartfelt as Wilson can manage in a book that luxuriates in its own "postmodernism" (a word used more than once in 24 HPP). What else? Oh, that's enough! I haven't even mentioned the super-arch "piece to camera" interludes (a smug Wilson TV presenter character smugly offers comment on the smug hero of this smug book etc). I haven't mentioned the errors or deliberate falsehoods (a punter at Rafters supposedly asking Gretton the resident DJ to play The Cure in April 1978, ie before the band had even released anything), or the mis-spelling of Jimmy Savile, or ...

No, say what you like, but this is a really good music book. Possibly a really great music book. As entertaining as the truly brilliant Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom by Nik Cohn, funny, and with a succession of sharp remarks and nicely-judged asides - I hereby assign 24 Hour Party People my very own catalogue number: NIL 593. Niluccio blog #593. Yes, that's how good it is. For sure, Wilson has his cake and completely gorges on it as well. That's his style, his shtick. At one point - describing the Happy Mondays' manager Nathan McGough - he talks about the "really great band manager" who "takes on the aura of his band ... and adds the businessman crap to wind people up". Yeah, we get you Tony. And some of the "Manc civic pride" crap as well. And the "postmodern" crap. And "design classic" crap. That's all part of the fun with 24 Hour Party People. All part of the party. I don't always agree with Wilson - on music he seems a bit wayward, over-praising the Happy Mondays, claiming that Martin Hannett's drum sounds on Joy Division's record were super-revolutionary (no, that was surely true of Lee Perry and King Tubby, not Hannett) - but I still thoroughly enjoyed this book. One of Wilson's recurring jokes is the jibe to the imaginary reader that they may not understand his latest esoteric reference (to Prometheus, to Boethius or whoever): "If you get it fine. If you don't, that's OK. But maybe you should read more". Shamelessly parading his Cambridge University education (while casually dissing - half-humorously/half-seriously - students who went to the Haçienda), Wilson's persona in the book is an impish multi-layered construction who's never meant to be taken completely seriously. Even at his most serious. Yes, they lose a load of money on the Hacienda, Dry bar and the expensive Ben Kelly-designed Factory headquarters in Charles Street. And yes people die (Curtis) and get injured (at the Haçienda door during the gang turf wars). But ... life goes on. Perhaps it's a form of Wilson-ite selfishness. Perhaps it's a sort of aestheticisation of life itself, in all its harshness and unpredictability. Either way, the charm (if that's the right word) sort of works. In the penultimate chapter, Wilson mentions the final night at the Haçienda, as the creditors hovered ready to close it down:

"There was a last night. The dream recreated for all for one last time. A great fucking night too. The drugs worked one more time. Pickering played, and the people danced, even Ian Curtis danced."

Even Ian Curtis. Freaky dancing.