Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl: The Story of Tony and Lindsay Wilson

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Characters from real-life Manchester played by actors in film-life Manchester get a chance to appear in small roles. Wilson himself will appear in the film as a Granada TV studio director. Shaun Ryder plays his own father. Howard Devoto, the man who could be said to have started it all by arranging for the Sex Pistols to play at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, appears in the film as a toilet cleaner. There is so much and so little that can be read into that. She was giving a statement at the first “faint hope hearing” for her former brother-in-law-turned lifer Colin Thatcher, who was asking a jury to give him an early chance at seeking parole from his first-degree murder conviction. He would eventually win freedom in 2006, following a second hearing, and write a book in a bid to convince the world of his innocence.

Pips - The forgotten history of a club that birthed Joy Division 10 years before The Hacienda even opened For Ryder, Wilson’s influence on the city is everywhere. “What’s his legacy? All of it,” he says. “From buildings to bands and everything in between.” Despite the passage of nearly 40 years since Wilson’s murder, we still haven’t discerned the means to turn that tide. There have only been two real revolutions for homo sapiens. The first happened 12,000 years ago when people gave up hunting and gathering and settled down as farmers. The second was in the 18th and 19th centuries, when they became industrial beings.

It took Morley 10 years to complete this book and there’s a lot in it. Fifty-one chapters, three sections: the central, shortest part is, cleverly, about the Sex Pistols’ 1976 gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, the one attended by around 40 people, whose lives were changed because of it. Morley was there. Wilson said he was there, too, though Morley doesn’t remember him. It doesn’t matter. Morley has a way with a list, and starts each chapter with one that describes Wilson at that moment His big frustration was that Manchester never had what he called a ‘Sunday Times front cover building.’ He was really annoyed when they built Bridgewater Hall and didn’t bring a world-renowned architect in to do it. I think now with The Factory building and all of that - he would have been delighted. He wanted Manchester to have buildings that were world class. That would stand out just as he was trying to.” Morley is great at capturing the almost incomprehensible power of a single gig, of how, six weeks later, when the Pistols play again, the audience have all cut their hair, tightened their trousers, altered their attitude. He understands how punk changed Wilson’s life, diverted him from becoming, as he says, “an amiable mainstream national figure, even a treasure”; how it “rekindled the radical teenage rebel inside him, and it never really let him go”. He’s also fantastic at evoking the atmosphere of a time (especially the grim 1970s) and how a city’s history affects all those who live there. He has a way with a list, and starts each chapter with one that describes Wilson at that moment. He writes as only he can, in long, descriptive, flowery sentences, each a mind map in itself.

Just as Tristram hilariously recounts his own birth, Wilson’s “self-birth” was also heroic: “It was as though he had organised the move himself — it was all his doing, launching himself from inside the dark womb into the whirlwind of the great outdoors, already taking control, and then spending much of his life recreating the phantasmagorical canal trip he never got to make.” It’s not until Wilson loses his virginity at Cambridge, Morley writes, that he gets “his first actual experience with the elusive mysteries of the birth canal.” Covid showed up the weakness of Manchester. Many of the people I know who still lived in the city centre instantly moved out. They started to think: what am I doing here?

There has been lots of talk about the current government’s levelling up agenda, specifically around the north of England. Have their initiatives impacted the area?