In his veins: How Tony Wilson devoted himself to Joy Division
Madchester—the clue is in the name. When Manchester asserted itself as the new home of new music, the birthplace of the next history-making scene, it was a lawless land. Forget the weed and LSD of the sixties; this was all out pill-popping, substance-shooting chaos now set to a post-punk, electronic-infused soundtrack. Somewhere between gothic angst and the rave, that’s where Tony Wilson made his name as the founder of Factory Records and the man who put Manchester music on the map. Starting as he meant to go on with a legacy of cultural carnage that would change music forever, his first signing wasn’t just proof of his talent for spotting greatness when he saw it but was a blood pact to his dedication.
There are very few people who can boost the fact that they have singularly changed music. Brian Epstein, Alan McGee possibly—but Tony Wilson certainly could. TV, radio, records, and club nights; he basically had every arm of the music industry mastered at some point or another during his career. But it’s his role in putting Manchester on people’s radar as the ultimate city to watch in the 1980s and 1990s that made his name. First, with a series of gigs spotlighting exciting new acts, they morphed into a record label of sorts.
I say of sorts because Factory Records never ran like any typical label. “We made history, not money,” Wilson later said of the label’s legacy. Several of the label’s projects actually lost money as Wilson was totally committed to the culture and focused on allowing bands to make whatever project they wanted and seeing the vision through rather than focusing on it being marketable or even launching things like the Hacienda nightclub, which caused a cultural moment but was a money drain from the beginning.
Wilson never seemed to care about that, though, making it clear time and time again that he wasn’t doing any of this for profit or gain. “It was all about not treating the music as a commodity,” he said of their ethos, which extended to how he treated his artist, way back to the very first one he signed, Joy Divison.
Once again, saying he signed them feels wrong. In direct opposition to the image of the artist signing on the dotted line as industry heads loom over them as if the musician has just signed their soul away, it was Wilson making the pact. To assure Joy Divison of his dedication and that he would put everything into this project, he cut his finger open in front of them and sprawled their contract in his own blood—or at least a few smears of it.
“The company owns nothing, the musicians own their music and everything they do, and all artists have the freedom to fuck off.” That’s what the contract read. With the Is dotted and the Ts crossed in his blood, making a pact that he would never seek to own or control the band, Wilson’s contract for Joy Division isn’t just a moment that set the tone for the band’s career but defined Wilson’s, both as a businessman and as a person.
“We were being profoundly political by not owning our groups,” Wilson told The Guardian, and as he rallied against the typical way things were done, this blood-soaked contract is the ultimate symbol of his anarchist ways.
