“Don’t be a fucking elitist”: the scathing letter Tony Wilson sent to Malcolm McLaren in 1977
Music executives are often viewed as the enemy of artists, using music and artistic expression as a means of driving profit over everything. On the contrary, Factory Records boss Tony Wilson was endlessly dedicated to providing a vehicle for revolutionary art and music. Wilson helped to popularise the works of seminal artists like Joy Division, Happy Mondays, ESG and A Certain Ratio, among countless others. Initially, the journalist and TV presenter was inspired down this path after seeing the Sex Pistols perform in Manchester, but he soon grew tired of their manager, Malcolm McLaren.
In essence, McLaren was responsible for the formation of the Pistols after plucking its respective members from the customer base of his ‘SEX’ shop, run alongside Vivienne Westwood. However, the band manager was subsequently criticised for his handling of the band – not least by the band members themselves – and his prioritisation of profits and fame rather than the DIY, anti-capitalist revolution that punk rock was meant to represent. “I would call the whole gaggle of them parasites,” Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon once said of McLaren and Westwood.
Many people outside the bubble of the London punk scene were introduced to the Sex Pistols on television. Their first appearance on national screens came in 1976 on the Granada show So It Goes, which was presented, of course, by Tony Wilson. Wilson had been one of the special few to have witnessed the Sex Pistols play the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a gig which would go on to spawn many iconic bands, including Joy Division, The Fall and The Smiths. After the gig, the Granada presenter set about getting the London punks to appear on his television show, exposing the revolutionary sounds of punk to a much wider audience and spurring the popularity of the punk age onward.
Of course, this appearance led to an increase in popularity for the band, too. However, when Wilson tried to get the band to appear on So It Goes only a year later, he found himself held back by Malcolm McLaren. The Pistols’ manager made it his prerogative to limit the band’s media output, mainly as a way of increasing notoriety and intrigue about the group. After being repeatedly knocked back by the band manager, Tony Wilson wrote to Malcolm McLaren to let off some steam.
“This time last year,” Wilson began, “I spent a considerable number of bloody hours fighting people at Granada to get a band I had seen at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on a TV show,” continuing, “This time, this year, I’ve spent as much energy trying to get the same band on TV only this time, it’s been a complete waste; and what’s more it’s been just a little bit more degrading, and a lot more like dealing with The Rolling Stones or any other fucked up rich man’s band who treat media lackeys like me with the same amount of contempt, and revel in their position of impregnable power, due to that strange position of being wanted.”
The Factory boss seemed to suggest that McLaren was on track to turn the Sex Pistols into just another corporate rock outfit, completely at odds with what the band were claiming to represent. “First off,” he argued later in the three-page letter, “more important than you, safety pins or Steve [Jones’] rapidly improving guitar playing are the kids,” adding, “Your greatest contribution has been almost as missionaries, but don’t tell me the fucking mission is over.”
All the way through this letter, it seems as though Wilson forgoes any attempts to sweet-talk McLaren into letting the Pistols appear on So It Goes, instead using it as an opportunity to lament his management of the band. “Don’t be a fucking elitist,” he wrote, “get your invaluable message over to more kids…get them to form more bands.”
The journalist then went on to explain the hypocrisy of McLaren’s management style, saying, “Your Rod Stewart style retreat into the shadows, punctured only by the occasional brown-tongued NME exclusive and exorbitantly priced important singles, turns you into exactly the kind of mythologised distanced product that you wished to avoid.” Ouch.
In a final plea for McLaren to give his head a shake and reconsider his management of the Sex Pistols, Wilson put, “All I’m trying to say is the audience is the most important factor and in telling me to take a running jump, you are saying exactly the same thing to all those kids in Aberdeen, Wigan and Slough who aren’t going to get to see you but deserve to”, an argument which is certainly hard to dispute.
Wilson then concluded the message with a P.S.: “Get the fucking LP out…and make it cheap. Nice talking to you.” Nevertheless, the Pistols never appeared on So It Goes ever again, though Wilson did rerun their debut performance after the release of Nevermind the Bollocks in 1977.
In contrast to McLaren, Wilson gave the artists on Factory a kind of freedom that is virtually unheard of within the music industry. This freedom was probably a major contributing factor to the label’s eventual financial ruin. However, Wilson was not concerned with profitability; he was only bothered by issues of art and history, an example that more music industry figures should embrace.
