Our Hero

Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays. You’ve probably heard of the bands that came out of Manchester from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s. But you may not be familiar with their manager, Tony Wilson. Just don’t get him started about what the new film “24-Hour Party People” is really about. As his character claims in the film, speaking directly into the camera, Wilson’s the first to tell you it’s not about him, it’s about the music.

“You know that bit where he says that in the movie?” Wilson asks. The filmmakers listened to “me screaming at them in Liverpool and they just put it in the film. I tried to make it more about the real geniuses of the film, the real artists of the story. Like Ian Curtis,” the lead singer of Joy Division. “I tried very hard. But then I realized it wasn’t going to happen so I gave up.”

Like it or not, Wilson is the subject of “24-Hour Party People,” a sprawling, playfully postmodern movie from director Michael Winterbottom (“The Claim,” “Wonderland”) that charts the trajectory of the “Madchester” music scene from the birth of punk to the death of acid house. It opens in Los Angeles on Aug. 16.

When Winterbottom approached screenwriter and frequent collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce about making a film on the subject, Boyce was enthusiastic, but they had to decide which of many stories in the subculture they were going to tell.

They eventually found themselves fascinated by Wilson, a Cambridge-educated television reporter who had been relegated to doing soft, human-interest segments--the film shows him reluctantly hang-gliding and visiting elephants at the Manchester Zoo--but who longed to make his artistic mark.

He found that inspiration when he went to a Sex Pistols concert in 1976. It was the impetus to sign a group of talented post-punk upstarts to his new avant-garde label, Factory Records, which put Manchester on the alternative music map.

Wilson and co-founder Alan Erasmus found inspiration for Factory in the Situationist International, a libertarian collective that argued for play at the expense of work. The music combined punk’s raw, do-it-yourself philosophy with the industrial sounds of reverb and digital delay. Bands like Joy Division (which ironically and controversially took its name from Hitler’s grouping of young women kept to pleasure Nazi soldiers) and A Certain Ratio produced music that was emotional and intellectual at the same time. In keeping with the company’s name, Factory’s albums purposely looked like they came off a conveyor belt, also invoking the processed art of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Stark images and plain fonts replaced the usual pictures of band members striking poses.

Factory almost came to a grinding halt with Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’ suicide in 1980. But the label resurfaced when the band’s surviving members became New Order, a wildly successful group that revolutionized dance music with the single “Blue Monday,” the biggest-selling 12-inch single of all time. Not content with regular club nights, Wilson opened the Hacienda in 1982, a nightclub that rivaled New York’s Studio 54 as a mecca for partying. That Bacchanalian spirit was best reflected by the Happy Mondays, a soulful band that incorporated vocals, R&B; grooves and DJ mixing into music that celebrated sex, drugs and tribal togetherness.

“I liked the idea that you could do a music film and make the main character the record company owner,” Winterbottom says. “Because he would normally be the villain and it would be about the tortured artist who gets ripped off by the record company. Whereas Factory was completely mad and never made money and was always too chaotic to get anything organized.”

In an effort to capture some of the anarchic feeling of the era, Winterbottom shot the movie on digital video, putting radio microphones on the actors and letting them improvise their way through scenes. The cameras are smaller and require little or no extra lighting, so the process is less intrusive and goes more quickly. “If you’re gonna make a film about Factory Records, it has to be in the same spirit as Factory Records,” the director says. “So the idea was to make it seem very careless to capture that freedom. So the actors could really go anywhere and do anything and the camera can follow them. If you’re trying to capture something like a concert or a club, it’s really much easier to do it that way rather than stage it shot by shot.”

However, to capture Factory’s freewheeling days scene-for-scene, the film had to be rooted in authenticity. Winterbottom and Boyce’s process took five years, which included interviewing musicians, producers, journalists and roadies from the era. In addition to Tony Wilson, the film enlisted such technical consultants as New Order’s Barney Sumner and Peter Hook, A Certain Ratio guitarist Martin Moscrop and DJ Dave Haslam. There are also cameos by Paul Ryder from the Happy Mondays, the Buzzcocks’ Howard Devoto, Clint Boon of Inspiral Carpets and Mark E. Smith, frontman for the Fall.

It was also a natural fit for comedian Steve Coogan to play Wilson. Not only was he born and raised in Manchester and not only did he have a brother who played in the Mock Turtles, a one-hit-wonder band that was regularly booked at the Hacienda, he even performed there himself. “I did a stand-up comedy gig there in ‘86,” he says. “I was just 21. This was in the trough after post-punk and before Madchester and all the DJ culture when they didn’t know what the hell to do with the Hacienda so they tried stand-up comics. It didn’t really work out. I got a glass thrown at me, which luckily missed.”

For a time, Coogan even did a Tony Wilson impression in his act and, in 1989, both men appeared on “Up Front,” a local public affairs debate show. “He was the serious journalist and I was the guy who made jokes about the week’s news,” Coogan says. Less than a decade later, Coogan became a celebrity on the BBC with his creation of the character Alan Partridge, a brilliantly stupid sportscaster with a messy career and even messier personal life.

At first, Wilson had some trepidation about Coogan playing him because of his television persona. “He’s enormously popular in England,” Wilson says. “He’s like Eddie Murphy. And we were like, the audience is gonna go, ‘Wait a minute. This is a local TV presenter and Alan Partridge by Steve Coogan is a local TV presenter.’ ” But eventually Wilson got used to the idea and even enjoyed a cheerfully antagonistic friendship with the actor. “He wears designer clothes,” Coogan says. “I remember one time he came to the set and I was dressed virtually identical to him. Black suit, white shirt and sneakers. And he just stared at me and said, ‘Oh, this is freaking me out.’ And I shouted back, ‘You can have the suits afterward but you’ll have to let the waists out.’ ”

For all of Wilson’s intelligence and enthusiasm, success eluded him on the scale of, say, Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Factory Records and the Hacienda were run less as a mini-empire than as a wild kingdom, with Wilson playing den mother to a brood of dysfunctional children ranging from Curtis to the Ecstasy-binging, gun-toting Ryder brothers of the Happy Mondays. The company wasted millions of dollars on excesses like Shaun Ryder’s crack binge in Barbados, where the Mondays were supposedly working on their third album, and never turned an actual profit. Famously, the only documentation kept in Factory Records office was a framed, expletive-laden contract Wilson signed in blood. “We actually lost that one sheet of paper in the early ‘80s,” says an amused Wilson. “We discovered it again in the late ‘80s. When PolyGram bought us, our lawyers were like, ‘Do you realize if you have a contract that says we own nothing and they own everything, then you have nothing! And we all went, ‘Oh, right. Sorry.’ ”

Depending on whom you talk to, Manchester locals consider him a cult hero or a complete meathead. It’s become a citywide pastime to love, hate or love to hate the 52-year-old man who’s still peddling TV fluff like “Top Ranker,” a sports-quiz show. (“He thinks they call it that so everyone could shout at him ‘Top Wanker,’ ” Winterbottom says.)

Yet he’s also still dedicated to breaking important new bands with In the City, an annual British music conference he runs with his third wife, Yvette. “I am not a genius. I mean I do nothing. I can’t sing, I can’t program music, I can’t design clubs. I’m a journalist,” Wilson says.

“My talent is my passion to hang out with geniuses. Before the Mondays got famous, I remember walking into a backer’s office and he says, ‘Look I’ve got a problem. They pulled out of an interview today. They hit the journalist. We just can’t go on like this.’ And I said, ‘Sorry, I just really love that band.’ My obsession is hanging out with people that are cleverer than I am. And I’ve made a great success of that.”

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Kevin Maynard is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.