Tony Wilson: the music maverick dubbed 'Mr Manchester'

He may have been a lousy business operator, but Tony Wilson was the driving force behind Manchester's transformation from gloomy post-industrial city to rave Mecca.

"It was curiously appropriate that on the day of Tony Wilson's death his beloved Manchester suffered an earthquake, rocking buildings, shaking doors and rattling windows," observes The Sunday Times. By common consent a lousy business operator, and so arrogant that he was hailed throughout the city as "Wilson, you twat", he remained the biggest single influence in Manchester's transformation from depressed "post-Cottonopolis" to a major modern city with its radical traditions intact.

Although lionised in the musical press, Wilson was never a household name in the south. But in the northwest he was ubiquitous first as a local television presenter and then as the music entrepreneur who put Madchester' on the map. His Factory Records label signed such iconic groups as Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays and Wilson then founded its infamous spin-off, the Hacienda nightclub. Fans loved his "erratic flashes of wit and wisdom", says The Daily Telegraph, but detractors saw him as a "smug, preening and pretentious loudmouth". Wilson couldn't care less. "The more people reviled him, the more he purred with pleasure", never more so than when he was parodied by Steve Coogan in the semi-fictional 2002 film, 24 Hour Party People. "Wilson walked the line between his own highbrow preoccupations and those of the thousands of young working-class people who thronged his club and bought his records." Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, put his success down to his ability to approach everyone in the same way, "never dropping the intellectual stuff on the assumption that the plebs might not get it".

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