Not been hanging around BN much recently - but I'm suprised that there is no thread on 'Off-Topic' about the untimely demise of Anthony H Wilson. Here are some details about the man/myth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Wilson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries...147392,00.html
My own take: for the pitiful perspsective it provides ... When I was growing up, I knew Tony Wilson as a regional TV newsreader - with cock-sure delivery, hair that was always a bit too long, introducing some story about illuminations crisis in Blackpool, or race tensions in Accrington, and ten seconds after you would realise that he had made a WB Yates allusion or delivered the whole mundane news story in iambic pentameter. The guy was dead smart, clever-as-fuck ... and didn't he let you know it. Everyone in the NorthWest of England had a love-hate thing with Tony Wilson.
I won't go over the newspaper acheivements - but when I was reaching conciousness New Order were more like a religion than a mere band in my home town; and later when I discovered Joy Division; and when I was 17 and off my head in the Hacienda and believed that tho we (the urban North, the poor huddled masses ...) had been rejected and despised by the metropolitan/Home Counties purseholders, that in 1987-90, we possessed the most important nightclub in the world ... even then I realised that it would not have happened without Tony Wilson.
He could have taken the routine route of very smart Lancashire middle-class lads and gone to the BBC - but he turned down every temptation and in return contributed to; the explosion of punk, the creation of the greatest independent record label ever (do I need to say Factory Records?); the transmission of expression/futurist art to the mainstream of UK culture; the creation of club culture; the renaissance of provincial life and pride in tbe UK .. and on and on ...
and in return - his anarchist/romantic view of record label ownership, and his rejection of consultancy gigs that did not involve total freedom and his blessed North left him a (financially) poor man.
When he was not wasting away with cancer he said - ' You can make money: or you can make history'. When he was dying for the want of an experimental drug that the NHS should have provided but that ultimately his friends drummed up the cash for- he said 'That was a funny remark, until you realise that [poverty] will kill you'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Wilson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries...147392,00.html
My own take: for the pitiful perspsective it provides ... When I was growing up, I knew Tony Wilson as a regional TV newsreader - with cock-sure delivery, hair that was always a bit too long, introducing some story about illuminations crisis in Blackpool, or race tensions in Accrington, and ten seconds after you would realise that he had made a WB Yates allusion or delivered the whole mundane news story in iambic pentameter. The guy was dead smart, clever-as-fuck ... and didn't he let you know it. Everyone in the NorthWest of England had a love-hate thing with Tony Wilson.
I won't go over the newspaper acheivements - but when I was reaching conciousness New Order were more like a religion than a mere band in my home town; and later when I discovered Joy Division; and when I was 17 and off my head in the Hacienda and believed that tho we (the urban North, the poor huddled masses ...) had been rejected and despised by the metropolitan/Home Counties purseholders, that in 1987-90, we possessed the most important nightclub in the world ... even then I realised that it would not have happened without Tony Wilson.
He could have taken the routine route of very smart Lancashire middle-class lads and gone to the BBC - but he turned down every temptation and in return contributed to; the explosion of punk, the creation of the greatest independent record label ever (do I need to say Factory Records?); the transmission of expression/futurist art to the mainstream of UK culture; the creation of club culture; the renaissance of provincial life and pride in tbe UK .. and on and on ...
and in return - his anarchist/romantic view of record label ownership, and his rejection of consultancy gigs that did not involve total freedom and his blessed North left him a (financially) poor man.
When he was not wasting away with cancer he said - ' You can make money: or you can make history'. When he was dying for the want of an experimental drug that the NHS should have provided but that ultimately his friends drummed up the cash for- he said 'That was a funny remark, until you realise that [poverty] will kill you'.
