The importance of Anthony H Wilson, Manchester and male bonding

Tony Wilson - "So It Goes"

Foreword

I regard this essay as one of the most important I have ever written. With that in mind, I beg forbearance from my readers given the fact that it is longer than most of the things I have posted on Cic Saor to date. In fact, it is so important to me that I would like readers, if they so wish, to pass it on (or mail it) to other people as I believe the lines below have new and challenging things to say to at least one generation younger than my own and Tony Wilson’s. New things, in particular, for an Irish audience, which was never really fully exposed to the Tony Wilson phenomenon and the important things that happened in Manchester during his time on this earth.

All this, perhaps, sounds very pompous but anyone who has ever struggled with notions of self and identity and the directions one should take in life, will understand the torrent of words and ideas which have overwhelmed me since Tony’s death. He died of a heart attack whilst battling against renal/kidney cancer. The cancer itself was apparently responding well to treatment. Sadly, and frustratingly, it was his heart that went in the month of August 2007. Though his metaphorical and spiritual heart is immortal.
Like me, he was born in Salford, which Manchester is near. He was even born in the same hospital as me – Hope Hospital.
That was in 1950, seven years prior to my own arrival. Like me he was baptised into the Roman Catholic faith and like me remained a Catholic, despite (also like me) being divorced and in spite of all the efforts of a degenerate Catholic hierarchy to push out so many of the people of God (Pobal Dé – for that is what we are). The hierarchy’s problem is that it cannot un-baptise us; much as it may wish otherwise. The hierarchy is not God.


The beginnings of Manchester cool

Coronation Street goes punk and punk goes culture vulture

All Manchester people, wherever they are in the world, will have had their own specific reactions to the shocking news that their most prominent public son and cultural icon had left us at such a relatively young age. For my part, Anthony H Wilson’s demise not only led me, once again, to face my own mortality but also presented me with an artistic challenge in the very bald fact of that mortality. Tony’s artistic instinct was that if you were good at something, if it came naturally to you and you enjoyed it, enjoyed it so much that you just had to keep going with it wherever it took you, then you were duty bound to push on with it, take it further still. Have I really done that with my ideas, my art, my writing?, I asked myself.
Indeed, the idea of challenging and provoking proved to be an anarchic kernel in the centre of Tony’s being; something that saved him from becoming comfortable, flabby, self satisfied. May God grant that I too never succumb to the worst sin of all – complacency – because Tony never did, no matter how much of a celebrity he became. Yet, this was a man who not only launched the 1970s punk explosion onto television screens in the UK and was the co-founder of Factory Records, but who was also able to argue for good architecture, the saving graces of Coronation Street and the joys and pains of following his beloved Manchester United. He was a renaissance man of Manchester and the man who acted as one of the catalysts for the Manchester renaissance, which reached its ‘Madchester’ zenith in the mid 1980s. In other words, right in the teeth of a freezing, howling economic gale of oppression blown in by an extremely right wing Conservative government.

Not many of the readers of this blog are likely to have heard of Tony Wilson, but a look at the list of musicians who attended his funeral mass at St. Mary’s Hidden Gem church in the centre of Manchester would soon make them aware of his stature. For here were many of the most prominent people who at some time or other came under the huge influence of Wilson’s Factory Records and the Manchester music scene which Factory and its vibes exploded into life at that time. Andy Rourke, bass player with The Smiths was there; along with Peter Hook, bassist, first with Joy Division and then New Order. Clint Boon of the Inspiral Carpets; Shaun Ryder and Rowetta Satchell from Happy Mondays were also in attendance.
Now, in meditating upon his death, I acknowledged that “Mr Manchester” (a people’s title that he fully deserved) had never shirked his responsibility in taking a lead and stating in passionate and eloquent terms his own philosophy. It is true that this philosophy was often mercurial, sometimes contradictory and often seemingly based on a momentary whim, on some brilliant thought that suddenly occurred to him, rather than a fully thought out position. An approach bordering on the eccentric, perhaps, but then I reflected that this too is part of the Manchester way.
As we will discover below, there were also political reasons why he adopted this idiosyncratic approach. In his recent Observer eulogy about Tony Wilson, the ‘post punk’ journalist Paul Morley described his ‘mentor’ as an ‘Idealist, chancer and loyal friend’. In another tribute, however, (written in the Guardian see - http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2147392,00.html), Morley salutes, as do many other obituary writers, a fundamental aspect of the Tony Wilson effect. Put simply, this is that behind Tony Wilson’s egotistical, and philanthropic adventures (his betimes Don Quixote forays as a non musician into the music world and as a chancer in the corridors of power), there was always a wider picture; a social, cultural and spiritual canvas for Manchester of which Tony Wilson never lost sight. Mr Manchester was ‘on message’, seeing ‘bigger pictures’ and ‘thinking outside the box’ long before those terms were even invented. He was nothing short of a visionary who changed and enriched the lives of Manchester people and challenged us to think about who we were, what we wanted from life and, crucially, made us, ‘uz’ the common people, think as citizens and thereby gave us power. In this sense, Tony Wilson was more like Socrates and the other famous Athenian philosophers who would, apparently, hang around the street corners and dramatic spaces of Athens and begin debates about the meaning of life (and how we should best live that life) with students, writers and artisans.



I can already hear academic philosophers wailing and gnashing their teeth at my temerity in comparing Tony Wilson with Socrates. After all, what philosophical works did Tony Wilson leave behind? What systems of thought? But then, as far as we know, Socrates wrote nothing himself and his central theme was that nothing could be taught, but the important thing was to set an example, via love, and to search for the truth via debate and honest enquiry - even unto death. By all accounts, Socrates faced his state execution for ‘offending the Gods’ and ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’ in a stoical and dignified manner. If you want to see a modern Socrates facing the prospect of his own death, go to this interview with Anthony H Wilson: http://www.salfordadvertiser.co.uk/audiovideo/popup/0/235.html?broad, then give the man maximum respect and pray that his soul now rests in peace and permanent epiphany.
Nowadays, philosophers talk to each other in the hallowed halls of academia, debating whether what they see in front of them is actually there at all. They are oblivious to the working masses and the life and death philosophical questions with which they deal every day - how will I put bread on the table and why is it always so difficult?; how can both of us keep working to pay the mortgage?; where is the spare time for reflection and peace and a bit of craic? Watch the above interview, done mainly to turn the celebrity news of his bodily frailty into support for the NHS (the public service, but continually squeezed, National Health Service in the UK) and see the dignity of a true philosopher and activist for change. How brave will those wannabe proles and plastic socialist workers who called Tony Wilson ‘nothing but a middle class wanker’ be when their times come? Will they be found fighting for their principles to the very last breath, like Tony did, like Socrates did? I doubt it somehow.
I was born in the tough two up and two down terraced streets of Salford and I know that the common people will take Tony Wilson over a Beaujolais soaked philosopher or socialist poser any day. Wilson himself, I am sure, enjoyed his Beaujolais but you take my point. And it is this link to the mass of the people that got me really thinking after Tony’s death and I then found some words which expressed perfectly how I felt. Words, because of Tony Wilson’s inspiration, that I want to become even more central to my own work, such as it is, and will be, from this time forward – Má bheir Dia mo sláinte agus saol – if God spares me.



"The Hacienda must be built"

Society, Culture, and Spirituality
Those three words, quoted above in relation to Tony Wilson’s bigger picture excite me the most, and then another one kept coming to me, even to my own surprise. But I’ll come to that last word as a conclusion to this essay. In my reflections on Tony Wilson’s untimely death, I realised that the issues raised by these words are also central to the art I myself have created. For example, I have just finished a drama-documentary in Irish Imeacht na nIarlaí about the Flight Of The Earls in 1607 and I felt that social, cultural and spiritual issues were central to what I tried to do as the director and screenplay writer for the film. See for example the Irish Film Centre’s description of the film:
http://www.irishfilm.ie/cinema/f_details1_07.asp?ID=Flight+of+the+Earls&SessionID=0&ref=0.
I might add that the film is full of pop music!
Of course I would never wish to be a television celebrity and Tony Wilson, as far as I know, never showed an interest in directing movies but he will be delighted to learn that I now realise my debt to him, as a Manchester Irish lad and as an artist striving to say things in a particular way; a way that is informed by European artistic movements and based on equally European and equally long standing principles of justice and dignity for all. But now to take those three words in turn.



Society – Socialism
Tony Wilson was a brilliant scholar who particularly excelled at physics and maths (or ‘maffs’ as kids say in Salford) and initially intended to pursue a career in these fields. However, he abandoned his wish to become a nuclear physicist after seeing Hamlet being played at Stratford-upon-Avon, falling in love with literature, and probably himself, and then taking up an interesting political position from which he never really departed. Now that to me seems a very Celtic thing to do and I wanted to kiss him when I found this out. I shower his spirit and his memory with kisses instead.


Jesus College Cambridge - a nest of spies and renegades?

Thus, in 1986, he enrolled at Jesus College Cambridge to study English Literature and whilst there joined a group called the Kim Philby Dining Club (Kim Philby spied for the Russians during the last cold war between the Soviet bloc and North America – a new cold war is probably just around the corner but that is another day’s blog). Effectively, Tony signed up with a group of socialists and ‘situationists’ some of whom did not necessarily agree with Kim Philby’s pro-Moscow views but all loving the fact that he had gone against his own establishment. My grandfather Thomas Larkin had his own quiet soft spot for Kim Philby and the other Soviet spies.

Now before readers' eyes glaze over at this word "situationism", take a minute to think about the possibilities of Punk Rock and the new wave of art and music which burst forth, often from the poorest parts of England, and shocked everybody into new ways of thinking and reacting to the world around them. A lot of it was to do with a distorted and playful plagiarism which took a set of conventions and then, sometimes literally, threw them back at the people to incite a reaction. Shakespeare did it, James Joyce did it and both theses geniuses revolutionised art. Now, think of Andy Warhol’s myriad cans of soup, or the dayglo plagiarisms of Punk art which had the effect, on some of us anyway, of releasing us from the straight jacket of consumerism and consumer fetishism. Naomi Klein did not invent modern day NO LOGISM, Punk Rock did, and this was a key tenet of Situationism – to wake people up, to stop them passively consuming the cow fodder of mediocre art and anodyne media comment. Situationism was also very much influenced by the way in which the ‘psycheographhy’ of a city, its psychological geography, can impinge upon the people who live within its boundaries so as to entrap and pacify them with its grey mundanities. Tony Wilson’s theories about urbanism and architecture would seem to be inspired by an essay written by Ivan Chtcheglov called ‘Formulary For A New Urbanism’ In it Chtcheglov envisions that a new form of urban life can be created, a new city built – ‘we are bored in the city, there is no longer any temple to the sun’ – ‘You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.’
Of course, a few years after setting up Factory Records in 1978, Wilson helped found a dance club called - The Hacienda, which eventually became a new cathedral, a temple, to music, dance and a new kind of idea about communal love – a happy culture, which lasted much longer than everyone expected. It is also worth noting that the three bars in the Hacienda were all called after Soviet spies in the English establishment in Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and the aforementioned Kim Philby.

Some may say, and have said, that this was all just the posturing of a media peacock, and it changed nothing, but the fact is that many important things were changed by Tony Wilson just being there, mouthing off, annoying people and trying to set off trains of positive reactions. Richard Madeley (yes of Richard and Judy fame but long before that depressing turn in his career) used to present the regional news from the North West of England with Tony Wilson and a fellow presenter has described the following scene:
"Once he and Richard Madeley were ordered to read a particular news story on TV straight and without comment. We knew there would be trouble. Richard read the story about Granada's own journalists going on strike in support of the nurses' day of action with true professionalism. As he did so, Tony's clenched fist appeared behind him as a sign of solidarity with the workers!
On the day of the strike he mounted the Quay Street steps and addressed the bemused health workers with quotations about Marx and ‘dialectical materialism’.”

Now I remember hearing about that particular incident where Tony Wilson quoted Karl Marx and it had a profound effect on me. For I realised that it wasn’t just my grandfather who could quote Karl Marx’s philosophy in arguments against capitalism. We were no longer alone. Defiant gestures for freedom, symbols, do matter. They do have an effect.



Culture
Returning from Cambridge to Manchester in 1971, Tony Wilson took up a job with Granada television which in those days was known for having a radical and rebellious pink tinge in comparison to the patrician BBC. One of my uncle’s through marriage (of Waterford extraction) worked at Granada as a stage hand and I seem to remember him calling his bosses “Champagne Socialists”, which tickled me at the time. In any event, after establishing his own slightly anarchic, what will he do next?, onscreen persona, because of escapades like the one about striking nurses described above, Tony eventually secured a cultural/music What’s On type of programme called So It Goes and the rest is Manchester legend. So It Goes was the beginning of a new dawn, which swept away previous notions of acceptable pop music as it placed spitting, cursing, thrashing, youths and poets like John Cooper Clarke at the centre of the television stage, to the shock and disbelief of many and to the absolute joy of others. Wake up everybody! Tony was saying, and they did. On one show, Iggy Pop said 'fuck’ and the greatest rock show, ever, was pulled.
In 1976 Tony went to see the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall. The story goes that there was less than 50 people in the audience that night but it was a turning point, nonetheless, in the history of popular music, the history of Manchester and the history of Tony Wilson who described the moment as an ‘epiphany’. Writing in the Guardian this time, journalist Paul Morley describes perfectly how Wilson and then Manchester itself captured the dawning of the age of Punk Rock -

"Everyone in the audience was inspired by this incendiary performance to react in some creative way. Many formed bands - Buzzcocks, Magazine, Fall, Smiths, Simply Red, Joy Division members were all present. Others became designers, writers or took up roles in the music business. Wilson was galvanised by the event, by the combination of anarchy and music, philosophy and pop, danger and delight, image and protest, and it changed his life, as it did Manchester itself. He immediately invited the Sex Pistols on to the second and final series of So It Goes, which was never shown in more than three ITV regions. Taking pop culture seriously as a social and political force, it was ahead of its time. It still would be today."
See - http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2147392,00.html for the full article above.

It needs to be remembered that Tony Wilson was not just a parochial Manc (Manchester lad) who tuned his back on the outside world. Indeed, he used his television show to give televised debuts to Elvis Costello and The Jam, amongst others, but his primary aim was to promote local talent and to provoke.



Spirituality - The spirit of Tony Wilson
There is not only no doubt that Tony Wilson stubbornly refused to give up his Catholicism and his belief in some kind of God and the afterlife but also that he made a direct connection with Ireland within that context. Tony Wilson was well aware, for example, that the Hidden Gem church, which was the venue for his Requiem mass, was long a spiritual refuge for the Irish who had begun to stream into the city from the 1840s onwards. Both Tony’s children, Isabel and Oliver, were baptised there and according to reports Tony used to pop into the church regularly to have theological discussions with the resident priest, Canon Clinch. Indeed, this brings Tony’s Irish connection into full relief because the former Meath football legend and renowned herbalist, Sean Boylan, was a Cara Chríost (Godfather) to Tony’s son Oliver and he was also one of the main speakers at the funeral service where he spoke movingly of Tony growing up and spending his summer holidays at Seán Boylan’s home in Dunboyne. Speaking on the Dave Fanning raidió show after Tony’s death, Boylan described it as Dunboyne having lost one of its own people and the atmosphere in the village was like that of a wake. Tony would attend mass in Dunboyne and drag his, presumably protesting, kids there too because he recognised the importance of the Holy Spirit in peoples’ lives. It seems to me that Ireland has ever played the role of divine comforter, it certainly did and does for me, and I hope and pray that the spiritual baby is not thrown out by our people as they flush out the rank and foul bath water which arrogant clerics and abusing priests have bequeathed as a legacy of their sins.
The music used at Tony’s requiem service also reflected both a modern and religious feel: Atmosphere by Joy Division and New Order's first single, Ceremony; Bob's Yer Uncle by the Happy Mondays; He Who Would Valiant Be by John Bunyan; and Hail Queen of Heaven, a traditional Catholic hymn. But I like the story which I think best sums up Tony Wilson’s approach to life and how he would describe himself both in worldly and spiritual terms. He once appeared in a local weekly newspaper in the ‘celebrity’ role of handing out prizes for a business competition in a local school. According to one of his former colleagues at Granada TV, the caption for the picture in the newspaper, presumably dictated by Tony himself, gave a kind of potted history with all its ‘brilliant contradictions’ of the man himself, it read: 'Anthony Wilson, TV Presenter, Entrepreneur, Marxist, Atheist, Christian is pictured above'.



Tony Wilson – Man
Now, there is that fourth word – man. This word has occupied my mind a lot, especially as I went through a long and, at times, excruciating divorce and have now come out on the other side in some state of shock and realising that I never really spoke of it to anyone. Tony’s death and his, for some, complex personal life gave me an urgent sense that the male experience of being in the world, and more particularly from my point of view, the working class male experience of being in the world, has been silenced. Castrated. More humorously on this point, I have thought about this word a lot since I heard the story about the original French designer of Disney’s Lion King crying out in dismay when he was shown the Disney, North American, version of his proud Lion. ‘My Lion’, he cried, ‘it has no balls!’
Tony Wilson had balls, cujones, and not just metaphorical male balls either. In the way of the Old West (Cormac McCarthy would approve) he would walk into that space where all that was before him was danger. As a mad ‘Manc’ (see above) he would enter the lair of the enemy (Liverpool) and speak at a dockers strike meeting and then go for a pint with them later. He was the street philosopher who frequented dodgy bars and music venues, was booed, sometimes denounced from the stage and occasionally punched and kicked as he quoted Shakespeare, Marx, anarchism and then put punks on the telly for the first time.

But here finally is the main point; the main male point. Actor Steve Coogan, who played Wilson in the film 24 Hour Party People, wrote a personal tribute in the Guardian http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2153104,00.html , hailing Wilson as "the older brother for a whole generation of creative, bold, innovative people" who "gave confidence and legitimacy to an army of haltingly insecure men. Put simply, he showed it wasn't poofy to wear nice clothes and use long words."
Tony Wilson was a brother, a soul brother, and he gave us all (uz insecure Manchester males) the confidence to use big words and believe that we might be artists ourselves one day. A generous brother and there are numerous examples of him digging deep into his own pocket to help struggling bands. Paul Ryder, guitarist with the Happy Mondays, told the Guardian newspaper: "I would still be working at the post office if it wasn't for Tony. He was the one that gave working kids like me and Shaun (his brother, the band's lead singer) their chance."
. The now world famous designer Peter Saville, who crafted the legendary cover of the New Order single Blue Monday (1983) and also the sleeve of the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures (1979) gave the best last word at the funeral of Athony H Wilson: "I only wanted to say thank you to him for what he did for me and to thank him for what he did on behalf of the city. We shared an opinion that time on Earth is short and is not about making a lot of wealth but about making a difference. Anthony Wilson made an enormous difference." Precisely. Tony Wilson could have made a fortune with his looks, his social and media cachet, but all that meant nothing to him because the main thing was to make a difference, to change things for the better.
In Ireland, just as in Manchester, everywhere on the planet, the best art is not there for its own sake but because it will make you stop and stare, make you think, change your life, make a difference, make life better. But, again, its not just about art but also making a statement about the things you believe in. I mentioned earlier the film I made for TG 4 about Imeacht na nIarlaí - the Flight of the Earls. This film was broadcast by TG4 on Sunday the 16th of September (2007) but it was actually first screened at the Irish Film Centre in Dublin’s Temple Bar area on the exact day that the Earls are believed to have left Ireland - the 14th of September 1607.
Now, there were two Tony Wilsonesque type moments during this screening in front of a sell out audience. Or, more accurately, these moments came when some of the cast and crew were invited to speak and take questions from the audience after the film had been shown. The film received enthusiastic applause as the credits rolled and then world renowned actor Stephen Rea, who played the leader of the Gaelic chieftains (Aodh O’Neill - Hugh O’Neil) was invited to say a few words. I didn’t hear all that Stephen said because I ran out of the auditorium in case I was asked to speak! I do not enjoy speaking in public. However , the AD (Assistant Director) on the film hauled me back in and I was grateful to her because I then heard Stephen Rea make a direct connection between events in Ireland in 1607 and present day events in Iraq. A kind of nervous frisson ran around the auditorium, followed by hearty applause. Then it was my turn to speak and I have to be honest and say that Stephen, and Tony Wilson’s ghost, had given me the courage to make the points I wanted to make.
My first point wasn’t that controversial, (except that it would have made any attending television executives wince slightly in their seats) and referred to the disappearance of metaphor in Irish film making. Every image, every issue, now has to be explained by a voice over or by the omnipotent reporter. My second point was warmly applauded but there was a section of the audience which took great exception to it. Here, I pointed out that the Flight of the Earls in 1607 marked the first real outpouring of enforced emigration from Ireland. That I was the son of Irish emigrants and that the attitude of the Irish born to their millions of cousins abroad was a disgrace. Unlike the Jews, unlike the Palestinians, the Irish have never cherished their own Diaspora. Worse, for the most part, they have turned their backs on them, and yet it is often the case that Irish emigrants are more Gaelach , than the Irish born themselves.
In the wine reception that followed, various members of the audience approached me to shake my hand, congratulate me, first of all with regards to my excellent film, and then to support my comments with regards to the Irish abroad. However, a small number of people, not one of whom mentioned my film, voiced their anger at what I had said about our distant cousins and denounced me as an incoherent eejit, an egomaniac, a dickhead, and the most popular one - you’ve such a chip on your shoulder. I was so proud. It could have been Tony Wilson himself they were talking about.


Slán anois Antain mo chara – Suaimhneas Dé ar do anam go síoraí
So long Tony mate – may you rest in God’s eternal peace.

 

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