You Can't Buy It With Money

Having finished reading I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records this week, at least three things stick out:

• The book is probably the best work that talks about the actual nuts and bolts of how Factory operated, from dealing with international licensees to flushing half of the confiscated drugs down the toilet at the Haçienda so the police didn’t get wind of the total scale of the drug traffic in the club
• Although the early years of the club have become ingrained as ‘empty nights, a money sink, and then house & ecstasy came along and saved the place’, the book paints a slightly different picture. The club in its early incarnation was a hub of activity and did a lot to support the art movements of Manchester (and it’s something the city desperately needs again, but that’s another story), plus you can argue that its LGBTQIA nights were foundational for creating a scene outside of London
• There’s a justified sense of anger that it took this long for people’s stories to be heard over the din of Tony Wilson. As Lindsay Reade rightfully points out, if Factory had been formed ten years later, she would have been a director on the level of Wilson or Erasmus, so why is she treated as a punchline in 24 Hour Party People and barely mentioned in most retellings of Factory?
• Despite that, Wilson comes out of the book reasonably well, Peter Hook a lot less so depending on who is talking, and everybody seemed to get on with Bernard Sumner (and obviously, everybody loves Stephen and Gillian, but that’s not a surprise!)

Going to be an interesting week…but I’ll tell you more about that next weekend, I guess…