How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 by Richard King
Authors: Richard King
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all his mates were, like, “This is rubbish,” so he stuck up for it.’
Wilson’s in-tray filled up with correspondence from punk bands keen to gain some access and exposure. The pile included an envelope from Buzzcocks, inviting him to the first of the Sex Pistols Lesser Free Trade Hall concerts. Wilson recalled, ‘I got a letter and a cassette from a guy called Howard Trafford, and he said, “This is a really wonderful group, just started up in London, they’re coming to Manchester on June 2nd, Lesser Free Trade Hall,” and I went, of course, and apparently 18,000 people attended that first gig. Something I found very interesting about pop music was that it was a genuinely popular, i.e. classless, art form, in a way that television isn’t. There’s a demographic to people who watch Coronation Street , to a degree. There is no class demographic to the received experience of being a Sex Pistols fan. It has the same intellectual content for a Cambridge undergraduate, and a kid on the dole.’
Wilson’s ability to distance himself from the editorial protocols of Granada allowed him a unique perspective, one he would holdon to throughout Factory. As well as the free-for-all experience of being a member in the Sex Pistols audience, he also noticed a distinct sensibility developing among the crowds at Manchester concerts. Behind the aggression and theatricality of punk, a more thoughtful, if no less intense, space was opening up. ‘One of the great achievements of Manchester,’ he said, ‘was that when Suicide supported the Clash the following year, they were bottled and canned and fucked over at every gig in the country, including London, except when they played The Factory. Fifteen hundred people went berserk, loved it. We were that advanced. There was a subculture there; the Residents and Suicide seemed to go together with a certain bunch of people.’
Jon Savage had recently moved to Manchester and was now a colleague of Wilson’s at Granada and was equally seduced by Suicide and the burgeoning new electronic sensibility. ‘It was kind of dark, electronic, psychedelic and it was very comforting,’ he says. ‘During that period there was a lot of bombing around in a crap car all over the north of England … late at night, listening to this analogue electronic music and it was sounding very warm and although it was alienating, it was very pleasurable.’
Wilson had been the only UK broadcaster to book the Sex Pistols on to live television on his late-night music and culture programme So It Goes . He had planned to cover the group in depth and film their appearance at Eric’s club in Liverpool on the band’s ill-fated Anarchy tour. Granada had tired of what his producers considered to be his obsession with the band and decided against the idea, a decision that led to Wilson’s resignation. ‘I resigned at Granada over the Anarchy tour,’ he recalled, ‘I’d had a documentary I was making on the Pistols cancelled on the morning I was to start shooting it, because my producer had called Granada and said, “Don’t give Wilson his crew.” This was four or five weeks after Grundy – things are goingaround in the press. * The next day Roger Eagle rang me to say the police had been down to Eric’s and said, ‘If you put this group on, you will not get your licence next time it comes up.’
The late Roger Eagle was a totemic presence in Liverpool and the north-west throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Having cut his teeth on the northern soul circuit, he brought Dr. Feelgood and Captain Beefheart to mid-Seventies Lancashire before opening Eric’s on Mathew Street in Liverpool. Preceding The Factory Club by nearly two years, Eric’s was quite possibly, and certainly in the eyes of its clientele, the hippest club in Britain. It was undoubtedly a peerless seedbed for post-punk and a bohemian watering hole, where the juke box played 7-inches by Howlin’ Wolf, Ornette Coleman and the Seeds.
Wilson and
Wilson’s in-tray filled up with correspondence from punk bands keen to gain some access and exposure. The pile included an envelope from Buzzcocks, inviting him to the first of the Sex Pistols Lesser Free Trade Hall concerts. Wilson recalled, ‘I got a letter and a cassette from a guy called Howard Trafford, and he said, “This is a really wonderful group, just started up in London, they’re coming to Manchester on June 2nd, Lesser Free Trade Hall,” and I went, of course, and apparently 18,000 people attended that first gig. Something I found very interesting about pop music was that it was a genuinely popular, i.e. classless, art form, in a way that television isn’t. There’s a demographic to people who watch Coronation Street , to a degree. There is no class demographic to the received experience of being a Sex Pistols fan. It has the same intellectual content for a Cambridge undergraduate, and a kid on the dole.’
Wilson’s ability to distance himself from the editorial protocols of Granada allowed him a unique perspective, one he would holdon to throughout Factory. As well as the free-for-all experience of being a member in the Sex Pistols audience, he also noticed a distinct sensibility developing among the crowds at Manchester concerts. Behind the aggression and theatricality of punk, a more thoughtful, if no less intense, space was opening up. ‘One of the great achievements of Manchester,’ he said, ‘was that when Suicide supported the Clash the following year, they were bottled and canned and fucked over at every gig in the country, including London, except when they played The Factory. Fifteen hundred people went berserk, loved it. We were that advanced. There was a subculture there; the Residents and Suicide seemed to go together with a certain bunch of people.’
Jon Savage had recently moved to Manchester and was now a colleague of Wilson’s at Granada and was equally seduced by Suicide and the burgeoning new electronic sensibility. ‘It was kind of dark, electronic, psychedelic and it was very comforting,’ he says. ‘During that period there was a lot of bombing around in a crap car all over the north of England … late at night, listening to this analogue electronic music and it was sounding very warm and although it was alienating, it was very pleasurable.’
Wilson had been the only UK broadcaster to book the Sex Pistols on to live television on his late-night music and culture programme So It Goes . He had planned to cover the group in depth and film their appearance at Eric’s club in Liverpool on the band’s ill-fated Anarchy tour. Granada had tired of what his producers considered to be his obsession with the band and decided against the idea, a decision that led to Wilson’s resignation. ‘I resigned at Granada over the Anarchy tour,’ he recalled, ‘I’d had a documentary I was making on the Pistols cancelled on the morning I was to start shooting it, because my producer had called Granada and said, “Don’t give Wilson his crew.” This was four or five weeks after Grundy – things are goingaround in the press. * The next day Roger Eagle rang me to say the police had been down to Eric’s and said, ‘If you put this group on, you will not get your licence next time it comes up.’
The late Roger Eagle was a totemic presence in Liverpool and the north-west throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Having cut his teeth on the northern soul circuit, he brought Dr. Feelgood and Captain Beefheart to mid-Seventies Lancashire before opening Eric’s on Mathew Street in Liverpool. Preceding The Factory Club by nearly two years, Eric’s was quite possibly, and certainly in the eyes of its clientele, the hippest club in Britain. It was undoubtedly a peerless seedbed for post-punk and a bohemian watering hole, where the juke box played 7-inches by Howlin’ Wolf, Ornette Coleman and the Seeds.
Wilson and
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