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As well as raising money for this fund, the secondary aim of Manchester With Love is to demonstrate, celebrate and share the diversity and unity which continues to permeate from the city’s streets via its music. In our opinion, there’s no better metaphor and Hammo’s unique artwork sums this up perfectly.
It took ten years for you to complete this book, but really its genesis is about thirty years prior to that, with you being to some extent groomed by Tony Wilson over the years to write about his life. To Paul Morley he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, shrewd mentor, insatiable publicity seeker. It was Morley to whom Wilson left a daunting final request: to write this book. Not just a "biog" but the story of a city's history and culture and a unique and disappearing figure.' I had no idea that Wilson had been taught by Raymond Williams at Cambridge, and you make quite a lot of the significance of that. At that meeting at the council, the fact that there was no Wilson, it didn’t matter how many of us there was, there was nobody there to be a Wilson anymore. That part of Manchester was over. Elliot Rashman, manager of Simply Red, wanted an enormous statue of Wilson that was about the size of Beetham Tower. And in a sense, that is actually what you need. Because the truth of how wild he was, and how disruptive, it’s difficult for people to understand. It’s difficult to understand what the hell you do with the idea of Wilson, really.It took Morley 10 years to complete this book and there’s a lot in it. Fifty-one chapters, three sections: the central, shortest part is, cleverly, about the Sex Pistols’ 1976 gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, the one attended by around 40 people, whose lives were changed because of it. Morley was there. Wilson said he was there, too, though Morley doesn’t remember him. It doesn’t matter. Morley has a way with a list, and starts each chapter with one that describes Wilson at that moment I wanted to give a sense of how he came out of Cambridge a very different person to other people born in Salford and Manchester, and Raymond Williams' writing on television seemed to point forward to the kind of television personality Tony became. In the way that sometimes happens when reading books, I found that during the weekend I was reading the section about the zenith years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, I began behaving slightly more iconoclastic or bloody minded in situations. Thankfully this wore off after a few days, but I started to think that this was probably Wilson’s biggest talent. The ability to – and I don’t mean this in a sentimental way – inspire people into action. To draw things out in people. That’s an underrated, and potentially harmful, gift for a person to have. I thought it was revealing when Vini Reilly described the Durutti Column as just music he made for Tony to drive around and listen to. Morley's biography is as illuminating on Wilson's strange ability to hold others in his orbit, even after his death, as it is on the story of his life.'
He was always putting on a show, he was always entertaining,” suggests fanzine writer Liz Naylor, whom Wilson once commissioned to write a film script for A Certain Ratio, the band he managed and saw as potential pop stars. “And he needed an audience.” To Paul Morley, he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, inventive broadcaster, self-deprecating chancer, publicity seeker, loyal friend. It was Morley to whom Wilson left a daunting final request: to write this book. He was also, Morley’s book makes clear, now and then a total arse, someone who used people to his own ends, who was a poor husband (twice) and not the greatest father, who took too many drugs and was too fond of his own voice. Which makes him what? Human, I guess.
Announcing 'Manchester With Love' compilation album: an outpouring of love from the Manchester music community celebrating our diversity and unity.
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