Tony Wilson was a Manchester music legend, and founder of the influential Factory Records - the label which signed the likes of Happy Mondays, New Order and more. This week marked the eighth anniversary of his passing, and Tom Dunne paid tribute to Tony on the show.
Dunboyne native and former Meath GAA football manager Sean Boylan spoke to Tom Dunne about how Wilson "was like a brother" to him. He explained the unlikely origins of a decades-long friendship with the former Joy Division manager.
“Tony was seven, when I first met him,” he recalled. “My father had Parkinson’s disease, and he went to see a consultant in Cheshire. My mum and dad went to mass in Marple Bridge. Daddy was shuffling up the town and a car pulled up, and the door opened and this lady said ‘could I give you a seat to the top of the hill?’
“That was Doris Wilson, Tony’s mother. Tony was in the back, Sydney was driving,” Sean said. After realising they had a mutual acquaintance in Tony’s teacher, “by the time they reached the top of the hill, they were into their house having tea, and that was the start of a lifelong friendship.”
“Tony fell in love with our family and everyone around Dunboyne”
“Tony fell in love with our family and everyone around Dunboyne,” Sean explained. “So he came every Christmas. He came at Easter. He came at summer. He came at Whit. Every break there was he came, even when he went to Cambridge… Once you were a friend of Tony, that was it.”
Sean said Tony loved the freedom of Dunboyne, and enjoyed nothing more than heading out on a tractor or trailer: “It was a totally different life - but it was something he never wanted to lose sight of.”
Sean would often head over to visit Tony during difficult times, or when he got the sense something wasn’t right. “One of the times, I went across and he wasn’t at home, and he was in hospital,” he recalled. “He was trying to contact me and he couldn’t, and that was when he got sick before he died.
“But he wanted to see me not just because of the cancer or anything like this - he’d heard of this book called The Twisted Serpent, about an hallucinogenic drug he’d heard about. He wanted to know, being a herbalist, did I know anything about this and how you could get your hands on it!”
"One of Tony’s greatest achievements was helping Mancunians be proud of their heritage, but also more accepting of other communities."
St Anthony: An Ode to Anthony H Wilson is a poem written by Mancunian poet and lifelong Wilson fan Mike Garry. A musical version of the poem has been released as a fundraising single in aid of The Christie Hospital in Manchester, where Tony was treated for cancer.
You can check out the video below, featuring Iggy Pop, Steve Coogan (who played Tony in the film 24 Hour Party People), members of New Order and other well known faces:
Mike wrote the poem after being invited on to a radio show by Terry Christian after Tony’s death. “That was the inspiration,” he told Tom. “I sat down and geeked out on a load of information - but I knew it anyway because I grew up in that environment and I grew up in that world, and Tony was on the telly all the time.”
Remembering what life was like in Manchester during the heyday of Factory Records, Mike explained, “it was wonderful, but you’ve got to remember it was Thatcher’s Britain at the time, and it was the north of Thatcher’s Britain. It was quite a dark place indeed. Tony turned the light on, and Tony was a massive inspiration and made young people believe from all this darkness there could be light and there could be warmth and there could be creativity”.
Mike admitted he wasn’t the biggest fan of the iconic Factory Records club The Hacienda. “But it wasn’t just about the Hacienda as a club,” he pointed out. “It was about the Hacienda and Factory Records as a movement and an attitude.
“[Tony] was a wonderful man, and a person who would make mistake which was very endearing about him…. [But] his passion for things was effervescent and infectious, and he made you realise that if you have a passion for things and work really hard you can be successful at them,” he added.
Mike told Tom that one of Tony’s greatest achievements was helping Mancunians be proud of their heritage, but also more accepting of other communities: “The Hacienda had a gay community before a gay community was totally accepted within large northern cities… It had communities which were marginalised. The Hacienda opened its arms to the likes of Morrissey when people would laugh their heads off at Morrissey.
“I love the way everybody likes The Smiths now - when the Smiths came out they were hated. They were laughed at by thousands of people! They’re not even a Factory band - people didn’t know who Joy Division were, or New Order. It took the likes of Tony to champion these people,” he observed.
You can listen back to the full podcast below, with Mike and Sean sharing many more memories of Tony - from an unlikely christening at the Hacienda to some insights into Tony’s more spiritual side:
All proceeds for the musical version of St Anthony: An Ode to Anthony H Wilson go to The Christy Charity – the hospital where Tony died.
