Tony Wilson

Anthony Howard Wilson, broadcaster, record company executive and entrepreneur: born Salford, Lancashire 20 February 1950; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Manchester 10 August 2007.

Tony Wilson, the broadcaster and co-founder of Factory Records, was as close to the perfect maverick as can be. A native of Salford, this fiercely independent spirit refused to move to London and instead set about putting Manchester on the musical and cultural map. He succeeded beyond all expectations, homing in on the first stirrings of punk with So It Goes, the pioneering television show he presented on Granada in 1976 and 1977, and then launching Factory, the indie label par excellence, and releasing groundbreaking records by Joy Division, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and the Happy Mondays.

Wilson was also one of the prime movers behind the Hacienda, the night-club that became the home of the "Madchester" scene and the acid house movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the 50:50 split in royalties between Factory and its artists, Wilson's socialist principles, his reluctance to tie bands to contracts and the costly, crack-fuelled antics of the Happy Mondays while recording their Yes Please! album in Barbados - as well as the huge investment in the Hacienda and other ventures - eventually did for Factory, which declared bankruptcy with debts of £2 million in November 1992.

Five years later, the Hacienda also closed after drug dealers and gangs moved in on the venue that had anticipated rave culture, the superstar DJ phenomenon and superclubs like the Ministry of Sound and Cream. Undeterred, Wilson launched other labels including Factory Too and F4, though most of his formidable drive and energy went into setting up, with his longtime partner Yvette Livesey, In The City, an annual international music conference in Manchester.

The media-savvy Wilson enjoyed the irony of being portrayed on screen, first by Steve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom's 2002 semi-fictional film about the rise and fall of Factory Records, and more recently by Craig Parkinson in Control, Anton Corbijn's biopic - due out this October - about Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer who committed suicide in 1980. Wilson appeared in Winterbottom's later film A Cock And Bull Story (2006), playing himself interviewing Coogan. He also played a TV director in 24 Hour Party People. "The whole point of the film was that it was a collection of lies, myths and untruths, hung together in such a way as to tell the absolute truth about the birth of punk, acid house, and my company, Factory Records."

Anthony Howard Wilson was born in Salford in 1950, the grandson of a German immigrant. His father ran a couple of jewellers' shops and added a tobacconist when the family moved to Marple, near Stockport, in the mid-1950s. Wilson was brought up a Catholic and got a scholarship to De La Salle School in Salford.

He excelled at his studies, Maths and Physics in particular, and thought about becoming a nuclear physicist until he saw a production of Hamlet that awoke a life-long passion for the English language and intellectual argument. He was fast-tracked at grammar school, winning a place at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English. With two terms to kill before going there in 1968, he taught English and Drama at the Blue Coat School in Oldham.

After graduation, he returned to Manchester and got a job at Granada Television where he made his name as a roving reporter and rather hip presenter on the regional early evening news programme, Granada Reports, becoming a minor celebrity in the process.

In June 1976, he saw the Sex Pistols play Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall - "nothing short of an epiphany," he said - and realised that their anarchist tendencies chimed in with his long-standing interest in radicalism and the Situationists. The following month, Wilson hosted the first edition of the irreverent, all-embracing music show So It Goes and gave the Sex Pistols a slot in the ninth programme broadcast at the end of August, their first television appearance.

"I'm very lucky," Wilson said. "In my early childhood I was just vaguely aware of rock'n'roll. I was 13 in the school playground when the Beatles happened, I was 18 and went to university when the revolution in drugs happened, and I was 26 and a TV presenter with my own show when punk happened."

By the time of the second series in the autumn of 1977, the focus of So It Goes had shifted to punk acts like The Stranglers, The Jam, The Clash, Elvis Costello and Ian Dury, and also featured the local groups Buzzcocks, The Fall and Magazine, and the poet John Cooper Clarke. However, following Iggy Pop's antics and swearing, a projected third series was cancelled - despite the fact that the programme, which only ever aired in the Granada region, had by now acquired cult status.

It certainly brought Wilson, already an advocate of Manchester talent, into contact with the next generation of musicians. Accosted by Joy Division at a "Battle of the Bands" at the Rafters club in April 1978, Wilson told the group that they could play at a new club night he was setting up with his friend Alan Erasmus. The Factory launched in May 1978 at the Russell Club, a working man's club in the Hulme area of Manchester, and Joy Division performed the following month.

According to Wilson, the name of the venture was never intended as a tribute to Andy Warhol's Factory Club in New York. "It came by accident. Alan Erasmus saw a sign that read 'Factory Warehouse Sale' and said 'Why don't we call it Factory? I said 'That's fine'. The Warhol connection never occurred to me."

Factory evolved from a club night to become a record label set up as a five-way partnership between Wilson - who used a small inheritance to bankroll things - Erasmus, the record producer Martin Hannett, the graphic designer Peter Saville and Joy Division manager Rob Gretton.

"I had this idea to release two 7" EPs with four groups. It would be the first double 7" since The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. Plus, we would do it with this tissue paper sealed in plastic," recalled Wilson. When it eventually came out in January 1979, A Factory Sample contained tracks by Joy Division, the proto-ambient duo Durutti Column, the comedian John Dowie and Cabaret Voltaire, a group from Sheffield.

The original Factory mission statement simply read: "We own nothing, the musicians own everything." "All our musicians have the right to F off, which I think was a wonderful contract," Wilson said.

That document in the end made Factory bankrupt and resulted in my entire catalogue being owned by somebody else. But I can't regret it, because the idea was not to own the past but to present the future.

Having witnessed Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the electronic duo from Liverpool, move after their first single from Factory to the Virgin-financed Dindisc label, Wilson expected Joy Division to sign to a major company. But the post-punk band opted instead to release their début album, Unknown Pleasures, on Factory in July 1979. Wilson invested £8,500 to press 10,000 copies and kept reinvesting the proceeds into further pressings. "It was just going out to independent record stores. I used to deal with 24 different accounts. In those days, you went and acted as virtually your own distributor. At that level of work, you'll never get a chart position," said Wilson.

Through word of mouth, John Peel sessions and a support slot on the Buzzcocks tour in 1979, Joy Division became the original angsty indie band. But in May 1980, on the eve of what would have been the band's first American tour, Curtis committed suicide.

Wilson, already with a sense of history in the making, insisted that the NME journalist Paul Morley accompany him to Curtis' home in Macclesfield. "Unlike in 24 Hour Party People, I didn't take Paul in to see the body," recalled Wilson. "I wasn't so crass, I had some respect. But I wanted him to be part of it. I knew one day he would have to write the story."

Joy Division carried on as New Order, releasing Movement on Factory in 1981, and staying with the label until its bitter end in 1992. Factory became a sought-after imprint with unusual releases and an infuriating catalogue system. Everything the company did was given an "FAC" number - not just music releases, but posters, Wilson's desk, Gretton's dental work - preventing any would-be collector ever owning a complete set of Factory releases. Saville designed wonderfully distinctive industrial sleeves but hardly ever delivered the artwork on time. When New Order finally scored a huge hit with the hypnotic "Blue Monday" in 1983, the sleeve of the 12" single - designed to look like a floppy disc - was so costly to manufacture that Factory lost money on every copy sold.

In 1991, the label defiantly issued a box-set entitled Palatine: The Factory Story 1979-1990 but, by then, they were being kept afloat by London Records, and the Polygram company eventually moved in to cherry-pick New Order and the Happy Mondays as Factory collapsed.

Throughout his years with Factory, Wilson kept what he called his "day job" as a television presenter. He anchored Granada Reports alongside Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, presented World In Action - though a disastrous interview with the Cabinet minister Keith Joseph rather put paid to any ambitions he might have had to become a regular on the programme - and hosted the Granada arts show The Other Side of Midnight, the late night debate After Dark for Channel 4, and Content for ITV. More recently, he also presented radio shows on XFM Manchester and BBC Manchester Radio.

He supported Manchester United, advocated devolution for the North-West and retained his enthusiasm for new music. He admitted to being occasionally abrasive, arrogant and pretentious but he could also be charming, engaging, self-deprecating. Most of all, he was a supreme communicator and tireless networker. "My life is made complete by working with people who are cleverer than me," he said.

I am obsessed with their genius. I am just a journalist or a presenter. I can't write songs or design clubs. And I've never wanted to be a rock star because I can't sing. I have a craft and I'm good at that.

Within minutes of my meeting him backstage at a Durutti Column gig in London in the 1980s, he invited me up to Manchester. We didn't see eye to eye on the merits of the Happy Mondays but, in the 1990s, he made sure I took part in a panel at In The City.

Wilson had few regrets, apart from "not seeing the carnage the Mondays were causing in Barbados." He wished Factory had invested in the Fairlight synthesizer the visionary producer Martin Hannett wanted in 1982, and explained that the label didn't sign the Smiths that year because it was going through a difficult period. While he had spotted swaggering local boys Oasis before Alan McGee, the collapse of Factory prevented him from offering them a contract in 1992.

More maverick than mogul, the hugely influential Wilson certainly didn't get rich. "I am famous for being the only person who didn't make any money out of the Manchester music scene of the Eighties and Nineties," admitted Wilson.

I am a bit of a communist. I felt that as long as I paid my taxes and put some effort back into the community, I would be looked after if I needed it. I used to say some people make money and some make history - which is very funny until you find you can't afford to keep yourself alive.

When Manchester Primary Care Trust refused funding for the drug Wilson needed to fight kidney and lung cancer, friends and associates rallied round to finance his treatment.

"When I turned 50, I remember thinking that if I died then I wouldn't mind at all," Wilson said in a recent interview. "I had had such a fulfilling, colourful life, and had done just about everything I wanted to do. But now that mortality was staring me in the face, I realised what an idiot I had been to think like that. I had so many things still to do."

Pierre Perrone