Читать книгу Tony Wilson - You're Entitled to an Opinion But. . . - David Nolan - Страница 12

Punk, far from being a peasants’ revolt, was just another English spectacle; like the Royal Wedding

– JULIE BURCHILL

As the first series of So It Goes was coming together, two items arrived on Tony Wilson’s desk. One was postmarked Stretford, the other Salford. From his home on Kings Road, Stretford, Steven Patrick Morrissey had sent Tony the sleeve of the New York Dolls’ self-titled 1973 debut album. No disc inside, just the sleeve. It was accompanied by a letter advising Tony to get more music like that on air. Meanwhile, from a flat on Lower Broughton Road, Salford, student Howard Trafford sent Tony a tape and a covering letter, also offering Wilson advice. ‘He said there’s a new band from London,’ Wilson later recalled. ‘They’re coming to Manchester on 4 June, I think you’ll like them.’

The new band from London was the Sex Pistols. They had been playing London art colleges where the band’s mix of 1960s garage and mod cover versions, plus half-a-dozen of their own songs, had been met with confusion and hostility, some of it generated by the group’s own entourage. The Pistols had made the pages of the New Musical Express in February, claiming they were into chaos not music.

Howard Trafford and his friend Pete McNeish [now better known as Pete Shelley] had seen the Pistols twice in the space of one weekend, after turning up in London on spec and charmingly asking staff at the New Musical Express where they could find them. It’s a measure of how far away this period in music really is when you consider that at one of the gigs, the Pistols were the support act for shock rocker turned politician Screamin’ Lord Sutch.

Howard Trafford: ‘Everything about the Sex Pistols impressed. Most importantly the music and the lyrics. The aggro of it was interesting. At the first gig John [Johnny Rotten] got into a bit of a tussle with somebody in the audience but kept singing under a small pile of people. Pete and I immediately had a model.’

After the show they cornered Malcolm McLaren, offering to lay on a show for them in or around Manchester. Their own band – now called Buzzcocks, eschewing the traditional The – had managed to play one gig at their college, the Bolton Institute. More accurately, they’d played four songs before the plug was pulled by college officials. Perhaps based on their one brush with Howard and Pete’s taste in music, the Institute put a veto on the Pistols. Undeterred, the students opted for the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester city centre instead, a theatre-style venue above the main Free Trade Hall.

Howard and Pete had a venue but not much by way of an act. Concerned they’d make fools of themselves in front of the Pistols, Trafford – now styling himself Howard Devoto – panicked and got the closest thing to a ‘pro’ band he could find to act as support to the Pistols – a progressive rock collective from Bolton called Solstice.

Howard personally issued the tickets at his flat, banging on the keys of a typewriter with a single finger to make each one individually. Many came out wrongly. Some of the 28 people who bought the 50p tickets found themselves promised entrance for a show on 4 June 1076. Among those who bought them were Morrissey (The Smiths), Paul Morley (New Musical Express), Manchester punk legend Jon the Postman (real name John Ormerod, real occupation postman), Steve Diggle (Buzzcocks) and Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook (Joy Division). ‘It was absolutely bizarre,’ Hook later recalled. ‘It was the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen in my life, it was unbelievable. We just looked at each other and said, “Oh my God.” They looked like they were having such a fantastic time. You just thought, God, we could do that.’

Events that night at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Manchester, would be claimed as a cultural ground zero for the city and for Tony Wilson. The mythology has it that the gig was the spark that ignited the Manchester music scene: all the city’s key players-to-be mystically called together by the siren call of punk rock and sent on their way to start their own pop culture revolutions, armed with a blueprint drawn up by the Sex Pistols and handed out in the stalls of the Lesser Free Trade Hall.

No one was keener to push this brand of mythology than Tony Wilson. He would trumpet it to the rooftops at every opportunity. The gig formed key early scenes of both 24 Hour Party People and the Ian Curtis movie Control. Tony would expound at length on the importance of the gig in terms of music, culture and Manchester. ‘Something about the energy imparted that night set up a train of events,’ he later told me. ‘Factory Records would not have existed and my life would not have been what it was without Joy Division. And Joy Division got up on stage because they saw these buggers [Sex Pistols] on stage. If they can do it, we can do it. That was the message.’

More than 30 years after the event, mention of the gig can still start a fist-fight among men of a certain age in Manchester pubs. The issue that gets jackets tossed aside and dukes raised is this: who was really there that night? There’s one name that causes more trouble than most. Co-organiser Pete McNeish took the tickets on the door: ‘I knew of him [Wilson] because I used to watch him on TV every night. I’ve no strong recollection of him being at the first one. I don’t actually remember him coming up to the box office and saying “I’m on the guest list.”’

‘I never saw Wilson either,’ says Steve Diggle, who joined the band that very night.

‘I’m sure Tony Wilson wasn’t there,’ says Jon the Postman.

Fanzine writer Paul Welsh was there to cover the gig for Penetration: ‘I was at that first Pistols’ show with nine other people, none of whom went on to form bands. As far as I know Mr Wilson wasn’t there, although he said he was. I didn’t see him and we knew each other by sight.’

Four weeks after the Pistols’ gig the first episode of So It Goes was aired across several regions of ITV. The punk groundswell was becoming ever more convincing and the show now looked out of step. On 20 July, the Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall again. This time, Buzzcocks were ready to prop up the bottom of the bill; Wythenshawe rockers Slaughter and the Dogs were up next, then the main attraction. This time the hall was full.

Tony Wilson would later claim he was on holiday as a way of cementing his place at the first gig. Fanzine writer Paul Welsh returned to see the Pistols for a second time and remembers it very differently. ‘I took photos at the first gig and featured the Pistols in my magazine, which I took along to the second show and presented it to Malcolm McLaren. I then saw Tony dressed in a long velvet coat with a chiffon scarf, pink shades and shoulder bag. He asked me, “Have you seen Malcolm, man?” I directed him in McLaren’s direction and that was it.’

Tony’s new Granada colleague Dick Witts: ‘I went with Tony to see the Sex Pistols. It was the second one in July. He went with me and my girlfriend.’ Appearing to see the potential in claiming to have been at a sparsely attended first gig as a way of starting his musical affiliations afresh, Tony seized the chance. The spiel goes like this: Manchester, music and popular culture were all rubbish, until me and a handful of chosen ones saw the Sex Pistols on 4 June 1976 and were inspired to make everything better.

Back at Granada, So It Goes was soldiering on. Tony must have been acutely aware how much the show now needed to change. In among acts like John Miles, Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers and Lulu, there were nods to the changing tastes of the outside world. Eddie and the Hot Rods somehow slipped past the guards, as did Graham Parker and the Rumour and Patti Smith. But there was one band that Tony Wilson had been banging on the table to get on the show. ‘The Sex Pistols had been in Tony’s mind right from the word go,’ says So It Goes director Peter Walker. ‘Every pre-production meeting we’d have about who was going to be on the show, Tony would say, “When are we going to get the Sex Pistols on?” The show for Tony at that stage was a very different proposition. He wanted to have a lot of exposure. He was very much an egocentric sort of presenter.’

The penultimate show of the series featured Kiss at the Free Trade Hall. Described by Wilson as ‘The biggest stage act since Nuremberg’, Kiss were filmed backstage with him. Tony sported a scarf and a manbag as he camped it up with the make-up-plastered giants in a surprisingly positive piece. ‘Don’t knock ’em,’ he advised in the studio outro.

The final episode of the series was a special edition featuring bands without a record deal. ‘We were what you’d call a progressive band,’ says Howard Kingston, the former lead singer of one of three unsigned acts featured on the show, Gentlemen. (The other two were Manhattan Transfer-style vocal group the Bowles Brothers and the Sex Pistols.) ‘We were into Yes, Genesis, that kind of thing,’ says Kingston. ‘I was 23. We had to hire a hall near Manchester University to sort of audition for Wilson as we had no gigs coming up. He got us on the show, so he was OK by us. There was a feeling that he was an OK person, but also that he was out for himself. But I liked the way he managed to play the straight news guy for Granada Reports, then the music guy on So It Goes. He was good cop and bad cop.’

Tony had to play to both roles in dealing with the Sex Pistols and their entourage during rehearsals for the show. Punk queen Jordan came up with the band and upset everyone with her death-camp, Myra Hyndley look that included a swastika arm band. Johnny Rotten and Jordan called Clive James a ‘Baldy old Sheila’. Sex Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock called Tony a cunt. The Pistols upset director Peter Walker and producer Chris Pye by trashing their stage set in studio two. All the while, Tony acted the peacemaker.

‘Tony spoke to them because Tony was that kind of guy,’ recalls Chris Pye. ‘He’d talk to anyone. Tony thought the band were great. I’ve no idea what they made of him. I think that they thought he was some kind of ageing, naff person, because he was a TV presenter and had really quite nice hair.’

‘We had to share a green room with the Pistols,’ recalls Howard Kingston. ‘They were obnoxious – drinking, making a mess, disrespecting musicians we had a lot of respect for: Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan… In retrospect, I get it. I see that although this was their shtick, music had got out of hand and needed to change, but I didn’t like it. We nearly got into a fight with them – Clive James advised us not to. In a way I wish we had fought them – it would have been good publicity for us. They didn’t like what we represented and we didn’t like what they represented. There was an element that the show was all about the Pistols. They were the headliners after all.’

‘I remember the Pistols were extremely badly-behaved all day,’ Tony told me in 2001. ‘I remember Clive James in the green room getting very upset with them. That was the day, the moment, that Clive James got old. Because Clive didn’t get it.’

Gordon Burns: ‘A lot of us were thinking, How can we let this go on air? All these horrible nasty groups spitting and swearing. Sex Pistols and that lot. At the time it was heavy stuff. A lot of people were saying that these guys shouldn’t be allowed in the building and that it was disgraceful and “What’s Tony doing?” But that was one of Granada’s strengths. They backed him. Tony had the vision that we never had and it was another milestone in pop music.’

Gentlemen played first, with a new song from their set called ‘My Ego’s Killing Me’. ‘There was an advert around at the time, “My girdle’s killing me,”’ explains Howard Kingston. ‘The song was a play on that. Wilson messed it up – he said the song was called “My Ego’s Hurting Me”. That was sloppy. The song was an attempt by us to do something more snappy and up-tempo. We were changing.’

Next came the summery jazz of Bowles Brothers. After some pop culture guff from Cook and James, the Pistols battered their way through ‘Anarchy in the UK’. It was blistering.

‘As they hit the last chord,’ remembered Tony, ‘I’m sitting there with a big grin on my face. The wonderful thing is, when the last note hits there’s complete silence. There’s two hundred people in the audience and there’s nothing… complete silence.’

Wilson’s first concern after the Pistols’ performance was not how it had gone down at Granada – really badly, as it happened – but that someone else was going to pick up the punk ball and run with it while So It Goes was off-air. ‘I was shivering with nightmares,’ Wilson later told me, ‘that someone at the BBC or elsewhere would wake up and put all these bands on. Luckily, the man at the BBC thought it was all about technique, so unless you were technically proficient or American you couldn’t get on The Old Grey Whistle Test. What a dickhead. Wonderful for us.’

Wilson sat tight and when So It Goes returned the running order was armed with a brace of live performances from a very different set of bands. At a time when there was practically nothing about the new wave of music on television apart from a few news reports, Wilson and his team single-handedly filled the archives for the benefit of every music documentary producer for the next 30 years with film of Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, XTC, Elvis Costello, The Stranglers, The Jam, X-Ray Spex, Magazine, Steel Pulse and Iggy Pop. As the So It Goes film crews recorded the action, Wilson could be spied at the back of the hall – not for him pogoing and gobbing – with what onlookers assumed was the latest in his long line of stunners. In fact it was his new wife, Lindsay Reade. ‘She just appeared,’ recalls musician Chris Lee. ‘She was very elegant in that Biba-esque, hippie way. She wore all the right clothes.’

Tony and Lindsay’s first date had been a visit to Portwood in Stockport to see Slaughter and the Dogs. ‘He was outwardly very outgoing, very confident. He seemed very cocksure,’ she later told researchers at Salford Museum for an audio-visual display about local music. ‘He used to annoy people, but apart from little old ladies [watching him on Granada Reports] he wasn’t that popular in those days. He could be pretty infuriating. What we were together was very exciting to me. He was just incredibly clever. He always had a literary reference to make. His mind was always working overtime. I always used to think it was all the drugs we took because he always seemed like he was somewhere else – I think it because his mind was always working.’

‘They were very much in love,’ recalls Chris Lee. ‘There’s no denying that. They were in love. Or in lust. One or the other.’ Lee had been tasked with the job of organising Tony’s stag night. ‘Alan [Erasmus], myself and Tony went to see a band called Flashback – Alan’s idea,’ he says. ‘We’d just dropped some acid and Alan said, “I’ll do the driving.” The great acid-fuelled stag party… Walking into a pub watching a load of hippies. I don’t remember much about it, but the colours were great.’

Back at Granada, the powers-that-be had their patience stretched to the limit towards the end of the punked-up second series of So It Goes. Iggy Pop was filmed at Manchester’s Apollo theatre, stripped to the waist, in leather pants and swearing. A lot.

‘They’d had enough of me and I can’t blame them,’ Wilson later recalled in the pages of the NME. ‘My boss said, “I don’t need any more guys with horse’s tails sticking out of their asses.” When we filmed him – and a wonderful show it was too – Jimmy [Iggy’s real name is James Osterberg] had this horse’s tail sticking out of his ass. Plus, in the middle of “The Passenger” he yells out “fucking”. So there’s a week’s debate over this one word, right? And I’m screaming “ART, ART, this is fucking ART!’

Horses’ tails were one thing, swearing was quite another. The show was axed and Wilson was put back on regional news patrol. But he’d seized the moment and cut his first notch in pop culture’s bedpost. Everything that was to come in Tony’s musical life would be traced back to his achievements on So It Goes and the part the Sex Pistols played on his road to rock’n’roll Damascus. Time and time again he would come back to the Lesser Free Trade Hall as a way of explaining everything that was to come. It would become the undercoat for every music revolution for the next three decades. His presence at the first gig was key to this. ‘I’m blessed,’ he told me. ‘I’m gig one.’

In fact, putting the Pistols on TV for the first time – three months before the band swore their way to infamy on Bill Grundy’s Today show on Thames TV in London – was a much more important feat than seeing the band at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Far more people were inspired to form a band by watching Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Paul Cook on So It Goes than by seeing the Pistols in the flesh. The show itself was also an influential television template for The Tube, The Word and Jools Holland’s Later.

So Tony Wilson, the Sex Pistols and 4 June 1976 was now set in stone – certainly as far as Tony was concerned. The event even featured in the film ostensibly chronicling Tony’s life – 24 Hour Party People – more than 25 years later, so it must be true. Woe betide anyone who questioned Tony’s version of events.

Thirty years on from the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Tony invited me on to his BBC Manchester radio programme Talk of the Town. The Saturday morning show was broadcast live from Cornerhouse, Manchester’s art cinema/cafe/meeting place. Three characters from differing walks of life would come together to talk through the issues of the day with Tony as conversational ringmaster.

I was there to promote my new book, I Swear I Was There, an account of events surrounding that very gig. Also on the show were a nice lady from Salford Council and a bullish local businessman. Wilson was sporting open-toed sandals and black-painted toenails. I asked him, ‘Why the new look?’

‘It annoys people,’ was his reply.

Tony allowed me free rein to talk about the book and that famous gig, which had recently been voted one of the most important concerts of all time, engaging the other guests in our conversation with his usual mix of deftness and tangential flurry.

During a break for headlines and travel news, Wilson leaned over to me. ‘There was one thing I didn’t like about the book,’ he said in an off-air stage whisper, glasses teetering on the edge of his nose. ‘Saying that I wasn’t there – that was snide. You shouldn’t have done that.’ As I began to defend myself, saying I was just reporting what eyewitnesses had told me, he pushed up the fader and carried on with the show. He made no reference to the exchange and carried on in Tony Tigger mode. He never mentioned it again.