He’d been diagnosed with cancer for some time.
He was never a singer, a performer, a manager (well, not the best manager at least), a designer, a producer (much), a video director. He was a TV presenter on a regional station in the UK with goals, hopes, yet also personal problems, misplaced loyalties, his own misplacing of them, poor management of his own resources as well as those of others, dreams that never quite panned out all the time. Garrulous, gifted with self-promotion, someone whose every word seemed simultaneously one to pay attention to and one to look askance at.
None of which is meant to criticize, not beyond the acknowledgment that, nobody being perfect, he too had his flaws. But set them aside — had he not been a music lover, a social man, somebody who had those dreams and found both the means and medium to put some into play, and had he not helped bring together a variety of kindred souls in various fields, not all musical, then the world would look different, sound different, simply BE different. Sure, maybe everyone who ever fell into his orbit that gained fame and attention over time would have done so without him, and maybe even more satisfyingly in some cases.
But you know…I think back to that first time I heard New Order’s “Blue Monday” pumping out of the speaker of my radio when I was listening to the ‘dance party’ Saturday night block on the top 40 station I loved in San Diego back in 1986. He had a part in that. So very, very much more too. Forget Warhol’s Factory — for me Factory will always mean Wilson’s.
RIP, sir.
August 13, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Fantastic that his passing has been noted over there, Ned. I remember Tony Wilson as being a “tasty geezer” when he first appeared on British national telly in my schooldays – very attractive in an intelligent way, the antithesis of the telegenic airheads around today.
For some reason, his premature death upset me more than expected. I never met him but I couldn’t help but be aware of him and his various adventures throughout the years.
To learn the circumstances of his death and the fact that he’d refused to sign up to private health out of principle – as well as the fact that he had made history and not shedloads of loot – is deeply saddening, yet uplifting when everyone else is down on their knees to Mammon and filling their boots.
August 14, 2007 at 6:22 am
The principle is a good one indeed and should be honored all that much more given what happened — a final example towards the end. It’s been…interesting, seeing some of the romanticization already at work regarding his path in life, and not without reason, since he would have enjoyed it deeply.
I do wonder what people would say and think if the Hacienda and Factory were still going as opposed to a comfortable memory, and I wonder how much of the blaze of ‘glorious failure,’ given the seal with 24HPP in particular, was added after the fact. It makes it all seem more pure…