Tune in to Tameside Radio on Sunday evenings from 9pm for Music Therapy to unwind with Michael Taylor and Neil Summers. In the meantime, have a read of their latest words for the Tameside Reporter...

Tony Wilson was a complex man. Paul Morley, a complex writer, has written a complex book about him. In many ways, its messiness seems entirely fitting.

The founder of Factory Records and The Hacienda nightclub was also a journalist for Granada TV, playful, but also deadly serious about the need for truth, regional identity and civic pride. He always said he suffered from an excess of that.

His life was cruelly cut down in 2007 at the ludicrously young age of 57. 

He’d suffered from cancer of the kidneys and after being poorly for a year he eventually died in the Christie Hospital. 

Reddish born writer Paul Morley is not known for his brevity. 

His last book The North, seemed like a poetic and overblown series of Wikipedia entries and this has that faint whiff of that too.  

The book has much to commend it. It reveals how much he approached his latter passions for urban regeneration, regional devolution and technology. 

The interviews are poignant and raw at times, especially with his wives and children.

In my time as a journalist in Manchester, he was one of the first people I sought out to tell how the city was going to be the home of the second industrial revolution, just as it had been the cradle of the first. 

He didn’t always like what I wrote and told me so, but he was always ridiculously supportive. 

He bought me a Terry Eagleton book on critical theory for my birthday.

Not only was he one of the most interesting people I met, but he was endlessly interested in new things, in people and projects. 

He was curious about how he could insert himself into things to make them better and he would liven up many a lunch event or round table seminar I’d invite him to. 

He also used to love introducing people to one another, a twinkle in his eye that he was creating a microcosm of Rolls meeting Royce in the Midland Hotel.

Morley captures a bit of this, the random free thinker, the iconoclast, the maverick, and elevates his legacy above that of the two-dimensional image portrayed by Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s film 24 Hour Party People.

 In a script entirely written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, a brilliant writer, it has Tony saying - “this is Manchester, we do things differently here”. A quote erroneously attributed to him in many places.

Does this matter? No, probably not. After all, didn’t Wilson also say - ‘faced with the choice between the truth and the legend, always print the legend?’ Except, he didn’t say that either. It comes from ‘This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ which is from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

That Paul Morley’s book has this as a quote on the back cover, with the disclaimer that this might not actually be true, tells you a great deal about what’s going on here. 

Although Morley has had 14 years to finish this book, it’s neither the first about Wilson, or the best. 

In fact, it takes 51 chapters and nearly 600 pages to still feel strangely incomplete and inadequate. In death, as in life, he deserved better.

You can listen to Michael Taylor and Neil Summers on Music Therapy on Tameside Radio 103.6FM on Sunday evenings from 9pm to 11pm. Click here to subscribe and catch up on previous shows.

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