Anthony Wilson, the music mogul behind some of Manchester's most successful bands, has died of cancer.

The Salford-born entrepreneur, who managed New Order, Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, was diagnosed last year during a routine visit to the doctor.

 

The 57-year-old, who launched Factory records and the Hacienda nightclub, underwent emergency surgery in January to remove a kidney.

 

He passed away on Friday evening in hospital.

 

Doctors recommended he take the drug Sutent after chemotherapy failed to beat the disease, but the NHS refused to fund the £3,500-a-month treatment.

 

However, members of the Happy Mondays and other acts he supported over the years stepped in and started a fund to help pay for it.

 

 

 

 

This is a very sad day for Manchester and the world as a whole...

 

Tony have a fat blunt up there with the man bob for me !! and everyone

RIP

Obituary: Tony Wilson

Record label owner, broadcaster, journalist, pop impresario and nightclub founder - Anthony Wilson was famous for many things, but perhaps he was most famous for being a self-styled professional Mancunian.

 

Tony Wilson was widely regarded as the man who put Manchester on the map for its music and vibrant nightlife. He remained active on the city scene until his death on Friday aged 57.

 

He was born in Salford's Hope Hospital on 20 February 1950.

 

He attended De La Salle Christian Brothers' school, before going on to read English at the University of Cambridge in 1968.

 

In the 1970s he went to work for Granada Television in Manchester, where he fronted programmes including music show So It Goes and current affairs magazine World In Action.

 

He later went on to be long-time host of the early evening Granada Reports.

 

Wilson was a founder of Factory Records in the late 1970s, the label behind Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays.

 

He continued to work in television even at the height of his work with Factory records.

 

In 1982, he set up The Hacienda nightclub, which became known as perhaps the most famous club in the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

 

It became the heart of the "Madchester" scene, playing host to bands such as New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and Oasis.

 

Even Madonna played her first UK gig at the Whitworth Street club in February 1983.

 

The club was famous for its dance nights, particularly house music nights where DJs Mike Pickering, Sasha and Dave Haslam regularly played.

 

In the early 1990s the club was blighted by cash flow problems and it closed its doors in 1997.

 

Devolution call

 

The building was demolished in 2002 and apartments were built in its place.

 

The semi-fictional story of the club, the music and Wilson's life was documented in Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film, 24 Hour Party People.

 

His character was played by comedian Steve Coogan to critical acclaim.

 

Wilson later went on to set up the annual Manchester music conference, In The City, with long-term partner and former Miss England Yvette Livesey.

 

But it was not just in the music world that he made his mark - he was also a key player in local politics and supported a campaign for a regional assembly for the North West.

 

Emergency surgery

In 2004 he set up an unofficial coalition calling for regional devolution, called The Necessary Group.

 

More recently he presented radio shows Ground Rules and Talk of the Town on BBC Radio Manchester and Sunday Roast on Xfm Manchester.

 

He was the main presenter of the BBC's Politics Show North West.

 

Wilson fell ill in 2006, before undergoing emergency surgery to have a kidney removed in January 2007.

 

Doctors diagnosed him with cancer and he started a chemotherapy course at Manchester's Christie Hospital.

 

The chemotherapy failed to beat the disease and he was recommended to take the drug Sutent, which is not funded by the NHS in Manchester.

 

Members of the Happy Mondays and other acts he supported over the years had started a fund to help pay for his treatment.

 

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/manchester/6941105.stm

Shame all the bands mentioned there suck. :D

Your too young to remember.

And too insensitive to reminisce. RIP TW.

insensitive and too ignorant :)

Rest in peace pal, you're with Ian Curtis now. A huge figure in the British music scene and he will be greatly missed. :cry:

Farewell to Mr Manchester

 

The man, the myth and the music: from left to right, with comedian Steve Coogan; the Hacienda club in Manchester; with wife Yvette

 

Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records and moving spirit behind the Haçienda Club, died last week, mourned by the musicians he nurtured, the city he loved and that loved him back, and the people – our correspondent among them – whose lives he changed

 

Four weeks ago Tony Wilson somehow summoned the energy to attend a performance at the Manchester International Festival of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear us Apart. He was terribly ill by that stage, but it was the sort of thing Wilson would not miss – a rendition in complete darkness by June Tabor of arguably one of the best songs ever written by a band which he discovered.

 

A few days before he had also taken part in a festival debate. Afterwards the festival director Alex Poots remembers escorting a frail Wilson to his car. “You know, I love this fucking city,” he said to Poots. This was classic Wilson: passionate, sentimental, generous, dramatic and always head over heels in love with Manchester. In the days after his death on August 10, the extent to which that romance was reciprocated is obvious.

 

This was classic Wilson: passionate, sentimental, generous, dramatic and always head over heels in love with Manchester. In the days after his death on August 10, the extent to which that romance was reciprocated is obvious.

 

The Union Flag flies at half-mast over the town hall, tender tributes are still flooding in and, according to a local evening newspaper poll, three-quarters of its readers think there should be a concert, a statue and a music prize in his honour.

 

The city knows that it owes him a massive debt. Yesterday Kevin Cummins, the original photographer of Joy Division – whose brief was never to picture the band’s leader, Ian Curtis, smiling – described Wilson, the founder of the Haçienda nightclub and Factory Records label through which he championed iconic bands such as New Order and the Happy Mondays, as “the catalyst for everything that happened in Manchester music.

 

“His legacy will continue,” said Cummins, “because most bands will still cite Factory bands as their inspiration.”

 

Cummins, who attended the same school as Wilson in Salford and moved to London in 1987, added: “The thing with Tony was that he thought anyone who left Manchester had betrayed the city. But he would still introduce me as the greatest photographer to come out of Manchester: he was very proud of what we had achieved. I think he liked being Mr Manchester, he liked walking round the city with everyone knowing him – even when they were shouting abuse at him.”

 

This, of course, is a reference to some locals seeing him as a pretentious git – an image which was played up hugely in the film 24 Hour Party People. Wilson didn’t particularly mind being skitted. Cummins remembers that, in the early days of the Haçienda, Wilson bought a Mercedes Benz and would often come outside to find it scratched or with “twat” scrawled down the side. He laughed it off. “Manchester the general public paid for it,” he said. “So Manchester the general public can do what the fuck they like with it.”

 

Cummins spoke to him a few days before he died last Friday. Cummins is working on a book, to be published next year, about Manchester music from the Buzzcocks onwards, entitled Looking for the Light in the Pouring Rain. Wilson was due to contribute an essay to it. “He rang me a couple of weeks ago and said: ‘It’s all in my head, I’m just about to download it.’ He asked for an extension to the deadline.”

 

Of course, he never did download it, succumbing at the age of 57 to a heart attack as he fought kidney cancer. The gap he leaves, both for the book and the music industry at large, will be immense. As Tim Burgess of the Charlatans said: “It’s like losing a musical dad.”

 

Bernard Sumner, the guitarist with Joy Division and lead singer with New Order, the band that succeeded it, got married a month ago and Wilson, despite being so ill, attended the wedding. It was the last time Sumner saw the man who he describes as “an eternal teenager”, “an incredible optimist” and a massive creative inspiration. Asked what he would like to say to Wilson, he said: “I’d like to say thank you for completely changing my life and allowing me the opportunity to haul myself out of my working-class background. Thanks for allowing Joy Division and New Order to develop in their own way and letting us retain our individuality. And to do it all in Manchester.”

 

It was Wilson’s relaxed management style that allowed the bands not to be shackled by corporate demands. “There was a fun side to Tony’s flippancy with money,” said Sumner. “We didn’t have a record company breathing down our necks for hit singles. It allowed us to express ourselves in our own way.”

 

He said the love-hate relationship that some people in Manchester had with Wilson was just the Mancunian way. “People would like to say they hated him, but they loved him really. It’s Manchester humour: you greet people you like with an insult and you expect one back.”

 

Shaun Ryder, the lead singer of the Happy Mondays, has said he is “fucking gutted” by Wilson’s death. At his home in Manchester Gaz Whelan, the band’s drummer, said simply: “I am heartbroken. Everyone is devastated. It’s hard to talk about it, really. People see Tony as that figure in 24 Hour Party People and he wasn’t like that. Yes, he could be pedantic; he always took things personally. If you didn’t e-mail back immediately, he wanted to know why. But he was brilliant. He showed that you can be a provincial loudmouth and fight above your weight. A couple of weeks ago he was still saying that Shaun was the greatest poet in the greatest band.”

 

Whelan said Wilson had a paternal, schoolteacherish quality about him. “He was so clever that sometimes you wondered whether he was toying with you.”

 

But, apart from being a great TV broadcaster, Wilson’s gift was being able to see potential talent and predict trends in music. After attending Cambridge University he became a TV presenter, but music was his real love. He founded Factory Records in 1978 and four years later set up the Haçienda nightclub, which in time would give birth to the “Mad-chester” scene with its acid house club nights. Problems with the drug scene forced its closure in 1997.

 

But Wilson was always thinking ahead to the next thing. In 1992, with his long-term partner Yvette Livesey, he set up the characteristically uncorporate In the City conference, a forum for finding new talent and discussing the future of the music industry. Even in his fifties the eternal adolescent was still at the cutting edge. In 2002 he forecast, correctly, that the future of music would be kids in hooded tops with samplers and guitars.

 

Just so we are clear on his tastes he once described Coldplay as “utter middle-class shit” and added: “If I hear any UK garage or Craig David again I will fucking throw up." One of his favourite songs was Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground.

 

The Mondays have no doubt that they owe everything to him – as the band’s guitarist, Paul Ryder, said: “I would still be working at the post office if it wasn’t for Tony. He was the one that gave working kids like me and Shaun [his brother] their chance.”

 

Whelan said that in the early days a couple of record companies had been to see the band but declined to sign them, saying: “You have got potential but you haven’t got style. You need an image.”

 

“Tony saw us and immediately said: ‘You have got a great image.’ We said: ‘But we haven't got one.’ ‘ Exactly,’ he said.”

 

The esteem in which Wilson is held was demonstrated when members of the Happy Mondays and other musicians Wilson worked with over three decades set up a fund to pay for Sutent, a £3,500-a month-drug used to treat kidney cancer which the Manchester NHS

 

Primary Care Trust had refused to finance. Wilson may have had “genius” qualities but he was no great businessman, famously making little money out of his ventures. In 1983 New Order's Blue Monday became the best-selling 12in single of all but, thanks to the intricate packaging, Factory lost money on every copy sold. “You either make money,” he once said, “or you make history.”

 

Alex Poots knew Wilson from 1990, when he was a student working for a classics offshoot of Factory in London and nervously rang the “big boss” to ask for a fax machine. “He said, ‘You leave that to me, son’.”

 

A week later he met Wilson for lunch in L’Escargot. “In walked Tony in his Armani suit and trainers and he had this huge box under his arm. ‘Here’s the fax,’ he said. He was a can-do guy. He got things done. And he believed in what he did.”

 

I too had spoken to Wilson recently and had arranged to interview him. About three weeks before he died he was in good spirits, despite being back in hospital with a clot on his lung. “I’ve just had the results of a scan,” he said. “The tumour has shrunk.”

 

This meant that Sutent was working for him – a great relief, not least because he was campaigning for more health trusts to fund it for kidney cancer patients on the NHS. He sent me a text. “I have been worrying that being the poster boy for Sutent would look pretty dim if it didn’t work for me,” he wrote. “But it does.”

 

He was right. His oncologist Professor Robert Hawkins told me this week that Wilson had been responding well to the drug. Though his body was clearly weakened by the cancer, it was a heart attack that killed him. I think Wilson would have wanted that made clear, lest it detracted from his campaign. However, the next time we spoke, ten days before he died, his voice was desperately weak. “What I’ve got is a bleeding blood clot on my lung,” he texted later. “Completely debilitating. Could take two weeks to clear, or longer. Talk when stronger. X.”

 

Gaz Whelan tells a story about Peter Hook, the New Order bassist, driving past the Haçienda long after it had closed and was being sold off to property developers, and seeing that New Order material had been thrown in the bins. He telephoned Wilson to tell him. “It’s over, darling,” said Wilson.

 

Sadly, it is now.

 

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article2272328.ece

Never heard of him. Still have no idea why he's so important. I'm real sure he'll be missed.

Anthony Wilson

 

MUSIC legend Tony Wilson drew up a will just weeks before he died leaving property worth less than £500,000.

 

Probate documents reveal his estate was valued at £484,747 after tax. That figure includes the value of his city centre apartment on Little Peter Street which is currently up for sale. The will, signed by Wilson on July 4 last year, gives Yvette Livesey, 39, his partner of 17 years, the proceeds from their home. He also leaves to her his share of six businesses.

 

His son Oliver, and daughter Isabel get the rest of his estate.

 

The financial situation of the former Factory Records boss was thrust into the spotlight after he was diagnosed with cancer late in 2006 and had a kidney removed.

 

Doctors at Christie Hospital recommended Sutent, a drug which has doubled the life expectancy of some patients - but said he would have to pay £3,500 a month for it.

 

Help

 

Friends rallied round to fund his care. Simply Red manager Elliot Rashman, TV stars Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, the Happy Mondays, and their former manager Nathan McGough were among those who helped.

 

At time Tony Wilson told the M.E.N: "I'm the one person in this industry who famously has never made any money. I used to say some people make money and some make history - which is funny until you find you can't afford to keep yourself alive."

 

Before his death of a heart attack on August 10, aged 57, Tony Wilson led a campaign to make Sutent widely available.

 

Factory Records crashed in 1992 with debts of £2m. The Hacienda nightclub, which he part-owned, closed in 1997, plagued by drug and gun problems and owing £500,000.

 

Yvette Livesey declined to comment on the details of the will, which gives her his share of the businesses, some of which the couple ran together.

 

These are In the City Ltd, Esmeralda Events Ltd, Sound Productions Ltd, Interactive City Ltd, Livesey Wilson Associates and Livesey Wilson Ideas Management.

 

In the City, an annual music industry convention, was launched by Wilson and Livesey in Manchester in 1992. Bands that performed before getting deals include Coldplay, Elbow and Placebo.

 

The executors of the estate are Yvette Livesey and solicitor Stephen Quick Lea. Witnesses were In The City's general manager Jon-Paul Waddington, and Gavin Cooke, the business' office manager.

 

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1042126_tony_wilsons_will_revealed

In the City, an annual music industry convention, was launched by Wilson and Livesey in Manchester in 1992. Bands that performed before getting deals include Coldplay, Elbow and Placebo.

I'm sure you know why he's important now ;)

Yes I know.... :) Mr Manchester

RIP