A myth put to rest at our summer lunch – THAT Tony Wilson quote about Manchester

Tony Wilson never said: “This is Manchester, we do things differently here.”

There is no recorded evidence of the Factory Records founder and former TV presenter ever saying it, because he didn’t.

It has become this slightly ridiculous marketing slogan, plastered on hotel reception walls, property marketing brochures, Andy Burnham’s manifesto and most recently in a speech by new Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.

Steve Coogan said it, playing “Tony” in Michael Winterbottom’s film 24 Hour Party People. In a script entirely written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, a brilliant writer and currently the children’s laureate, who knew what he was doing. It’s a mesh of literary references, something Tony could have done, but didn’t. Not those anyway.

Summer Lunch 2024

Author Brian Groom told this story, and others at theBusinessDesk.com summer lunch at Ducie Street Warehouse yesterday where guests were treated to insights about the history of the city from his book ‘Made in Manchester: A people’s history of the city that shaped the modern world’ published by Harper North, and available at the House of Books and Friends on King Street, and other good book shops.

Leah, one of the book sellers made some recommendations for summer holiday reading, which are here.

Michael Taylor and Brian Groom

Brian said: “Tony Wilson himself, sadly, I never met, but did muddy the waters a bit because he wrote a book to go with the film, which was he called a novelization. I was kind of embroidered story around it with lots of false facts. And he did claim that he’d said something along those lines, in another context, but it seems to be complete nonsense. I don’t think he ever said that.”

Here are the roots of that quote though.

Half way through the film, in a delicious use of the theatrical technique of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ “Tony” reflects on the transition from one musical era to another, sort of quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (subject to some dispute, by the way): There are no second acts in American lives.

The supposed Manchester quote is the reply, which itself is derived from ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,’ the first line of L. P. Hartley’s The Go Between.

Does any of this matter? No, probably not. Afterall, didn’t Tony 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.

Quotes from the film, attributed to Tony, appeared at his funeral and were beamed on to a wall at the wake. It’s a fitting allegory, because he’s become one of these figures who people project their own version of an ideal reality onto. When Frank Cottrell Boyce was asked about all of this, he said that a public intellectual Tony would never have referenced Fitzgerald, or WB Yeats, Frank said, pointing out that Tony was far more interested in philosophers like Derrida, Adorno, Deleuze and in his later days, Habermas.