NOVEMBER 1992 …Factory Records Collapses

Thrills‘n’spills: (clockwise from above) Happy Mondays break the boardroom table, Factory HQ, Manchester, 1992; the last Factory single; outside the Charles Street office; New Order; (from left) Mondays press officer Jeff Barrett, manager Nathan McGough, Factory boss Tony Wilson.

NOVEMBER 23 Rumours of their demise had been circulating for months, as had the denials. But this rainy winter night, the long-predicted collapse of Manchester’s storied, quixotic Factory Communications was finally made public. “I’m numb,” mediagenic figurehead Tony Wilson, who co-founded the label in 1978, told the Manchester Evening News. “I don’t have any feelings except for the staff I have had to lay off.”

Local scenester Tosh Ryan, formerly of early Factory competitors Rabid Records, had been outside the label’s Charles Street office with a video camera all day. Tipped off that the receivers had been called in, Ryan gleaned fragmentary comment from inner circle faces including Wilson and co-owners Alan Erasmus and Rob Gretton, who was also New Order’s manager. Earlier in the day, it seemed hopes still held out that the London label, a long-term suitor, would step in with a rescue package worth up to £4 million. Yet, after employees were seen leaving with the contents of their cleared desks, A&R man Phil Saxe dropped the bomb on his way into the Lass ‘O’ Gowrie pub over the road: “It’s gone down.” When Wilson reappeared, Ryan spoke of how this was the end of an era, and needed to be documented: he also recalled former Factory producer Martin Hannett, who had died the previous year. “And our mate Ian,” added Wilson, remembering Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who died by his own hand in 1980, “[and] all our dead friends who appear on these important days…”