Factory Records: Communications 1978-1992 (Rhino) Released 19/01/09

The Manchester music scene has long been the stuff of legend.  It survives on the life stories of its two greatest egos if nothing else – Tony Wilson, the industry svengali whose reckless intelligence was responsible for transforming a moment in mancunian musical culture into the cult of Madchester; and Ian Curtis, ill-starred Joy Division frontman and the antihero of the hour.  At the epicentre of the legend was a haphazard industry based on the musical whimsies of Wilson and his Factory confederates.  

Factory was never grounded in a solid business ethos, and this, in many respects, was its undoing – even Wilson had to resort to charity to pay for his cancer treatment towards the end of his life.  Yet this ill-advised label formula, directed almost exclusively by profitless passion for indefinable genius, was the magic of Factory.  As a truly spirited independent it gave a voice to the dark pneumatics of Joy Division and the unhurried, inflated rattle-shake of the Happy Mondays, all of which rotated around the centrifugal cultural cyclone of the Hacienda nightclub.  

2008 marked Factory’s 30th birthday – an anniversary commemorated by the release of ‘A Factory Box Set’ this month (January 2009).  The box set comprises of four CDs of chronologically ordered Factory history from the fuzzed opening bassline of Joy Division’s ‘Digital’ right through to Happy Monday’s ‘Sunshine and Love’, the last ever Factory release.  Many of Factory’s highlights feature here – from the apogee of New Order ingenuity in ‘Blue Monday’, to Joy Division favourites ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Transmission’, and Happy Monday’s ’24 Hour Party People’, the song that later gave its name to a highly fictionalised film about Factory’s heyday.