Tony Wilson

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

As I've been terrible at mentioning, it's POPTIMISM tonight at the Cross Kings near Kings Cross, downstairs in the Jester Bar, free entry, dancing until 2.

The guest DJs are fathands and Jim D, who doesn't have a LiveJournal. Jim is planning to play a Manchester set. He was planning this anyway (and Pete is thinking of responding with a London set so expect Dancefloor War) but I think it's a specially good idea now as Tony Wilson, a non-musician without whom "Manchester sets" would probably be very thin and certainly not anything you'd want to dance to, died yesterday of cancer.

There'll be lots of Tony Wilson obituaries and tributes, and it's not as if I'd ever thought about him in the last n years, but I'm sad because 57 is young and because he was a lively presence in pop when I was getting into it. Here's a link with a (slightly partisan) report on the Wake Up America - You're Dead panel he chaired at the 1990 New Music Seminar in New York - Tony Wilson trolls America, you might call it (but like the best trolls, somehow a lot of the interesting points get made along the way too).

the pirates died the cats died pt2 :(

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i only met tw once, at a promo party at the diorama off euston road -- in a moment of particularly ripe cash-loss lunacy, he was attempting to er staunch the sooncome bankrupting of his beloved factory by launching a CLASSICAL SUB-LABEL -- the material was iffy, and the plan superbly muddleheaded (one of those he signed was famous -- tho to be fair this might have been after -- for being billed as giving an ica talk, and literally zero audience turned up)

but this failure is after all utterly of a type with what had worked earlier: iffy, muddleheaded, no-chance absurdity, except somehow something new under the moon occurred that no one a right to expect, and no one HAD expected, and very few got their heads fully round at the time, as if Club Dada had opened its doors on Coronation Street -- you could grasp one or the other but not both at once

so if his goofiness is what's easiest to pick out of fictional portrayals (rather than the wisdom he's shown trying for and never reaching) it's pretty much also the side of him that got stuff done -- anyone else would have come to their senses, given up before bothering further, and hey presto! no factory, that means no lots of other things too, including me