Just been listening to the Tony Wilson Experience, a 24-hour long conversation celebrating the late, great music Tony Wilson, musical Svengali and proud Mancunian. Wilson died of cancer last year and today would have been his 58th birthday. Loads of good people on the bill: John Cooper Clarke, Clint Boon, Irvine Welsh, Paul Morley, Peter Hook et al. You can tune in to the live stream over here.
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Update: I’ve been enjoying a curmudgeonly Kevin Cummins bemoan the fate of the rock photographer. Cummings thinks that user-generated content is just a way for newspapers to “get a load of free content”. He’s dismissive of the generation of photographers coming out of sites like Flickr. He said: the newspapers “don’t care about quality. It’s quantity that they want.” He also said that blogs were mostly “just middle class letters pages.”
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Even later: It is nearly 1PM and it’s getting really belligerent. The Manc poet John Cooper Clarke is on stage. He just recited his famous haiku:
To convey one’s mood,
in seventeen syllables,
is very diffic…
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The intelligence finally ran out about 3am. The Happy Mondays were on a panel and someone in the audience mentioned Stella Grundy, who I assume is Shaun Ryder’s ex-partner from the way he reacted. The guy in the audience was being provocative, but the reaction of the Monday’s, particularly Bez, was somewhat stereotypical. The guy was threatened from the stage (”you are fucking dead”, was the precise quote and worst was said after that) and for a moment I thought that it was all about to kick off. And then, the security intervened and started escorting the bloke out of the venue. Brilliantly, the Mondays then changed their tune and started berating the bouncers to let the man stay in the building. It was all rather touching and probably what Tony would have wanted.
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Thankfully, after a sleep, I awake to find the conversation has got much more intelligent again. This is much more like a more belligerent (I keep using that word) version of Radio 4. For the final conversation we’ve got Steven Morris, Peter Saville and physicist Brian Cox discussing the secrets of the universe. He reminded us how important Manchester has been to our understanding of the universe, and that the atomic nucleus had been discovered up on Oxford Road by Ernest Rutherford.
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That’s it. The poet Mike Garry has just read his poem Saint Anthony, and there’s talk of another one next year. I hope so. It was really good an pretty intelligent all the way through.
Tags: architecture, art, brian cox, culture, ernest rutherford, factory, factory records, future, happy mondays, intelligent, john cooper clarke, Joy Division, kevin cummins, Manchester, music, new order, peter saville, physics, Politics, television, tony wilson, tony wilson experience
June 23, 2008 at 6:09 pm
To whoever wrote this. My name is Stella Grundy. I am a playwrite. and Ex front woman for the Band Intastella. I was invited to speak at the Tony Wison Experience about my experiences as as an artist over the past 20 years along with John Cooper Clarke and Alan Wise . I was attacked by Shaun Ryder because I asked him a question about music he didnt like. I am NOT his Ex girlfreind !!! Women in music are not just wifes and girlfriends.
June 23, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Sorry Stella, as I said that was an asuumption. I had actually listened to a lot of the talk when you were on the panel and not heard your altercation with Shaun Ryder and assumed it was about something else, my mistake. No one though is saying that womein in music are just wives and girlfriends. Just click on my Last FM link if you don’t believe me
Sean
June 25, 2008 at 7:16 pm
R.I.P Tony.
July 1, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Has there been any evaluation of the event? Will it be public?
The Tony Wilson Experience website has some wonderful images but no forum: neither does it facilitate ’social networking’ by making content re-usable for bloggers (the fanzine producers of today, and writers of tomorrow?). Rather, the cut and paste aesthetic of punk, house music and the appropriation which so inspired Factory (the name itself appropriated from Warhol) seems to be absent.
Cameras and mobile phones were banned from the event “The entire conversation is being recorded in HD. It will not be permitted to take any cameras, mobile phones or other recording/communication” – Participant Handbook e-mailed to participants.
To the ‘talent’ I spoke to over the course of the event, the following objective taken from the website did not seem to ring true:
“The Talent will gain unprecedented access to the ‘Experienced’ over the 24 hours as well as having an opportunity to meet other talented creatives based in Manchester in a unique setting. ”
It became apparent that the ‘Experienced’ hung out in the Green Room, guarded by a security guard, while the ‘talent’ either made up a studio audience watching the ‘expereinced’ or sat about talking between themselves.
Given that situationism was given such an airing as a core value of the event, the reduction of the event to a spectacle resembling a TV show sometimes seemed to be either ill considered or at others a subtle ironic gesture designed to anger ‘talent’ to overthrow the ‘experienced’ – now part of the establishment. Either way of looking at it has merit in my opinion.
Perhaps it is a case of what seemed to be television professionals organising an event the way that they know best. The event was it was highly efficiently scheduled and at times interesting entertainment as well as inspiring and thought provoking. Paul Morley and Irvine Welsh were so spot on when they were talking about anything edgy being co-opted by the advertising industry. The pictures of the event seem to have been a particularly good viral marketing campaign for Adidas thanks to the Adidas lanyard.
It would have been nice to offer up the pictures for ‘talent’ to use to write their own experiences up, and to talk about the event. I would have loved to read what some of Simon Armatige’s fans, eager on Sunday morning to meet the hero, whose poem they studied for GCSE.
It would have been nice to put the video on YouTube like the famous TED talks: young talent has taken to remixing footage and applying the cut an paste aesthetic. These are skills and passions which should be encouraged, and I think that the organisers have missed an opportunity to allow talent to flourish from this event.
At the end of the event I stood in URBIS looking at the space between the door and the Green Room. What would happen there I wondered.
A flag was rolled out on the floor. It was the cross of St George. In the left corner was Stone Roses / Pollock pattern. Tony Wilson’s son signed it, so did Bonehead and John Robb. Tim Burgess did as well. I thought about signing it, but didn’t. Unfortunately Paul Morley was not around to observe the situation for critical analysis. I would have loved to hear what he thought.
September 22, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Perfect news.., dude