Tony Wilson: The Cemetery He Chose

Anthony H. Wilson died 19 years ago today. In June 2017, I went to Manchester's Southern Cemetery specifically to find his grave, and ended up finding three others nearby that, together, tell a better story about him than most tributes do. It's the same cemetery Morrissey used to walk through with his friend Linder Sterling, walks that later became The Smiths song "Cemetry Gates," so it was already somewhere I half-knew before I ever went looking for Wilson.

Here's what I found.

FAC 501

Tony Wilson's grave is easy to miss if you don't know what you're looking at. There's no name in large letters from a distance, just a plain black stone, no Factory branding on it at all. Get closer and it reads: Anthony H Wilson. Broadcaster. Cultural Catalyst. 1950-2007.

In a detail that's almost too perfectly Factory to be true, his casket was given its own catalogue number: FAC 501. Factory numbered everything it ever released, records, posters, even the fixtures inside the Haçienda. Apparently, that system extended to its own founder's funeral.

Below his name sits a quote, and it isn't his own. It's a line from The Manchester Man, an 1876 novel by Isabella Banks (published under her husband's name, as was standard at the time), about the city's rise as an industrial power a century before Wilson's version of it:

"Mutability is the epitaph of worlds. Change alone is changeless. People drop out of the history of a life as of a land, though their work or their influence remains."

It's a strange, quiet choice for a man mostly remembered for being loud. The headstone itself, designed by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly, the same pair behind Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures sleeve and the Haçienda's interior, took three years to arrive. Characteristically for Factory, it was late.

The producer who lay unmarked for 17 years

A short distance away is Martin Hannett, the producer behind Joy Division's sound, though that undersells him considerably. He also produced Buzzcocks, Magazine, New Order, OMD, Nico, John Cooper Clarke, and Happy Mondays. His own headstone credits him, simply, as "the creator of the Manchester Sound."

For 17 years after his death in 1991, that headstone didn't exist. Hannett died with almost nothing, and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 2008, Wilson's first wife, Lindsay Reade, was visiting Wilson's own grave and decided to check on Hannett and Rob Gretton nearby. She had to ask cemetery staff just to locate them, and found Hannett's grave completely bare. That visit set in motion the process that got him a proper headstone later that year, paid for by Factory and the surviving members of Joy Division.

It's a strange kind of justice that it took someone else's grave visit to notice his was missing entirely.

The manager, a few yards from his rival

Rob Gretton managed Joy Division and New Order, and was, by every account, one of the people actually holding Factory's chaos together behind the scenes. He rests a short walk from Hannett and Wilson. He was also, famously among people who knew him, a lifelong Manchester City supporter, and he's buried a few yards from Sir Matt Busby, the legendary Manchester United manager. Rivals across the city for their entire working lives, neighbours in the end.

The painter who got there first

Two decades before any of them arrived, L.S. Lowry was buried in the same cemetery, with his parents, in 1976. Lowry spent his career painting Manchester's and Salford's industrial streets and crowds in a style that was, for a long time, dismissed as too plain by the art establishment he was ignored by for most of his working life. He was documenting the same city Wilson, Hannett, and Gretton would later document, just decades earlier, and in paint instead of vinyl.

Why he chose to be there

Here's the detail that actually explains the other three: Wilson didn't end up in Southern Cemetery by accident. He chose it, specifically, because Gretton and Hannett were already there. Whatever tensions existed between them while they were alive, and there were plenty, he wanted to be buried near them anyway.

The favourite band nobody guesses

One more thing, unrelated to the cemetery, that's stuck with me since researching this. When Wilson was asked, later in life, which Factory band he loved most, he didn't say Joy Division or New Order. He said Stockholm Monsters, a much smaller, largely forgotten group he admitted he hadn't fully understood the importance of at the time. He said he still loved them anyway, guitar theft and all.

It's a small thing, but it fits everything else here. The legend of Tony Wilson is Joy Division, New Order, the Haçienda, Steve Coogan in a leather jacket. The real answer, when you actually ask him, was something smaller and less obvious. Same as the cemetery. Same as the headstone that doesn't quote him at all.