FAC 15: The £2 Festival Where Manchester Met Liverpool

27 AUGUST 1979: ZOO MEETS FACTORY HALF-WAY

Joy Division. Echo & the Bunnymen. The Teardrop Explodes. OMD. A Certain Ratio.

Admission: £2.

The idea started with a phone call

On the August Bank Holiday Monday of 1979, the 27th, Factory Records and Liverpool's Zoo Records put on a joint festival in a field off Plank Lane in Leigh, Lancashire, billed as Zoo Meets Factory Half-Way. The idea started with a phone call from Tony Wilson to Bill Drummond: the two labels had emerged within months of each other, and Drummond later remembered a friendly rivalry between them that mirrored the considerably less friendly rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool. Leigh sat roughly halfway between the two cities, which made the location less a compromise than a statement. The event and its poster were catalogued as FAC 15. Factory discographies credit the poster to Peter Saville, though surviving archive material also attributes the layout to Tony Wilson, working after Saville's design. The tagline read: "Zoo records and Factory records bring you the flesh that brought you the vinyl." Around 300 posters were printed.

Who played

The Monday bill mixed both labels' sharpest young bands: Joy Division, A Certain Ratio, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, OMD, Elti-Fits, Crawling Chaos, Lori and the Chameleons, The Distractions and X-O-Dus. Admission was £2, first band on at 1pm. The surviving running order had A Certain Ratio, Echo & the Bunnymen, OMD, The Teardrop Explodes and Joy Division closing at 9 pm. Kevin Cummins photographed Joy Division there, Ian Curtis and Peter Hook, less than a year before Curtis's death: some of the more quietly loaded images in the Factory archive, precisely because nothing about that afternoon looked historic at the time.

Two cities, one afternoon. A field, not a festival site

Nothing about the setting matched the bill. The festival took place at Plank Lane in Leigh, awkward enough to reach that the poster told people to “use your wits or use the bus,” listing the No. 26 from Manchester Victoria and the No. 39 from Liverpool. Jon Savage reported a crowd of around 200, against an expected 2,000, while Bill Drummond later remembered perhaps 300 to 350. Either way, almost nobody came to see a bill that now reads like a snapshot of some of the most important British independent music of the next five years.

Photo: Kevin Cummins

Manchester and Liverpool

Manchester and Liverpool’s music histories are often told as separate stories, even though the two scenes repeatedly overlapped. That relationship is something I’ve explored in the Greater Manchester Music History Map, the Liverpool & Merseyside Music History Map and the Factory Records print, each tracing a different part of that wider northern music history. Zoo Meets Factory Half-Way is one of the most literal points where those stories converged: Manchester and Liverpool’s emerging post-punk scenes gathered on the same patch of ground between the two cities. I’ve also brought the three works together in the Manchester Meets Liverpool collection.