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Factory design rationale, the pick of the crop: “Does
the Catholic Church pour its wine into mouldy earthenware
pots? I think not.” How can one not love this man
(other than by meeting him perhaps)?
However, Wilson’s got a gimlet eye for the design
success of the Happy Mondays album Bummed, writing
about its controversial inside sleeve: “It wasn’t the fact
that the woman was middle-aged, it wasn’t the shaved
pubes, it was the colour quality which made the viewer
feel dirty. Sheer genius, that.”
The Durutti Column album The Return of the Durutti
Column (1979) designed by Dave Rowbotham is composed
entirely of sandpaper and was inspired by the
Situationist Guy Debord’s Memoires, “a book bound
in raw sandpaper designed to damage all other publications
around it” – perfect for punk.
Of course, Factory didn’t just operate in two dimensions
– as Tony Wilson might have said – there was Ben
Kelly’s Hacienda nightclub, for a while the most famous
club in the world, with its chevrons, bollards and cats
eyes – a kind of theatrical industrial space, which included
the Gay Traitor bar, with its spot lights and furtive air
of treachery. (Saville said astutely that “Instead of being
a monument to the 80s, the Hacienda is the birthplace of
the 90s”.) Then there was Factory HQ on Charles Street,
a disused textile warehouse (since the 70s they had operated
from Alan Erasmus’s one-bed flat) – “a mausoleum
to the corporate brand that the label could never be”, plus
the Dry bar, a continental-style bar, one of the first of its
kind in England, all in Manchester.
There’s even info here that’s new to a Factory nut like
me (and I made sure my son’s initial allowed me to have
a FAC family code, though perhaps that’s a retrospective
justification), such as the f-hole logo which I’d always
taken to be f for Factory but it’s actually f for Fractured
Music, Joy Division’s company (fascinating eh?). Also
that there was a cigarette pack design for the Joy Division
video Here Are The Young Men, got up like 20 John
Player Special’s – I want to trade my VHS copy now!
There’s even plenty to drool over in corporate terms
such as the stationery and the Factory Christmas cards,
especially the one from 1987 designed by Johnson Panas
(they were of course commissioned and absurdly lavish),
a cardboard model kit of the Hacienda.
While Saville continued his “grand tour for the masses”,
with the New Order covers taking in De Chirico for
‘Thieves Like Us’, Futurist Fortunato Depero’s Dynamo
(1927) for Procession (1981) and appropriating Jan
Tschichold typography, there is a sense of a dead end.
Luckily, the Happy Mondays covers rescued Saville’s
anally retentive control freakery and let rip: they were
garish, often unreadable and trippy. Happy Mondays’
‘Lazyitis’ single by Central Station Design looks as if
they can’t be bothered, which is perfect of course, the
bloated lettering slurring its way across the sleeve – you
half expect the cover to belch in your face. �
BUY Matthew Robertson books online from and
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