Fanzine
A Certain Ratio, Joy Division
New Hormones, Newton Buildings, 55 Newton Street
4th April 1980

“This relates to an incident discussed in the Factory book Shadowplayers by James Nice. The previous teasing of Factory as ‘Fat Tory Records’ flares up into a full-blown editorial rant by Liz Naylor and Martin X after Factory removed City Fun from its mailing list and Tony Wilson wrote in to accuse them of “third rate journalism”. The cause? Factory had put on a benefit gig for the paper, and City Fun had dared to criticise A Certain Ratio and Section 25 in its subsequent review. Nice describes this as “recklessly ungrateful”, but he also quotes Naylor, who was still a teenager at the time, saying “I was really intimidated by Tony, he was an older person who’d been to Cambridge, and quite controlling...the way they dominated the city felt very elitist.” Like City Fun’s description of The Fall as “intellectualism for anti-intellectuals”, we can see here another example of those tensions of class and education in post-punk, and another instance of its anti-elitism. “If you think,” Liz fulminates, “that because someone hasn’t got a good job, hasn’t been educated up to the eyeballs, isn’t in a band, or in the public eye...if you think FOR ONE MINUTE that such a person’s opinion isn’t as important as that of the exalted beings of the media, or you would deny them the right to voice that opinion, then you’re making the biggest mistake that any one CAN make, becoming a fool and a FACIST [sic].” I can’t help sympathising, even if Wilson wasn’t quite a ‘facist’!”