Contributors:
Andy Zero, Mike Stanley, Dave Thing, Neil H., Matthew Prow, Andy Mitchelson, Guees Who, 'Shoola Archer'
Address: c/o New Hormones, 55 Newton Street, Manchester
David Wilkinson SAYS -
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’!
First mention of The Beach Club, a night set up by Richard Boon and other New Hormones/City Fun associates at Oozits, a seedy, collapsing gay bar with foul bogs in Shudehill that Liz Naylor described as “like The Killing of Sister George”. Its style (obscure film showings, New Order gigs) and the Situationist origins of its name would later be borrowed by Factory for the Hacienda. Indeed Richard Boon intended The Beach Club to fill the gap left when Factory’s original night at the PSV club in Hulme ended, thus there’s a nice continuity there; proof that the two camps weren’t always squabbling. The continuity goes back even further, according to CP Lee – he told journalist Justin Toland that “I remember thinking, Richard’s doing what we used to do in the 1960s – put a band on with a film showing at the same time; dancers; just weird shit. It was great!”
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