I received this package in today’s mail. Except it’s not really a package; it’s a glow stick shoved into a 1st Class Royal Mail prepaid letter envelope and mailed (awkwardly) from Manchester to Los Angeles. It’s a miracle that it arrived in one piece.

The glow stick is supposed to promote Tony Wilson’s In the City conference, coming up again this October.

What an outrageous and probably futile gesture, poorly executed (where are the padded mailers?) with absolutely no concern for what things actually cost. Yet it’s totally awesome and extremely punk rock.

That could be the epitaph for both Factory Records and the Haçienda night club. When word came that Tony Wilson had died this evening in Manchester, I thought today’s package could serve as an epitaph for him as well.

Tony wanted everyone to believe that Peter Saville’s original die-cut sleeve design for New Order’s “Blue Monday” 12″ was so expensive to produce that Factory actually lost money on each copy sold.

Whether it was true was irrelevant, the story made a point: art trumps commerce and business is just another venue for situationist spectacle. We should be so lucky that it were.

Here’s an interview from 1988:

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Business, UK, 80s. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.