Tony Wilson

“In the '80s, we played the Roxy and the Whiskey with our bands.”

“Even though the hero of emo is Morrissey, the great song of emo is 'Love Will Tear Us Apart.' An emo soundtrack would introduce Joy Division's music to a whole new generation.”

“I don't mind the fact that people hate me. Nobody likes anyone who's been on the telly as long as I have.”

“I am not a piece of hash. I'm in charge of Factory Records. I think.”

“I had the virtue of wanting to hang out with people who were more talented than me. I can't write songs, I can't perform, I can't design clubs, but I was an enthusiast. My gift was that I said yes to everybody.”

“The special relationship between the region and a regional celebrity means that people feel that they have a special investment in you.”

“I've been a minor celebrity since I was 23 years old.”

“We had a heroic attitude to artistic freedom, and we thought normal contracts were a bit vulgar - somehow not punk. But that was the whole point - we weren't a regular record label.”

“Energy, energy? Energy is, is, it's nothing more than a lot of new age hokum masquerading as religion.”

“Every band needs it's own special chemistry. And Bez was a very good chemist.”

“It's hard to describe how bloody awful music was, how desperately bad it was, how our 1960s heroes had become boring and useless. Not only were they bad - they were badly dressed.”

“You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.”

“Factory Records would not have existed and my life would not have been what it was without Joy Division.”

“Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.”

“Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening."Where's the cloakroom?""The what?""The cloakroom, the fucking cloakroom.""What's your problem?""We don't have a cloakroom. We have special polished South African granite bar tops that we haven't told Erasmus about 'cause he has a thing about apartheid, we have a balcony balustrade made of shaped QE-fucking-2 mahogany, but we seem to have built an entire club without a cloakroom.""Fuck."Hence you did not pass the games room but the cloakroom, the only cloakroom in the Manchester with forty-two power points. if you ever wanted to do a bit of ironing, these people were there for you.”

“I am very much an only child, meaning I am self-reliant, egocentric, sociable. I had my mother, father, and an uncle who lived with us, all doting on me.”

“There is no celebrity quite as powerful as the local, homegrown celebrity.”

“I have this problem that I just like to get a reaction from people.”

“My public image is none of my business.”

“I hate English kids rapping - complete crap.”