Tony Wilson; NME 31 May 1986 (photo: A.J. Barratt).

Tony Wilson, co-founder of Factory Records and the Haçienda nightclub, TV presenter (who gave the Sex Pistols their first television appearance) and Manchester hero, died on Friday after a long battle with cancer. RIP.

Paul Morley in The Guardian:

Tony Wilson was furious when I left his beautiful north back in the late 1970 for a new life down south.

He felt this was a terrible betrayal of my responsibility to Manchester, a city he had definite plans for. He wanted to connect where the city was going with where it had been, with its radical, pioneering industrial past.

He wanted to work out how the 19th century visit to the city by Friedrich Engels led to the 1976 visits of the Sex Pistols. And his absurd, splendid solution, Factory Records, including the Hacienda nightclub, became an emblem of the city’s belief in progress.

Factory became the great Manchester label; it had Joy Division and Happy Mondays – but mostly it celebrated provocative northern imagination.

He was convinced I was the writer to chronicle the changes he knew would happen; he wanted me where he could see me. I left; it took years for him to forgive me. Eventually I accepted that his surreal mission to remake Manchester was not madness, and I have taken on the role he saw for me. I think he always knew I would.

We used to make fun of Wilson and the mantle of grandeur he often assumed, but we knew that in his idiosyncratic and subversive way he was a great and important figure. Good things happened because he was around. This flamboyant, infuriating, pushy hybrid of light entertainer and anarchic Situationist was so in love with life, with music, with ideas, that he infected you with his passion.

No matter how far from Manchester, you couldn’t escape his plans for a better, brighter and definitely stranger north.