Legendary figure of the Manchester music scene, Tony Wilson has died, aged 57. He passed away on Friday (10th Aug) after suffering a heart attack in Manchester’s Christie Hospital.

Wilson had also been battling with kidney cancer. His doctor at Christie, Professor Robert Hawkins told the Manchester Evening News, “It’s very sad. He died as a result of something unrelated to his cancer. His cancer was responding well to treatment but obviously did contribute to his poor health.”

Beginning his media career in 1975, Wilson joined Granada TV as a news reporter. This eventually led to his own music show, So It Goes, on which he booked the Sex Pistols for their first television performance, having been one of around 40 people (including future members of Joy Division, The Buzzcocks and The Smiths) to see the band play at The Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester.

In 1978, he began hosting the Factory club night, showcasing new local bands. Soon afterward, he also launched the Factory record label with designer Peter Saville, producer Martin Hannett and managers Alan Erasmus and Rob Gretton. Their first signing was Joy Division, whose contract, famously written in Wilson’s blood on a napkin, read, “The label owns nothing, the band owns everything and the band is free to fuck off whenever they like.”

It was this simple, almost flippant gesture that summed up all of Wilson’s later successes and failures. Vehemently against treating music as a commodity, he allowed all Factory artists 100% creative freedom and never had contracts with any.

After Joy Division’s vocalist Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980, the band became New Order and with Wilson opened a new nightclub, The Haçienda. The club became a beacon for music fans nationwide, becoming best known in the mid-80’s for importing new dance music from New York and Detroit.

Factory collapsed in 1992 with debts of £2m caused by overspending on the recording of albums by The Happy Mondays (Yes Please) and New Order (Republic) and the artwork for the label’s most successful release, New Order’s Blue Monday, which cost so much to print that the company lost money each time a copy was sold.

The Haçienda followed suit in 1997, wracked by drugs and crime. It was demolished to make way for luxury flats.

A semi-fictionalised film chronicling the rise and fall of Factory, directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson, was released 2002. Entitled 24hr Party People, after a song by the Happy Mondays, promotional posters billed Wilson as a “twat”, much to his delight.

Subsequently, Wilson dabbled in regional politics and continued to work as a broadcaster and journalist in various capacities, including hosting radio shows on BBC Manchester and XFM Manchester. He also founded the In The City festival and music conference, Britain’s answer to the SXSW festival in Texas, and attempted a number of times to reignite Factory records, most recently with F4 Records, which released music by Vini Reilly and The Young Offenders Institute.