And in the end, the whole event was about the attendees, as a few hundred creatives from all over the UK and some further afield applied and were accepted to come and be part of the happening, schmoozing, promoting themselves and artistically blagging in the name of Tony Wilson, Factory, The Hacienda and what Saville put as earlier that ephemeral “something to believe in”.
So here, in the manner of the event, Clash Music entertains writers culled from the guests of the Wilsonian Experience – take it away lads and lasses.
Julie Edwards, Tony Wilson Experience attendee
We were a couple of hundred Charlies, with lucky golden tickets, entering the inner-sanctum of Factory, and for the next 24 hours we inhabited a marquee next to Urbis in Cathedral Gardens for some 24-carat conversation. Like it or not, we were all now situationists’ “engaging in the construction of a situation” – The Tony Wilson Experience. Something was definitely up – fortunately it wasn’t the marquee, because the howling winds on Sunday morning had me a bit worried!
By mid-morning Sunday, as the Manchester Cathedral bells rang and Mike Garry delivered his Saint Anthony poem, I had goosebumps, but not because of cold weather. I hoped the marquee wouldn’t blow away like Dorothy’s house because, really, there’s no place like home.
‘Reification – making the Abstract Concrete’ was the first tagline for the event; it headed the programme notes, and was very Tony Wilson in that I had to look up the word in my dictionary. The Tony Wilson Experience was about creating a ‘happening’, a dynamic meeting of minds to enrich primarily the soul rather than the bank balance; to ‘inspire and advise the next generation of cultural innovators in the city… to create connections…” Very altruistic – but it actually did happen, I was there. Big names, from Steve Coogan to Irvine Welsh, gave their advice, opinions and anecdotes free to all-comers.
The spirit was very much that of Factory, in that it was deliberately experimental and ‘live – anything could and might happen. For 24 hours we were, empoweringly called ‘the talent’. The ‘gurus’ or ‘experts’ – ‘the stars’– did come out, all with individual reasons to be be there, most often with a genuine need to pay tribute to a man who helped them realise their own talent in some way. Inevitably, and wonderfully, Tony H Wilson personal anecdotes peppered the conversation from start to finish.
And therein lies the magic of Tony Wilson – he shared his World Class abilities; he shared his insight, for what he believed to be the betterment of society – in particular Mancunian society; he found wonder in helping talented people find their voice, and lent that philosophy to everyone. As Steve Coogan said ‘he injected the bright lights of possibility into a gloomy landscape’.
Luke Frost, Tony Wilson Experience Attendee
To call something an Experience gives it a lot to live up to. Make it a legacy to one of Manchester’s much-loved sons and it suddenly has the anticipation of a city on its shoulders.
Bringing together icons from every aspect of the creative world in a 24 hour marathon debate, the Tony Wilson Experience was devised to give advice, support and inspiration to a selected audience of the regions young creative talent in memory of a man who did more for that talent than any other.
The anticipation was immense and by midday when actor Steve Coogan and designer Peter Saville took to the stage, the specially designed tent in the Urbis gardens was buzzing. The event did commence as some kind of celebrity seminar with the unplanned approach clearly leaving audience and guests unsure of what to say or do.
However, as the neatly formed rows disbanded and the quiet crowd of ‘talent’ grabbed the microphones and challenged the ‘experienced’ speakers with thought-provoking questions, the event became what it was always destined to be and you just knew that Tony would approve.
You only have to see a tent full of people in riotous debate over the future of photography at 4am then still have enough energy to grill the leader of the council at 7am the next morning to know why Tony could never leave this place.
As I enthusiastically entered the tent on that damp Saturday morning there was one thing (apart from what we were actually going to do all night) that baffled me: the theme. Reification. Apparently it means making the abstract solid. Although sounding like an overly-academic theme for a city that prides itself on being down to earth, as I left 24 hours later with red-eyes and a bulging mind I understood. Making the abstract solid. What I had witnessed, and what Manchester was the first city to ever achieve was to give a solid living breathing tangible reproductive legacy to the man who deserved it most.
