Paperjam

24 Hour Party People by Tony Wilson

Literature // Jim // 17th May 2003

I’ve always thought Tony Wilson got a bit of a hard time, certainly I remember him being a bit of a smug bloke who acted like he invented punk. He seemed alright though, an interesting bloke who happened to be involved with legends like Joy Division and the Happy Mondays through his half arsed record company, Factory.

I personally traipsed through large chunks of the nineties in a shitty Factory t-shirt and count Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches as one of my favourite albums so when I saw this book sitting in Fopp priced at a paltry £3 I thought I would give it a whirl.
Having already watched the excellent film (of which it turns out this is the novelisation) and read more NME articles over the last 15 years than is probably safe, I was already aware of a lot of the stuff that goes on in the Factory records story. What I wasn’t ready for was just what a complete twat Tony Wilson actually appears to be.

As an author who constantly reminds us of just how clever and well read he is, Tony has a lot to learn about how to write a book that doesn’t make the reader want to burn it. It is almost impossible to convey just how far up its own arse this book is, but lets have a go anyway:
-Talking about yourself in the third person isn’t clever or hard, exhibit 1: Lennox Lewis.
-Boasting about your jailbait wife is best done in the pub, not in print.
-Moaning about “Fucking Students” while dropping in painful, elitist references to a Cambridge University education ON EVERY SINGLE PAGE OF THIS SODDING BOOK is a bit annoying.

Admittedly there are a few interesting snippets about Factory and the ill-fated, overrated Hacienda nightclub, no event is related without Wilson smearing himself and his irritating hypocrisies all over the place. It really is a struggle to get through this, even before you see the pictures showing Wilson and his kids beaming out from the Man Utd trophy room captioned by some trite comment about winning the treble.

At this point you start to realise that Mr Wilson is very similar to another man you may have come across; Smug, condescending, hypocritical and bandwagon jumping - his name is Tony as well.

The best thing about this book is the fact that you don’t have to read it, watch the film instead.