Lindsay Reade was once Lindsay Wilson, long suffering wife of Tony Wilson, Manchester man about town, Granada TV presenter and founder of Factory Records and its offshoot, the Hacienda club. Ambitious yet raised in a traditional household where wives shopped, cooked and cleaned, she certainly found life with Tony “challenging”, nowadays the preferred euphemism for difficult.
The challenge was Tony’s relentless energy which left her neglected and alone, and it forms the basis of this, her second, and quite lovely, book about the marriage, a follow-up to Mr Manchester and The Factory Girl: The Story of Tony and Lindsay Wilson in 2010. It differs from the first in that it tells the story of their see-saw relationship through letters, mostly from him to her, and it’s certainly brave of Lindsay to expose her innermost feelings to this kind of scrutiny. Tony believed in honesty, however, and if nothing else, Lindsay’s book is scrupulously honest, so much so that in part it has the feel of a novel, fact as fiction.
It’s also well-written, not just by her but also by Tony, who died from cancer in 2007, by which time he and Lindsay had long since reconciled. Well read, he was a regular, loquacious and literate correspondent, sprinkling his lengthy letters, most of them typed and reproduced as facsimiles in this book, with lines from Shakespeare, Proust, Yeats and modern lyricists, Latin quotations and even philosophy gleaned from books about Ancient Greek warriors. It’s left to Lindsay to analyse them, which she does in hindsight with remarkable clarity and candour, explaining how the various references allude to aspects of their life, both together and apart, and interactions with friends, lovers and Factory colleagues. It’s like looking through the keyhole at a disintegrating marriage, the sort of thing kitchen-sink playwrights like John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe or Shelagh Delaney might have used for research material.
Running parallel to the marriage are the fortunes of Factory Records and the acts on the label, most notably Joy Division, whose singer Ian Curtis was the subject of Torn Apart, the book Lindsay co-wrote with Mick Middles, commissioned and edited by myself and published by Omnibus Press in 2006. I went up to Manchester to meet with her and Middles, their original intention to write a book about Factory Records, but over dinner I persuaded them to drop this idea and concentrate instead on Curtis, Factory’s most charismatic performer, which I’m happy to say worked out to everyone’s satisfaction.
But I digress. Married in 1977, wedded bliss somehow eludes Lindsay and Tony, and within a couple of years both are unfaithful, on her part (initially with Howard Devoto) as a form of revenge, not only for Tony’s own tomcat impulses but also as a response to the boys’ club culture at Factory where women are excluded from decision making, which righteously vexes her. So does Tony’s laissez-faire attitude towards punctuality and bookkeeping, with the result that the portrait Lindsay paints of him is that of a loveable rogue, attractive and erudite but irresponsibly consumed by restlessness and his sense of self-importance. “He was an easy man to love but a hard man to stay in love with,” she writes.
All of which makes for a compelling read, especially as the relationship lingers on after they separate. Tony doesn’t seem to want to let Lindsay go, so he keeps on writing letters to her, even from China where he holidays in 1981, leaving her to muse despondently on his intentions. Though they live apart, this prolongation occupies the central part of the book, leading to a sort of will-they-won’t-they tension, this despite copious references to Tony’s next wife, Hilary Sherlock, with whom he had two children, and, following her, the former Miss UK Yvette Livesey, with whom he spent the final years 17 years of his life.
We also learn that Lindsay naively signed away any rights she may have had in Factory which, as she points out, was launched with funds that were held jointly. Neither are acquisitive, however, and money is frittered away by everyone involved to everyone’s ultimate detriment. Only after the Hacienda takes off do Tony’s fortunes soar and by this time Lindsay has gone, not just from Tony’s life but also from Factory, where she was briefly employed looking after foreign rights before her abrupt dismissal for what she rightly regards as confected crimes.
But this isn’t a book about money or even Factory, it’s about love, a love that endured despite everything that was thrown at it, from Tony’s occasionally appalling behaviour to what Lindsay now regards as her immature reaction to this. It’s somehow comforting that in the closing chapters Lindsay reveals their secret trysts on trips to America and, at the close, the nights she spent by Tony’s deathbed. “I stayed with him every weekend in the three months of his illness but she [Yvette] never knew this,” she writes. And later: “I bear much guilt for the failure of our marriage. After all, I was the volatile one who finally walked away from it, the one who broke it up. Tony really meant it to be for life, as evidenced by his letters… He might have been a self-confessed twat, he might have treated me appallingly many times, punishing me severely for my offences, but there it is. He really was the nice boy his mum wanted him to be, he just went astray, as we all do in one way or another.”
A Continual Farewell is beautifully produced and illustrated throughout, not just with their typed and handwritten letters but with photographs, many of them from Lindsay’s archive. It has 350 pages and costs £25.00, 18.39 on Amazon.
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