FAC 101 Tony Wilson's Lofts is a memorable undone Factory Records concept from the pioneering early days of the Eighties. He drew on his experience of New York City to try to convince the authorities in Manchester that they would be a viable proposition but they didn't buy it.

AHW explained thus: "We were visionary in that sense, that lofts would come one day. But we ran out of money - we were too busy with clubs and bars. We tried to explain lofts to people in Manchester and nobody understood it. We actually walked the Manchester Development corporation around a building in Sackville Street, which became lofts ten years later, and said 'These would make great lofts' and they went 'What are lofts?'"

It was thought that was nothing in writing in the public domain to document this FAC number. Well that was true until the discovery in amongst AHW's personal archive papers in the collection of the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) of a briefing paper from a chap called 'Ken' (more info needed on who this is) where he sets out "a few initial notes for FAC 101" and includes a generic schematic of a typical loft.



Ken sets out the basic principle of what lofts are and concludes: "The development of the loft conversion is obviously in its initial stages in this country and will require a good deal of commitment on the part of local government and developers if it is to become a reality."

Eventually the commitment would come to light and now loft-type apartments are everywhere and not just in Manchester.

The full transcript of the 101 notes is on our sister site factoryrecords.org.

Labels: back_in_the_cellar, concept, Manchester, MSI, Tony_Wilson

It's definitely not been a "No Factory" zone during Cerysmatic's 2-year hiatus which has just been broken. Just to prove it's definitely not all about designing web pages and doing blogposts, I was intrigued to get the call from the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester in late 2015 about a huge number of tapes in their collection that they would no longer be able to store due to cost and space restraints.

The tapes used to belong to Tony Wilson and represent his personal collection of audio and video from the Factory estate in a remarkable number of formats ranging from compact cassette to compact disc, VHS to Betacam and just about every type of studio audio master tape known to man. There were approximately 20 boxes which filled (with Colin Torr's help) a large car and subsequently a large portion of my storage unit.

I agreed to take the tapes with the proviso that I would return them to their rightful owners. However, some tapes went directly back to owner without leaving Manchester. In particular, Richard from Space Monkeys collected his direct from MSI and I took a couple of boxes to Bruce Mitchell's Manchester Light and Stage depot in Ardwick.

The Space Monkeys stuff included apparently the only known copy of 'Splinters' E.P recorded at Suite 16 Studios in Rochdale in February 1996 and two Hi8 videos of the first ever London gig at the Dublin Castle in March 1996 which were filmed by Tony Wilson on his camcorder.

The Durutti Column selection was quite varied and highlights included hefty video masters of When The World and Domo Arigato (U-matic), Last Kiss Remix c.1998, "Data DAT for Durutti" c.1998, Abbey Road audio masters for Valuable Passages, and so on. Hopefully some of it will see the light of day although FBN has already just re-released Domo so maybe not that one.



Masters to Rachel from Hopper and DATs to The Wendys and Khalique soon followed and I returned several masters to Gary Newby of The Railway Children when they played the 100 Club last November.

I will soon be returning a hefty box of Section 25, Cath Carroll and more to James Nice @ FBN/LDDC/LTM and then there's the A Certain Ratio, Happy Mondays, Fadela, The Distractions.

And then there's the Greif but that's another story...

See also: The Master Tapes (a story from 2008)

Labels: back_in_the_cellar, MSI, tape_archive, Tony_Wilson

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