“We do things differently here”: the long afterlife of 24 Hour Party People and its modern myth of Manchester

To a pious crowd, the Mancunian poet Mike Garry calls out as he crosses the floor of a cinema in Salford: “Saint Anthony! Saint Anthony! Please come around. Something is lost that can’t be found.” His voice dips out of amplification. “Like a microphone…” says Garry to the chuckling audience. Continuing acoustically, his poem ‘St Anthony’ recounts Manchester’s iconography, from Alan Turing, acid house and Alexandra Park to the Buzzcocks, Ian Curtis and the Christie charity. The first stanza gives way to a proclamation: “Talk to me of all these things and one thing is for certain” — pulling off his jumper to reveal a red T-shirt featuring a portrait of his patron — “I’ll see the face, I’ll hear the voice of Anthony H. Wilson.”

‘St Anthony’ is both an encyclopaedia of Manchester and a eulogy to Tony Wilson, the co-founder and storyteller of Factory Records, who died in 2007, aged 57. The tribute opened this year’s Beyond the Music festival in Salford’s MediaCity, setting the stage for a screening celebrating the 24th anniversary of 24 Hour Party People (2002). Michael Winterbottom’s black-comedy biopic traces Factory Records’ rise from a club night in Hulme to the home of Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays, and on to operating the Haçienda, the nightclub that helped define Manchester’s late-1980s explosion of rave culture and the Madchester scene.

The film arrived only a few years after the events it depicts, yet its version of Manchester has proven remarkably enduring. In offering an origin story for the city’s modern cultural identity, 24 Hour Party People has become part of the history it mythologises. Propulsively edited, and guided by Steve Coogan’s singular performance as Tony Wilson, it moves through pivotal figures, places and moments, blending historical recreation with archival footage and deliberate embellishment. The film announces its intentions early with its recreation of the Sex Pistols’ 4 June 1976 gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, cutting between real footage and dramatisation as Wilson addresses the audience directly, explaining the event’s significance and the future importance of those present, not least himself.

“The key to it was that Michael’s approach to the film was the same as Tony’s approach to Factory Records,” Coogan said, during a Beyond the Music keynote alongside Winterbottom and producer Andrew Eaton. “The chaos of real creativity was captured in the making of the film, because it didn’t follow normal lines.”

Winterbottom agreed that the film sought to embody the “spirit of Factory”. “Tony was a huge champion of Manchester and of all the people he worked with. He was always saying how brilliant everyone was, what a genius everyone was. He let people get on with it. That sense of freedom was what we tried to capture.”

For Winterbottom and Eaton, the attraction was the chance to make something playful and close to home after the rigours of the Canadian shoot of their frontier drama The Claim (2000). Working often improvisationally, and rarely filming for more than eight hours a day, they immersed themselves in Manchester’s musical history, even rebuilding the interior of the Haçienda after it was demolished two weeks into production. Coogan says it remains the only film where he cannot separate memories of making it from memories of the fun surrounding it.

“Talk to me of Warsaw, drug wars and trendy flats within warehouses,” continues Garry’s poem. “But when it comes to footy Tony, don’t talk to me about the Scousers.” Yet Liverpool is vital to understanding 24 Hour Party People’s version of Manchester. Its defining line, “This is Manchester, we do things differently here”, frequently invoked by Andy Burnham, was not written by Wilson but by the film’s Liverpudlian screenwriter, Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

The fact is revealing. One of the film’s strengths is its candour about its own myth-making. Wilson’s son Oli, music promoter, social enterprise founder and director of Beyond the Music, laughs at how thoroughly the film’s inventions have entered popular memory. “It has come to the point where the quotes in 24 Hour Party People are the de-facto quotes [for Manchester]. If you look up Tony Wilson quotes, it’s all Frank Cottrell-Boyce,” he says. “What gave it authenticity was that he’s from the north. He understands northern humour and he understands Manchester. A lot of the magic was Frank’s writing.”

Another line frequently attached to Wilson, though borrowed from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), is: “When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend.” The sentiment feels increasingly apt as 24 Hour Party People’s version of events has become part of Manchester’s accepted history.

George Francis Lee is a journalist and co-founder of STAT, a magazine which critiques Manchester’s dominance within narratives of northern culture while championing the creativity of England’s wider north-west. He admires the film precisely because it never pretends to be definitive history. “It knowingly indulges in yarn-spinning and never sells itself as a historical document,” he says. “I was shocked that some people seem to refer to it as a bog-standard biopic. There are those who watched it and thought, ‘This would make a great thing to market the city on, wouldn’t it?’”

For Lee, the irony is that Manchester has embraced stories of creative rebellion while making them harder to repeat. “Music scenes are very rarely clean storylines. There’s a lot of ahistorical, retroactive narrativising, and Manchester has been shaped by that. Manchester prides itself on these stories but has removed the [economic] conditions to make those stories happen again today.”

Fundamentally, Lee admires Coogan’s portrayal of Wilson, which humanises both the person and belief he had in his hometown. “He’s just this guy. A lot of ideas didn’t really work. The culmination of his ideas left an impact.”

At its core, Lee argues, the film expresses a belief shared by many artists and cultural workers outside London: “We are worth listening to. There are things of note here.” Wilson’s gift, he suggests, was not simply in creating stories but in recognising them first.

At Beyond the Music, Coogan described Wilson as the “headteacher of a school of creative people”, someone who used his influence to facilitate opportunities for others. “He tapped into a generation of people who were exposed to literature and art. Most of the artists he promoted were working class and had artistic aspiration. That’s quite a defining feature of the north and, in particular, Manchester. He understood that.” 

Winterbottom’s first and only choice for the role, Coogan captures Wilson’s mixture of eloquence, enthusiasm and occasional absurdity – a large part of the reason the film remains so watchable. “My approach to acting is do the voice, put the clothes on, look in the mirror and think, ‘I’ll do that then,’” he said. “Tony had a physicality in his gestures, the way he spoke. It was slightly mannered but easy to embody. He enjoyed expostulating about things, but he meant it.”

Oli sees little distance between the character and the man himself. Whether discussing Manchester’s industrial heritage, a line of poetry or somebody else’s personal dilemma, his father approached life with the same curiosity and conviction. “He effused passion for Manchester and the world in general. He found life to be infinitely fascinating. Every street corner, every road and alleyway had a story attached to it. He would always be quoting lines from poems or plays. You’d be going through something in your life and he’d be able to sum it up in a sentence. It was great fun having him as a dad.”

If the portrayal appears outlandish, Oli insists it encapsulates how his father really was. “He was halfway between a poet and a philosopher, which I think drove people up the wall but was also one of the reasons people loved him. You might think that because Steve took it from a comedic perspective it would lose some of its authenticity, but it got him very well.”

In keeping with Factory’s co-operative ethos, 24 Hour Party People spreads the humour around. Paddy Considine is dryly hilarious as Rob Gretton, the label co-director and manager of Joy Division and New Order, while Lennie James’s Alan Erasmus – actor and Factory co-founder – provides a straight-faced counterweight to Wilson’s endless philosophising, even if Cottrell-Boyce has since reflected that the real Erasmus deserved greater prominence.

The film’s account of Factory’s naming neatly punctures the aura that later accumulated around the label. When Wilson enthuses that ‘Factory’ sounds “a bit Andy Warhol”, his wife Lindsay (Shirley Henderson) counters: “A bit L.S. Lowry.” Erasmus shrugs off both interpretations. “I just saw a sign on the wall that said ‘Factory closing’, so I thought we can have one going ‘Factory opening’ and reverse the trend.”

Andy Serkis steals scenes as producer Martin Hannett, introduced recording ambient sound on a Peak District hillside. “You’re recording silence?” asks Wilson. “Well, now I’m recording Tony fucking Wilson,” Hannett replies. Later, during the making of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, he hears a rattle and responds by ordering drummer Stephen Morris to dismantle his kit, rebuild it on a studio roof and continue playing until further notice.

“I never played the drums on the roof. I have a fear of heights and I don’t like the cold,” says Morris. For years it was the question he was asked most often about the film. Hannett’s obsessiveness, however, rang true. “He’d have me destroy a brand new drum kit, taking every spring out of it and replacing it with kitchen roll. It was completely untuneable after that.”

Reflecting recently on the mythology that has grown around Joy Division, Morris admitted he often struggles to recognise popular depictions of the band, particularly those of Ian Curtis. “The only way I can take 24 Hour Party People seriously is that it’s a film about somebody else,” he says. “It’s not a criticism. They’re just caricatures of reality. It all goes back to Tony’s ‘print the myth’ thing.”

That playful relationship with reality runs throughout the film. Its cameos and in-jokes give it a Where’s Wally? quality for devoted music fans while constantly reminding viewers that what they are watching is as much performance as history. One of the sharpest examples of collapsing the distance between the real and the fictionalised sees Mark E. Smith briefly appear as Mark E. Smith, 20 years out of time in the the Haçienda’s queue, in a friendly exchange with Wilson and, equally, the audience.

Oli Wilson spent much of his childhood around music venues, recording studios, Granada Television, the Factory Records office, and also the set of Winterbottom’s film. He remembers Manchester embracing the production as it took over large parts of the city. Such a feat would be harder to pull off today, he says, in a city transformed by redevelopment and investment. In that context, he believes the film and Factory’s legacy have acquired renewed relevance.

“I think our socialist roots and our artistic roots grow more important,” he says. “It’s important we’re always on the forward foot but not to forget some of the brilliant places we’ve come from. We’re going to need to find our foundations once again. I think the city of Manchester can do that with the film. It’s a powerful, beautiful tool in terms of finding our way forwards.”

Coogan suspects Wilson would have had mixed feelings about a 24th-anniversary celebration. “He would probably take a bit of a dim view of all this self-congratulatory back-patting that we’re doing. Although he’d secretly like it as well. But he was always looking forward. ‘What’s next? Be creative. Move on.’”

Factory Records famously assigned catalogue numbers not only to records but to posters, buildings and almost anything associated with the label. The system eventually encompassed Tony Wilson’s grave and, fittingly, the film itself: FAC 401.

In absorbing the film into its own mythology, Factory made 24 Hour Party People part of the story it tells. Or, as Oli Wilson puts it: “My dad spent the best part of 20 years creating the legend of Manchester. In conversations, in the way they did business, and in the things that they did. He was creating that legend, and 24 Hour Party People completely cemented it. It completed his job.”

24 Hour Party People is out now on 4K UHD.