“He could be at any given time Jerry Springer and/or Malcolm McLaren, Melvyn Bragg and/or Andrew Loog Oldham, a fiercely smart hybrid of bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, insatiable publicity seeker. How could you not love this freewheeling, freethinking bundle of contradictions, even as he drove you up the wall with his non-stop need for adventure and his loathing for mental and moral inertia?”
Factory Records founder Tony Wilson has been the subject of countless tributes since his passing on Friday, but I’ve read no eulogy as deeply personal nor as evocative as one by Paul Morley in Sunday’s Observer.