Factory Records - Black Monday (The Last Days Of Factory) (DVD)

Black Monday – A Reportage Rockumentary, the last days of FAC251- The Factory Records office building. Running time approx 2 hours 40 minutes. NTSC Region 0 – all Region.

ere’s the idea- early on a Monday morning in November 1992 a film crew get a phone call to say The Factory Records empire is about to go into receivership that very day. Being based just down the road from Factory’s palatial offices they get outside the building early and start quizzing people who are coming and going from the building, starting with minor office staff and as the day goes on the major players Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Alan Erasmus who all initially deny anything untoward is happening. As day turns into early evening it is finally announced that the Factory Records empire is no more and Tony Wilson does an interview on the pavement outside the Lass’O’Gowrie in Charles Street. The next section of the film is where the camera crew trawl through the four floors of the Factory Offices as they are being pulled to pieces, Happy Mondays and New Order posters and sleeves strewn around the floor in piles of rubbish, the £35,000 suspended table snapped in half by the Happy Mondays hanging by steel wires from the third floor ceiling. On Monday November 23rd 1992 (around 20 years ago) Leonard Curtis a firm of receivers were appointed by National Westminster Bank to look after  the demise of Factory Communications Ltd of One Charles St , Manchester, an empire which had 12 years earlier seen its first successful record and the dark mythology around Factory created by the suicide of the receiver’s namesake Ian Curtis of Joy Division.

“In the beginning Factory Records was all run from a room in Alan Erasmus’s flat in Didsbury. By the end they had their famous art deco-palatial offices,One Charles St, FAC251, with the useless suspended table in the boardroom and MTV on all the time. Philosophically, professionally, whichever way you look at it, not much changed in the meantime . It was always a shambles” Vini Reilly

 “Factory was a label that was wilfully awkward, and it almost bragged about its lack of business capability. It wanted to become iconic and it succeeded. It was never going to be a money-making operation like Sony.”Bob Stanley writing in The Telegraph

Whatever else Factory were good at , Factory were brilliant at inspiring loyalty. Even now in 2012 Mancunians will tell you that Factory Records was one of the best things that ever happened to the city.

Bonus chapters on the DVD : 1. The Re-opening of FAC251 as nightclub. 2. The Making of The Anvil FAC73.

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