Si les gusta todo sobre ese momento en Manchester, Joy Division, Hacienda y, por supuesto Factory, verdaderamente les recomiendo el libro, se divertirán con la idea de Tony Wilson hablando de si mismo en tercera persona como "nuestro héroe", haciendo contabilidad siempre en números negativos y explicando las muchas excentricidades, una de ellas la fijación numérica detrás de cada lanzamiento FAC.
Sin embargo al paso de las hojas, las historias que más me gustaron fueron las relacionadas con el diseñador Peter Saville, conocido por su impuntualidad (razón por la que no se le pidió el diseño de portada del libro), la solución eterna de regalar carteles y boletos como recuerdos cuando sus diseños perdían la utilidad inicial por su retraso, el enamoramiento con un floppy disc que terminó en Blue Monday y otros muchos detalles que hacen del arte de Factory Records algo más intrigante.
No quiero contarles todo el libro, pero si les guardé unos fragmentos para que los disfruten y para que su mente sienta hambre.
Sobre Tony Wilson y las obsesiones de Factory con el arte, incluso si no sale de las bodegas.
'We don't treat music as a commodity; so we don't use pluggers,' said Martin. 'OK.' Wilson didn't argue. The mood in the darkly lit room was clear. It was that easy. At least he didn't fight it. It was the way they made decisions. He still insisted on pressing 10,000 of these fabulous little 7-inch singles with their exploding nebula, textured card sleeves.
Great. And that way, he got to see what 6,000 7-inch records look like in their wire mesh pallets at the pressing plant. Every month. A fellow conspirator called Daniel had an equal number of a thing called 'Warm Leatherette' by his outfit, The Normal, in the next mesh pallet. Those went down significantly quicker than Wilson's. Did he learn a lesson? Did he fuck. A few years later, he found out what 100,000 embossed 12-inch sleeves looked like when he over-optimized on 'Thieves Like Us' by New Order.
Those same sleeves went on to topple over in a Stockport storage shed and completely wipe out an old couple's caravan stored nearby, and ended up as an art object when sculptor David Mach used 80,000 of them to build Egyptian pillars on a Manchester dance floor. So sometimes, great records don't sell. At first. But they infect. They seep into the water-table. They change the world.
Cuando Peter Saville llegó a la disquera para presentar la portada del disco Power, Corruption & Lies de New Order.
'I have been asking myself a question and I want the sleeve to answer the question.' 'What's the question, Peter?' asked Hooky, always willing to move the conversation along and show a little more interest. 'How many colours does it take to replace language, to replace the alphabet?' People were beginning to doze off at this point, but Wilson had an edgy feeling. Colours. Special colours.
Pantone fucking colours. Most people print colours by the four-colour printing process - that cyan, magenta crap. And Factory did that. But every so often Peter or one of his acolytes -for Peter had been followed by a trail of other 'great graphic designerson the way up' - asked for a special colour. Which meant the printers did the four-colour run and then added one, two or more runs for these 'special colours'.
'Cause Factory's designers did not trust the cyans and magentas to get together specifically enough to give them the exact bloody shade that their vision demanded. And since the music was great, then the packaging in which the customer received said art would have to have the same attention to perfection. It cost more, to cut it short.
And Peter's intriguing question was bound to cost more. The explanation was almost mundane compared to the preceding analysis of cost, process and attitude. With ten colours representing digits zero to nine, you could make numbers one to twenty-six and reflect a Western European alphabet. So that was that, they'd have this bloody picture of a bunch of flowers and some colour coding instead of lettering. Sounded good. No one complained. No one ever did. Peter was good. That was enough.
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