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Also this issue: For My Next Trick! The Good Girl |
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August 15-21, 2002
interview
 Tony or not tony?: Coogan incarnates Wilson. |
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Though basically unknown in the States, Steve Coogan is arguably the most popular comedian in Britain, based largely on a series of TV specials featuring Coogan as sleazy, ineffectual TV host Alan Partridge. Tony Wilson, whom Coogan incarnates in 24 Hour Party People (reviewed on p. 41), a history of Manchester music from the late ’70s to the early ’90s, may not be much better known here. But the music Wilson released on his Factory Records label certainly is: From Joy Division to New Order to the Happy Mondays, as well as less-known but no-less-respected bands like A Certain Ratio and The Durutti Column, Factory’s music -- as well as its dance club, the legendary Hacienda -- reshaped punk and dance the world over, culminating in what the movie calls “the birth of rave culture.” Talking simultaneously to Wilson and Coogan is a little like grappling with a boxful of hungry puppies, but there’s no doubt these two outsize Mancunian personalities can hold their own against each other.
City Paper: Steve, you used to do Tony as part of your standup act?
Steve Coogan: When I used to do standup in Manchester, I’d do Tony, because everyone knew him in the area. All I had to do was do his accent -- I’d say, “Hi, I’m Tony Wilson,” and I’d open my jacket and point to the label and go “Comme des Garçons.”
Tony Wilson: I’ll make a long story short. His mate John Thomson, who’s also in the film, was once on radio in Manchester, and they were living in the same flat together. Thomson started doing me, and then started doing [sniffles loudly] cocaine jokes, and my colleague here rang up Piccadilly Radio, as me, to threaten a lawsuit. Didn’t you, Steve?
SC: Yeah, I did. I rang up the producer, and said, “Listen, I just heard the program, and unless you put out a retraction to those very tasteless jokes about Class A drug use, you will have my solicitors first thing Monday morning.”
TW: They freaked.
SC: They freaked out. They put out this big retraction on the radio, live on air. “We never meant any offense to Tony. It was only someone having a joke, and we’d love to have Tony on the program soon to talk about what he’s up to.”
CP: What was the difference between doing Tony in your act and playing him as a character?
SC: It’s a completely different thing, really. I toyed with the idea of not using an impersonation as a way into playing Tony as a character. In the end, I thought maybe I could either do this part by distancing it completely from the way Tony is, or using the mannerisms and the way Tony is as a person, the way he comes across publicly. His body language is quite specific. It’s very difficult to get under Tony’s skin, so I didn’t try. I just did the way he came across. I made him amusing and witty -- Tony thinks I make him look like too much of an idiot, but I think he got off very lightly.
TW: The funny thing is when I hear Steven, I don’t hear me at all. I have no idea that it’s me. I watch the movie and I hear Steve, who I know, doing the things that I did with my pals. There are some parts of it, particularly the civic terms of “Fuck London” and “This is Manchester” and stuff that Steve feels. He enjoyed doing those things. And he’s a team player, which isn’t normal for a comedian, but I always think he enjoyed working with the actors playing my partners in the same way that, I have to say over the years, I’ve enjoyed working with my colleagues.
SC: Performing Tony Wilson is a bit like being him. There’s certain parallels there. Some scenes in the film, there was improvisation, but because I agree with Tony on a lot of things, [particularly] about Manchester, I find it very easy to improvise my enthusiasm for that -- things like the references in the movie to the fact that the railways started there …
TW: The bouncing bomb, the computer. This guy’s American, right? You’re American?
CP: Mmm hmm.
TW: Did you know we invented the computer?
CP: I did not.
TW: No one ever told us that when we grew up in Manchester. We always thought, like you did, it was Philadelphia or blahblahblah. What’s stupid is the scientists say, it’s the world’s first stored program computer. To which I say, can you name me a computer that doesn’t work on the basis of a stored fucking program? The answer is you can’t. That’s what a computer is.
CP: I’m not going to tell the people at the ENIAC museum you said that.
SC [overlapping]: Do! We want a fight about it!
TW: Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em. … Sorry, we’re just taking the piss out you Yanks.
CP: Fair enough. Tony, Factory’s contract with its initial bands was almost unprecedented in the history of music, giving them total freedom, and you and the label almost nothing. There are a lot of ways to phrase this question, but the most basic is: What were you thinking?
TW: Very rightly. It didn’t quite happen [the way it does in the movie] -- remember, this film is a collection of lies, misdirections and misgivings. It happened very differently, but it was the same result. We were thinking very consciously that music should not be a product. Now I have to say over the years, I’ve come to truly despise all musicians. All musicians are assholes. So there’s no kindness to them in this at all. Fuck them. One loves their work, but, really, all of them. People in the music industry like me, we love music, not money. It’s the artists who love money not music. Don’t tell the public that because it would upset their romantic view of the rock ’n’ roll industry. Basically, we were thinking, quite correctly, we should not own the band. [Thus Factory’s famous one-page contract, which gave artists the absolute “freedom to fuck off.”] It wasn’t as actively heroic as Steve’s version, but it was absolutely that: We just thought we should not own music.
CP: There’s a point in the movie where Steve turns to the camera and apologizes for the lapses in his/Tony’s story. His excuse is, “It’s not about me, it’s about the music.”
TW: Everybody asks about that, and it’s a result of me being on the phone screaming at [screenwriter] Frank Cottrell Boyce, “For fuck’s sake, let’s do more on [Joy Division singer] Ian [Curtis] and more on [Happy Mondays singer] Shaun [Ryder] and leave this teeny percent of other shit [about me] out of it, but when Steve started turning up at script meetings with his co-writer, I gave up on that.
SC: It is about the music, but through Tony’s eyes. How do you get inside the head of Shaun Ryder; how do you get inside the head of Ian Curtis? Tony was at the center of things -- he didn’t make them happen, but he kind of steered things. He was sort of involved, but he was sort of not involved. He was an observer.
TW: I have the ability to hang out with a bunch of very clever people. That’s what I do.
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