Brass Trax

If any record label needs to be demystified, Factory Records certainly does. Rock fans know its legends. The rise of Joy Division and its lead singer’s melodramatic exit. The best selling single that cost so much to manufacture that it lost money every time a copy was sold. The television personality who started it all. The contracts signed in blood. The catalog numbers that were assigned to everything the label did, including lawsuits. Factory is so deep in mythos that its history was made into a very funny movie, 24 Hour Party People. Factory was founded on fashionable, utopian philosophies, and it hosted a handful of brilliant bands. It’s easy to think that the label could do no wrong. Thankfully, as the new boxed set, Factory Communications: 1978-92 makes painfully clear, Factory Records could do very, very wrong.

Factory’s appeal might have as much to do with the personalities involved in its founding as it does with its musical output. Four men in Manchester, a television host, a starving actor, a troubled record producer, and a brilliant designer, began the label in the wake of the Sex Pistols and the tidal wave of DIY culture. The founders wanted Factory to represent industrial and provincial Manchester on the fledgling post-punk scene, but they were also in the thrall of the aesthetic Marxism of the Situationists. They wanted to put out their friends’ records, but they also wanted to change the world. Hence, the allusive ramblings of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s Tory lead singer, could share space on a recording with the left-wing tape experiments of Cabaret Voltaire. It was both Factory’s strength and its weakness.

Consider the Durutti Column. By the time of its first Factory release, the band was little more than the solo project of guitarist Vini Reilly, which was fine by Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, who thought Reilly was a genius. The band’s name came from Buenaventura Durutti, the leader of a group of anarchists during the Spanish Civil War who featured prominently in the work of the Situationists.

Wilson’s assessment aside, Durutti Column’s music is terrible. It’s light guitar music played by a guitarist who is both deeply unfunky and not particularly talented. Factory released the band anyway, rather pretentiously packaging its first record inside a sleeve of sandpaper. Another Situationist swipe, but it’s hard to change the world when you are so boring. The Durutti Column released enough music on Factory that it gets five tracks on the new boxed set, which makes the release a must-have for fans of New Age music.

And the Durutti Column is hardly the worst thing on the release. There’s awful reggae (Xodus), inelegant new wave (Distractions and Seven Reasons), and clumsy cybertronic post-punk (Crawling Chaos). Even the usually unimpeachable New Order released a handful of duds on Factory, both as a unit (”World in Motion”) and as spin-off acts (The Other Two’s near-parody of a pop hit “Tasty Fish” or Electronic’s sappy “Getting Away With It”). The box set even includes “Shall We Take a Trip?” an acid anthem so bad that it’s almost good.

It’s Factory’s misses that make the label’s hits so potent. Without the dross of Northside, how could we have the gold of New Order? The box set does include a few pleasant surprises, too, like lo-fi pop from Stockholm Monsters, Swamp Children’s Brazilian fusion track “Taste What’s Rhythm” or John Dowie’s goofy Tin Pan Alley ditty “It’s Hard to Be an Egg.” And there was a period of time, just after the label started the Hacienda (FAC 51) dance club, that it churned out nothing but sure shot electro jams. 52nd Street’s “Cool as Ice” and the tracks from Quando Quango represent that period on the box set.

But there is no escaping the conclusion, after listening to more than 60 tracks from the label’s history, that its finest moments—Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays at its most batshit (think “24 Hour Party People” or “Hallelujah”)—were also its most popular. (A special exception would apply to A Certain Ratio, had it been included in the box set.) A rare victory for the wisdom of the crowd. It would make any good Situationist turn in his grave.

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