Setting the record straight

Reviewing Audrey Golden's I Thought I Heard You Speak for Vice, Kelly Bishop begins by asking the obvious question: why do we need yet another book about Factory Records and the Hacienda (especially - I might add - in light of Manchester's persistent tendency to wallow in nostalgia for its own musical past)? The answer is equally obvious: "Because this one tells a different story - of the women who played a vital role in Manchester's world-famous record label and club, many of whom you've probably never heard of."

The blame for their anonymity lies with those who have generated and embellished the Factory narrative over the years - Tony Wilson and Peter Hook among them. But, Bishop argues, Golden's book - an oral history for which she spoke to around 80 women who were in and around the orbit of the label and/or the club - doesn't set out to "shit on the legendary Factory myth - it enlivens it, filling in the gaps with true stories that have been sat on for too long". (That includes, for instance, the Hacienda's central role in Manchester's gay scene, as touched on by DJ Paulette in Daniel Dylan Wray's own oral history of the club for Vice.)

Factory fanboys needn't worry too much about their heroes being painted in a negative light, then; indeed, according to New Order's Gillian Gilbert, Factory and the Hacienda were actually relatively pleasant, enlightened spaces for women to work, particularly in a notoriously sexist and toxic industry. That said, Bishop does note: "The Hacienda could be an absolute shambles, but women often waded in to make sense of things while blokes flounced around having big ideas." Without such behind-the-scenes organising and pragmatism, it seems, the whole enterprise would have collapsed sooner than it did.