Use Hearing Protection

On Monday I got to the Museum Of Science And Industry to see an exhibition which has been open since the start of June and which I finally got to on its final day- Use Hearing Protection, a version of the Factory records story. Manchester has been drowning in its own nostalgia for many years now but this exhibition was excellent all the same and really skewered the period when Factory first started, those early years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Looking at the flickering film footage playing with OMD's Electricity on the banks of tv screens at the entrance to the exhibition was like looking at another world and also the city I remember as a kid- derelict buildings, the Arndale Centre, dirty orange buses. There was an introduction to the main players- Wilson, Hannett, Saville, Gretton, Erasmus, Granada TV, Situationism- and the teardrop guitar Ian Curtis plays in the Love Will Tear Us Apart video.

There were many posters from the time, many loaned by Rob Gretton's family and Tony Wilson's family. These ones stand out, designed by writer Jon Savage, advertising gigs by Durutti Column at the Lesser Free Trade Hall and a Joy Division gig with support from A Certain Ratio and Section 25 (which would set you back £1.25). 

The central room was an exhibition of all the items that make up Fac 1-to Fac 50 in the Factory catalogue- not just singles and albums (though they were all there with sleeve proofs and sketches) but the posters (Fac 1, Fac 15, Fac 26), the menstrual egg timer (Fac 8), the film scripts, the Factory notepaper (Fac 7), the badges (Fac 21) and much more. The major releases, Unknown Pleasures, Closer, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Still and Movement, were accompanied by extras- film clips and interviews and pieces of Martin Hannett's studio equipment. There was an appreciation of the somewhat unsung role women played in the early years of Factory- Ann Quigley, Lesley Gilbert, Linder, New Order's Gillian Gilbert and Lindsay Reade. 

In the room next door (see picture at the top of this post) there was a wall of floor to ceiling screens with nine different live performances projected, starting with Joy Division and ending with New Order. In between this start and end point were some lesser known Factory acts such as The Names and Section 25 and the totally bewitching clip of The Durutti Column playing Sketch For Dawn in a park in Finland in 1981 (later released as part of a Factory video, Fact 56). 

The next room had photographs of Manchester during the period, to put some historical and social context around what was going on at Palatine Road, The Russell Club and The Hacienda. Photos of the Hulme Crescents, the multi- racial crowd enjoying themselves at a Rock Against Racism concert in Alexandra Park, grainy shots of footbridges and people, children playing on bombsites, a post- industrial city on the verge of something even if no- one can really see it at the time. On the way out you could walk through a mock up of the edge of the Hacienda's dancefloor- the future it suggests, the way out, Manchester's rebirth as a modern city begins here. 

There are so many single releases in the first 50 Fac numbers that are from the fringes of the culture, pieces of minor brilliance that Factory's team saw something special in and put out in beautifully designed sleeves that set out to make a statement (and for Gretton, Wilson and Saville to subvert as well). ACR's All Night Party. OMD's Electricity. ESG's You're No Good. X-O- Dus' English Black Boys. The Distractions' Time Goes By So Slow. Section 25's Girls Don't Count. Crispy Ambulances' Unsightly And Serene. Stockholm Monsters' Fairy Tales. And this one, a long time favourite of mine, a one off single by a group of teenagers from Blackpool called Tunnelvision. They'd split up by the time a second single was suggested, leaving one sole 7" single as their legacy- a doomy, sombre, rough- edged slice of post- punk beauty called Watching The Hydroplanes. 

Watching The Hydroplanes