David Nolan is also a critically acclaimed and commercially successful writer. He is the author of Simon Cowell - The Man Who Changed The World. the Tony Wilson biography You're Entitled To An Opinion... (John Blake Publishing 2009), as well as I Swear I Was There (Milo Books 2001)... The Gig That Changed The World (IMP Books 2006) ... Bernard Sumner: Confusion (IMP Books 2007) and co-author of Damon Albarn: Blur, Gorillaz and Other fables (IMP 2007).

Get David's book at AMAZON

Nolan's Truthful Tribute to Tony

Manchester Evening News Wed, 15 July, 2009

FROM certain angles, David Nolan looks a lot like Tony Wilson. It’s in his eyes and nose and the way he twists his face when making the kind of proclamation for which the late record boss and broadcaster was famous.

He also shares many interests with the subject of his forthcoming biography and is acutely aware of the weight of responsibility which comes with chronicling a man who has been all but canonised since his death in 2007 at the age of 57.

What fans won’t know is that Wilson had suffered a stroke which he kept private – an experience Nolan also had.

“Tony had a stroke, but didn’t tell anyone,” Nolan says. “It was at the time he got sacked from Granada, something of a blessing because it meant he could rest. This came up in interviews with Yvette Livesey, Tony’s partner.

“He had what’s called a minor infarction. And then, when I finished the book, I said to my wife what I always say at the end of writing ‘There’s another one that the Queen will never know about’. And then the following morning I started to feel really unwell.

“And I remember thinking to myself ‘I think I’m having an infarction’. It was a bit of bad luck, bad genes, a poor lifestyle in the past.

“It took a while for my arm and my leg and my face to come back to normal, but apart from that, I’m all right.”

Many books will be written about Tony Wilson but Nolan says his is different because while Wilson famously said the legend was more entertaining than the facts, he offers only truths.

Nolan, 44, a lecturer and former Granada programme maker, has previously written books about New Order’s Bernard Sumner and the legendary gig played by the Sex Pistols in Manchester.

He says plans for the Wilson book pre-date his death.

“It’s something I’ve been chipping away at for a couple of years now,” says Nolan. “There’d been a bit of a shrug from people because he’d been off the radar.

“The reason was that he was unemployed. It makes me smile a bit, not necessarily in a happy way, that all of these people who came out of the woodwork with a moist eye and said what a genius he was, well, where were they when he was out of work?”

Nolan says that his book is warts and all.

“If you’re going to do something like this then you’ve got to bite the bullet,” he adds. “Not just print the legend but print the other stuff as well.”

He started work on the project, because, like Steve Coogan, who played Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, “I didn’t want anyone else to do it.”

But he is qualified for the task.

Dash home

“My relationship is that I’m one of Tony’s children. I used to dash home and watch television in the hope that Tony might be showing off some new band. I was 14 when the first Factory single came out, 18 when the Hacienda opened, and I went every week for the first five years.

“Later, I ended up working at Granada. The first time I met him properly, I interviewed him for a programme I was making when he was in and out of Granada. Then we worked in the same open plan office, where he drove everybody mad and swore loudly.”

Yvette Livesey was one of the 50-plus people that Nolan spoke to for the book while researching his book and she says she won’t speak to any other authors about her late partner.

“She said I brought him off the page,” Nolan adds.

Other interviewees include those who worked with Wilson and family members with some surprising insights into his early life.

Readers will learn that Wilson’s dad “was gay as a trout” and the truth about Wilson leaving his wife and children for Livesey, and the rift it caused between the couple and some of their friends.

Myra Hindley

Somewhat incongruously, Geoff Knupfer, the Manchester detective who took Myra Hindley’s confession, was Tony Wilson’s cousin.

There are amusing anecdotes too. Why he didn’t speak to Gordon Burns for a year, how he was exposed as a non-windsurfer and how he was recording a programme for entrepreneurs on the day Factory went bust.

There’s also a chapter on his Sutent battle, the drug which can keep cancer patients alive for longer, and his treatment at The Christie.

A donation will be made to the hospital for each book sold.

“If I’m honest, having spent time with him, I probably wasn’t crazy about the man at the beginning of this process,” Nolan admits. “But at the end, I really liked him.

“I relate everything to punk rock and of all the promises made, the only person who kept his word was Tony. He was the only one who wasn’t out for himself. He was the dictionary definition of failing yet succeeding.”

Does he think Wilson was fulfilled when he died?

“He always said ‘If I die tomorrow I’ll be happy because I’ve achieved everything I want to’. But before he died, he revised that because he was working with the BBC, he had this ideas company, these films were coming out, and he kind of back-tracked and said, ‘sorry, but I’ve got loads to do’. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.

“He was suddenly on the crest of a wave and it was taken away from him.

“Last week I went walking up Winter Hill, because the signal from that transmitter is about to be switched off. That’s the end of Tony’s world – Granadaland.

“Somebody said in the book, he was an analogue man with analogue hair, analogue suits and that world is literally going to be switched off.

“Even if there was someone in the corner of this cafÈ now who was as bright as Tony was, who could talk the talk as Tony could, could get on with people as well as he could and had the sheer brass neck that he had, then they still couldn’t achieve what he did.”

You're Entitled To An Opinion - The High Times And Many Lives of Tony Wilson is out now, priced £18.99

FILLING THE GAPS - BY ORDER

Manchester Evening News 13/ 9/2007

THE Factory Records' story has been everywhere of late, with books, films and documentaries devoted to almost anything ever to be adorned with one of those cool "Fac" product code badges.

But we still know very little about a character arguably as important as the label's recently-departed founder Tony Wilson.

A new book about New Order frontman Bernard "Barney" Sumner aims to fill the void.

Marple author David Nolan was commissioned to write "Bernard Sumner: Confusion - Joy Division, Electronic and New Order Versus the World" having already set the scene with "I Swear I Was There", his book dealing with the legend of a Sex Pistols' gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall which inspired many a future Mancunian musician.

Joy Division formed shortly after that 1974 happening and it was the premature death of their iconic frontman Ian Curtis - himself the subject of umpteen books and films - which landed Sumner a task akin to sipping from pop's poisoned chalice.

According to Nolan, the unprecedented success he made of a job which he really didn't want is just one of the things which makes his story so fascinating.

"Apart from a difficult background, there's a guy who will take on the worst job in rock music in replacing a man who was virtually sainted," the author explains.

"No one before or since has made a success of such a move and that means that Sumner's story is particularly impressive."

A former Granada employee with penchant for Manchester music programmes, Nolan, 42, says he was an "admirer rather than a fan of New Order's" material before embarking on the mammoth task of researching the enigmatic singer and lyricist's life story.

He knew the basics (the way New Order poured the concrete on which generations of Manchester music were constructed; how they bankrolled the Hacienda, Dry Bar and, unwittingly, Factory Records; and that they are now name-checked by bands like Bloc Party and The Killers) but wanted to present a more rounded picture of the man himself.

Almost immediately, he hit a brick wall.

Research

"Every other book about New Order and Joy Division stated that he was born as Bernard Dicken in Salford and that's why I started my research. But there was no Bernard Dicken who had been born in Salford.

"I eventually discovered that he was actually born Bernard Sumner in Manchester."

Nolan, a father of three, has his own ideas about the secrecy surrounding Sumner's early years, suggesting that the future music icon wanted to protect his severely-disabled mother, who had cerebral palsy, and the step-father who she married when he was still a child and had actually been given the surname Dickin.

He believes that Sumner's tough upbringing on the streets of Salford, where he lived for much of his childhood, will have been character- building at least.

"He was a kid in Salford with a disabled mum and disabled step-dad," Nolan adds. "It was always going to be a learning process."

For Nolan, too, this book was something of a learning curve, with painstaking research conducted among contemporaries of the singer. He refused to co-operate with Nolan for nine months but relented when the author managed to set the partially finished manuscript before him.

"I think he saw that it wasn't simply a cut and paste job, that I'd really done my research," Nolan adds. "He was able to correct things and to add things. He went through the whole thing and added paragraphs here and there, right up to the fall-out with Hooky."

Nolan is sworn to secrecy about the real reasons for the animosity, but says Sumner was candid when it came to giving his side of the debate about whether New Order have split up or not. Events have moved on, though, with the news that the group is considering a one-off reunion following the death of Tony Wilson.

"As far as he and Stephen Morris are concerned, New Order will continue to exist for as long as they want it to, whether they have new material out or not."

Whatever happens, it should make an interesting new chapter in the Bernard Sumner story when the time comes for a reprint.

Bernard Sumner: Confusion - Joy Division, Electronic And New Order Versus The World is out now, priced £12.99