She helped build Factory Records from the ground up. So how did Lindsay Reade get cut out of the story?

‘What is this with all these men? You know? What about me?’

By Ophira Gottlieb

Factory Records left a legacy that has seeped itself so thoroughly into Manchester’s identity that there’s a wall dedicated entirely to it in the Ashton-under-Lyne Ikea. But it’s only fairly recently that this legacy, and the cultural historians that work tirelessly to preserve it, remembered about women. The 2021 exhibition ‘Use Hearing Protection’ at the Science and Industry Museum uncovered a number of until-then-untold stories from the women of Manchester’s most mythologised music label, and last year American author Audrey Golden published her debut book I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records, a first-hand oral history from many of these same forgotten contributors. By all these new accounts, women were everywhere: You had Gillian Lesley Gilbert of New Order; you had their production and office manager who was also confusingly called Lesley Gilbert; Linder Sterling designed album covers; Angela Matthews managed the Haçienda; and Lindsay Reade was involved with the label from its conception, as both a band manager, and head of their overseas licensing department. The question is not one of whether women were involved in the label’s success, but rather why it’s taken just under half a century for their involvement to be recognised.

But first, for the rock-dwellers and the post-punk-rock-averse: Factory Records was an independent music label founded by Granada presenter and soon-to-be ‘Mr Manchester’ Tony Wilson, and small-time actor turned big-time music mogul Alan Erasmus. It operated between 1978 and 1992 and during that time, put out the likes of Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, and the Durutti Column, and subsequently led to the opening of the Haçienda nightclub.

Lindsay Reade played a significant role in the development and success of Factory Records from the start, so much so that she considers herself a co-founder of the label, though she is yet to be acknowledged as one. This bothers her firstly for financial reasons – Lindsay is still having to work at the age of 72 – but more frustrating than this is the feeling that her work has been erased from the Factory narrative entirely. When you begin to type her name into Google, rather than mentioning her involvement with the label, or her management of the bands 52nd Street and The Stone Roses, or her discovery of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the search bar offers the simple suggestion: ‘Lindsay Reade – Tony Wilson’s ex-wife’. For Tony, Lindsay was the first wife of three; a loving marriage by both of their accounts, though one tainted by infidelity.

Lindsay and Tony are their wedding day. Photo: Lindsay Reade

“When I first married Tony, there was no Factory or nothing,” Lindsay tells me over the phone. The pair met in 1976. Lindsay was a teacher in Gorton at the time, and Tony was presenting a music show for Granada Television called So It Goes, which would soon come to be known for its promotion of punk music, and for being the first programme to showcase the Sex Pistols live on TV. They met at a party, although Lindsay had already had a premonition that she would one day come to know him, after a colleague of hers showed her a recording of Tony doing stunts on Granada Reports.

Lindsay credits So It Goes for giving Tony the music business bug, so when it was cancelled after only two seasons because Iggy Pop swore repeatedly live on air, Tony found himself searching for other ways to be involved with Manchester’s music scene. In 1978, together with Alan Erasmus, he assembled and managed his very own post-punk band, The Durutti Column. That same year, Tony started putting on ‘Factory’ gigs at The Russell Club in Hulme on a Friday night. “The object was that Tony wanted to showcase The Durutti Column, cause he thought they were gonna be massive,” Lindsay explains. “I didn’t. We never particularly agreed about who were gonna be massive.” The club nights grew in popularity, and featured various soon-to-be classic Factory bands, eventually culminating in the release of A Factory Sample: a 7-inch double sampler EP which was released in December of 1978. “It had four records on it,” says Lindsay. “Durutti Column, Joy Division, some comedian… John Dowie, and Cabaret Voltaire. That’s how Factory began.”

At what point did Lindsay begin to consider herself a co-founder of Factory Records? “I mean, I was a co-founder of Factory,” laughs Lindsay when I ask her. “That’s a fact actually.” For starters, she performed many executive roles over the course of her career – forming contacts, finding record deals, managing bands – but alongside these were a number of administrative, laborious tasks. “I’d be driving musicians around, going to the studio, putting them up, feeding them, answering the phone all the time,” she says.

But it’s not just the roles that Lindsay took on that make her feel she played a significant part at Factory — it was about the money and time she invested, too. She explains that A Factory Sample was produced with money left to Tony (and, through their marriage, to Lindsay too) by his mother when she died. Tony was initially unsure about spending that money on producing the record, fearing that his late mother would not approve. “And I don’t think she would’ve done, actually, from what I’ve learnt about her,” Lindsay adds. “But I said ‘No, do it, let's spend it, we don’t need it to live.’” Lindsay had a steady teaching income, and the pair didn’t need to save the inheritance. “At the time I didn’t believe in having savings. It seemed wrong. Money should be circulated,” she says. They spent approximately £7000 on producing the record, fully expecting to lose the sum, and had written it off as a justified expense for creating something beautiful. “But weirdly,” says Lindsay, “the money came back.”

Lindsay was also responsible for bringing one of Factory Records’ most successful acts to the label. After Factory took off, countless bands began sending Tony demo tapes in the hope of being signed to the label. “One day Tony and I were in the car,” she says, “and I looked back at the seat and saw this bulging bag of cassettes. I felt sorry for the people that sent them, you know, that he’d done nothing with it.”

Lindsay recalls asking Tony if he ever listened to the demo tapes, and him replying that he hadn’t. “So I start putting them one by one into the cassette player, and I hadn’t put that many in when this song ‘Electricity’ came on,” she says. “It was only a demo. But I said to Tony ‘Hey, hang on a minute, this is good this one!’” The song had been recorded by the then-unknown Liverpudlian band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

Lindsay says that Tony wasn’t a fan of the track, so she played him it again, insisting that it would be a hit. “So he very patronisingly put his hand on my leg and said ‘Alright darling, we’ll put it out just for you.’” The single was a huge success. Adrian Thrills from NME lauded ‘Electricity’ as “the best example of Factory Records to date,” while Mike Mettler of Digital Trends wrote that the song was “generally acknowledged as being the pioneering inspirational synth-pop track”. However, in the meantime, an unconfirmed incident of infidelity on Tony’s part followed by a confirmed one on Lindsay’s had come between the couple, which Lindsay claims meant that Tony was prone to acting out in revenge. Shortly after the release of the single, he sold both song and band to Virgin Records, an act Lindsay to this day believes to have been spiteful.

Lindsay in the office. Photo: Lindsay Reade

This wasn’t the first time Lindsay felt that her contributions to the label had been dismissed or overlooked. “One by one,” she tells me, “Tony was making new directors of Factory.” Tony initially made Alan Erasmus a director, as the two of them were managing The Durutti Column together. This was followed shortly afterwards by the appointment of Joy Division manager Rob Gretton, and then graphic designer Pete Saville, and then record producer Martin Hannett. Lindsay was initially sceptical about being overlooked for the role, but then thought it didn’t matter about being a partner – “because Tony and I were partners,” she explains. “That was a mistake.”

At this point it should be noted that there was, in fact, a female director of Factory Records. Tina Simmons replaced Rob Gretton as a director of Factory in 1986 (Lindsay had already been fired two years previously). This is a fact that is mentioned only in Audrey Golden’s book, and on Factory paperwork. Her career there was not without its troubling moments – Audrey quotes an anecdote from Tina about her job interview, during which Tony accused Alan of only inviting her for the interview in order to sleep with her. Eventually, she would quit the role unceremoniously on April Fool’s Day 1990, telling Tony she didn’t want to be around when he inevitably destroyed the company.

Still, the very fact that a woman was appointed a director, but nevertheless fails to appear in the countless films and memoirs about the label, speaks to the nature of the marginalisation of women in Factory. “A lot of that has to do with sexism,” says Audrey Golden when I ask her about Factory women’s forgotten legacy, “but a lot of it is sexism after the fact.” Audrey spoke to 77 different women with professional ties to the label (either as musicians or as employees) for the book, with Lindsay herself featuring heavily, and she recounts that many of them praised Factory Records for its egalitarian management, and revered how their creativity was able to flourish while working there.

In fact, Tracey Donnelly, receptionist at the Haçienda and employee at Factory Communications, is quoted in the first section of the book speaking openly about why women’s stories have been forgotten. “Women have been the backbone of everything in that company, in Factory,” she says. “So I never felt it was a sexist place, but it’s the other people, isn’t it? The writers, the music journalists, the ones shaping the history who just are not interested in women’s stories.”

Audrey agrees. “There’s a real problem with this idea of the so-called definitive history,” she tells me. “As soon as you say that, then everyone reading the book thinks that’s all there is to know.” Audrey even recounts how a number of women she approached for the book were initially reluctant to speak to her, as they didn’t think their contributions to the label were interesting or relevant. “They actually said to me that because they weren’t interviewed for any of these books, they didn’t think their story was important.”

This narrative – that the erasure of women from the story of Factory stems both from a lack of interest on writers’ parts, and from men being more inclined to believe their contributions are important – is brought up independently by a number of others I speak to. Bruce Mitchell, like Lindsay, was involved with Factory Records from the start: He played drums for John Dowie on A Factory Sample, and subsequently joined The Durutti Column, where he even recorded a song featuring Lindsay both on vocals and on the sleeve. Why does he think that women are less present in the books about Factory? “You might find that the men do the most shouting,” he answers. “But for a while it was four female managers at the Haçienda.”

Journalist and City Life magazine founder Andy Spinoza also weighs in on the sexism at Factory, or lack thereof. “It was a male-dominated industry at the time,” he says. “We all kind of know why women have been represented less.” Andy takes a slightly less rose-tinted view of the Factory and Haçienda glory days. “There were incidents,” he says. “There was an incident at the Haçienda one night with strippers involved, and one of the journalists working for us at City Life wrote an article about how that was disgusting, and we printed it.” Andy also recalls that the Haçienda booked the notoriously sexist (as well as racist and homophobic) comedian Bernard Manning to perform on their opening night. But still, he doesn’t see these events as representative of Factory as a whole. “I don’t believe that the output of Factory had any kind of male or masculine bias,” he says, referencing the testimonies in Audrey’s book as evidence. “If you look at the entirety of their output, even with the extreme nature of those events, it would be hard for even their harshest critics to say that’s how Factory should be categorised.”

So why, then, have Lindsay’s contributions been overlooked? “Lindsay was very attuned to the Factory way of doing things,” says Andy, “and very right to be part of the creative dynamics there. Because she always wanted to put the art first, you know? I don’t know why she never ended up as one of the directors.”

When I put Lindsay’s claim that she should be considered a cofounder to Audrey, she tells me that there are those from Factory that agree, and those that don’t, though she quite sensibly refuses to name names. In her own opinion, however, the money and time invested by Lindsay into starting the label merits her role being reconsidered.

Lindsay with 52nd Street vocalist Diane Charlemagne in 2015. Photo: Lindsay Reade

It would be false to say that Lindsay has no legacy at all. She is referenced in multiple books and films about the period, but only as Tony’s wife, and has even written a number of books about the period herself, including a collection of letters from Tony earlier this year. She also appears in the 2002 Michael Winterbottom film 24 Hour Party People, portrayed by Shirley Henderson. In it, there’s no mention at all of her role at Factory as employee or manager – she comes across as little more than a romantic partner to Tony, and not a great one at that. Lindsay recalls Tony coming to her house one day with the script, which she was not allowed to keep but was permitted to read on the spot. In it, they portrayed her cheating on Tony by having serial sex with five different men in a single scene. “I said ‘Tony, this is bollocks, I haven’t even had sex with any of these people,’” she tells me. “One of them was Vini Reilly!” Lindsay told Tony that she’d sue if the scene went ahead, and so it was changed to portray her having sex with Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto in a toilet cubicle, following which the real Howard Devoto appears and says that never really happened. “I asked them to put that in,” says Lindsay, “but I shouldn’t have bothered, because I actually quite liked that film.”

“How did Factory and The Haçienda become the ‘24-hour party people’?” asks DJ Paulette in her foreword to Audrey’s book. "In the last twenty years, more than a dozen books have been published on the Factory Records story yet none among them has ever given the women their flowers...Tuning these women’s stories out, while never intentionally malicious, has done history a disservice and the history makers themselves some damage."

It’s not just history taking a hit. I suspect the male-centric yarns spun out of a reality rife with women does substantial damage to the present, too. It seems likely that the way our city’s cultural and musical history is told may well have some impact on who picks up a guitar and who doesn't, who books bands, puts on festivals, helps shape the cultural scene here.

When I ask Lindsay what really bothers her about not being acknowledged, she mentions small things, like a book launch she wasn’t invited to. But books and stories (and, let’s not forget, records) are all that remains of Factory now – and how weird to have spent years being a part of something legendary, only to be forgotten when the legend is told.