This is not the story of Factory Records. Or, rather, this is not the whole story of Factory Records. This is the story of how Factory Records shook off its post-punk gloom and found its dancing feet.

For a city of the size of Manchester (pop: 483,000), its musical culture is quite remarkable. Manchester has always been a centre for music, from the first professionally established symphony orchestra in Britain, the Hallé Orchestra (founded in 1858) to the more recent Electric Chair rave-ups. In the 1920s, as reported by Robert Roberts in The Classic Slum, “The young from sixteen to twenty-five flocked into the dancehalls by the hundred thousand; some went ‘jigging’ as often as six times a week.” Many of the ballrooms that were re-purposed from the 1970s onwards as discotheques were in use long before disco’s arrival.

The Factory Records story has been well told (not least in the essential James Nice book, Shadowplayers: The Rise And Fall Of Factory Records), born out of a sense of civic pride, boredom and Tony Wilson’s often ludicrous art theories and Situationism (my favourite quote about Wilson came from Peter Hook when he heard that Steve Coogan would be playing him in the movie 24 Hour Party People: “The biggest cnt in Manchester being played by the second biggest cnt in Manchester.”). It’s a label that could only have come from Manchester and it was lucky enough to have an immense talent pool on which to draw.

Factory Records blossomed in one of the most innovative and exciting periods in music, the post-punk era, which eventually gave way to house music. The several years between, they were responsible for some amazing releases and, as Tony Wilson biographer David Nolan wrote, “[Factory] made singles that were often better to look at than they were to listen to.”

There are a few easily explicable reasons why Factory Records was able to produce so many successful dance records. Firstly, the early successes of A Certain Ratio, New Order and Quando Quango afforded them regular jaunts to New York and this established what was effectively a permanent feedback loop between the two cities (they discovered ESG on such a trip). Secondly, the opening of the Haçienda gave them the perfect laboratory to test their productions, but also the right environment to be inspired by other records (Klein & MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk’ was a huge record in Manchester clubs and an inspiration for ‘Blue Monday’).

The natural question for many Factory observers is why, with all the dance releases in the lead-up to the house explosion, did they not sign A Guy Called Gerald, 808 State and co? “Factory had always had this thing about a lot of us being influenced by funk and electro records,” says Pickering. “The real truth was that Rob Gretton and myself went to Tony in about 1986 or ’87 and said, ‘Look, we wanna start a subsidiary dance label’. Tony said, ‘Dance will never happen’. And, of course, two years later it did.”