Tony Wilson R.I.P

It is often said, when a pivotal figure in popular culture dies, that you had to be there to appreciate their influence and impact. With Tony Wilson, who died last night aged 57, this isn't the case, anybody from 15 to 50 would have been touched by Wilson's influence on the music and television scene, not just in Madchester but beyond through his radio and television appearances and his magazine interviews and his writing.

For those of us who were exactly the right age, and of the right attitude, when Punk burst forth on the British music scene Wilson was at the forefront of its promotion. The famous Sex Pistols concert that is faithfully reconstructed in 24 Hour Party People ignited Wilson's enthusiasm for the nascent pop movement and his subsequent involvement in So It Goes, which gave the Pistols one of the first television appearances, was crucial in spreading the word beyond the metropolitan media elite.

Factory Records introduced a new ethos into the music business, as Tony Wilson says in Jon Savages seminal work England's Dreaming, of independent record labels hanging onto their biggest acts. For Factory this was Joy Division, but they also had Cabaret Voltaire and Durutti Column whose albums I still cling onto. The choice of names for the three bands I've named weren't accidental either - Wilson believed that Factory records, along with 'rivals' Rough Trade had a bigger political agenda to fulfill.

Wilson died in hospital after battling cancer. He is probably best known to the wider music buying public as the Factory record label boss and owner of the legendary Hacienda nightclub in Manchester. He had been diagnosed with kidney cancer last year and had been in hospital receiving treatment. He had an operation to remove a kidney and had undergone chemotherapy, which did not work. He was being treated with the life-prolonging drug Sutent.

After being diagnosed, he was denied Sutent - which is a new drug - on the NHS and his friends set up a fund to start paying for the £3,500-a-month treatment.

As one of the five wise men who started Factory Records, Wilson had a hand in grooming some of British musics most iconic bands and I'm quite sure that the music of Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays to name just three will live on long beyond next weeks latest pop sensation has been forgotten.