Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.
Already a member?
Log in
24 Hour Party People, the black comedy film documenting the evolution of Manchester’s music scene from the mid-Seventies to the early Nineties, is getting a re-release in cinemas in the UK and Ireland to mark its 24th anniversary on 9 October.
A special screening is also taking place at Beyond the Music Festival in Salford, along with a keynote conversation with director Michael Winterbottom and actor Steve Coogan, who played pioneering Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in the film.
“24 Hour Party People is the work that is closest to my heart,” Coogan said in a statement. “It captures the creative spirit of the town I am proud to have grown up in. I feel very sentimental about it all, which Tony Wilson would have deplored.
“Like Anthony HW and all those working-class musicians, when it came to tell the story, Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce made something very special. ‘A vague plan wrapped in an impossible dream’, but it worked.”
Speaking to The Independent, Winterbottom recalled how he and producer Andrew Eaton were staying in a logging town in British Columbia, Canada, while scouting for locations for their film The Claim.
“We wanted to do something closer to home, and in that conversation we landed on Manchester music – and at the center of that would be Tony Wilson, Factory Records,” he explained. “All of the initial ideas came out of one long bar session in Canada.”
Coogan was their first pick to play Wilson. Winterbottom recalled: “He was obviously the perfect person to play Tony.”
The film’s impressive cast also included Shirley Henderson as Wilson’s first wife, Lindsay, Paddy Considine as Joy Division / New Order manager Rob Gretton, Andy Serkis as producer Martin Hannett, Sean Harris as Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, and John Simm as Bernard Sumner.
24 Hour Party People also featured several cameos, including Wilson himself as the director of the TV show Wheel of Fortune, Happy Mondays singer Rowetta as herself, Happy Mondays bassist Paul Ryder as a drug dealer and doorman, and the late Stone Roses bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield as a roadie for the Happy Mondays.
“He was incredibly friendly and welcoming,” Eaton recalled of the late music pioneer, who died in 2007. “He told us so much – loads of stories that end up in the film – and put us in touch with all these people connected with the bands, with Factory and with the Haçienda.”
Wilson was behind some of Manchester’s most successful bands, including Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays. He co-founded Factory Records and was also the founder and manager of the Haçienda nightclub, which became famous during the Madchester scene of the Eighties and early Nineties.
“From the start it seemed like it’d be interesting and different to not focus on some tortured artistic genius or a creative romantic hero, where there’s an exploitative record company executive squeezing them dry, but the opposite in a way,” Eaton said. “Tony is the most kind, generous, positive and music-loving person in the whole story. And I don’t think Manchester would be how it is now without him.”
24 Hour Party People is back in cinemas from 9 October, with a special screening at Beyond the Music Festival on Tuesday 6 October.
