Rare was the day when Anthony Wilson, the Manchester music impresario and local TV presenter who died yesterday, couldn’t walk down the street in his home city without a murmur of “wanker” and “twat”. It was as much as a part of the city as the incessant drizzle.
But Wilson revelled in the role of camp, ironic, antihero and played it to the hilt. In interviews in early June, six months after his cancer had been diagnosed, Wilson fretted that Mancunians were suddenly “being nice to me”. This was a shock in such a fiercely unsentimental city.
Music lovers visiting Britain from overseas began skipping London in the 1990s, heading straight for what’s now recognised as Britain’s great music city – and that owed much of that outrageous charm of Tony Wilson.