Publications > Scream City > Scream City Issue #1 > You're Rendering That Scaffolding Dang'rous by Aloysius Munn

Rendering that scaffolding dangerous. And so they were, and the whole bloody lot came down with it. This was back in the early 90s. Back in the last century. Factory was razed to the ground. And to this day you can still smell the brickdust in the air. Beautiful thing it was too, this Factory. Some thought it monolithic, overbearing, depressive. But what the fuck did they know. Within Factory's red brick Lancastrian walls, alchemy was performed; DNA was mutated; the righteous were wronged. Two Lancastrian fingers up to the world. And what a legacy.

Now it's probably not appropriate to start quoting Nazis here, but I will anyway. The Austrian Prick's favoured draughtsman -- Albert Speers -- summed it all up when he said: "Today's architecture is tomorrow's archaeology". So, among the brickdust and the rubble and the disjecta membra is where we will find that legacy. A legacy summed up by John Lydon in the universal truth that "only the fakes survive".

And there was another edifice, be it annexe or alternate reality. Fac 51 on Whitworth Street. It went from yacht showroom to nightclub. Then the nightclub became a dispersal zone, for reasons too complicated to go into here. Now it's flats. They should have sold each flat with a vinyl copy of Fact 400, but somehow I doubt they did. Let's just hope that, occasionally, the well-to-do who reside there get woken up in the middle of the night by the ghost of repetitive beats. The ones at the start of 'Wrote For Luck' would be perfect for this.

Let me digress for a second, with a true story. In late '99 I witnessed Shaun Ryder buying drugs1. I was in Boots on Princes Street in Edinburgh, buying vitamin C. Now, if you live in Edinburgh you need your vitamin C.

Prophylactic against the biting wind and the colds that follow it. Anyway I looked up and saw someone who could only be Shaun. Taller than I'd imagined, but still probably him. I knew for sure it was the former Mondays frontman when he went up to the counter, and in that inimitable Little Hulton voice said to the pharmacy counter assistant: "Have you got any of them Zantac pills?" So here we find a Factory myth turned gospel : the bellyaches were for real. There must be so many others. Myths, that is. Alongside gospels, and bellyaches. Legends too.

It's not for me, in the pages of this zine, to come out with a call to arms like "The Factory Must Be Built", but hey – even if only as an elemental part of the psychogeography of Manchester, it's still there anyways. It is still there. Take a walk down Central MCR's Oldham Street, it's in the air. Head down to South MCR's Palatine Road, where the old Factory HQ is now a chiropractic clinic. It's there too. So much so that on my first visit I knelt down and kissed the pavement. No doubt the bonecracker looked out the window of number 86 and thought '...who's that eejit kissing the pavement?'. The feeling is still there. Lips that would kiss. Broken stone. Brickdust swirling in Manchester air. And far beyond : for this was never someone else's party, some style mag Babylon with a dress and behaviour code. If you knew what the deal was, it was yours too. There are folk in Tokyo, Paris, New York, Liverpool, even, who've never been to Manchester, but understood and still understand. It was theirs as much as anyone's. And continues to be. Life keeps moving.

Sometimes I wonder though: what was Factory? Why was Factory? How did they do it?

We can sift thru the dust and trawl the rubble. But there is an answer. And it follows. People like them found it easy. Walking on air.

1. This story is true. Funnily enough the week after I saw him, there was a report in the NME that Bez had crashed his motorbike just outside Edinburgh. WTF were they doing here ? Better class of Zantac?

The reason I thought S W Ryder would be less than tall is because in 1990 or thereabouts, a Pinnacle distribution employee told me he'd been introduced to Shaun at the Haçienda. The Pinnacle employee said something along the lines of he'd met Shaun at the Haç, and that he was a 'wee guy'. So until 1999 I thought SWR would be about five four. The Mancunian I saw in Boots (who was definitely SWR) was much taller than five four. Five eight at the least, I'd say Aloysius Munn lives in Edinburgh and writes Hey Asda! [JC note 2019: Hey Asda! is no longer with us]