Alan Wise was many things but sorting truth from fiction is difficult when one of his favourite pastimes – besides, gambling, football and women – was telling stories.
His grave, in Southern Cemetery, bears the inscription ‘Impresario Extraordinaire’: it stands metres from Tony Wilson – and they certainly worked together – but supporters will say that Alan did all the groundwork, that made the punk and then Manchester music scene so potent.
As the Salford Star wrote, after his death…
“Where does one start to write about Alan Wise? Long term off and on manager of John Cooper Clarke, long time off and on promoter of The Fall, mainstay in Nico’s Broughton stay, in at the start of the Russell Club and Factory Records, depicted in books and a play…a larger than life legend who had Salford running through his being.”
He was the third son of Lionel and Edith Wise who ran a chain of pharmacies in and around Cheetham Hill; and he always maintained he was expelled, for gambling, from William Hulme Grammar School, aged 15, but that’s refuted by anyone who should know. He would often refer to himself as Doctor Alan Wise, despite not completing his Theology degree at Oxford.
By 1971 Alan set up Wise Moves, a removal company that soon also became van and driver for Dougie James (who became a life-long friend) and led to his direct involvement in much that gives Manchester it’s worldwide reputation for music. It was also when he moved into a flat on St Anns Road, just off Bury New Road.
John Cooper Clarke describes this period in his autobiography I Wanna Be Yours…
“Wise Moves ran for at least 10 years in spite of pianos trashed, mirrors smashed and payment cheques seldom cashed. He was forever trying to claw back the losses from the financially moronic world of punk. Same time he was always falling in love with hookers and paying them to love him back. Yankee Bill would try and get him to see it for what it was but Al was a romantic fool. The mail-order bride was the last to take him for the patsy he was with women.”
The flat was also home, at different times, to his friend Jim Young, Yankee Bill, JCC and his girlfriend, Nico and various musicians who went on to work with AC/DC and Gil Scott Heron, amongst others…There’s been a lot written and said about Alan’s management of Nico: this interview with Nina Antonia in 2018 tells the story, mainly in his own words – click here.
It is well documented that he preferred the musicians and their ‘hangers on’ to the music and that he did not like recreational drugs or alcohol, but had a long-time addiction to Valium. Indeed, ‘30 Years on Valium’ became ‘40 years on Valium’…and then ‘50 Years On Valium‘ This was the proposed title of his ‘extreme autobiography’ that he described to the Salford Star…
“It’s about Manchester and Salford of the late 60s to 2000…A story very unlikely, essentially true, to be published by instalments like an adventure story with drama and romance. It’s not a dirty book, far from it – it’s spiritual in a way and uplifting. The message is `Nothing really changes and we must know the past is alive in us to know our future’…”
He was hopeless with money but his kindness and generosity – whenever he had it – was legendary. John Cooper Clarke, again…
“I’d known Alan years, first as booker at Rafters, Russell and Factory Nights…Let him become my manager for a bit because he had so many big names on his roster I figured he had to have something. But it was a mistake. He would arrange gigs for me and Nico which looked good but lost money and then we would have to play a load of dives to try and make it up. Then he would disappear when you needed paying…
“Al had creditors over the shop at all times. He got so behind with his books that a smart person would have cut their losses and run, but there was always the chance that maybe this time he would pay out. Law of averages, I thought It must come right sometimes with this guy, or why would the likes of New Order, Gil Scott-Heron, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Nico deal with him in the first place? And more than once, even…
“In the end I fired him. But when I really needed help, to get into a detox clinic, it was Alan who hassled CBS into putting the money up. And it was Alan who came to fetch me when I came out, and fixed me up with a new suit…”
Longtime partner of Alan, Bev Hoyle, says that when Alan read the above he commented that JCC had forgotten to say that he was ‘an exhaustingly , unpredictable, drug user at that time’; however they remained friends and in regular contact until Alan’s death.
Another Bury New Road music Icon, Mark E. Smith, published his autobiography, Renegade, in 2008.
Despite Mark E telling Al it was the ghost writer, Austin Collings’, fault for any negative comments about him…Alan responded with a proposed book ‘I Was Mark E Smith’s Impresario….The Shocking Revelations of The Fall’s Long-suffering ‘Fixer’’… But he didn’t finish or publish it. Here’s a taster…
“I was Mark E Smith’s impresario. Mark wrote a song about it…It’s something a temperamental opera singer would have – agent, adviser, arranger. The Fall had other managers but I was their champion. Here is a thing about Smith. He is not funny. He can laugh at things, see absurdities, but he cannot make you laugh. He was always most jealous of me because I could entertain. He is a man of few friends but I am one of them…
“The Fall were a mystery to me at first. I kept putting them on out of perversity but couldn’t understand what they were about. It was their fans who taught me. His Circus creatures. I learned it all from the fans. Nice people but anarchists. Now grown up into doctors or policemen or plumbers or deadbeats – and 90 percent of them men. Mark represented the anarchic creature they would have liked to be.
“I insisted on them in the early days even though Tony (Wilson) didn’t want them, couldn’t understand why I liked them, and knew I couldn’t really like their songs. But I loved Smith’s political incorrectness and thought he had something. Mark stayed loyal and he is my friend. But he is not the most relaxing guy to have around, especially when drunk. We were always dependent on his mood and that’s a type of tyranny.”
If not tyranny, there’s some signs of promoter/artist tension in this unofficial Fall gig webpage from 2007 – click here
At his funeral, Alan’s friends put together the following roll call of people Al had promoted, sometimes with partners, at Rafters, The Russell Club, The International, the Cities in the Park memorial for Martin Hannett plus tours with bands in the UK, Europe and America…
Dougie James & the Soul Train. Siouxsie Sue. Adam and The Ants. Penetration. John Cooper Clarke. Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Generation X. C.P.Lee. New Fast Automatic Daffodils. Elvis Costello. The Q-Tips. The Albertos. The Police. The Cure. The Skids. The Damned. The Wailers….To speed things up now cut out all the Thes…Distractions. Human League. Fall. Tiller Boys. Undertones. Specials. Some strippers. UB40. Eddy Grant. Gary Glitter. Toyah. Orchestral Manoeuvres. Some wrestlers. A special exception has to be made for one band: The The.
Jilted John. Gordon Moron. John Otway. Joy Division. Pretenders…Northern Temperance Dance Society. Buzzcocks. Primetime Suckers. Throbbing Gristle. Hampton Levy. Gladiators. Culture. Iggy Pop. Echo and Bunnymen. Television.
Happy Mondays. Nico. Gil Scott Heron. Mary Coughlan. Geno Washington. Stone Roses. New Order. Jerry Lee Lewis. Lonesome Penniless Cowboys. Little Richard. Chuck Berry. Chet Baker. Courtney Pine. John Cale. Sandie Shaw. Peter Green. Durutti Column. A Certain Ratio. Black Grape. Nusrat Fati El Khan. Mark E. Smith. Arlo Guthrie, Lee Scratch Perry, Steven Segal… And most recently Donovan.
Final word though, should be from the people who knew and loved the man and chose this epitaph…
‘Dr Timothy Alan Wise, 12 May 1953 – 2 June 2016. A man of Christian principles, spiritually bohemian. Funny, clever, outrageous. Always kind. An inspirational friend to musicians, writers, artists et al.’
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