“I am not here to compere or introduce Joy Division/New Order…My job is to introduce Alan Wise, who always introduces Joy Division/New Order…Ladies and gentlemen, Alan Wise…” Tony Wilson, Move Festival at Old Trafford 2002
6 June 1987: New Order play Super Tent, Finsbury Park, London as part of an all-day Factory benefit gig…
“We were introduced on stage by Alan Wise. He would always introduce us with some weird shit like ‘Here they are, four girls from Preston, it’s Joy D’Odour’, or something like that…Tonight it was ‘Four girls from Macclesfield, Joy Division’. His best or worst moment was at the Tenth Summer gig when he came on with a girl in a wheelchair and then pretended to push her off the front of the stage by accident. Even we were shocked. I loved him to bits, but he was an absolute nutcase…” Peter Hook: Substance: Inside New Order.
“In June we played a jazz festival in Denmark, another Alan Wise gig, but he didn’t tell us until we got there that it was a jazz festival. God knows what possessed him, the money probably…I know we’d had some pretty wild performances…but, ironically, this would prove to be our wildest…” Peter Hook: Substance: Inside New Order.
“I met Alan Wise on different slots in time. First when he gave a support slot with Hawkwind to Intastella, and we were told as a young band to keep away from him as he wasn’t to be trusted re money etc. Then I got to know him as a friend when I was doing the Nico thing, and kept in touch. He was the one person who liked to see women on stage, whatever his reasons, but he did support women. Nico was in her forties touring. Who can do that now as a female? You really can’t. You have to do somersaults to get people to come and see stuff…” Stella Grundy
“Alan Wise was the only real Punk I ever knew although he never adhered to any youth movement like Punk or Mod or Hippie etc. But he stayed true to an inner anarchic spirit which was parallel to the Punk era from which he emerged. He was a maverick in an age that despises the true individualist yet celebrates a phoney commercial pseudo-individualism. He has been sidelined by corporate UK Pop culture because of that.
“Alan gave a lot of now famous groups and artists their start…not because he had any interest in their music but because he liked to create an event. Alan genuinely didn’t give a fuck… except about: Manchester United, the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mahler, Dostoevsky and dangerously sexy women…” James Young, author of the Nico book Songs They Never Play on the Radio (quoted in Huff Post)
“Alan was an extraordinary bloke, always trying to set me up with one of his women pals (even though I was married at the time!), and always talking about religious pre-history that went right over my head. He was incredibly well read, and we talked loads about politics and socialist traditions…but, strangely, we never talked about music… ‘I am Socialist but with Christian Pantheistic leanings’ he once messaged me, which I still don’t understand!
“The Salford Star was going to serialise his, kind of, autobiography which was eventually titled 50 Years on Valium…
‘A story of Manchester/Salford and how these places created people not vice versa, and how it’s changed. It’s about two cities asleep, drugged out on Valium and the people like that too; they are anaesthetised…I think people will like it; it’s simple written and it has a political theme…I’ve got the first chapter about Manchester and Salford of the late 60s to 2000…It’s not a pop book but the characters are in. Should I use their real names?
‘The seedy bits and sex are in too, all true. 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’…
“Unfortunately I never got to see that first chapter. Alan wrote that ‘places created people not vice versa’ but he might have been slightly wrong. Alan Wise definitely helped create all that’s wild in Manchester and Salford!…” Stephen Kingston, former Editor, Salford Star
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