Factory Records had an aesthetic that captured a revolutionary spirit: it stood for both high art and a good time. That idea has blossomed in contemporary Britain
A coffee-table book. The perfect present for the settled fortysomething, for £50 man with his ordered CD collection, for a once-ponytailed DJ, for parents who first met at a rave. In fact, bring Factory Records: the complete graphic album into the home of anyone interested in British music between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, and you will be fighting to hold on to it when you leave.
The book is a beautiful thing, sleek and glossy, big and gorgeous. But that's not why they'll want it. It's complete, too, containing the entire graphic product of Manchester's most revolutionary and romantic record label: album sleeves, posters, single covers, flyers, stationery, architecture. But that's not why, either. This book is desirable because it holds the colourful resi-due of something that lived. Like a collection of butterflies pinned to a board, these pages glitter with a vital history, skewered for enthusiasts, collated for spods.
Factory Records lasted for nearly 15 years, from 1978 until 1992, during which time it put out hits by Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, and records from less chart-bothering bands such as A Certain Ratio, the Durutti Column, Crispy Ambulance. It also created a world-famous nightclub, the Haçienda, and a bar, Dry: an admirably ambitious output for an independent record label. But what really made Factory different was that, from the start, it had an aesthetic. The graphic designer Peter Saville, who went on to work for a huge variety of clients, from Pulp to the Pompidou Centre, was an integral part of Factory - a founder partner with the journalist Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton (Joy Division/New Order's manager), the producer Martin Hannett and the actor Alan Erasmus.
It is Saville's stark modernist-classical eye that dominates the first part of this book, from the debut flyer (which combined the typography of Jan Tschichold with the colour scheme of National Car Parks) to the floating-leaf cover of New Order's "True Faith" and the bright pills of "Fine Time". His 1983 sleeve design for New Order's "Blue Monday", the biggest-selling 12-inch single ever, is remarkably prescient: it is based on the floppy disc, which had just started to be used in electronic music production. But, infamously, it was also expensive: the production costs for the sleeve were higher than the revenue generated by sales, and each single sold at a loss. A failure by accountants' standards: a stunning success, by Factory's.
The second part of the book - covering the Madchester years - is in direct contrast to the first. The Central Station team gives us splashy, colourful, freewheeling designs: amateurish paintings, sampled sweet wrappers, mucky pics. The team's Happy Mondays sleeves couldn't be more different from Saville's sumptuous cool. Though both styles are fantastic, it is Saville's that has become the most influential: you can see reflections of it throughout youth culture today, from lower-cased nightclub flyers (Ministry of Sound) to delectable fashion campaigns (Stella McCartney). And record covers?
Sad to say, but record sleeves are disappearing. They are just not needed in the age of instant download. A few years ago, when CDs first came along, several of the more cheapskate record companies took this as a cue to think less and spend less on the packaging of music. Today, when a track's aesthetic is provided by the wallpaper on an artist's MySpace page, the idea that the cover of a single might be more expensive to produce than the whole record costs to buy is not only ludicrous, but impossible. Sure, the album might come out on CD, its chipped plastic casing jazzed up by a flimsy picture of the band, a list of tracks, an insert demanding your e-mail address. But even CD sales are being eroded by the give-it-to-me-now gratification of a download. These days, the only people who buy compact discs are housewives and completists.
Today, music visuals are supplied by photo-graphs (in Sunday-paper adverts, snatched by paparazzi) and moving pictures (videos on MTV, band chats on the internet) - not by graphics. Only one of New Order's LPs, 1985's Low-Life, features photos of the band, obscured behind an overlay of tracing paper; yet, through the beauty of the product, fans across the world had a sense of what New Order was about. Which was: artistry over accountancy, romance before sense. In fact, the group's highbrow reputation was misleading: in real life, Bernard, Hooky, Stephen and Gillian were far funnier, and much messier, than their creative output would make you believe.
Because that was what Factory stood for; there was art, and there was a good time, and Factory said you were allowed to have both. And des-pite the decline of the record sleeve, despite the rise of the lad, that central idea has blossomed across Britain.
In the end, the single most successful Factory legacy, aesthetically, was an architectural one. Dry was one of the first Barcelona-type bars in the UK and, as such, influential. But it was the stark, industrial Haçienda nightclub, designed by Ben Kelly, that became Britain's blueprint, the forerunner of the 1990s superclubs, despite the speakers being in the wrong place, and although it was freezing unless it was packed. In the club's early days (it opened in 1982), when there were so few punters that you had to keep your coat on, and when you could jig to the June Brides, by yourself, on an empty dance floor, the idea that such a nightclub could be enjoyed by everyone, together, seemed an impossible ideal. There was the Haçienda, full of spiky-haired alternos in macs, and then, down the street, there was Rotters, packed with white-trousered psychos with mullets. They never met.
Ten years later, and the Haç was heaving with house fans, with Madchester liggers, with students and hooligans, the Cheshire set and Salford scallies. Everyone all together in the same, sleek-and-bleak pleasure palace. And now, if you go to Manchester and you walk past the old Haçienda site, transformed into luxury city-centre apartments, you come across Deansgate Locks, packed full of bars that, in the words of Happy Mondays's Shaun Ryder, "look like the Haçienda but have the mentality of Rotters".
Factory's design aesthetic has been democratised: Sugar Lounge, Loaf, Baa Bar and Revolution are all smart surroundings - shiny floors, bit of metal, airy, nouveau. Diluted Haçiendas, baby Drys. And they are heaving with people who, if they'd been around 30 years ago, would have been happy enough with the Rotters rottenness. Now that we all have designer lifestyles, the way things look is important to everyone, not just the arty and the privileged. Our cities have transformed themselves into social hubs lined with metal-floored coffee shops, with sleek nightclubs, with classy environments. Rotters is no more. We wouldn't dream of going somewhere so naff, so ugly. Our standards have been raised, and we have Factory Records to thank for it.
"Factory Records: the complete graphic album" by Matthew Robertson is newly published by Thames & Hudson (£29.95). Robertson, Tony Wilson, Peter Saville and Central Station discuss the legacy of Factory on 19 June (7pm) at Central Saint Martins, London WC1. For more details call: 020 7269 1606
Factory classics
Unknown Pleasures (1979) by Joy Division
Power, Corruption and Lies (1983) by New Order
Technique (1989) by New Order
Pills 'n Thrills and Bellyaches (1990) by Happy Mondays
Electronic (1991) by Electronic
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