

Tony Wilson would probably have winced at today's widespread claim that he was known as 'Mr Manchester'. Photograph: Garry Weaser

Sentimentality is some obituarists' stock-in trade, and Tony Wilson loathed that quality more than most. He would probably have winced at today's widespread claim that he was known as 'Mr Manchester' - a nickname I certainly never heard anyone use - and given an embarrassed shrug at the countless quotes crediting him with being a pop-cultural pioneer, de facto Mancunian Mayor, inventor of the superclub, and much more besides. Self-deprecation was always a part of his brand of super-confidence: we are, after all, talking about the man who gave his blessing to a poster campaign for 24 Hour Party People in which two of his protégés were described as a 'genius' and 'poet' (respectively, Ian Curtis and Shaun Ryder), while by way of a punchline, he was hailed as a "twat".

At the time, I thought that was a little misplaced, and told him so, but Wilson shrugged off the implied compliment, having long since come to conclusion that for all its buffoonish aspects, Steve Coogan's portrayal of him made for a great story, and great stories were always worth it. There is, let us not forget, a faintly epic subtext to that film, embodied in the final sequence in which the camera scans the nocturnal cityscape, and Coogan/Wilson tells us that the essential feature of just about everything he did was "an excess of civic pride". All told, it rendered him heroic, but with enough affectionate mockery to render that heroism completely believable.

And therein lies the important thing; that this most unlikely story actually happened, and is still doing so. At a time when the British music industry - as now - was absurdly London-centred and establishing an independent record label in Manchester was a fantastically foolhardy move, he and his friends did it. When Manchester was on its economic uppers, they really did think that turning an old dry-dock into a vast club-cum-venue - The Haçienda, for those too young to remember - was a good idea, and endured vast losses, before it became world-renowned. In the high days of 1988-90, Manchester really was the centre of the UK's pop culture. And these days, you really can draw lines from Manchester's reinvention as a culture-driven urban success story to the visions Wilson and co were outlining - and putting into practice - two decades ago.

Moreover, let us not forget that even if the word 'indie' these days denotes a certain kind of marketing strategy, Wilson really was one of a few people who cleaved to the absurdly idealistic notion that in putting out records that you loved, you could somehow implicity attack corporate chicanery, and build a fragile little microcosm of the ideal society. Flipping through an interview I did with him circa 2002, it's all there: "We were being profoundly political by not owning our groups," he told me. "'The company owns nothing, the musicians own their music and everything they do, and all artists have the freedom to fuck off.' That was the famous Joy Division contract that I signed in blood. And our other political act, throughout the '80s, was to never have a publishing arm. Because that would have made a lot of money. That was the reason we didn't want to do it. It seemed correctly anarchistic not to want to be rich."

"The other thing," he said, "was that in its first two years, Factory had this non-promotion thing: 'We don't promote. No press officers.' It was all about not treating the music as a commodity." Scoff if you want, but he meant it: the Factory mini-empire's serial business failures, culminating in the final meltdown of 1992, were the proof.

That said, it'd be as wrong to characterise him as some dreamy romantic as it would to be to reduce his story to the three or four components that are still being parroted over the wires and airwaves. In 1998 or thereabouts, I can remember Wilson telling me that Shaun Ryder could be compared to Yeats and Mozart, and then correctly lecturing a gathering of the music industry about the digital future it was trying to pretend it could somehow fend off (he started an above-board music download website not long after, which foundered thanks to a lack of music-biz interest). He was a self-described anarchist, but I have clear memories of arguing with him about his charitable-sum-supportive feelings about New Labour.

Most of all, if anyone gets too carried away with the idea that all his hyperbole and myth-making somehow served to diminish him, they should consider this. The records came out. The Haçienda got built. Things happened. The glorifying stories came later, which he was fond of describing as a proof of the Marxist idea of praxis: "You learn why you do something by actually doing it." Though making the point comes dangerously close to the sentimentality he so despised, that can surely stand as some kind of epitaph.

Read Tony Wilson's obituary here.