View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Leeds Beckett Repository ‘Closer from a distance’: Auras of Factory Records in design, place, film, and historiography James McGrath
[email protected] On Monday 23 November 1992, as independent Manchester label Factory Records was declared bankrupt, co-director Rob Gretton was filmed leaving the company’s latter-day Charles Street headquarters. Asked to comment, he buoyantly replied: ‘This isn’t the final chapter. There’s a whole new book to be written. Whole new film to be made.’1 Gretton was proven right; repeatedly. Subjected to dozens of books, documentaries and films since 1992, Factory and its artists have received mainstream media attention surpassing the independent label’s profile during its fourteen-year existence. This article discusses how Factory, from its 1978 beginnings, mythologized itself and its artists through notions of distance and absence. Screens of mystique were created. Post-1992 narratives concerning Factory implicitly offer to penetrate these screens, taking audiences somehow closer to the artists, texts and events themselves. Exploring these processes, I adapt and expand on Walter Benjamin’s 1936 terms of ‘aura’, ‘cult value’ and ‘exhibition value’. I apply these to key Factory albums, designs and videos, as well as its celebrated Manchester nightclub, The Haçienda. I critique how Joy Division’s media presence gradually transformed after their catalogue was subsumed by a major label, London in 1992, and how this both developed and contradicted Factory’s initially very different approach to promoting (or not promoting) artists.