24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE

A HISTORY OF FACTORY RECORDS

Manchester was the first industrial city in England.  There had been factories in the northern city since the eighteenth century, but there was one Factory that mattered more than any other.

Factory Records was the proud purveyor of a distinct sound and a distinct look.  Factory Records was also a marvelous knot of contradictions as high-minded artistic and political ideologies were distilled and recycled into mass entertainment – an enabling force that ushered youth culture through years of change.  From punk to post-punk to acid house, one label in one city embodied the zeitgeist and made time for fun along the way.  For all the chaos scribbled in the margins of Factory Records’ history, with hindsight one can see that there was a roadmap, that there was order all along.

Tony Wilson, who founded the label with Alan Erasmus, has written that Factory was built on “anarchic sentimentalism about the role of popular art.”  They took inspiration from various movements, but most conspicuously from the Situationist International, a band of libertarians who argued for play at the expense of work.  The appeal of such an ideology to citizens of an economically depressed city – especially those enamored of punk’s do-it-yourself ethos – should be obvious.  Luckily, Factory’s embrace of such rhetoric was backed up with an enthusiasm and determinism that bordered on the insane.

“Sooner or later – and later was late ’77 – someone was going to have to want a way

to express more complex emotions, but to build to that place

from the simplicity and anger of punk instrumentation.”

—Tony Wilson, 1996

Punk took politics and made it resonate with personal fury.  Factory Records used political rhetoric to market personal expression.  Punk had cheaply-recorded buzzsaw guitars that sliced through pomposity.  Factory Records had impeccably recorded guitars that sliced through the dirge of funereal howls and industrial rhythms.  Staff producer (and eventual partner) Martin Hannett was something of a mad genius (fittingly, he’d previously worked in a chemistry laboratory), giving musicians such direction as “play faster, but slower.”  Through a revolutionary alchemy of reverb and digital delay, the rich arrangements of Joy Division were transformed into something simultaneously rich and wide-open.  Despite meticulous recording that kept each instrument discreet and identifiable, vocals and bass and guitar and drums moved together like a juggernaut.  On top of all that, he added the sounds of breaking glass, of slamming doors, of moving elevators, of ambulance sirens.  These records were full of emotion, but there was something intellectual that came through as well.

Joy Division wasn’t alone in its innovation.  A Certain Ratio, the Durutti Column, Section 25, James, Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark, and The Wake were only a few of the shining lights of the Factory roster.  And the music was only the beginning. Graphic designer Peter Saville stole from decades of art movements (especially Constructivism and Futurism) to create a distanced, even frigid, corporate identity.  There were no pictures of band members.  Stark images, plain fonts, and (for a while) joyless color schemes were a far cry from the unhinged collage art associated with punk.  Instead everything looked like it had come straight from the conveyer belt.  The DIY sensibility had never been so professional – or so it would seem.  Always more interested in slogans and styles than business plans, Factory lost money on such schemes as the sandpaper-encrusted sleeves meant to destroy adjacent records.

Enhancing both Factory’s playfulness and its connection to industry, everything was assigned a catalogue number.  Three of the first Factory releases were posters; later unveilings included stationery, badges, leaflets, matchbooks, brooches, model kits, Christmas cards, doggy bags...and an egg timer.  Even the nightclub that would become ground zero for rave culture, the Hacienda, had a number – a conceit that made every undertaking seem as consequential as the next.

The Hacienda, unsurprisingly, took its text from a Situationist text by Ivan Chtcheglov, who railed against the drudgery of modern urban life and imagined a city “set apart for free play.”  Manchester would be that city.  As the success of New Order conspired with the popularity of Hacienda DJ’s to achieve a synergy of post-punk dance fever, Factory continued to define the era.  The Hacienda, in turn, soon became ground zero for acid-house/rave culture.  Once you get past the seemingly absurd trajectory from punk to disco, it’s clear that acid house – and the accompanying rush of ecstasy – represented just one more way for people to revolutionize through celebration.  Of course, this time there were more drugs (and, by turn, guns), so naturally the celebration wasn’t as pure as the slogans had promised.  Manchester became “Madchester,” and the selfish hedonism symbolized by the Happy Mondays made them a perfect band for the times.  At such a dangerous pace, the party had to conclude.  But Tony Wilson was the host until the end.

Welcome to FAC401, the culmination of 400 previous endeavors.

“I will never interfere with the freedom of my artists.  Artists make their own rules.  Do you think Pope Julius wanted homoerotica all over the walls of the Vatican?”

- Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson

PLANNING THE PARTY

24 Hour Party People was first discussed by Eaton and Winterbottom whilst the pair were in Canada shooting The Claim.  Both wanted to make a film with great music that wasn’t specifically a musical.  “We thought it would be fun to have a lot of music but to avoid people bursting into song,” says Eaton.  In thinking about it, they were drawn to the influential Manchester music scene, with which both had previous personal allegiances.  

“Andrew and I were in British Columbia about five hundred miles north of Vancouver in a logging town in a Country-and-Western bar, and we decided it would be a good idea to make a movie about that music,” says Winterbottom.  “After about 30 seconds, we decided Factory was the obvious story and Tony Wilson should be the main character, because he had this strange double life of local TV news reporter and Factory Records and the Haçienda.  It just started from that.”

“The music element was a big attraction,” he continues.  “As I come from that area, I liked the idea of making a movie about Manchester, and I also liked the period because a lot of the characters in the story are roughly my generation.”

Eaton adds, “We both grew up listening to the music.  The first job I had in London was at the Riverside Studios, where we did FAC121 – the week of Factory at Riverside.”

The pair approached writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, with whom they had previously worked.  He was immediately excited about being involved.  “Michael just rung me up saying ‘Wouldn’t it be good tell a story about Factory Records?’” says Cottrell Boyce.  “I said ‘If you do it with anyone else, I’ll have you shot!’  Anyone growing up in the north west feels a connection with Tony (Wilson) because he was this kind of mad magic uncle, the besuited newsreader telling you about car boot sales in Bolton but at the same time the manager of the hippest pop group in the world.”

The first major difficulty in bringing the script to life was deciding on exactly what tale to tell.  “There are several very obvious stories,” says Cottrell Boyce.  “The Ian Curtis rock ‘n’ roll suicide story, the Happy Monday sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll story.  But the idea of doing it all, having everything from ’76 - ’92, that was an act of courage – but for me, dealing with the huge time scale was the attraction.”

Anthony Wilson was also impressed by the proposed time frame for the film.  “When he told me they were going to do this two and a half years ago, Andrew specifically said 1976 to 1992, which is what endeared me to the project, because it meant they understood the dawn of punk to the death of acid.” 

Compressing two decades of musical and cultural history into 120 minutes was not the only challenge faced by the writer.  “The other major difficulty,” says Cottrell Boyce, “is that these are all living people, and they have to be respected, they have to be courted, and they have to be made to feel good.  They also have to be listened to, so writing it was nothing compared to going around and reassuring people, listening to them, collecting information, tracking people down.  Even during the shoot, keeping the real people happy – the people on whom the film is based – that was difficult.”

He continues, “I think most of them had not realized just how emotional it would be for them.  I know Tony has found it very difficult meeting the actors playing Martin and Rob, because both of them are now dead.  He has three great adjectives for how he feels.  He says ‘I’m flattered, exhilarated and embarrassed.’”

Cottrell Boyce re-read the Anthony Powell novel A Dance To The Music Of Time whilst working on the script.  “The way the characters are picked up and dropped and then re-appear is hopefully the kind of rhythm you will see with this film,” he says.  “The obvious one is Martin Hannett (Andy Serkis), who is this fantastically exciting character in the first act, disappears for the second act, then re-appears in the third act as this huge, bloated, alcoholic.  The make-up for Martin Hannett is just extraordinary – even better than the make-up he is wearing to play Gollum in Lord of the Rings!”

DOCUMENTING THE EVENT

The filmmakers’ next step was to bring award-winning director of photography Robby Müller on board.  “I’d talked to Robby about a couple of films before, but it hadn’t worked out,” says Winterbottom.  “I think he’s a fantastic cinematographer, from his early work with Wenders to his recent work with Lars Von Trier.  He has a great eye and I think his work often seems very simple, very direct, yet somehow he manages to capture exactly the things you want to see on film.  So with this one I was lucky.  He was free and he was interested in the story, so he came over to talk about it.  From that point on it was just a question of working in a way that Robby felt comfortable with.”

In his approach to the filming, Winterbottom was keen to replicate the ethos that had made Factory so unique. “Part of the original idea was that the script would be quite loose.  In a way, part of the attraction of making a film about Factory is that when you read about it, it sounds fairly shambolic.  Almost the idea of Factory was not to plan things, not to organize, not to work like a company, but to work as a group of people who let other people do what they wanted to do.  So the idea was that the film would have the same spirit.  That anyone who was working on it would be as free as possible to do what they wanted to do.  The whole thing is a bit of a shambles, but hopefully in the kind of way that…” – and here Tony Wilson chips in, “we were!”

“That you were, thank you,” says Winterbottom.  “Loads of great things came out of Factory.  I’m sure the film will be the same – a patchwork of different bits and pieces.”

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE is shot entirely on digital video.  “I’ve shot films like this before,” says Winterbottom.  “Though Wonderland was on film, the filming style was the same.  I don’t think it matters so much about the technology as much as the relationship between the cameras and the actors.”

“When we started talking about the idea with Robby,” Winterbottom continues, “the idea was to mix between 35mm and DV.  We looked at Wonderland (which I’d shot on 16mm), Breaking the Waves (which Robby shot on 35mm), and then some stuff he shot on DV.  In the end, the practical advantages of DV and the actual aesthetic of the film – it was surprising how close the DV was to the film.”

Müller adds, “The quality of DV is so forgiving that you can be a bit more lose on lighting, which helped us, because we didn’t have time for lighting and Michael wanted to see 360 degrees around.”

Commenting on the overall style of the film, Winterbottom says, “The reason we shot the way we did was to allow the performances as much space as possible and to have a sense of recording things as they happen, as opposed to composing and organizing them.  It’s not to achieve a certain look or style, but to achieve the best content.”

PARTY GUESTS

“We do things differently in Manchester.  We let people make up their own mind.”

- Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson

Making a film based on the lives of real people was always going to draw attention, both good and bad, from those depicted, from idle tales of Shaun Ryder’s demands for a Hollywood star to play him to cameo appearances by some of Manchester’s finest.  Winterbottom admits, “We were really nervous at first.  It’s really difficult when you’re making a movie about real people, with their names attached and events from their lives.  All we’ve tried to do is to talk to as many people as possible and tell them we’re trying to celebrate what went on.  It’s not an attack on anyone and it’s not trying to slag off these bands.”

Over the course of the production, any initial doubts of the city were overcome and the sheer level of contributions illustrated people’s dedication to the film.  In addition to Anthony Wilson assisting as a consultant on the film, the production enlisted the help of many other people who were around at the time:  from original guitarist with A Certain Ratio, Martin Moscrop (who was bought in as Music Technical Advisor) and DJ Dave Haslam (who returned for the Hacienda club scenes) to New Order’s Barney Sumner and Peter Hook, who provided original musical instruments and other personal belongings to authenticate the film.

Winterbottom is pleased with the support.  “I think what we hoped for in the best case is that we made a movie about Factory in the spirit of Factory,” he says.  “We’ve been lucky in that most of the people we’ve met and talked to that were involved at the time have felt relaxed enough about it.”

“It’s great when Paul Ryder is acting in the film,” he continues, “and lots of other people have come down and been on set and done little bits and pieces.”  In addition to Ryder, other cameos include the Buzzcocks’ Howard Devoto, Clint Boon of Inspiral Carpets fame, the real Vini Reilly, and frontman with The Fall, Mark E Smith.  In addition, Christopher Eccleston makes an appearance, as do Margi Clarke and comedians Fiona Allen and Simon Pegg.

Despite casting actors into the roles of real individuals, Winterbottom says the casting for 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE was no different from any other.  “You just want to cast the people you think are best for the part,” he says.  “It’s incredibly subjective and it’s no more complicated than that really.  You look around for people, and when you find someone you like, you cast them.” 

Even during their earliest discussions about the film, Winterbottom felt Steve Coogan was the obvious choice for the role of Wilson.  “I met up with Steve and tried to persuade him,” says Winterbottom, “but that was about two years ago, before we even started on the script.  He always seemed to me to be the perfect person to play Tony.  I just really like his work, so I really wanted to work with him.”

Winterbottom continues, “We felt a lot of aspects of Tony’s character within the film, he would be able to do brilliantly.  It had to be someone who was used to creating a whole character, and Steve, besides being a great performer, is a brilliant observer of people, which is why his writing is so sharp and funny.  Because the whole film was going to be built around that one character, we had to have someone create a real person out of the string of incidents in the script.”

For his part, Coogan says, “If ‘Dave Wannabe Director’ had come up to me and said he wanted to do a film about Manchester, I would have been very, very worried.  But the combination of subject matter and Michael and Andrew’s reputation as a company made me want to do it.

“Lots of reasons endeared me to the project,” he continues.  “One was that I’d worked with Tony about ten years ago on a local television program, so I knew him from that.  Also I’d grown up with him on television and I was aware of Factory.  I bought Joy Division’s records.  I used to go to the Haçienda and hang out there, like any other young, happening person in Manchester.  The subject matter was close to my heart and I felt very proprietary about it.

“Also, I’m proud to be from Manchester myself, and part of it was not necessarily that I wanted to play Tony Wilson, but I didn’t want anyone else to play him.  I felt that I could do it better than anyone else.”

For the casting of the bands, Winterbottom acknowledges that the ability to play an instrument was advantageous, but they weren’t necessarily looking for lookalikes.  “There was a certain sense of [the cast] not necessarily looking like the real people,” he says, “but having some kind of resemblance, whether it was in terms of behavior or character or just some sort of energy that felt similar.  We didn’t want to have four people on stage that looked so different from the originals that you’re just completely distracted, but at the same time we didn’t cast anyone just to be lookalikes because we wanted them to be able to perform.”  He cites the actors playing the Mondays as a good example.  “A lot of people who have seen the actors play have said they’re amazingly similar to how the real Happy Mondays were.  There’s something about them that has the same sort of atmosphere.  It’s more than their look – there is something about the way they behave, the way they are.  They seem like a bunch of people who know each other and have spent a lot of time together, and that’s a hard thing to achieve when you’re on a film.  They’re only together for six or seven weeks, where I think the Mondays were together for three or four years before they even made a record.”

REBUILDING THE HAÇIENDA

“We should open our own club.  Run it ourselves.  Put who we like on.

Mix it up a bit, you know.  Have proper food, clean toilets.”

- Paddy Considine as Rob Gretton

Though the film follows the rise of Factory Records and the bands that were attached to it, the other major focus of the story is about the emergence of rave culture, the beautification of the beat, the arrival of dance music, and the birth of one of the most famous clubs in the world.  The brainchild of Rob Gretton, the clubber’s mecca: the Hacienda.

On Friday, March 2, 2001, 1500 revelers returned to the Hacienda to help film the penultimate scenes of the movie.  Original Hacienda DJ’s Dave Haslam and Mike Pickering were bought in once again to mix the decks.  Old faces were there to enjoy the party.  Barney Sumner and Hooky joined the Mondays’ Bez and a host of original regular Hacienda-goers who danced the night away into the early hours.

The infamous club was passionately and intricately recreated down to the last bolt by Production Designer Mark Tildesley and his team. 

 “Initially I was hoping that we could use the original building,” Tildesley says.  “When I was brought on board, the actual Haçienda was still in place, but it had been sold to a property developer.  Though we tried some early negotiations about keeping the place alive until we could finish filming, that crumbled into nothing.”  They set about rebuilding the club then, and had to work out how much they’d need to replicate to shoot the script.  Tildesley says, “we decided we really had to build the main area, the mezzanine, the Kim Philby bar, and the street entrance.”

With not much to go on, the team scaled up a small plan of the Hacienda, and they were able to get onto the original plot to take some final measurements before it was finally demolished.  However, much of the recreation was done from a set of photographs from a Manchester post-grad who had done a thesis on the club.  Tildesley says what they have created is “a replication of the Haçienda when it first opened in 1984.”

To maintain the authenticity of the set they used some original fixtures and fittings in the reconstruction.  “We’ve got some original light fittings in here,” Tildesley says.  “We bought some stuff from the sale – a lot of furniture, some of which we we’ve used, some of which we’ve replicated.  We have the original shutter doors back at base.  But a lot of the stuff we got we bought for reference purposes rather than for construction use.”

Some original fixtures were too precious to risk using on set.  As Tildesley explains, "We were going to use the original doors.  They’re owned by Peter Hook.  He gave us two and the other two are on his garage doors.  But because we were smashing into them, we decided to use replications.  We also sourced some original Phil Diggle (Hacienda artist) paintings in a gallery, but they’re quite valuable.  So the nice thing is Phil himself came here and repainted a set of the paintings.  That was really cool.”

Though you would never know when walking on to the set, Tildesley does admit to a few artistic liberties in the replication.  “The width of the building (housing the set) was slightly wider,” he says.  “In order for us to make our Haçienda work, we had to proportionally spread out some of the things, so you’ll find that the thrust on the front of the stage was four feet longer than the original one.  The dance floor is seven feet wider and the mezzanine nine feet wider.  We don’t have the flat ceiling in as low as they did, as in terms of filming purposes it wasn’t actually very good.” 

“The temple that they built is an empty shell.”

- “Two Worlds Collide,” Inspiral Carpets

The real club having closed in 1992, the reactions to the big club night from those people who had regularly attended were astounding.  Andrew Eaton said, “I spoke to Peter Hook, who said it was the biggest nightmare of his life – but at the same time, the biggest orgasm.”  John Simm, who was first introduced to his counterpart Bernard Sumner on the night, said, “He was very emotional.  He just kept saying ‘It’s exactly the same.’”  Winterbottom was pleased with the response.  “The crowd seemed to be really happy that the set looked like the real club,” he says, “and the atmosphere was great.”  

Though he himself was not present on the big night – “It would have been unbearably self conscious,” he says – Anthony Wilson was equally impressed by the accuracy of the set, so much so that he was reduced to tears when he first set foot inside.  “I didn’t cry when they closed it, I didn’t cry when I had nowhere to go at night.  I didn’t cry when they auctioned it off.  But I did cry when I walked into the recreation,” he says.  “It was very emotional.  The fact that Tiger and the boys rebuilt it, it’s been very nice for us.  We’ve loved it.”

Upon completion of filming, the set was broken up and destroyed.  “It was bad enough that I had to watch the Hacienda be knocked down once, but now I’ve had to watch it a second time,” says Wilson.  Eaton added, “It was great to have given the Hacienda back to Manchester for one last night.  Though it’s a shame that we were unable to retain the set, it’s good that we were able to draw filming to a close on such a high note.”

STRIVING FOR AUTHENTICITY

“I feel so extraordinary, something’s got a hold on me.

I get this feeling I’m in motion, certain sense of liberty.”

- “True Faith,” New Order

With the focus of the film so heavily on the music, it was essential to recreate the live atmosphere that had put Manchester on the map.  To achieve this Eaton and Winterbottom brought in Martin Moscrop, guitarist with A Certain Ratio, to oversee the live sets and teach the actors how to play the tunes note for note – some of whom had never picked up an instrument in their lives.

“They first sent me a script because A Certain Ratio are in the film” says Moscrop.  “They sent me a script and a release form, and I wrote back saying I’d love to make a cameo appearance, and at the bottom I added a bit about how I could help the film musically.  I forgot all about that letter, but that might have been what planted the seed with them.”  Moscrop was working at a studio at a local college when he first met Winterbottom.  “Michael came down to the studio,” he says, “and just started chatting to me about the studio and stuff.  Then Mike and Nic (1^st and 2^nd AD’s) came to my house to ask me if I could help recruit musicians.  So from a few little meetings with people, it just seemed to escalate.” 

Moscrop’s role was to ensure the pseudo-bands looked like the originals in their mannerisms and playing techniques.  He also had to teach them to play the real thing, to look like they were hitting the right notes, playing the right chords, basslines, drum beats, etc.  “There is nothing worse than seeing a film about music when the sound coming out of the speakers bears no relation to what the actors are playing on screen,” says Moscrop.  “When musicians watch films, they just pick holes in it” he adds.  “I know it’s really petty, but if it’s a film about music, then that aspect of it should be correct.”

Among the live recreations Moscrop oversaw was the Sex Pistols’ first gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, New Order and Happy Mondays gig at Manchester Apollo, Stone Roses and the Mondays in Battle of the Bands at the Hacienda, and Joy Division at The Russell Club.  “I really liked working with Joy Division because all the actors were excellent.  They were really hard workers, and would do a lot of research and take it very, very seriously.  I liked working with the Mondays team, too.  And it was great doing Siouxsie and the Banshees, because the gig we were recreating, I was there as a 16 or 17-year-old, so it brought back loads of memories.”  Another strange feeling for Moscrop was working with the actors to recreate the live performances of his own band, A Certain Ratio.  “That was quite an emotional part of the process,” he says.

Sean Harris, who plays Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis, studied his counterpart in depth up to and during production.  He also perfected Curtis’ infamous freaky dancing from watching video footage of Curtis on stage.  “You just kind of soak yourself in all the videos and watch them,” he says.  “Of course you can’t do what he did, really you can’t, but you just try and be as close to it as you can.  You’ve just got to let yourself go, even enjoy it in a way, which I have done.  I enjoyed losing myself – moments of it were just fantastic, actually.  As an actor you don’t get many opportunities to do that.”

Having never played guitar, Ralf Little took on the challenge of Joy Division and New Order bassist, Hooky.  “I was a bit worried,” he says.  “The bass lines were simple enough.  I mean ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ – anyone that plays the guitar will just laugh at how un-difficult it is.  But when you’ve never played anything it’s a little bit tricky.”  Help was at hand in Moscrop, about whom Little can only sing praises.  “He’s been great,” Little says, “just this really pleasant fella teaching me to play the guitar.”

PARTY CLOTHES

“I would go out tonight but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.”

- “This Charming Man,” The Smiths

The costumes for 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE had to span two decades of Manchester culture, from the punk era of the ‘70’s through the rave and house movement of the ‘80’s.  Fortunately for costume designers Natalie Ward and Stephen Noble, the brief from Winterbottom was quite loose.  “Michael said he wanted us to recreate the look,” says Ward, “but he didn’t care if it wasn’t exactly the same as the original.  We weren’t making a documentary, we were making a film, so he wanted us really to just get a feel for it.” 

The pair initially set about transforming Steve Coogan into Tony Wilson.  “We went to Tony’s house,” Ward says, “and he showed us a few photos.  But we also went out for lunch with his ex-wife, who showed us a lot of old pictures of Tony which we were able to take quite a lot from.  Tony was quite easy because he was on TV all the time, so his look is well-recorded.”  In the film, Coogan can be seen wearing everything from pink tie-dyed shirts and ruffled neck ties, to the trademark Yahji Yamamoto suits that so often adorned Wilson.

The clothes of New Order, Joy Division and the Mondays, were also well-documented, so Noble and Ward were able to create their looks primarily from media pictures and footage from the time.  The cast themselves also had some input into their character’s costumes.  “Some of the cast were really helpful,” says Ward.  “Sean Harris (who played Ian Curtis) took the role really seriously and was reading loads of books about Ian.  We had one fitting with him where we gave him a pair of trousers and a belt, and he said ‘Ian never wore a belt.’  It was something to do with his epilepsy.  He’d done his research on Ian.”

Having some of the real people around on set also helped.  Rowetta from the Happy Mondays plays herself in the film, and would often help out with what the Mondays boys would and would not have been wearing.  “For the young Shaun and Paul, we tried to meet up with Derek Ryder (their dad), but were unable to,” says Ward.  “We had to use our creative judgement about how the boys would have looked in 1978.  Dressing the bands was great, especially the Mondays, as they were a band from my era.  To recreate them in our own eyes and know that they looked right was really good.”

The costumes themselves came from a mixture of costume houses and second hand clothes stores.  “Quite a lot of the early stuff came from costume houses,” says Ward, “as you just can’t buy ‘70s everyday wear.  Once it got into the ‘80s, in Manchester you can actually still buy a lot of the clothes people were wearing ten years ago.  There are a couple of great shops in Manchester that provided us with the big baggy flares, and Aflecks Palace was around in the 70’s and still is now, so we got some stuff from there.”

Noble and Ward also had a lot of support from various clothes labels.  “We tried to use as many of the labels as possible,” says Ward.  “Dr. Martins go right through from the ‘70s to the ‘90s.  Joe Bloggs reprinted a lot of old t-shirts for us, as the Mondays wore a lot of their stuff.  Kickers were around in the ‘70s and then had a bit of a resurgence in the late ‘80s with the Mondays.  And Gola was really helpful.  We used a lot of their stuff for the Mondays, as well as for Barney Sumner in the ‘70s, as he went for that old school look.”

Ward feels dressing actors up to look like the real people is harder than dressing purely fictional characters.  “Working with characters that people still remember and individuals who are close to people’s hearts,” she says, “leaves you more open to criticism.  If you are doing a period drama and something is not quite right, unless you were a costume historian, chances are no one would notice.  But with this, people around at the time would know.  People are more likely to say, ‘Hooky would never have worn that.’”