So as you can see, the reality was far and away quite different from Peter Kay’s interpretation in 24 Hour Party People – even though the film retained Tonay’s flamboyant mode of transport home from the Russell Club each night. (This was a shebeen that Don owned.) To which Don responded, deadpan, ‘Anything else?’ The first thing Don said was, ‘Anything happen?’ ‘5 Mitten Street got torched,’ came the reply. Tosh (Ryan) recalled accompanying Don’s right-hand man to collect Don from the airport after a trip to Italy. “A man of Irish gypsy descent with black wavy hair…(Don Tonay) looked like a big Mafiosi character. Whilst Lindsey Reade, Tony Wilson’s first wife, recalls in her book, Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl, that Tonay was The students, needless to say, filed out respectfully, silently, nervously.” Tonay proceeded to pick up a table, hurl it in the air and, before it crashed to the ground, screamed ‘OOOOOUTTTTTTT!!!!’. Wilson answered pointedly, ‘No…not really, Don’.
BUGGERS WITH STYLE PLUNKETT AND MACCLEAN HOW TO
‘Don’t you know how to clear a club out?’ asked Tonay, his question directed at Alan Wise, his sidekick Nigel, and Wilson. On another occasion Tonay entered the club at 2 a.m, and two or three straggling tables remained – students mainly – only too slowly finishing their Guinnesses, smoking dope, chatting about the evening’s gig.
However one clue could be the time Tonay wandered into the club and, spying three Jamaican guys in woolly hats, screamed ‘Haaaattttts!’, following which the offending articles were removed. It was difficult to know quite what this meant. There were signs in the club that read ‘NO TAMS ALLOWED’. Two ‘drug squad’ officers, standing at the bar – drinking Red Stripe – were heard to mutter, ‘Whoever broke into that van will be very sorry…very sorry indeed…pity for him that it wasn’t our precinct. The band’s van had been cynically and pointlessly broken into in the car park. This was, perhaps, typified by a conversation overheard at the Russell Club one night when Magazine were performing.
BUGGERS WITH STYLE PLUNKETT AND MACCLEAN PATCH
One is tempted, of course, to break into Pythonesque tales of a Piranha Brothers nature ‘Oh yeah Don… he was a lovely bloke…’ etc, and such cliches wouldn’t be too far from the truth as Tonay ruled his patch with an iron hand, be it a loving hand or otherwise. Tonay’s style was a throwback, of sorts, to the gangster tradition – he did have links, it was strongly rumoured, with the Kray fraternity – and most people who knew him, and knew him well enough not to cross him, regarded him as a lovely individual. The door would be pulled shut and the van would cruise away into the night. The rear door would open to reveal two beautiful prostitutes in reclining poses, between whom Tonay would stylishly flop. A van would pull respectfully onto the car park. Each night, after prowling around the club, he would leave at precisely 1 a.m. He was a tall, commanding handsome man in his late forties. He was, in the eyes of Wilson, ‘ an incredible character…a civilised gangster’ (Tony) Wilson had chanced upon the venue following a meeting with the owner, local ‘businessman’ Don Tonay. It had made its name in later days as a suitably downbeat reggae-orientated venue handily placed, as it was, for nearby Moss Side. “The Russell Club had numerous guises, mainly though as the PSV Club (Public Service Vehicle…no, I never understood that, either). In his book, Factory: The Story of the Record Label, Mick Middles elaborates more on Tonay’s ‘gangster’ qualities
0 kommentar(er)
