Wilson began as a journalist and broadcaster. In the mid-1970s his Granada Television programme So It Goes gave punk and new music a regional television platform at a moment when much of the established media still treated it as noise.

His encounter with the Sex Pistols at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976 became one of the foundation stories of the city’s post-punk generation. The important point is what followed: Wilson used the access he already had in television to amplify new music, then moved beyond broadcasting into putting on nights and creating a label.

Factory grew out of club nights in Hulme in 1978 and became a record label run by Wilson with figures including Alan Erasmus, Peter Saville, Martin Hannett and Rob Gretton. The label’s catalogue included Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, the Durutti Column and Happy Mondays. Factory’s importance was musical, visual and organisational: Saville’s design language, Hannett’s production, the FAC numbering system and Wilson’s refusal to behave like a conventional record executive made the label feel like a world rather than a company.

When Joy Division became New Order after Ian Curtis’s death, the label entered the 1980s with a band increasingly interested in electronic dance music, clubs and New York. That shift became central to the next chapter.

The Haçienda opened in Manchester in 1982. Designed by Ben Kelly and largely financed through Factory and New Order, it was initially an expensive experiment that struggled to find its audience. Over time the room changed. DJs including Mike Pickering and Graeme Park helped turn it toward dance music; imported records from Chicago, Detroit and New York increasingly defined the floor.

By the second half of the 1980s, house and then acid house had transformed the club. The Haçienda became one of the key British spaces associated with the social shift around house music, ecstasy and all-night dance culture. Its story belongs beside Shoom, Spectrum and the other rooms through which Britain’s rave generation learned a new way of going out.

But the story is better when the slow build is left in. Mike Pickering’s Nude night had been pushing house alongside hip-hop and street soul from 1986, with a strong Black crowd long before acid-house mythology flattened everything into one sudden summer. The Haçienda did not wake up one morning as a rave club. The room, the DJs and the crowd changed it record by record.

That is the part ravers recognise. A venue can look half-empty for years, then one sound catches, the right people arrive, somebody brings a new tune back from somewhere else and suddenly the whole place feels like it was built for that exact moment. Wilson’s gamble was keeping the doors open long enough for that moment to happen.

By 1988 and 1989, the Haçienda was a symbol of a wider change in Manchester. The city’s post-punk culture, Black dance-music networks, new house imports, independent labels and a generation of clubbers overlapped in ways that did not fit old genre boundaries. Happy Mondays embodied that crossover in a particularly visible form, while New Order had already made club music part of Factory’s DNA.

Wilson was the public face most willing to explain, exaggerate and mythologise the movement. The mythology can obscure the many people who actually made the records and ran the club night-to-night, but his ability to make the city feel culturally important was itself part of the phenomenon.

Wilson did not invent house music, acid house or rave. His contribution was different: he backed people, put money and attention behind ideas that looked unreasonable, and helped build a physical and cultural platform where the Manchester chapter of Britain’s dance revolution could happen.