The musical scene that coalesced in Manchester in the 1980s was arguably the most significant non-London-based development in British popular culture since the Beatles had emerged from Liverpool two decades earlier to conquer the world with their Mersey-beat. Closely associated with allnight clubbing and the use of the drug Ecstasy, the music and its accompanying lifestyle became a national phenomenon known as “Madchester”. Tony Wilson was its ringmaster and leading entrepreneurial spirit.

He was a bright grammar school boy who secured a place at Cambridge, but instead of drifting to London like so many of his talented contemporaries from the provinces, after graduating he returned to his native Manchester, where he became a well-known regional television presenter and cultural commentator. His boundless energy and unerring ability to spot emerging trends led him to set up Factory Records, to which he signed most of the best of Manchester’s emerging postpunk bands, including Joy Division and the Durutti Column, and later New Order and the Happy Mondays.

He also founded The Haçienda nightclub, which swiftly became the official headquarters of the late1980s “Madchester” acid house scene. The era was later commemorated in the semi-fictional 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, which starred the comedian Steve Coogan as Wilson. Away from music, Wilson was not only a prominent figure on television and radio, but a highly active political campaigner for regional self-government.

Born Anthony Howard Wilson in 1950, in Salford, at 11 he won a scholarship to the Roman Catholic grammar school De La Salle, where he showed an early interest in science. He later claimed that it had been his ambition to become a nuclear scientist, until seeing a production of Hamlet persuaded him that his future lay not in atoms but in the arts. In 1968 he went up to read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he edited the college newspaper.

That he only gained a third-class degree was to do more with his determination to enjoy to the full every facet of student life than a lack of academic aptitude. After university he was accepted on ITN’s trainee scheme and by 1973 his quick wit and lively mind had landed him a job as a news reporter for the Manchester-based Granada Television. Working under the name Anthony H. Wilson (an affectation which, when he reverted to the more plebian Tony, he claimed he had adopted simply to get up people’s noses), he was briefly assigned to Granada’s flagship World in Action current affairs programme, but he really made his mark presenting the music show So It Goes.

After seeing an early Sex Pistols concert at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in June 1976, when he was allegedly one of just 42 people in attendance, he booked the band to appear on the show. They made their first television appearance on the programme in September that year, singing Anarchy in the UK some two months before the record was released, giving most viewers their first exposure to the emerging punk scene.

Wilson also afforded television debuts to the Jam and Elvis Costello on So It Goes but he was determined that his programme should also be a platform for local talent. He promoted Manchester-based punk and new-wave groups such as the Buzzcocks and Magazine assiduously. Enthused by the passion and attitude of punk, in 1978 he started his own record label, Factory Records.

Several of the label’s first signings, including Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio, were also personally managed by Wilson, which might have led to claims of conflict of interest, although Factory’s biggest success came with Joy Division, managed by his friend and sometime business partner Rob Gretton.

Joy Division’s anxious, sombre, discordant sound helped not only to establish the label on a firm financial footing but also to make Factory for a while the most significant independent record company in Britain, with a unique and innovatively creative vision that extended to the packaging, marketing and every other aspect of its releases.

The suicide of Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis, in 1981 was a blow to the label but the remaining members regrouped as New Order and went on to even greater success, securing for Factory in 1983 the biggest-sell-ing 12-inch single with Blue Monday. New Order were also instrumental in the transition from postpunk to a new form of dance music, influenced by American house music, that had credibility with rock audiences and came as a welcome relief after the banalities of disco.

Wilson was swift to see the potential and in 1985 signed the Happy Mondays, whose Ecstasy-fuelled singer Shaun Ryder coined the term “Mad-chester”. The band went on to become one of the most important acid-house acts, despite having come last in a “battle of the bands” contest at the Haçienca Club in 1984. Wilson had opened the club two years earlier, with characteristic flair giving the club a Factory catalogue release number (FAC 51) as if the venture were another record.

Described on its launch as a “postindustrial fantasy venue,” the Haçienda was the first club in Britain to play imported “house” music from America. With Mike Pickering, who went on to found M People, as the in-house DJ, by the end of the 1980s the club was a mecca for acid-house fans from all over Britain. Wilson, always ready with a quotable line, postulated the theory that major developments in British popular culture were based on a 13-year cycle. The Beatles had changed music for ever in 1963, punk had done the same in 1976 and acid-house had brought about an equally profound sea-change in 1989. He predicted the next “big thing” would come in 2002, which is where the theory collapsed.

In 1991, Wilson added a celebrity/ VIP nightspot called the Dry Bar (given the catalogue number FAC201) to his empire, but his problems were mounting. With Ecstasy culture at its height, the Haçienda became the object of an intense campaign by the tabloid press, which cited it – with considerable justification – as a hotbed of illicit drug taking. A firearms offence, reportedly drug-related, led to the club’s temporary closure when it lost its licence for six months in 1991. By then Factory Records was also in trouble, not least because the Happy Mondays had spent much of the label’s cash on an infamous three-month drug-addled recording session in the Caribbean, from which they returned with only one usable track.

By the end of 1992 the label had folded, although Wilson subsequently revived it in different guises, most recently as F4.

After a drug-related death and various firearms incidents, the Haçienda closed for good in 1997. Wilson always claimed that he had never made money from the club or Factory Records. He often worked by informal agreement, and many of his bands were not tied to the label by contract. Even on its best-selling single, Blue Monday, the label lost three and a half pence on every copy sold owing to its expensive sleeve design, while the club was never viable due to the nonexistence of crucial bar profits – most of its clientele was taking Ecstasy instead of drinking alcohol.

Throughout the success of Factory Records, Wilson remained a television presenter, anchoring Granada Reports, the regional early evening news programme and hosting The Other Side of Midnight, a late-night chat show. He also presented Channel 4’s similarly styled After Dark and the short-lived mid1990s TV quiz show Topranko! In 2006 he became the regional political presenter of the BBC’s Politics Show and he had radio shows on Xfm Manchester and BBC Manchester Radio.

Outside Manchester, Wilson was perhaps best known from his portrayal by the comedian Steve Coogan as the central character in the film, 24 Hour Party People, a semi-fictional account of the “Madchester” scene and the heyday of Factory Records and the Haçienda. Wilson’s own feelings about the film, however, were mixed. He was closely involved in its production and also wrote a novelised account of his life based on the screen play called 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You (2002).

But he had complaints, too. “They overdid me as a cultured, educated, pretentious git,” he noted and although he agreed to a poster campaign which featured the word “twat” over his picture, he objected when he was demoted to “prat”. He later appeared, playing himself, in the 2005 film A Cock and Bull Story, in which his character interviewed Steve Coogan.

A strong believer in regional government, in 2003 Wilson helped to launch a campaign for the North West to be given a referendum on the creation of a regional assembly. The Government was persuaded, only for the decision to be reversed when plans for a tier of regional government across Britain where shelved after the first referendum, on Humberside, decisively rejected the idea.

He continued to be active in music, setting up In The City, a music industry conference and festival held annually in Manchester. In February 2007 he had kidney cancer diagnosed.

He is survived by a son and a daughter with his ex-wife, Hilary, and by his partner, Yvette Livesey.

Tony Wilson, music industry entrepreneur and television presenter, was born on February 20, 1950. He died of complications from kidney cancer on August 10, 2007, aged 57