Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-album-that-was-supposed-to-save-a-struggling-label/
Every record label has a moment when one album is supposed to fix everything. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the fix costs more than the problem it was meant to solve, and the whole thing collapses in a way nobody could have scripted.
That is roughly what happened to Factory Records, the Manchester label behind Joy Division and New Order, when it sent its biggest party band to a Caribbean island in 1992 hoping for a hit. What came back was an album called Yes Please, and the story around it is one of the stranger cautionary tales in British music history.
A label that never played by the rules
Factory Records was founded in 1978 by Tony Wilson along with Alan Erasmus, Martin Hannett, and designer Peter Saville, and it built its reputation on doing things differently. Factory Records used a creative team, most notably record producer Martin Hannett and graphic designer Peter Saville, which gave the label and the artists recording for it a particular sound and image. The label famously avoided signing formal contracts with its artists, a quirk that felt romantic in the good years and turned catastrophic later on.
By the late 1980s Factory had become a genuine cultural force, home to Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio, and the Durutti Column. Success brought money, but Factory had a habit of spending it as fast as it arrived, often on projects that looked artistically bold and made no…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-07-17 08:18:00
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