FAC. Numbers

In November of 2005, I was invited to a press launch lunch at Daniel for the 2006 Manchester Arts & Music Festival.

As Special Projects Director at SPIN, I was often invited to fun parties where people would ply you with champagne, light fare and possibly gifts hoping that you would book their band, write about their cause etc.

When I was invited to the 2005 launch of the 2006 Manchester Music & Arts Festival, I was really excited. Those of you who know me well, know that as a small child I thought of Manchester, England as a magic place and as I grew older pretty much everything I loved came from the north of England.

And as many of you know, as social as I am, it really takes me a good 3 drinks to really feel comfortable talking to complete strangers, so I enlisted Maria Raha and Phoebe Reilly to come with me with promises of champagne, free lunch we could never afford without a banker husband and the opportunity to meet Tony Wilson.

Since we were from SPIN, Maria, Phoebe and I were seated with Tony Wilson (though somehow Phoebe ended up sitting at the same table as the mayor(is there a mayor?) of Manchester.

We were two giggling school girls, who were lavished with attention, stories about Shaun Ryder, and Ian Curtis. When I mentioned that Jon just bought the Joy Division Peter Saville skateboards, Tony whipped out his phone and rang him up, where I was promptly told that the New Order decks had a mistake and had one less color than they were supposed to. Of course Jon only bought the Joy Division decks, not the new order ones...

This chance meeting for an event that SPIN passed on, turned into a fun aquintenceship. An occasional email, specially burned CD's and another fun lunch at Artisinal during the World Cup where Doug Brod and Barbara Lang who I brought along were a bit starstruck and couldn't keep up with the football conversation. Oh yeah and Tony was wearing mandals (man sandals). And it suddenly struck me after lunch, that I should have asked Tony to give an unborn Max his own Factory number (even though he had nothing to do with Factory, how cool could that have been?)

You may wonder why am I waxing poetic about Tony Wilson right now? Recently Tim Burgess got a Factory number tattoo (New Order's Ceremony FAC. 33) . It got me thinking about everything Factory had done and what Factory number would I be?

Then last night Jon and I went to see the Killers play and they did their cover of Shadowplay (never released as a single) so its weighing on my mind...what number would I be? Clearly Tim chose the best number. Blue Monday (FAC.79) is too obvious so I picked FAC.133 New Order's Sub Culture.

What number would you be?