Originally published in 2010 but now revised and updated in 2025, Shadowplayers: The Rise and Fall of Factory Records has been reissued by Faber and Faber. It offers the definitive account of how a group of provincial radicals and idiosyncratic entrepreneurs saw off critics, bankers and gun-toting gangsters to create the most influential record label of modern times.

 

The main book is based on both archive and contemporary sources, several of which are gathered in this companion volume.

 

As well as unedited, in depth archive interviews with founding directors Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, Peter Saville, Martin Hannett and Rob Gretton, the source notes also includes fascinating conversations with Joy Division, Ian Curtis and Annik Honoré, complete source notes for the Faber edition, and a full chronological listing of gigs at the Factory, Beach Club and Hacienda.

 

Shadowplayers: Interviews + Source Notes also includes a copy of the 2006 DVD film Shadowplayers, charting the Factory story from 1978 to 1981 via filmed interviews with many of the key players and bands, including Wilson, Saville, Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, Section 25 and Cabaret Voltaire.

 

‘James Nice comes to his subject with no axe to grind, no partiality, no angle. Shadowplayers provides a detailed, scrupulously thorough year-by- year history of the label, its major and minor players, in which the full story of its triumph and disaster, sometimes concurrent, is slowly unfurled in

all its perpetual strife.’ - The Wire

 

Jacket design by Carl Glover

1st Factory bar graph logo by Peter Saville (1979)

Paperback 180pp plus DVD

Published by Burning Shed