FAC 7 : FACTORY NOTEPAPER

Regular readers will know that I’m offering up a short series dealing with the contents of the Use Hearing Protection box set.

FAC7 is a peculiar one given it was the catalogue number allocated to some stationary.  But this wasn’t just any old ordinary stationary, given that it was designed by Peter Saville.

It seems that, having gone through the rigmarole of actually releasing some records, Tony Wilson & co. decided that it would make some sense to print up some paper and envelopes to be used when issuing official correspondence.  Where most fledgling companies would likely have picked something cheap’n’cheerful from some sort of catalogue, Factory Records called on the services of its in-house designer who came up with headed paper and envelopes.   The box set did include some replicas of the envelopes (as pictured above), presumably on the basis that these did have FAC7 printed on them, but not any replicas of the official note paper, whose letterhead looked like this:-

I had to scratch my head a bit to come up with a suitable piece of music for today.  Having decided that it would need to be from the Factory Records catalogue, the little lightbulb above my head lit up.

mp3: Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck (Dance Mix)
mp3: Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck (Radio Mix)
mp3: Happy Mondays – Wrote For Luck (Club Mix)
mp3: Happy Mondays – Boom

The four tracks from the 12″ version of FAC212, released in October 1988 to huge indifference.  It was a different story less than a year down the line.

The mp3s today are provided today at a slightly higher level than normal, simply for the fact they deserve to be.  Play loud (and please excuse the click which crops up the very second the Dance Mix comes to a halt).

JC