The Factory Numbering System
There are some “hidden intentions” behind the arcane Factory Records numbering.
The last digit of the number may designate the following (but inconsistencies abound): 1 - Factory Corporate, 2 - Happy Mondays (singles), 3 - Joy Division / New Order (singles), 4 - Durutti Column, 6 - Factory Classical.
The "FACT" designation (as opposed to "FAC") usually denotes an album.
Sometimes the number can contain a further insight:
FACT 24, Various Artists: A Factory Quartet (album ): 2 records, 4 artists, thus 2/4. (In addition, Durutti Column is on this release.)
FAC 148, Styal Mill Sponsored Bucket (sponsorship): One of 48 blades on the mill wheel, thus 1/48.
FAC 289, New Order: Campaign Technique (notepaper): Campaign ran in February 1989, thus 2/89. (In typical Factory fashion this number was mistakenly re-assigned to The Wendys The Sun's Going to Shine For Me Soon single 2 years later. Double number assignments occur a few times within the catalogue.)
Sometimes it can be a bit of a witticism: FAC 321, Jonathan Demme: The Perfect Kiss (video). This is the reverse number of the release the video was made for: FAC 123, New Order: The Perfect Kiss. In addition, as noted above, 123 would signify a New Order single, and 321 a Factory Corporate project.
Read more about this topic: Factory Records Discography
Famous quotes containing the words factory, numbering and/or system:
“The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“The task he undertakes
Is numbering sands and drinking oceans dry.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)