The Haçienda (10 page)

So, our employees were either nicking from us or making a balls-up of their job; the club was always empty and our opening policy was misguided and costly.At least we were using the club to promote Factory’s bands, right?

Wrong. The Haçienda was rarely used as a platform for Factory bands. The groups’ managers would ask Tony for a night at the Haçienda, but it seemed like neither he nor Rob were ever that inter-ested.Tony used it as a bigger and better version of the original Factory club in Hulme, booking arty bands. Unfortunately, the bands (for the
most part) tended to be small while the venue was huge. When you consider how much it cost to run the place, the folly of it looks worse and worse. We’d need a nearly full house just to cover expenses yet put on acts who could only attract 400 people. That kind of recklessness shows how little planning went into it, but the idea was to champion groups that we loved, which – at the time – tended to be proper indie British post-punk bands.

There was a small army of regulars: arty, delicate types who might not go to a place like Fagin’s or the other normal clubs in town (because they were full of lager louts), but who came to the Haçienda because they felt safe. But actual ticket sales remained a serious issue. We struggled to expand our clientele. The building itself put off a lot of people, the crappy sound kept proper music fans away, and when we did get people through the door, they’d come in find the place empty and lacking any atmosphere. As a result, groups started talking about not coming back, despite the generous fees.

It was the year ‘Blue Monday’ was released. It came out on 7 March and charted twice – the second time as a result of having been a massive hit with holidaymakers, who’d heard it abroad during the summer, returned to the UK and bought it (often going into shops and asking for ‘New Order’ by Blue Monday).

As a result it went on to become the biggest-selling 12” of all time, spending a total of thirty-four weeks in the chart.

Thanks in no small part to the
24 Hour Party People
film, enduring myth has it that each copy of ‘Blue Monday’ lost Factory Records money because of Peter Saville’s intricate die-cut sleeve. This isn’t completely true. It was, indeed, die-cut by hand three times (the most expensive thing on the sleeve were the pieces people didn’t actually get, according to Steven Morris) – meaning that the design lost Factory 10p on each copy sold during the initial run of more than two million.. On the subsequent ‘holiday hit’ pressing, however, printing costs decreased when a less expensive sleeve was used, ‘the problem’ having been spotted.

‘Blue Monday’ wasn’t the only Factory product losing money thanks to over-ambitiousness. So too was the Haçienda.

Visiting bands spoke in glowing terms of the club’s dressing-room hospitality, for example. How the rooms were filled with flowers and booze, how it was far more comfortable than other venues and how at the end of their
performance they were given a video by the video-maker Malcolm Whitehead. Where other clubs might have attempted to profit from the footage, Haçienda simply gave it away.

That year, Frankie Goes to Hollywood played and Rob Gretton insisted that the Haçienda’s hospitality should match that of the Paradise Garage in New York. The dressing room was even more beautifully decorated than ever, piled high with fruit and flowers, while the main hall played host to more grand flower arrangements.

Bar manager Leroy Richardson recalls the club being over-generous with drinks given out to staff, and the stock-take revealing a huge shortfall. Staff weren’t ‘stealing’ the drinks, Richardson maintains; it was just that nobody was keeping a tally of what was taken. There was an unusual system for serving customers,too:one member of staff took the order then passed it to another to complete – so it took two members of staff to serve one customer. This was yet another somewhat ill-advised and costly idea transplanted from New York.

You’d think that being 3000 quid down on the too-secret secret Teardrop Explodes gig would have taught us a valuable business lesson. But no. We carried on doing business the same way – like it was a badge of honour.

So, our promotion continued to be haphazard (remember: the poster timings could be variable), plus we were treating visiting bands like they were kings. Rob’s attitude was, ‘If somebody plays in my club, I treat them like I’d expect to be treated’– which unfortunately meant that we’d lose money each time we booked a gig and the bands would be thinking, ‘It’s great playing here, isn’t it?’ (Credit where it’s due, though: Tears for Fears played for the £150 they’d arranged before they’d got to number 1 – then played to a sold-out house. Very honourable, well done, lads.

We frittered cash away each day. On special days we threw it away – ‘like a man with ten arms’, as Barney liked to say.

I remember going to the Haçienda’s first birthday party in May, walking into the dressing rooms and being delighted to see them full of beer and booze – all free. It felt like we’d died and gone to heaven; because we were still living on the breadline, yet here at the Haç was everything we wanted – which, back then, amounted to beer and food – laid out for us.

Only years later did it occur to me that New Order had paid for it all anyway. What a bunch of dickheads. We just got stuck in, like pigs at a trough. It’s easy to divert a musician: just show him free booze and he’ll forget (or forgive) just about anything.

I made so many wrong assumptions. I never associated what I saw at the Haçienda with our money. I believed that everyone who worked there had the same objective in mind as me: to make it a success. I assumed that everyone knew what they were doing.I was wrong on all counts.

For his review of the club for the
Local Times
that year, correspondent Robert King interviewed Rob Gretton in the downstairs Gay Traitor bar.

‘What sort of people are you aiming to attract?’ he asked.

‘The kind with two arms and two legs,’ sighed Gretton in reply.

The sort of people actually turning up, wrote King, were ‘a hairstyle exhibition’. ‘There can’t be too many clubs where men wear dark overcoats well into June,’ he added.

At least they were coming in. A gig by Culture Club in 1982 had kick-started a successful Saturday night, ushering in a trendy crowd who danced to Heaven 17, ABC and Soul Sonic Force. Even so, the numbers still weren’t enough. Plus, it wasn’t quite the sort of clientele Factory had been hoping to attract.

‘There is nobody on Earth who loathes Simple Minds as much as me,’ moaned Tony Wilson to the writer Mick Middles following a gig by the band. ‘I’m offended by this crap, by the fact that it is taking place in our club, and that this is our fullest night to date. If this is really what the Manchester public want, then we have been completely wasting our time. Still, I’m happy to let this night subsidize a few more important evenings
...
’

The truth was, however, that the gig had still only been half-full. Simple Minds hadn’t done much subsidizing at all.

Which meant that not only was the club failing to deliver financially, but also that it wasn’t satisfying the aim of being more about the music than the fashion,of being somewhere for Factory and their friends to hang out, wearing what they wanted. Instead, it was a bit ‘trendy’, in inverted commas. Plus the Friday night still hadn’t sufficiently made its mark.

All that was about to change thanks to Pickering. That year he’d visited New York with his band, Quando Quango. The DJ and then-boyfriend of Madonna Mark Kamins had remixed their ‘Love Tempo’, which had in
turn been played by legendary Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan.As a result, Quando Quango were asked to play a live PA at the Garage. Enjoying the New York nightlife, Pickering also visited Danceteria, Fun House and the Loft. Like New Order, he experienced a musical epiphany.

At the Danceteria Pickering saw Kamins mix electro such as Man Parrish with indie records. Back home this just wasn’t done. Meanwhile, at the Paradise Garage, a place Pickering later described as ‘heaven’, Rob Gretton told him, ‘This is it. This is what we’ve got to do. This is what our club should be like.’

Here was a club where the emphasis was very much on music and people – alcohol wasn’t even served – and in contrast to DJs back home, there was no use of the microphone. In fact, the DJs were mixing. This was just the vibe Pickering wanted. To help create it he wanted to attract the black audience who were attending Legends back home. The white trendies in long dark overcoats would just have to get used to it, he reasoned.

To achieve his aim, he first called on DJ Greg Wilson, who was then a mainstay at Legends. There Wilson was famous for having introduced Manchester to electro.

A New York-based movement spearheaded by Afrika Bambaataa, electro was to provide the building blocks of techno and house on which the Haçienda’s name would be made. It was inspired by the emerging hip-hop movement, by the sleek, robotic rhythms of Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk, and by the distinctive noises produced by the Roland TR-808 drum machine. A cold, yet undeniably funky sound, its Mancunian appeal was obvious.

And it was making Greg Wilson’s name at Legends. He’d done away with DJ banter and introduced mixing, packing the club out in the process. In the same month as the Haçienda opened in 1982, he appeared on Mike Shaft’s legendary Piccadilly Radio show, TCOB, playing electro and ushering in an era of mixes that inspired a generation of the city’s musicians and DJs (not least Gerald Simpson, a.k.a. A Guy Called Gerald, who fondly remembers rushing out to buy C90 cassettes in anticipation of their broadcast).

Wilson had also appeared on Channel Four’s
The Tube
that February, demonstrating this new art of mixing to presenter Jools Holland. As a result of his appearance, the traditional white Factory crowd had begun tuning into his shows on Piccadilly. This fact caught the attention of Pickering, who had returned from the States inspired by what he’d seen at Danceteria and
Paradise Garage and determined to push the musical envelope at the Haçienda. He secretly resented the fact that the club had to put bands on and wanted it to operate more like these New York clubs: with a great sound system, packed with a mixed crowd dancing to a wide variety of music.

Thus he set about shaking up the Haçienda’s music policy, hiring not only Greg Wilson but John Tracey and Chad Jackson too. Wilson was given the responsibility of shaking up Friday nights with an electro-based sound, ‘bringing what I was doing at Legends to a new audience’.

The night was called Fridays Go Truly Transatlantic, promising ‘DJ Greg Wilson with the newest in Funk and Dance’ and it debuted on Friday 19 August. From then on, Friday nights would be a largely black-music night (though the club still struggled to attract the black crowd it wanted), while Saturday nights catered more for the traditionally white Factory audience, with the odd slot from a moonlighting Greg Wilson in an attempt to familiarize the crowd with the sound of Fridays.

So, on Friday night you could expect to hear Wilson play ‘White Lines’ by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel (which he’d received on import that September) among the new sounds of hip hop and electro, while on Saturday night John Tracey played a mix that included Simple Minds, Willie Hutch, Iggy Pop and Sharon Redd. His top tune was ‘Shout’ by Lulu and he often ended the evening with the Thunderbirds themetune.

In addition to his Saturday-night slot Tracey took over Tuesday nights, hosting The End: A No-Funk Night. It went on to become the club’s most popular night until mid-1984. Again Greg Wilson was asked to play a slot during the evening, the club being absolutely determined to open its audience to new sounds – despite opposition from customers, some of whom even wrote to complain about the proliferation of ‘jazz, funk, disco, whatever it’s called’. Nevertheless, while this policy of playing different styles of music may have bewildered the audience at the time, it was to pay dividends in the future. The Haçienda was educating its customers, priming them for the genre-mashing rave and Madchester years ahead.

What’s more, Wilson’s legendary tenure at Piccadilly was doing the same thing. After Wilson came Stu Allan, widely credited with being the first radio DJ to champion Chicago house music in the mid-1980s, and switching on a generation of DJs in the process; names like Laurent Garnier and (once again) Gerald Simpson, who was inspired to make and send his own house tracks into the show. Allan gave the latter’s cassette its first-ever
airplay, introducing it as being ‘by a Guy called Gerald from Hulme’. The name stuck, and the destinies of the Haçienda and ‘a guy called Gerald’ were soon intertwined.

Greg hosted black and funk nights aimed at white men. I remember him coming up to me, asking if he could remix ‘Blue Monday.’ I told him to fuck off, thinking it was the most disgusting thing anyone had ever suggested – why should we let someone tamper with our work? How times change. Nowadays the remixes are often better than the originals.

I don’t remember much of Greg beyond that episode, although I know he mixed ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Rockers Revenge into New Order’s ‘Confusion’, which was ingenious. The first mash-up.

Greg Wilson also managed the Broken Glass Crew, a troupe of break-dancers that included Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge, who would later form Black Grape with Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays.

The focus of a piece in the
Observer
in November that year was the Broken Glass Crew, a ten-strong team of breakdancers who regularly performed at the Haçienda. Whether they encouraged the overcoat brigade to dance or simply terrified them further is not clear, but it was an impressive spectacle. Manager Howard Jones informed the
Observer
that having breakdancers was never part of any masterplan: ‘All we’re interested in is if something’s happening, to make sure we give it a chance.’ In the same piece Sue Smith, a club regular, admitted to being somewhat baffled by the club’s musical policy, the ‘American dance music’.