The Haçienda (13 page)

Admission was free to those holding invitations, which had been given away.

The day included a performance by the Factory All-Stars, as we’ve heard, but also on the bill were the Jazz Defektors.

Managed by Ellie Gray, the Jazz Defektors were led by Salts, a club regular who recalls being one of the few black people to regularly visit the club during that era. Whenever possible the group would take over the club, gaining fame as much for their look as their music – the look being colour-co-ordinated 1950s suits, high-waisted trousers bought from secondhand clothes shops and charity stores. They’d been due to perform for a TV
audience on
The Tube
but when the day came Madonna’s people insisted that she lip-sync to two songs, rather than one, meaning an act had to be cut for the running time. That act was the Jazz Defektors. ‘She couldn’t dance as well as us,’ noted Salts ruefully.

There’s a postscript to the event. Years after, Tony Wilson found himself sitting opposite Madonna at dinner.

‘I eventually plucked up the courage to look across the table to Madonna and ask, “Are you aware that the first place you appeared outside of New York was our club in Manchester?”

‘She gave me an ice-cold stare and said, “My memory seems to have wiped that.”’

Miaow.

Meanwhile, DJ Greg Wilson wasn’t the only one to leave the Haçienda. Howard ‘Ginger’ Jones, a director and the club’s manager, had left at the very end of 1983.His farewell party was held on 30 December.

He wanted something new, he said. Having heard the Stone Roses, he was thinking about a career in music management – and indeed went on to manage them briefly – so he handed in his notice during the club’s Halloween party. As result 1984 began with nobody at the helm of the Haçienda, nor with anybody who was either qualified for or even wanted the job. So began the era of the infamous ‘management committee’, a co-operative including Mike Pickering, bar manager Penny Henry and Ellie Gray, plus input from Gretton and Wilson.

Gray had been receptionist since the club’s opening, and was aware of financial problems from the very beginning.‘Debtors were always trying to get hold of Ginger and he was never available to them,’ she told Jon Savage. When the management committee was formed it was up to her keep the bailiffs away. However, she remembers the committee working well at the beginning of its life, ‘although no one knew what they were doing’.

By this time nearly everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. We should have brought in a professional club manager at this point or earlier, but we always employed our mates because we liked working with them, even if they knew fuck all about the job.

So when Ginger left in late December 1983 he was replaced by Penny. She lived at Alan Erasmus’s house, which doubled as the original Factory office building on Palatine Road,and she had all the necessary credentials to be put in charge: she was an old friend.

I think it was she who came up with the idea to run the Haçienda as a collective, and suddenly, she, Ellie and Mike Pickering were putting everything to the vote. Price increases, for example. Obviously the staff didn’t want the club to be expensive for their mates. They didn’t care whether the Haçienda made a profit or not. So every time a price rise came up, they voted against it:

‘Right, the wholesale cost of beer has gone up this week, we need to raise the price of a pint. Anybody in favour?’

Inevitably no one was. Prices stayed low, but at the same time nobody took action to bring expenses down, which meant that the club was losing even more money than before. Saying that, ‘the people’ loved us. Not only did we sell we the cheapest beer in Manchester but also we didn’t put the prices up on Saturday. There’s an unwritten law among pub and club owners that on Saturday night the price of everything goes up 10p. You charge extra simply because the market will bear it (i.e., everyone’s pissed). The Haçienda never did that because the staff voted against it.They never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as the saying goes. As long as money to fund the club came in from New Order and Joy Division and Factory,they didn’t care how much cash flew out.

To me, the decision to run the club as a co-operative was ridiculous because the members of the co-operative weren’t risking anything. I think the staff decided, ‘Oh, they’re rock-star millionaires, fuck them, we’ll keep it cheap for our mates.’

Rock-star millionaire? Where?

Seemed like everybody had that perception, though. One night I drove into town and parked my car outside the club. A brand-new Audi, it was, a company car – as in, a New Order car. When I came out later, it had been kicked to fuck. I mean, whoever had done it in had really done a number on it, lights, doors, roof, windscreen. I stormed back inside, steaming, only to bump into Tony Wilson on his way out.

‘Hooky,darling,what’s wrong?’he said.He called everyone darling,all the time.

I pointed back up the street to my mangled car, seething, ‘A bunch of fucking twats have kicked my car in. Fucking car’s trashed.’

‘Well, darling,’ he said, ‘they paid for it,’ and off he flounced, me lost for words in his wake.

Put it this way, Tony’s words were no solace.

We continued to make mistakes. For example, the place would be repainted every week,which cost a fortune.But,rather than wash out the paint tray and rollers, staff would throw them in a pile then go to B&Q and buy new ones. I found that pile after we went bankrupt and it was like fucking Everest, had two Sherpas and a base camp on it. We were just spunking it up the wall, as we say in Madchester.

We got robbed literally, too, not just figuratively. One Monday morning the staff counted the weekend’s revenue before taking it to the bank to deposit it all. The cleaners were in the club, too, tidying up. Standard procedure after a weekend.

Suddenly armed men burst in, held everyone at gunpoint, tied ’em all up, and took the money.

Police investigated but got nowhere, so we tried to put the experience behind us. About three weeks later, though, one of our staff said to a cleaner, ‘That’s a great tan, been on holiday?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Want to see my piccies?’

‘Sure.’

The cleaner took out her photos from Barbados or wherever, and uncovered a shot of her on the beach with an arm around one of the pricks who’d robbed us: her boyfriend.

Gotcha.

Whatever else was going on, though, the Haçienda was still a great place to hang out. Downstairs, Swing, the hairdressers, had advertised for female students with a ‘models wanted’ advert. Once there, the male hairdressers would work their mojo, promising them free entry into the club. Talk about grooming.

It primarily served as a place to hang out.It became a cult thing,certainly not a profit centre. All the Factory band members were there. Although I did get my first freebie there – a haircut, courtesy of Neil, Neil, Orange Peel. The only rent they ever paid. Swing eventually closed, though the basins remained – a weird reminder of what once had been.

Hewan Clarke’s notes complaining about the siting of the DJ box had become legendary and in 1984 it finally happened. Reluctantly – the one thing that the Haçienda didn’t need was an extra cost – it was decided that the booth would be shifted from a room at one side of the stage (from where DJs couldn’t see the crowd) to the balcony, where a wooden structure
was built. Ben Kelly apparently objected, but it would turn out to be a smart move, paving the way for the era of the superstar DJ when one of the club’s most enduring images would be of the smoke-shrouded DJ overseeing the carnage below, hands outstretched, in an almost Christ-like pose.

That was to come, though. In the meantime, the club continued to operate more like a venue.But still hosting some legendary concerts.

I was still watching groups all the time, whenever New Order were home. I’d occasionally see Barney there, although we’d never hang out together. We might nod and say, ‘All right,’ to one another, but he and I never socialized. We had different circles. If we went anywhere together, it was as New Order.

We were spoilt rotten by the number of big groups that came through during that time. Some I enjoyed, some I didn’t. In either event, I never fraternized. I firmly believe in the maxim ‘Don’t meet your heroes’. What if they turned out to be horrible, or even ordinary? Ooooh! I got better at that as I got older.

I remember seeing Jonathan Richman, at his maddest, insisting on playing without a PA – just him and his acoustic guitar. Two hundred people came and nobody could hear him. They were either laughing at him – he looked like an escaped lunatic – or ignoring him. That night was a complete debacle, though, hilarious. And the funny thing was, I later saw him do the same set at Alan Wise’s club, Six Six Six, on Fennel Street a couple of months later, and he was absolutely fantastic. In a small venue it worked, whereas in a big place it didn’t. Some shows are like that. The setting makes all the difference.

Johnny Thunders (another hero of mine) played ‘Chinese Rocks’ three times during his set. He’d turned into a rock ’n’ roll casualty to say the least.
(The ex-New York Dolls singer battled heroin addiction and died aged thirty-eight in mysterious circumstances.)
Shame,the Heartbreaker’s were the first band we supported at Rafter’s,but I enjoyed it.I love that extreme lifestyle. I love to witness it.

Likewise, I was a great fan of the Pogues, who headlined a few times and performed brilliantly. I’d see them perform elsewhere, too. New Order headlined Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival with them at the Isle of Wight. Our dressing rooms/tents were next to one another, and we walked into theirs by mistake; they had drinks and a huge buffet, making us think, ‘The hospitality here is great.’

Then we walked into our dressing room and there was nothing. Just a donkey. Literally, a big brown effing donkey!

So, we took the donkey out and dragged him into the Pogues’ dressing room,where he ate everything on their rider.We nicked the booze. When they arrived they went berserk. What a laugh. I often wonder what happened to that donkey? I think it went solo.

I ended up rebuilding a new sound system in the style of a band PA with the help of Chris from Tractor. Chris had a lot of experience. He and I later co-owned Suite 16 recording studio in Rochdale – named, again, by Tony Wilson – which was formerly John Brierley’s Cargo studios and where we’d recorded the first Factory single and later ‘Atmosphere’. He now sells Joy Division mementoes. Any time there’s something from Joy Division for sale, Chris Hewitt’s the one selling it. He seems to have a nice sideline buying things that Joy Division used and selling them over and over again.

I was very proud of the new PA. It sounded miles better than the original, and it only cost £1000. I set it up and maintained it. I’d come in every Friday before opening to EQ it.For a special occasion,like a big group coming to play, we’d hire an extra PA as well, to augment it.

That set-up lasted until 1988, when we splashed out for a huge system from Wigwam Acoustics (although still not as much as we spent on the original PA) that made everyone’s nose tingle because of the huge bottom end, and deafened audiences for a whole week. Eventually we had to turn it down from 140db to 130db because doctors were phoning up to complain – too many patients with Haçienda hearing problems. It also caused the baffling to fall down. We’d had this installed in the mid-eighties to improve the acoustics; it cost another thirty grand.The installation was designed by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly, in conjunction with Salford University, and was made up by a specialist company. Very stylish and looked fantastic. But it didn’t make any bleedin’ difference at all. Sometimes it would fall like a guillotine from the roof and always brought down half the ceiling plaster with it. There were some very lucky escapes. Ang Matthews was forever handing out free Life Memberships to dazed, white-haired people. In fact it became so dangerous we had to take most of it down. (Incidentally, most of the system is still going at a club in Oldham called the Tokyo Project, while the mixer and turntables are in Digital in Newcastle. The owner, Aaron Mellor, has also installed a huge chunk of
the Haç dance floor at another of his clubs, Atomic in Ashton. That is what I call a true fan.)

Nude, on Friday nights, was launched in October 1984 by Pickering, who stepped up to man the decks. One of the club’s most famous nights, and certainly the longest-running, it would go on make its name in 1987 and 1988, being one of the few places in the UK to play house music and providing a launch-pad for Pickering-as-DJ as well as for, later, Graeme Park.

Initially, however, Nude consisted of Pickering and Andrew ‘Marc’ Berry, from Swing, the hairdressers, playing jazz, salsa, Motown, pop, hip hop and electro. At last Pickering was providing the across-the-board blend of musical styles he’d witnessed in New York. It paid dividends, too. Within two or three weeks Nude was a capacity night plus it was attracting an even more mixed crowd than Greg Wilson had pulled in. Hairdressers and Goths were thin on the ground now.Punters wore trainers.It was the very beginning of the scally era.

Meanwhile, John Tracey’s The End: A No-Funk Night, despite having started the year with a new intake of DJs (including Suzanne, who would later manage the kitchens), died a natural death. For some time it had been the club’s most successful night. Yet now, perhaps because the regulars were having their ears tuned to different sounds – Nude on Fridays, Hewan Clarke’s Hot night on Saturdays – it seemed oddly anachronistic. Arthur Baker’s production of New Order’s ‘Confusion’ had drawn lines between electro and hip hop and was establishing a link between rock music and dance
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