The Haçienda (17 page)

‘About three years after opening the Haçienda we realized that everybody in Manchester was getting free drinks – except for the people who actually owned it.’

Tony Wilson

In January 1986 Nico of the Velvet Underground, who had made Manchester her home, played her last-ever gig. It was at the Haçienda. She played with the Faction and was supported by Eric Random. Shortly afterwards – ever the trailblazer – she relocated to Ibiza.

Meanwhile, Paul Mason – the man who would later be credited with turning the club around – arrived. He instigated immediate changes.

‘[The problems were] big losses,’ he told writer Jon Savage.

There was no management structure at all. [It was] run by committees, chaos. Unfortunately, I arrived being known in advance as the hatchet man. I had no friends at all. I used to go back to Nottingham at the end of the week. That’s the way it had to be for a few weeks. I started by explaining to the doormen that they couldn’t have pints of beer on the door. That’s how bad the situation was, There was no midweek club that was doing the business. The club was open Monday and Tuesday with about nine people in, it was costing a fortune. I saw the first Monday and Tuesday nights and we just didn’t open the following Monday and Tuesday.

To his credit,Alan Erasmus realized very early on that we couldn’t run the Haçienda properly, and he insisted loads and loads of times we needed new management –somebody who’d do things sensibly who had experience. It just took everyone else a while to come round to this idea. No one likes the truth.

But we all did come round, in the end, and we kicked out the committee and brought Paul Mason on board. He ran a club in Nottingham called Rock City (New Order played and met him there in 1981), and was a well-thought-of club manager, so Alan went along to Rock City, sat down with him, and lined him up for the job.

When he agreed we were ecstatic: ‘This is the one who’s going to turn it around.’ Our saviour.

He was very quiet.Studious.I remember coming in with him for his first day on the job in January and thinking,‘What a revelation!’He was all about doing things efficiently, asking the staff, ‘Why is the boiler on, putting out heat during the day when there’s nobody in the club? Turn that off until an hour before the doors open, to warm it up for when people come in.’

Pretty logical, but nobody had considered it before. He had an eye for detail the rest of us lacked. Little things like, ‘Why don’t you stop the staff stealing off you?’

He was a real, honest-to-God manager. A boss. For a while, he came across as a big authoritarian figure and everyone was scared him. For good reason: he hired and fired people like mad.

Because Paul came in as the golden boy, Rob and Tony basically offered him whatever he wanted. They gave him a lot of money, which he deserved. But he also wanted a company car. Now, Paul lived at Deansgate, which is 150 yards from the Haçienda, but they let him have any vehicle he chose. The one he picked was a £30,000 Lancia Delta Integrale 4X4, one of the fastest road cars ever made. To go from Deansgate to the Haçienda? They let him have it, though.

(We didn’t agree with this decision. When the members of New Order got involved, one of the first things we asked was, ‘Why has this guy got a £30,000 car when he lives across the fucking road?’)

For his part,I think Paul was impressed by the reputations of Factory and New Order and had decided that an association with us would be a feather in his cap. Business-wise the club itself wasn’t a success, so it can’t have been that.

Staffing at the lower levels remained erratic. Without regular, experienced employees to rely on,all sorts of things would slip– even big things like the finances. As our accountants wrote it in one of Factory’s annual reports:‘The subsidiary [i.e.,the Haçienda] had a high turnover of staff in the accounts department during the year. The book-keeping was not up to the required standards and there was no system of internal control upon which we could rely or alternative accounting procedures which we could adopt to verify the accounting records.’

*

In other words, we trusted that Paul would turn our financial mess around, but we couldn’t be sure by how much. We continued to move forward, blindly – but optimistically.

One story has it that Mason’s introduction to the world of Factory and the Haçienda involved attending a management meeting during which Wilson threw chips at Gretton and the pair ended up grappling on the floor. Given Gretton’s state of health at the time,however,this could be an apocryphal tale.

When Rob returned,unfortunately he was a shadow of his former self. Five stone lighter, he looked and acted a lot older. No longer as bombastic or as loud, he’d simply stopped being such a huge physical presence. He had to take things much easier, so a gentler, quieter side of him emerged, one that was much more thoughtful.

The axis of power shifted, and antagonism surfaced toward Rob, Factory and the Haçienda because the whole thing was such an absolute cock-up. To make matters worse, the taxman decided to fuck us all.

It all came out that while we were touring America, Tony didn’t have time to give Rob New Order’s royalties to invest in the Haçienda, so he put the money directly into the club without anyone paying tax on it.

That – technically – is fraud. It should have gone into New Order’s company first, and been accounted, and only
then
could it be invested in the Haçienda.

To paraphrase
Scooby Doo
, we might have got away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for a pesky member of staff.

The story goes that the PAYE/National Insurance contributions officer had asked to inspect the wages books – presumably to see if anyone was fiddling. We were informed of his impending visit, but unfortunately nobody advised the member of staff who was on the door when the contributions bloke came knocking.

Now in those days most business had two sets of books. The nice, clean set you gave to the taxman, which included all the PAYE, National Insurance details and so on, and another hush-hush set of books, the cash books for the cleaners, humpers, odd-job men, etc. Wouldn’t happen these days, of course.

So anyway, there’s our member of staff sitting scratching her arse when along comes the civil servant.

I wasn’t there, but let’s imagine he’s wearing a bowler hat and carrying a briefcase, perhaps with a rolled-up copy of the
Financial Times
under his arm.

‘Good morning to you,’ he says to our staffer. ‘I believe you’re expecting me. I’ve come to collect the wage books to check the PAYE and National Insurance calculations.’

So she gave him the books.

Only, she gave him the wrong books – she gave him the cash books. An unbelievably stupid mistake, and they didn’t even sack her. Someone must have been screwing her, I reckon.

This happening set in motion a very costly chain of events. The taxman investigated us under Section 105 of the 1970 Taxes Management Act, which regulates evidence in cases of tax fraud. He looked into the finances of Factory,New Order,Joy Division and all of the people involved. The only one he couldn’t get hold was Will O’ the Wisp himself, Alan Erasmus.

The inspector demanded to see all our financial paperwork and correspondence. On looking over the figures, investigators couldn’t believe we’d put so much money into the Haçienda. We must have been taking it out for ourselves, they figured; we must have been living like lords. They simply wouldn’t believe that we personally saw so little of what we were earning.

So one day three of the buggers turned up on my doorstep, demanding to do an inventory of the house. They even counted the tools in the garage and rooted through the knives and forks in the kitchen, thinking they’d find out where all the money had gone. They did the same to all of us.

One of the guys turned to me as he left, apparently satisfied – at last – that I wasn’t salting millions away on cutlery and Black & Decker Workmates.

‘Where’s all the money gone?’ he said, baffled.

‘What do you mean?’ I replied.

(A few months later, of course, I had the answer: the money he thought we were spending on ourselves? It had all been put into the club.)

At the end of the investigation a deal was done with the taxman where we agreed that the money New Order had put into the Haçienda was a promotional expense, not an investment. We and our
lawyers had to fight really hard to get that,and it was a very expensive long-winded fight indeed.

That was how we escaped the fraud charge. Which was good – none of us fancied a trip to Strangeways, after all. What’s the per-day money like inside? Do you get a rider? The downside was that we then had to write off our investment – it had become a promotional expense – so we no longer had any money in the club.

To add insult to injury the taxman fined New Order and Joy Division £800,000 for our own accounting irregularities – a record fine at the time.

It took us years to pay it off. Now we were working not only to keep funding the Haçienda – a club in which we no longer had a financial interest, remember – but also to pay off our own fine.

And we were pissed off about that because it meant we were no longer working for ourselves, or making music for the love of it. It felt like we were doing it for the taxman, or for the bloody Haçienda.

Even so, the music didn’t suffer, and you could even argue that New Order hit its creative peak around this time – or was about to. Perhaps Tony was right when he told us, ‘The taxman did you a favour, darling. You would have made shit music without that fine.’

Yeah, cheers, Tony. He definitely had a way with words.

Meanwhile, my growing-up period continued and I was starting to take an interest in some of the figures.

Or I was trying to.The accounts were very confusing.And when you could make head or tail of them, they simply didn’t add up. For example, in the accounts were entries for ‘records and CDs’, which vary from year to year:£42,000 one year and £49,000 the next.A thousand pounds a week? That was physically impossible and the DJs brought their own stuff to play anyway. What a con.

It was unbelievable. I held long, drug-fuelled conversations about what was happening at the Haçienda with anybody who would listen, but there were no answers. Not from my high-as-kite mates anyway.

Despite the ongoing money issues, not everything at the club was doom and gloom. It was a very easy-going place back then, even the security were lovely. They were like chaperones. Fred was the head bouncer. Nice guy. Jasmine looked after the female punters. Ditto. She was really sweet. Back then, there was hardly any trouble and not many drugs,just a bit of whizz and dope,so their jobs were very easy.They
even won an award in some magazine for being the best-presented bouncers in the UK. They all wore Crombies and were very smart. They left in 1986 when Roger Kennedy’s firm took over. He had the door until 1991.

Frankly, we rarely had fights at all in those days. The few times we did, it was always our mates involved. Things would change in that department.The whole of Manchester and Salford would soon join in.

The other upheaval that year was that the golden period of Haçienda gigs finally drew to an end. Competing venues like the Free Trade Hall and the Apollo were offering bands better deals and the bands were defecting. There’s loyalty for you.

It was decided that much more cost-effective were DJ-only nights. This decision would help to shape not just the club’s future direction, but also the direction of UK club culture as a whole.

Nude night had shown the way. Nude meant ‘nothing on’ – there were no acts between DJs (or vice versa) – and it had proven successful. In May, Andrew ‘Marc’Berry left.Now Pickering was joined in the booth by Martin Prendergast (who had been recruited by Ang on the back of the bus to work from Chorlton), the two playing as
MP
²
.

Together they were enthusiastic recipients of the new house sounds arriving in Manchester direct from Chicago: ‘No Way Back’ by Adonis, ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ by Farley Jackmaster Funk, J. M. Silk’s ‘Jump Back’, ‘Rhythm’by Marshall Jefferson.These were the very first house records and the Nude crowd loved them. Then, the style of dancing was ‘jacking’ and dancers the Foot Patrol would give virtuoso displays for the benefit of an appreciative crowd. Drugs had yet to enter the scene but, even so, clubbers sensed a change in the air at Nude, a shift from fashion to music, from ‘being seen’ to having a good time. The wardrobe was trainers and T-shirts; the night even saw the first appearances of what would later become the ubiquitous flares. This was the night that had attracted members of the Happy Mondays from the suburbs into the city, that would in retrospect be seen to have ushered in the era of the scally – who were at first known as Baldricks, according to a feature in
iD
magazine at the time. It was to provide the cornerstone of the club’s policy from that moment on.