The Haçienda (21 page)

‘You ok lads?’ I asked worriedly . . .

‘HEAD ON COLLISION WITH NEW ORDER! YEH!’ They chorused. Fuck me.

Still, no serious injuries sustained, we jumped out of the car to meet the driver of the other vehicle, also unharmed.

But very, very angry. He was a taxi driver, this guy, and he was gesticulating at his knackered car with one hand, using the other to wave a fist at us, screaming and shouting, ‘Fooking English pigs. You on wrong side of road.’

Terrified, I went into full-on diplomacy mode.

‘Sorry,mate,I’m really,really sorry.We’ll pay for all the damage.We will, we’re in a band.’

I was trying desperately to calm the guy down.He was having none of it. ‘Eenglish pigs. I call police.’

The tunes were still on in our car and the lads from Stretford were dancing in the middle of the road. Andy, too. Still making boxes, throwing shapes and gurning – which for some reason seemed to annoy him even more.

‘You ruin my livelihood, I no feed my children!’ he was screaming.

Then, to make matters worse, I heard sirens in the distance. Uh-oh.

‘You leg it,’ I told Andy. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

God help us. I don’t know what I was thinking.

So Andy and the two lads from Stretford did a runner to a graveyard opposite hiding behind the gravestones, watching me as I stood waiting to deal with the police, who arrived like a Spanish Starsky and Hutch, two right big bastards. They didn’t jump over the bonnet but both drew their nightsticks.

I gulped. One stood by the side of the car, glowering. The other one, the bigger of the two,fixed me with a stare.Then,very,very,slowly he walked round both of the crashed cars until he was standing in front of me again. He raised his nightstick and jabbed me in the chest.

‘In Spain,’ he said, ‘we drive on zee right!’ Then walked back to his car, me nodding inanely.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir!’

Meanwhile, Andy and the two lads from Stretford had decided to offer moral support from across the road in the graveyard.

‘Hooky,’one of them called,head bobbing up from behind a gravestone.

The two coppers looked over at the graveyard, but there was no sign of Andy or the two lads. They looked back at me.

Behind them I saw the heads popping up from behind the gravestones. Like that game with the moles. If only I’d had a mallet.

I grinned back at the coppers innocently. In the end, they’d had enough, got back in their car and drove off, leaving me a paranoid wreck in their wake. Now I legged it across the road and hid too, watching as the still-furious taxi driver managed to free his car of the wreckage and drive away, radiator steaming. With him gone, we emerged like Madchester zombies from the graveyard and pushed our car on to the side of the road. Another car wrecked.

‘See you, lads.’

‘Thanks for a top night, Hooky. See you in the Haç.’

That was the great thing about E. It made mates of you all. As a result, as soon as you’d had your first experience of it, you were always trying to convert other people to it.

Which brings us back to the barge, and my mate who is urging the two studio owners to get on one, offering them up in his upturned palm. ‘Everyone’s on one,’ he insists.

Stuck in the album charts
circa
1979 they may be, but these two don’t pass up the opportunity to try out the new wonder drug.

They each take one.

Almost immediately owner number one goes completely off it, thinks Andy is a monkey and freaks out. We lock him in the car for a while to recover, but when we go back later to check he’s OK he’s disappeared. Ah well. Owner number two, meanwhile, goes hyper.

‘I’m going to walk back,’ he tells me, head nodding, hair shaking.

‘The villa is about twelve miles away,’ I say.

‘I don’t care. I’m going to walk back,’ he insists. ‘Which way is it?’

I’m just as trashed as everybody else,which is obviously why I point in the opposite direction to the villa and say, ‘That way, mate’, chuckling as he trots off. Oops.

Sham 69 haven’t played a note and it’s absolute pandemonium; nobody can even string a sentence together. But, hey, the show must go on. So the band find themselves on a raft being towed out into the middle of San Antonio harbour, where they begin to play.

However, by now it’s three a.m. and the place is empty. God knows where everybody is, but they’re not in San Antonio harbour. It’s just Sham 69 on a raft, plus me, Andy, the PA guy, a few casualties and maybe a dog or two.

Of course we’re going mad at the mixing desk. Andy is dubbing everything up and screaming,‘Woo,woo,woo . . .’The PA guy wants to kill him for it. We go so mad on the sound that even the casualties and the dogs are driven away, but it doesn’t really matter. By the time the gig is over Sham 69 are completely incoherent with booze – they could have been playing Shea Stadium for all they know about it – so we ditch them, leave them dribbling on the barge and decide go to Eden instead.

Phew.

Out of the madness at last.

And then, into more madness.

Eden’s one of my favourite clubs, and it’s jumping. We make our way up to the balconies from where we can survey the devastation below, and there we spy some familiar faces. Paco’s here. He’s with a couple of our new friends, one a tranny, the other a lesbian, who always hang out together; plus we bump into a bunch of guys we’ve been meeting a lot – the air-traffic controllers from San Antonio airport.These guys are lunatics, I’m telling you. Total nutters. Tonight’s a weird one even by their standards – tonight they’re wearing make-up and half of them are in drag. It’s the beginning of their holidays so they are celebrating; they leave Ibiza tomorrow.

So there we are in Eden, off our cake. The music’s hitting the spot and we’re all talking – well, shouting, really. Strange, intense conversations about how great the music is, how wonderful the club is, how beautiful Ibiza is, how life is great.

Next thing, this German guy comes over, bawls something in my ear and indicates a corner where it’s quieter. I go with him and there he fixes me with a serious, probing stare and says, ‘It is not a woman.’

He points at the tranny as he says it. He’s really quite angry about the fact. Turns out he’s been buying him/her drinks all night. ‘It is not a woman,’ he repeats.

‘
Yeah
,’ I think, ‘
and
?’but trying to be polite,smiling and nodding.

‘Thanks, mate. Cheers for the information.’

‘It is not a woman,’ he insists. ‘It is a
man
.’

Yeah, right. Nod. Smile. Back away slowly.

Back to Andy. ‘That dickhead over there has only just worked out that it’s a guy,’ I bawl, jerking a thumb back at the corner.

‘This dickhead?’ Andy points.

I turn. The German guy has followed me back to the table. He’s now standing over us. Me, Andy, the tranny, the lesbian and the air-traffic controllers in drag. We all look at him. The tranny in particular looks scared. Now the German guy is screaming at the tranny.

‘It is not a woman,’ he repeats. He’s getting a bit lairy. Andy – suddenly, surprisingly – is looking all protective.

Then it kicks off. The German guy starts throwing things at the tranny, moving around the table as if to get at her. She gets scared, jumps up and tries to run away. Thing is, she can’t run too well in her stilettos. One of the heels breaks off and she crashes to the ground.

Andy, knight in shining armour that he is, rushes over and picks her up in his arms as though she’s a princess or something.

‘I’m in love, I’m in love,’ he shouts, taking the piss. The German guy stops throwing things, looks at us as though we’re the biggest bunch of degenerates he’s ever had the misfortune to meet,and skulks off,muttering to himself.

‘I’m in love,’ shouts Andy once more for good measure.

Later, I find out that the tranny is a butcher. Funny old world, innit?

So anyway, we leave Eden. By this time we’ve picked up another member of the party, our one-armed drug dealer, Pedro. For some reason I never fully understand, it’s Pedro’s job to get the air-traffic controllers to the ferry in time, so we all pile in cars to make our way there.

‘The ferry?’ I say, settling into the driving seat. ‘Why are we taking them to the ferry? Why aren’t they flying out like everybody else?’

Pedro leans over to me.‘Nobody who works at Ibiza airport will fly from there,’ he tells me conspiratorially, tapping his nose. ‘It’s far too dangerous. Too many near misses.’ Looking at this lot I think I know why.

Great
. Whether or not he was pulling my leg I never find out – I just hope he was.

By now it is very, very early in the morning and we’re all hanging, coming down, a rag-tag convoy of casualties, rushing across the island to the ferry.

Then –
crunch.
Oh no, not again?

Shit. I’ve gone into the car in front of me. The one full of air-traffic controllers. We stop. Everybody gets out of the cars, everybody panicking. The air-traffic controllers, still in drag, are going mad, they’re going to be late for the ferry. The tranny is panicking, the lesbian is
panicking. Pedro the one-armed drug dealer is screaming and running around. Me and Andy are holding our heads and trying to get it together. The whole lot of us: a screaming, dragged-up, drugged-up, noisy, early-morning-coming-down mess.

Then, all of a sudden, we stop. Suddenly we’re aware of being watched. We’ve crashed outside two massive tourist hotels and lining the pavements on either side of us are hundreds of holidaymakers sat there with suitcases, waiting for buses to take them to the airport. Mums, dads, children, grannies. Just normal tourists. All staring at us as we freak out in the middle of the road.

And, I swear to God, not one of them says a word.

There is a second or so of eerie silence. We stare at them. They stare back at us. All of us open-mouthed, like two different species meeting each other for the first time.

Then we just start freaking out again – even more.

We have to find an alternative mode of transport.
The taxi rank.
The air-traffic controllers continue on their way to the ferry; the tranny and the lesbian disappear. Andy and I get in the last one. The driver looks at me in the rear-view mirror, brow furrowed.

‘A dónde vas, Gringo?’

‘Studio Meditterraneo, mate, por favor.’

We drive.

‘Hey sen˜or,’ he says, eyes narrowing, ‘I know you?’

‘No I don’t think so!’

‘Si Si, where I know you from?’

Then the penny drops.
Oh, shit.
My bruised and battered brain flashes back to month or so ago, a head-on collision, an irate taxi driver screaming. ‘Eeenglish pigs.’

The same guy. Well, at least he was wrong – I hadn’t ruined his livelihood. I shrink into the seat dumbstruck.

After all that, I get back to the villa. There, it’s chaos, too. One of the Status Quo-meets-Judas Priest studio guys has been going round the island telling everyone he’s New Order’s manager.He’s been posing as Rob Gretton and he’s got himself in all kinds of trouble. He’s pulled a girl, brought her back to the villa, then thrown her out of his room. She’s running around the villa banging on all the doors, screaming, ‘Let me in, you filthy bastard.’

‘What’s up, love?’ I ask.

‘New Order’s manager, do you know him? He’s locked me out,’ she screams.

Can I be bothered to sort it out? No.And with that,grinning,I go to bed. Fuck me, what a life. Can’t wait till tonight.

Trouble was, we couldn’t stay in Ibiza forever, even if we’d wanted to. We’d rented the studio for a set period of time, and eventually that time ran out.

Before we left, Tony came over to see us for a few days, bringing his son Oliver with him. I ended up babysitting while he checked Ibiza out. I drove them back to the airport a few days later, where I dutifully waited till he’d checked in then walked him to departures. They left, I waved, I walked away, I heard a shout.

‘Hooky!’

It’s Tony. He’d come back, beckoned me over.

‘Yes, Tone?’ I asked.

‘This is the most expensive holiday you’ve ever had!’ he spat, and disappeared again.

The next day Andy and I had been in Amnesia all night and we were shedded. We were walking through Ibiza town, looking for a cab to take us back to the studio, when we saw Nico with her son, Ari, sitting at a table, drinking coffee.

I said to Andy, ‘Oh no, look, there’s Nico. She’ll do our heads in. Let’s do one.’ And shamefully we ran away.

Cycling home afterwards, she fell off her bike and hit her head; she died the next day. We must have been two of the last people to see her alive – of the last people who knew her, anyway. Now I really regret that.

Tony was dead right,though,at the airport.We’d wasted our time either out partying,or recovering,spent an absolute fortune and came home to England with just two songs (‘Fine Time’,inspired by a night in Amnesia,and ‘Run’,inspired by a night in San Antonio) and sixteen drum tracks (what can I say? Steve was always much better at concentrating than the rest of us) only to discover . . . In Manchester, acid house was in full swing.