The Haçienda (25 page)

‘What made the Haçienda so special was the insane acoustics. I remember complaining about them on the opening night. But, five years later, when it all exploded, I realized that the nature of the building, and its high roof, made it feel like a Gothic cathedral, allowing hymns to be sent to the Gods.’

Tony Wilson

‘The first couple of weeks of Hot were reasonably ‘normal’, but from the third week it was mayhem.It was almost scary.I came out of the DJ booth and there was this guy with dreadlocks who was almost hysterical, crying and laughing at the same time, just blown away by the atmosphere. You almost felt like you were missing out by DJing, you wanted to be on the floor.’

Jon DaSilva

‘I was DJing at the Haçienda one evening and a girl came into the DJ box,lay down and took all her clothes off.She was naked,and started pulling at my trousers. I was wise enough to know it was E taking effect, rather than anything to do with me, but it was just one of those things; there was a lot of craziness in the air.’

Dave Haslam

The year began with the Haçienda enjoying unprecedented popularity. The Hot night had ended on a high at the end of 1988, to be replaced by House Nation, meaning that the Wednesday night never missed a beat. Dave Haslam’s Temperance Club still ran on Thursdays; Nude, with Park and Pickering DJing, was on Fridays; then on Saturday nights there was Wide, featuring Jon DaSilva.

It was the year that Madchester took off, and indie-dance was born, kick-started by Paul Oakenfold’s W.F.L. remix of the Happy Monday’s ‘Wrote for Luck’ and further cemented by the
Rave On
EP and remixes. In November the Mondays appeared with the Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets on
Top of the Pops
and the Madchester phenomenon had its most defining moment. All eyes were on Manchester – and at the centre of it was the Haçienda, which was being credited with attracting tourists and students to the city and thus boosting the local economy.

Before all of that, however, came
The Hitman and Her
, the late-night clubbing show with Pete Waterman and Michaela Strachan. It paid a visit to the Haçienda in January 1989 and legend has it that Strachans’ drink was spiked
...

They had a lot of trouble at that one: loads of young kids showed up trying to get in, and the usual tensions built up until a riot erupted. In desperation,the coppers had to shut off Whitworth Street yet again.

If you watch that episode of the show, there’s a karaoke competition. The winner, at the ripe old age of seventeen, was Dave Potts ‘Pottsy’, who was soon to become my tape operator at my Rochdale studio, Suite 16, then my bandmate in Revenge and Monaco. Small world.

Personally, I missed most of the Madchester period because I was in America with New Order but,once our very successful
Technique
tour ended, Bernard and I stayed locally, working on projects of our own. He
started Electronic with Johnny Marr of the Smiths, while I started Revenge, and the two of us became inveterate (although independent) partygoers,and pains in the arses for the staff.

What I found was that the city had changed a lot in our absence and the Haçienda had become a phenomenon. Reporters and tourists from all over the world descended on it. Journalists would wait for the staff to arrive in the morning and quiz them about the club, trying to get an exclusive insight.

Rave was now massive.Everything that used to be underground was suddenly overground and there was still an Ibizan vibe in the air. Even the weather was Ibizan, with the summers of 1988 and 1989 turning out to be really hot; and whereas it used to be empty all the time, now it was packed every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday with upwards of 8000 sweaty, happy people, the bass pumping loud and deep. You couldn’t move without bumping into Italian, Japanese or American tourists and the club became a holiday destination for music fans from all over the world, like the Salford Lads Club for fans of the Smiths, or the Cavern in Liverpool for the Beatles. Americans would immediately walk up to me and say, ‘Oh, hi, Hooky, I’m here from Pittsburgh. How are you?’ the way Americans do, whereas the European ones were a bit cooler but came for the vibe nonetheless. Even my normal friends,who wouldn’t typically go to the club,started frequenting it. They came along for the vibe – and of course the free drinks and guest-list helped.

Speaking of which . . . During one of the weekly management meetings, somebody mentioned my drinks bill. It seemed that while New Order had been in America for our twelve-week tour, I’d continued drinking at the club. Impossible, given that I’d been thousands of miles away, right? Turned out that two of my best mates had set up a drinks tab while I was away,saying that Hooky would sort it when he got back. Once they’d done it, a couple of others joined in too. The staff just went along with it. I didn’t mind, really – we’re all fucking chancers, aren’t we?

Even without my mates, about £4000 in free drinks was signed off per month. VIP stuff, I suppose. One month the figure dropped to £2000 and Rob gave the bar manager a bollocking, saying he wasn’t hosting the club properly (which was odd, considering that Rob paid for every drink he ever had;no perks for him).Plus he kept giving me
bollockings about my drinks bill, even suggesting that either I should pay it or the other members of the band should get the same.

In February,the Void club opened,taking over from House Nation.The night had a space theme: two giant spacemen floated over the stage, bar staff wore space-suits bearing the Void logo and there were distorting mirrors along the balcony. The music policy remained broadly the same as it had done during Hot and House Nation, though: house music courtesy of DJs Jon DaSilva and Mike Pickering. Void would go on to be remembered as yet another landmark club night.

In May the club celebrated its seventh birthday with the now-traditional party that saw staff and followers decamping to Amsterdam (at the club’s expense) after Nude had finished on the Friday night.

And in July Factory opened the Dry bar
...

Because acid house had saved our bacon, Tony and Rob seemed to think that everything we touched would turn to gold and so they decided to expand. Paul had had many discussions with Whitbread about putting money up for a bar, so with a bit on work on the dynamic duo . . .

We opened our bar, Dry, in July, as a place for people to visit prior to coming to the Haçienda. Rob and Tony felt we were missing out because a nightclub’s hours were eleven p.m. until two a.m. They felt the bar filled the missing piece of the jigsaw. We now had somewhere to go during the day and early in the week, as per the original youth-club idea, and running a mere pub should be simple.

New Order were reluctant to get involved – which is the understatement of this book – but Rob promised us it wouldn’t cost us any money. All funds would be borrowed; we’d just be putting our name to it.It was a great opportunity to earn money all week,he said.

It was felt the Northern Quarter of Manchester was up and coming. At the time all there was for people to visit during the afternoon were working men’s pubs. Dry would be the first new thing in the area.

However,Barney (who came up with the name Dry) disagreed:he complained that the Northern Quarter was run down, and insisted that the best spot was Oxford Road, where students from the university and polytechnic congregated. Rob and Tony said fuck off. They hated students. We all did. He was right, though.

The building, on Oldham Street, had belonged to the James Woodhouse furniture and carpet company (ironic because the first location for the Haçienda itself was a carpet showroom just up Oldham Street on the same side) and offered not just the ground floor but also three floors of offices above, a basement below and – as said the brief we received – ‘a lift servicing all floors and rear loading off Spear Street’. All well and good. So well and good, I suppose, that everybody overlooked the implications of the final paragraph: ‘I understand that the property is in a poor state of repair and decoration and consequently the freeholders are only seeking offers in the region of £80,000 for the benefit of their interest.’

Yup, so that’s the one we chose. The other three floors were a hazard for the entire time we owned the place.

Once we went ahead with the plan to open Dry,Ben Kelly was the given the architect’s job. It came in 50 per cent over-budget. We were told after we’d borrowed the down payment that if we didn’t put our own money in too we’d lose everything again. Pretty soon we were almost £700,000 in the hole, including £69,647 loaned from Factory, £59,794 from Gainwest Limited (New Order’s business partnership), £112,669 loaned from the Haçienda (done without the knowledge of any of the directors or investors), and a staggering £457,636 from Whitbread,the very same brewery whose loan to the Haçienda put us irrevocably in debt at the start (the associated loan charges that Whitbread hit us with cost Dry £23,106 in the first year alone,and they could never be paid off).

Once again, because of over-spending on the build, we’d overextended ourselves,and once again our reliance on the brewery meant we’d never be able to buy the beer cheaply enough to make a profit. Unbelievable!

Ben Kelly’s involvement again changed everything.We thought we’d have someplace warm and cosy – we wanted to model it on Nell’s in New York, which was a great place even if it had just twenty people in it. What we got was a huge space, one that would accommodate 500 and again looked ridiculous with a small crowd. During the daytime, with only a few people in it, it looked deserted. We’d re-created the same problems.Dry was too light and too big to feel comfortable.

Everything was over-done:from the floor up it was way over the top. They intended to open all three floors and the basement to customers,
and even build accommodation for the manager, Leroy Richardson, on the top floor. But when the estimates came in they were way too high because the building was in such a bad condition.

We had to scale it down to suit the budget (the first time we’d ever taken any notice of a budget).

The place became another burden on the Haçienda and Factory, causing more stress all around, the ripple effect being that we felt pressured into making rash decisions in search of any solutions to our financial woes.

Despite all of Rob’s reasons for opening the place,Dry was built on wishful thinking, not on market analysis or whatever else people normally take into account when opening a bar. If we’d opened it on Oxford Road, as Bernard suggested, we’d have been close to the 15,000 students who attended classes there on a daily basis and we could have made a packet. Back then, the Northern Quarter was a wasteland. Now, of course, it’s much more developed. Ahead of our time as usual,it was Dry that kick-started the area’s regeneration.Hip little cafés and shops gathered around Dry, with many of them (most noticably Mantos on Canal Street) ripping off Ben’s design to great effect. But, because we ran our bar so poorly, it turned a profit only on Fridays and Saturdays – when the money it made came from selling Haçienda tickets. The queues were so long at the club on Friday and Saturday nights that people invariably bought them at Dry in advance. Dry sold a thousand tickets a week, charging a £2 booking fee and making two thousand quid because of this surcharge to the regular ticket price. That was it. Otherwise it never turned a profit as a pub. We’d have been smarter to just open a daytime ticket window at the club. Looking back now, it does feel like we just weren’t cut out to run a business, never mind two of them. Once again our managers wrote loads of budget /night projections, predicting income; once again, I felt they just made up numbers. All you can really do is look at the bottom line and ask yourself, ‘How much can we afford to lose?’ If the answer you come up with is too high, then don’t do it.

Factory’s accountant, Chris Smith, always thought the salvation of Dry would be the food.He insisted that it would earn money.He kept encouraging us to carry on until we could make the dining aspect of the place profitable. ‘Get the food going and we’ll clean up,’ he’d say. ‘Restaurants put a hundred per cent mark-up on food.’