The Haçienda (33 page)

Flesh nights were wild. They’d put shower cubicles by the toilets and hang cages from the ceiling with male dancers writhing inside. Later they added massage tables. Drag queens from all over England made the pilgrimage. Even by our standards Flesh could be really debauched. It was completely over the top.

The bouncers resisted it at first, as they resisted every new club night they didn’t understand – be it Asian, black, or whatever. But the bouncers were very popular at Flesh because the Muscle Marys fell in love immediately with them and their uniforms; it was a gay fantasy come to life. Initially the gangsters were scared off by it, too, but soon changed their tune when Flesh became a runaway success. They’d come in to sell drugs, or just to enjoy the wild atmosphere. No-one dared say no to them.

Mick Hucknall told me that a couple of them (who shall remain nameless) decided that they’d try a blowjob off the greeter,just to see what it was like. So Flesh introduced them to a whole new culture; and, if any of them already leaned that way or were curious, this was their opportunity to experiment.

The weirdest Flesh night involved an employee running up to Ang in tears because two guys at the back of the stage were dancing around with bottles shoved up their arses. He was worried about collecting the empties, I suppose.

I can’t tell you how many times Paul Cons suggested that we make the Haçienda a gay club. One of our friends, Kevin Millens, ran Heaven, which was for years the biggest gay club in England, and they never had any trouble there. Paul would make his pitch to us at the directors’ meetings.

‘Why do you bother with these straight fuckers?’ he’d say. ‘The gays spend more money. They’re less trouble. They smell better . . .’ etc., etc.

In fact Flesh nights proved to be so profitable that when Paul eventually left us he’d rent the Haçienda and host his own nights. Paul was ambitious – I liked that about him – and at one point we were so sick of the fighting that we really thought, ‘Oh fuck it, let’s knock it on the head and go gay.’ Never did, though. It would have been too radical a departure.Rob wanted the club to be for everybody.Plus he wouldn’t have been able to ogle the girls then, would he?

Flesh ushered in the era during which we could stay open until seven a.m.and serve drinks until three a.m.We could never get a late licence until Paul applied for one. Rob went off: ‘Why was he able to get one and we weren’t?’

Then we heard that the licensing committee were very ‘gay friendly’. They did Paul and the Haçienda a very big and important favour.They also set a precedent: once they’d accommodated Paul, they couldn’t refuse our other late-licence requests – nor those made by anyone else, unfortunately. So getting what we wanted did backfire slightly because we ended up in competition with a lot of other bars and clubs that also got late licences.

Meanwhile, the cost of maintenance had become astronomical. On popular nights, when it got hot and wet inside the club, and the bass made everything throb,huge lumps of plaster would fall from the roof and hit people. Ang used to compensate them with free memberships, free drinks and/or sexual favours (only joking, Ang!) so that they would-n’t file claims against us.

Towards the end the building decayed even more and skylight glasses started slipping off too;by this time incidents were occurring on an almost nightly basis.

The licensee was required to be on the premises at all times, but Paul Mason was also in control of the Dry bar so it became difficult for him to remain Haçienda licensee.Thus he moved across to Factory Leisure,which ran the Dry bar. The day-to-day running of the club was then put in the hands of Ang Matthews, who became the Haçienda licensee.

As the years passed, stress wore Paul Mason down. He was a good bloke with a good heart and he tried to deal with issues in a businesslike manner. He also worked hard to change the relationship between the police and the Haçienda, and to improve the licensing magistrate’s standpoint, too. He wanted to earn us money and he tried to stay optimistic – he’d phone me sometimes, really happy: ‘Hooky, two thousand two hundred in tonight; you can’t move.’

Once they were in, though, they were difficult to control. And that was the bit he found more difficult. Overall I’d say he worked best in pub culture, which was calmer. That’s why he came to prefer working at Dry.

Tony could convince Paul to do things just to annoy Rob. Arguing with Tony gave Rob something to do and they’d get into some almighty rows,which Rob always won because whenever he ran out of retorts he’d get right up in Tony’s face. Tony didn’t like that and he’d just say, ‘Fuck off,’ and storm off. To his credit I never saw Tony angry, whereas I saw Rob angry millions of times.

Paul also put himself in danger. In the early days, if the alarm went off at five a.m., or something, he’d have to investigate. God bless him. The place was so big and so lonely, if anyone had asked me to do it I’d have told them to fuck right off. You’d need to be mad to walk through that place by yourself. For a time the police responded to our alarm, but eventually stopped doing so because there were so many false alerts – mainly birds flying through the broken glass panels on the roof and triggering the alarm.

I liked Paul. He and his wife Karen were always wonderfully sweet to me, especially when I needed help, and I couldn’t be more grateful. But I didn’t work at the Haçienda any more, so my opinion of him didn’t matter. What did matter was what the staff thought. And they didn’t like him. It got so bad in the end that no one would work with him or take any notice of him as manager. At that point he’d had enough and wanted to leave – you couldn’t blame him.

He’d had a tough time,poor bastard:death threats and everything. I felt really sorry for him.Funny that when he left I bought his Lancia off the club (I paid £7,100), then couldn’t sell it. It was very fast but was left-hand drive, totally useless. I lost money on it twice.

When Paul handed over the club’s management and licence to Ang, he became operations manager of both the Haçienda and Dry. This ensured that he wouldn’t work in the club. Obviously Ang in her new role assumed more responsibility, but Paul Cons also took over some of Paul Mason’s duties; it became his job to decide our stylistic direction.

Rob always looked for ways to earn money and to make the building profitable,but it was always on his terms.In 1991 he started his own music label, Robs Records, which he operated with great success out of an upstairs office that he shared with his assistant, Rebecca Boulton (who took over the running of New Order when Rob died). He specialized in finding home-grown talent: most of the acts on Robs Records came from Manchester. He didn’t extensively scout for talent, either – he relied on John Drape (Ear to the Ground), Dave Rofe (Doves’
Manager) and people like that to bring him
the
Manchester acts. Despite all the power at his disposal, he ignored anyone outside of our area.He hated everyone south of Chorlton.He wasn’t looking for the next Black Box. He preferred to back a group from Wythenshawe, like the Doves or A Certain Ratio.It was a very purist attitude,but then he was a proper Wythenshawe boy.