The Haçienda (37 page)

Wednesdays: three nights open

Fashion Cabaret night: attendance 900 people @ £6

Sasha: attendance 800 people @ £6

Flesh night: attendance 1400 people @ £6 with a four a.m. licence

Thursdays: four nights open

Assume average attendance of 560 people per night @ £2

Fridays: four nights open

Assume average attendance of 750 people per night @ £6

(Mike Pickering and Sasha will be DJing)

Saturdays: four nights open

Assume average attendance of 1400 people per night @ £8

Bar takings are based on attendance figures and average results for the previous three months. Saturday bar prices include an extra 20p on all drinks.

Expenses and Overheads

Expenses and overheads for the three months are based on:

Average results for the previous three months, pro-rated.


Number of nights open plus any expected special nights.

FAC 51 Limited
Trading as: the Haçienda

FROM THE REPORT AND ACCOUNTS (23 June 1992)

Following the balance-sheet date the company’s nightclub outlet ceased operation due to operational problems.The closure was during January 1991 and is anticipated to be only temporary,such that no permanent curtailment of the company’s activities is anticipated. The nightclub licence was also withdrawn shortly before the balance-sheet date. However, the withdrawal was appealed and a temporary extension was further extended on appeal for the first half of 1991,to provide a probationary period of trade.

If the nightclub should fail to reopen or should the licence be permanently revoked, then the company would cease to trade.

This year marked a rare sighting of the Haçienda cat, which was pictured in an
NME
feature on Factory. Instead of a name the stray had been given its own Factory catalogue number, FAC 191, and was pictured with the caption ‘Feline groovy at the Haçienda’.

After a long wait the question of the basement was once again addressed.

The conversion was budgeted at £250,000 (comparatively cheap for a Haçienda project, but Ben Kelly was to put that right!).

I can’t remember what we did to get the money. Did Rob/New Order put it in? Whatever happened, it went ahead, was built and the takings literally . . . didn’t change.

The conversion did increase the club’s capacity, though, which on big nights proved to be quite useful. The downside was that it made policing the Haçienda a lot more difficult, there being more dark nooks and crannies.

The club struggled on but attendance was tailing off. The crime was driving customers away.

It even scared off the hot-dog seller. He had been a Haçienda institution, a lovely old geezer, there for as long as I could remember. I never got one off him – my body is a temple – but everybody loved him. It happened one night when Damien threw one of the Salford lot out of the club and the hot-dog seller got in the way during the affray; ended up with a tipped-over cart and a bad beating. Completely unwarranted.

The doormen rushed up to save him but he left and never came back. ‘It’s over, Hooky,’ they chorused. ‘It’s like the ravens leaving the tower of London.’

We’d entered a very sad phase, during which the club changed too much to ever return to its roots. Bit by bit we lost elements that we’d once cherished. The bonhomie, the friendliness, the specialness – they’d all gone.

It became a very nervy time.The staff came in one morning to find the safe – which must have weighed a ton – dragged halfway across the
basement on its way out to the canal towpath. The thieves must have run out of steam midway through the job. They’d also downed a few too many drinks, judging by the empties we found nearby.

We reported it to the police.‘Know any big guys? Weightlifter types who might have the alarm code?’

‘Er, no.’

‘Oh well. Bye.’

So much for persistence.

In 1993 the boom in dance-music culture brought about two major openings in Manchester.Paradise Factory,initially a gay club,opened in Charles Street in the old Factory building in May that year;while September saw the launch of Home, which was owned by Tom Bloxham and run by none other than Paul Cons.

Ang’s assistant, Anton Rozak – into the Smiths when she took him on, but we can’t hold that against him – found the madness of it all unbearable.He’s never mentioned in articles about the club because he wasn’t a director,but he did a very good job:he was a nice bloke,just straight up and down the line. Rare for us. He’d been hired on his eighteenth birthday,in 1989,as a pot-washer and was subsequently promoted to assistant manager. He also DJed on the Stone Love night, on Tuesdays.

He and Ang did everything together and if she went on holiday he ran the place in her absence. He also ran things on Thursdays, when Ang went to the Paradise Factory with me on her night off – our busman’s holiday.

Anton was always freaked out about guns. Once the police came into the building saying they were searching for a dead body. What had happened? Bear with me – it’s a long one . . .

This guy had come to the door trying to get in. He was clearly off his face, so the doormen fucked him off. Now, for the sake of their own safety, the doormen always parked their cars right outside the front door. Obviously the more senior you were the nearer your car would be, so Damien’s car was right outside. This jerk was mouthing off but they were ignoring him,so he decided to go one better:he jumped on the nearest car’s bonnet and started leaping up and down to make his point.

Unfortunately for him the car he chose was Damien’s brand-new
Ford Cosworth,the apple of his eye.Damien grabbed him and sparkled him in front of the queue. He didn’t get up, so he lay there a few minutes in front of the murmuring queue. Then the bouncers thought they’d better do something. So they picked him up by his legs and dragged him into the club. Why they did that we’ll never know. But obviously someone in the queue panicked and phoned the coppers, saying that the Haçienda doormen had just killed a guy then taken him inside the club so they could later dispose of the body, throw him in the canal, or something.

The police freaked and came down mob-handed to search for this guy. Damien kept them busy at the door while the guy got cleaned up and bandaged in the kitchen. With the help of one of the bar staff (a guy who we later discovered was there as a spy for the Salford lot, would you believe!), Ang put a hat and a big coat on him, then smuggled him past the police – pretending he was pissed and had passed out. They just shoved him in a cab, put £200 quid in his top pocket and told the taxi driver to drop him off in Swinton, where he lived. That got rid of the evidence and got the doormen off the hook.

Then Ang went to deal with the police, who didn’t believe her when she told them he’d gone. They emptied the club, shut it down for the night, and proceeded to search the place from top to bottom. We knew what had happened but Anton looked around the basement, showing willing.Unfortunately he found a gun in there,which sent him absolutely hysterical. He garbled about it to Ang, who’d developed something of a blasé attitude to it all and told him, ‘If you’ve not touched it, it’s OK. Just relax, cover it back over and leave it there.’

He had to bluff the rest of the evening out, but the police eventually got bored and left with another dire warning ringing in our ears.

Anton had always wanted to go to the directors’ meetings on Thursdays. When eventually he was given permission to attend one week, he came in full of serious suggestions about stock-takes and brimming with ideas about staff rotas and wastage, etc. Tony almost immediately stood up and screamed at him to leave – telling him to get the fuck out, that he had lost the ethos of what we were really about.

Anton was never allowed in again. He panicked – even more than when he’d found the gun – thinking he’d get sacked. In fact Tony later took him aside to reassure him that his job was secure: ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ he said. ‘It’s just how we are.’

Nobody expected to hear sensible ideas at these meetings. They just wanted to talk football and birds, to argue and place bets on how many customers might show up based on our attendance projections, and to drink.

I called them Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties. They were utter, utter nonsense that went on from two in the afternoon until early evening in the Round House section of the Haçienda building. The room became so hazy from everyone smoking draw,you’d lose track of time completely. The Round House (Shit House, I’d call it) was freezing during wintertime, impossible to heat. I’m sure we met there only so we’d feel like we’d got some use out of that half of the building. It always drove Alan Erasmus mad that we’d not rented it out; he made Paul Mason’s life hell because of it. Office space like that in Central Manchester would be considered prime real estate today. It wasn’t back then.

We’d start off sober.When we were sick of the latest tales of woe, Rob would order and pay for a crate of Sapporo. There’d be a dull middle bit spent sorting out a few practical things out – which burgers or toilet rolls to buy, for example – then things would degenerate as Rob simultaneously skinned up and slagged everyone off. Tony, always fashionably late, would leave first, usually followed by Ang and Paul Mason, leaving Rob and me to finish off the beer, befuddled.

This routinely meant the beginning of my weekend. I’d go to Dry afterwards,then to Paradise Factory,arriving home about midnight on Friday to recover before picking the kids up on Saturday.

At one Thursday meeting talk centred around how much VAT we owed. It seemed that our debts with the bank had become such a problem that any money we deposited was being swallowed by the overdraft on the current account.When the quarterly VAT payments were due there was no money put aside to pay them.

There I sat, a dumbo from Salford, looking at the management notes, trying to make sense of them. On paper everything appeared good. Profit from tickets? Yeah. Profits from bar sales? Yeah. Profit from the cloakroom? Yeah.

‘Where’s the VAT?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that figure includes the VAT,’ somebody replied. They hadn’t deducted the VAT from the figures.

‘Surely it’s not profit then?’ I said.

‘Oh, yeah. You’re right, We’ll have to change that.’

Fuck me. That had gone on for twelve years.

No one had thought to keep the VAT money separate so as to ensure that the sour-faced bastards at HM Customs & Excise remained paid off and happy (impossible,I know,but you have to try anyway).We slipped nine months (three payments) behind at one point, accruing late fees all the while: 17.5 per cent of three months’ turnover at £300,000,which amounted to about £40,000 a quarter with penalties.

Meanwhile, we settled in as comfortably as anyone could with the gangsters. Indeed, some of the staff took interest-free loans from them rather than go through a bank. They’d borrow cash for a month at a time, sometimes as much as two grand, and be given a date on which they had to pay it back. Because of their connection to the Haçienda, the staff weren’t charged interest – although by the same token neither were they able to welch. They might default on payments to a bank, but they’d never default with the gangs.

We saw unspeakable acts of wanton violence at the door. Horrible things were done to or by our doormen, then Damien would have to step up the next day to broker a deal – like a regular businessman – to smooth things out and save face.

For example, one night our doormen got attacked by a gang from Broughton. We had a hydraulically powered shutter door at the club, which shot down if you banged a button (God help anyone who got in its way). On this occasion they got the shutter down but the gang poked machetes and swords through the viewing slat. Our guys poked knives back. (Suzanne went mad; they used her best kitchen knives.)