The Haçienda (9 page)

FAC 51 The Haçienda
11/13 Whitworth Street West
Manchester M3 3AL

Function: club, disco, videotek, venue, club

Telephone: 061-236-5051

Opening: 21 May 1982

Facilities: 3 levels, 3 bars, dance floor (136m
²
), stage (72.25m
²
), restaurant, balconies, basement

Capacity: 1650

Dance-Floor Sound and Light: control equipment by Gamma, 15,000 watts of lighting, 43km of 1.5mm hard wire

Video: 2 × 2540mm low-gain screens, 2 × Sony VPK 720PS video-projection units and power packs

Colours: Pigeon Blue, Poppy, RAF Blue Aztec Gold, Salmon Red, Black, Aluminium, Pale Gold, Goose Grey, Signal Red & Light Orange

Approach: industrial fantasy

General Manager: Howard Jones

Booker: Mike Pickering

Design: Ben Kelly/Peter Saville (graphics)

Lights, Sound, Video: Martin Disney

Admission: members only

Membership: £5.25 per annum

Age Limit: over 18

Application: Passport photograph,SAE,and cheque made payable to FAC 51Ltd.,and sent to The Haçienda,11/13 Whitworth Street West, Manchester, M3 3AL.

Intention: To restore a sense of place. ‘The Haçienda must be built.’

Licensing regulations attendant on the building of the Haçienda mean that admission to the club is restricted to members only. We will
endeavour to keep our door and drink prices as low as possible. Membership will be £5.25 per annum. We believe that this is a small price to pay for a higher state of awareness.

‘Well, you’ve blown it now. You’ll never see The Hacienda. It doesn’t exist anywhere. THE HACIENDA MUST BE BUILT.’

FAC 51 the Haçienda: application for membership
Name:
Address:
Date of Birth:
What You Want from the Haçienda:

I am over 18 years of age
I agree to be bound by the rules of the club

Signature:

Admission to members only For official use only

N:

A:

DOB:

O. Stamp

Marvin Gaye – ‘Sexual Healing’


Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five – ‘The Message’


ABC – ‘Poison Arrow’


D Train – ‘You’re the One for Me’


Soft Cell – ‘Torch’


Rockers Revenge – ‘Walking On Sunshine’


Junior – ‘Mama Used to Say’


The Associates – ‘Party Fears Two’


New Order – ‘Temptation’


Yazoo – ‘Only You/Situation’


Dazz Band – ‘Let It Whip’


Kid Creole and the Coconuts – ‘I’m a Wonderful Thing Baby’


The Peech Boys – ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’


Roxy Music – ‘Avalon’


Alton Edwards – ‘I Just Wanna’


Patrice Rushen – ‘Forget Me Nots’


Kool and the Gang – ‘Get Down On It’


Spandau Ballet – ‘Instinction’


A Certain Ratio – ‘Knife Slits Water’


Soul Sonic Force – ‘Planet Rock’

‘
Jon Savage’s letters page [includes] the following gems: Legitimate gripes. [Member numbers] 04408 and 01510 note that the price of a pint of lager at the Philby Bar has increased from 66p to 70p, and that “£3 for Bauhaus is unreasonable“, a request for better chips, a public telephone and a playing list, and [member number] 00419 a.k.a. [local promoter] Alan Wise sends “a letter of protest that is so boring that I will not say any more”.’

From ‘FAC 51 the Haçienda Newsletter 6’

‘It’s very fitting that [the colour] International Orange was used in the Haçienda as it’s an active, creative and exuberant colour, between the passion of red and the mental stimulation of yellow. Orange is full of energy and will always be used to promote vibrant optimism.’

Inner Spaces
documentary, BBC2, 2004

‘Opening night: Tony Wilson complained about the acoustics. They were crap, he said. They were blah and blah. Six years later he would-n’t be complaining any more. Six years later he’d be talking breathlessly about the high roof, about Gothic cathedrals – about hymns to the Gods.’

Peter Saville

‘It cost £5.25 to become a member of the Haçienda and for that you would get a pound discount on everything. Which meant you got in free half the time. Drink was alehouse cheap at this stage. Many people came simply to get slotted and found themselves sitting on the floor listening to William Burroughs reading aloud from his mucky books.’

John McReady

In January a press ad promised that: ‘Over the next two months the Haçienda will be returning to what we consider to be the best of the Manchester bands rather than place these acts in support slots at the mercy of main groups’ sound engineers. We offer the opportunity to display their wares in a proper manner.’

But times were hard for the club, partly because it remained ahead of the pack. Booker Mike Pickering had a reputation for booking bands months before they made it big, and it became a standing joke that other promoters could benefit simply by booking the same bands six months later and reaping the financial rewards.

While others profited from its foresight, the Haçienda gained a name as a worthy, arty place, full of good intentions but not of customers. The suicidal cavalier opening policy meant that the club was often catering for fewer customers than staff; bands were being paid more than the going rate, no matter what size audience they attracted; pilfering was rife and overheads were vast. For the owners, keeping the club going was already a hands-on task
...

At that time, the only thing keeping the Haçienda going was the success of Joy Division and New Order.We were earning so much for Factory that they could afford to be complacent, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, the club was losing an average of £10,000 a month, much of that in wages. There was this guiding principle that if we paid our staff well they would be loyal and work hard. That was the principle, but in reality it was bollocks: some of the employees just got paid more to rip us off. They must have thought it was fucking Christmas. The whole thing functioned on misplaced trust, and we got shafted.

One spring day my mate Andy Fisher (who had done well for himself as a promoter) rang me; as we chatted he said to me, ‘I can
always tell the Haçienda bar staff when they’re walking home from the club.’

He laughed. I laughed, too. It was a joke, right?

‘No, it’s true,’ he said. ‘I can always tell the Haçienda bar staff when they’re walking down Oxford Road on their way home at night.’

‘How?’ I was puzzled. They looked just like any other bar staff. It wasn’t like we had a dress code.

He said, ‘You want me to tell you?’

‘Go on,smartarse.’

‘They’re always carrying a crate of beer.’

It was true: at the end of a shift they’d each grab a crate and leave. Suddenly it all made sense. Whenever there was a stock-take everything was missing and nobody could figure out what happened to the beer.Seems some of the staff certainly knew.

It even got to the stage where I was sick of asking, ‘Where’s everything going?’; ‘Where have all the lights gone?’ The trusses, the dimmer racks, the par cans, the slide projectors – some or all had disappeared and we were left with a right cheap, tatty-looking set-up. It turned out that one of the lighting guys, a disgraced ex-roadie, had somehow wormed his way in with Rob – was now running his own lighting company out of his South Manchester flat: renting out our bleeding lights. He only got caught when he’d tried to hire them to a tour manager I knew. Apparently he’d smuggled everything out bit by bit during the day, stored it all in his flat and eventually went into business for himself. If a band phoned up saying, ‘We need twenty lights, some racking, couple of dimmers and a lighting desk,’ he’d hire out the Haçienda’s stuff to them. When we found out, the lads went over and got it all back off him and sent him packing with a good clip round the ear.

Years later he came back to the club and spoke to our receptionist, who was then Fiona Allen (who went on to find fame in
Smack the Pony
): ‘You all right? Can I come in?’

She looked at him,gobsmacked – couldn’t believe the sheer nerve of the bloke.

‘Damien,’ she called to the head doorman, ‘throw this fucker in the canal.’

‘Right,’ he said.

So he did. Picked him up and chucked him in the canal. Damien came back, sat back down, and – I loved this – didn’t even ask her why.

Back then theft on this scale was an everyday occurrence. The security in the early 1980s was so lax that video players, turntables, lights, speakers, tills, etc., etc., disappeared every week. Everything that could be stolen got stolen. Because of the size of the building, you needed to police it really well or else whenever some twat wanted something they’d just go down to the Haçienda and take it! It would even happen when we were open. The sheer scale of the place made it easy to miss what was going on.

On any given night one of the employees would invariably come by and go, ‘Oh, somebody’s just nicked the video out of the video booth and run off with it.’ We were being eaten from within and without.

I remember Andy Liddle, New Order’s lighting guy, putting the rig together for our American tour in 1993 – the Technique tour – and taking great delight in showing Rob the two slide projectors he had hired from a Birmingham lighting company. They still had ‘FAC 51’ scratched on the side. They had been stolen, sold on, then rented back to us. Rob had paid for them out of his own money to jazz up the club.

On top of all this, costly mistakes were still being made. It turned out that D.G., a drinking buddy of ours who looked after the sound, was making a fundamental error that only came to light when Chris Hewitt kept telling me – laughing about it, actually – how much he was making by replacing speakers in our system. Five hundred quid a month. I couldn’t figure it out. Why did the speakers need replacing so often? I’d go in screaming at the DJs, who’d assure me it wasn’t anything to do with them. I was completely mystified. Then one night I was in the club, plastered,biding my time in the DJ box,and D.G.came in and started turning off the decks, etc.,
before he’d turned off the amplifiers
. The bloody popping of the speakers exploding was deafening. Ah well another mystery solved.D.G.thought it was normal ...