..
Anyone who has seen Life On Mars will know that Manchester was a miserable, deprived shit-hole back in the early seventies. Then punk happened; and in 1976 the Sex Pistols played at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall (you can almost taste the tepid pints of mild) watched by Stephen Morrissey, Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis, Peter Hook (Hooky), Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley who eventually became The Smiths, Warsaw and The Buzzcocks. Tony Wilson was also in the audience that night. He was later to start Factory Records, and it was he, as much as the bands he signed, who helped to transform Manchester; to re-brand it as the home of cutting edge popular culture.
By 1982 Warsaw had become Joy Division and then New Order. They were selling millions of records, but losing thousands under Factory’s idealistic management style (contracts in blood, it’s all about the music etc). It was no time for them to open a nightclub. But they did it anyway. With a sense of suicidal fatalism Factory and New Order pooled their resources and opened none other than the mighty Hacienda.
And this month, for those who were there, or even for those who missed out, Peter Hook has published a ‘warts and all’, ’spill your guts’ book called The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Nightclub (The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club: Amazon.co.uk: Peter Hook: Books). And as someone who was there through some of the madness I can tell you that it is a page turning laugh-riot, albeit with an underlying sense of doom.
Hooky takes us on a chronological journey through the highs and lows, the live bands, the ground breaking DJs (who no longer talked over the music and became as famous as the bands), the alcohol fueled nights, the temperance nights, the drugs, gangsters and violence. He also includes revealing extracts from the annual accounts that record the financial catastrophe of one of the biggest clubs on earth being run like a wedding reception that had been gate crashed by the Kray twins, Scarface, Al Capone, Freddie “Fingle’s Fingers” Feanie and Don Corleone.
Before the Hacienda, he and Barney used to “…go to all the regular clubs in Manchester, where the traditional crowd was girls in high heels and boys in white shirts and jackets…” The city had been desperate for something new, and New Order’s US tours had given the lads access to a hip, even alien, world of ideas. Ultimately, the Hacienda was inspired by New York clubs such as Area, The Loft, The Paradise Garden and Danceteria; names that sound like they belong in a Brett Easton Ellis novel. More particularly, the Hacienda was to be “a three dimensional manifestation of Factory Records.” A lofty ambition that epitomised Tony Wilson’s sense of history. The kind of ambition that torches fortunes.
In terms of musical credentials the Hacienda became known for featuring new bands before they became famous (for which read before they became too expensive). Amongst others, the Hacienda played host to Cabaret Voltaire, Orange Juice, Teardrop Explodes, Culture Club, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, Bauhaus, Big Country, Thomas Dolby, Kurtis Blow, Eurythmics, Madonna, John Cale, The Smiths, The Fall, Primal Scream, The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses.
That’s an impressive roster for any nightclub, but the Hacienda is probably even better known for championing the phenomenon known as Acid House. This was a sub-genre of house music developed in Chicago. The music used repetitive trance-like grooves, often with short vocal samples as opposed to traditional song lyrics. I remember standing on the speakers shouting “Aceeeed!” over and over, waving my arms like a maniac with up to 2,400 other sweating maniacs. It might sound crazy now. Because it was. But it worked, so don’t judge!
I was going to the Hacienda from 1987 to 1991 (as a very, very young man). We’d pile down Manchester on Thursdays after school. The queues down Whitworth Street outside the Hacienda are now the stuff of legend. From time to time Hooky worked the door. Unfortunately, by 1991 there was trouble brewing; stabbings and serious gang violence. Hooky explains that one night “A couple have been slapped, one punched, one beaten up, and we’ve had a few women complaining that what started as a ‘drug search’ ended with a bouncer’s hand down their knickers.” On a similar night Hooky told Anton (the bar manager) to bring him a treble vodka and orange every twenty minutes. Later, as the pubs emptied and spilled across to the Hacienda one of the bouncers was stabbed in the head. As the cops arrived Hooky grabbed Anton and changed his order to a rock hard vodka every ten minutes. The club was in serious bother.
Hooky reports that 1988 to 1990 was the Hacienda’s wildest period, but that from 1991 the club was in terminal decline. Here’s an extract:
By now the Haçienda’s wildest period, from 1988 to 1990, was well behind us; looking at the accounts for the years that followed, the profits came down very gradually by about 10 to 15 per cent per year. As Manchester had got hipper, more clubs had opened and investment came into the city. In some ways the Haçienda became a victim of its own success: people we’d drawn to the area opened their own places, which took our customers and made us look old-fashioned. And, because of our ongoing financial dire straits, we couldn’t afford to fully renovate the club to keep up with the times.
Furthermore, like punk before it, acid house lost something as it got older: the innocence of nobody knowing the rules, or even if there were any. That initial explosion of ecstasy – coupled with the music – had revolutionized the world. Everything that followed could only be an imitation.
Despite all this, though – despite the fights among gangsters, and trouble with the police – some nights made us forget it all. It was like London during the blitz, or the band playing on the bridge of the Titanic as the ship sank. We partied to spite fate. No matter how badly some people behaved, they couldn’t completely stop the great bits.
Even so, the comedian Keith Allen always said to me that you know you’ve got a drug problem when you feel like you’re a god when you’re not on it. And that was us: we had a problem. We were still off our heads. When the Haçienda celebrated its tenth anniversary, in May 1992, we built a bridge over the canal to a purpose-built Haçienda fairground.
The event cost us £10,000. We’d intended to use that money to fund a Haçienda compilation CD, but Rob spent it on this fairground and renting rides, thinking we’d get the money back on the door. My mate Cormac ran the dodgems and handled the announcing: ‘You want it to go faster? Put your arms up,’ etc., etc. At one point he boomed into the microphone: ‘OK. All of you who are on an E, I want you off of these dodgems right now!’ Exodus. Nearly every car got vacated. Only Manchester’s Lord Mayor and his deputy were left, sat right in the middle of the ride in a car of their own.
Criminals showed up every night, fighting, preening and jockeying for position. Other clubs were safer because all the gang members were in ours.
There were four corners under the Haçienda balcony and each belonged to a gang: Salford young and Salford old, Wythenshawe, Cheetham Hill and Gooch. They each took their own little section and if an opposing-gang member walked into the wrong corner it would really go off. Just about the only people allowed to move freely around the club were the musicians: me, Barney, the Mondays and the Roses.
Even innocent punters would get a slap if they staggered in by mistake and this became one of our bugbears: some student would get a bit pissed, sit in the wrong corner, get a slap (if he was lucky), and then – quite rightly – complain.
In a funny way, the Haçienda brought working-class crime to a different segment of society. It spread out of our doors right around Manchester.
Gangs terrorized everybody. The honeymoon period being by now well and truly over, there were non-stop full-on violent episodes and the mood of the club – and of the entire scene – went downhill.
We were surrounded by a fortune we couldn’t keep and thugs we couldn’t control. When a gangster from the Salford lot celebrated at the club one night Ang received a shock: he walked into her back area, a bottle of champagne in hand, looked around and told her, ‘One day I’ll be telling my son that this is his to inherit.’ It made her wonder how much power the gangs truly had over us, or at least how much they thought they had.
The Hacienda closed in 1997. By then it had lost a fortune for its owners, but in the process become an iconic venue. It is now a block of flats, but as Tony Wilson famously said, “Some people are here to make money, whilst others are here to make history.”
If you you are interested in popular culture, and are up for a funny, honest book written by a man who bears the scars then get yourself a copy of Peter Hook’s new book: you’ll love it.
I hadn’t slept for three days straight by the time I found Bourg-St-Pierre in search of Heidi. The air is so thin at this altitude that I almost drove the Red Shark into the packs of St Bernards roaming freely down the lanes. I was fresh out of ether, painkillers and deodorant and so had no option but to see off the Grey Goose that I’d recently sourced from from an unattended liquor wagon. The bats were back in my vision and every time I thought of Ace all I could see was Tiff’s jaundiced eyes bursting from their sockets as he drilled her over my mixing desk. I wished that I’d used the baseball bat on him (instead of attacking him with a lampshade), but that was all history now.
With a blast of cannon fire the flash fiction contest is now over. I have to thank everyone who has been brave and talented enough to take part. The quality of the entries has been amazing. The discipline associated with this type of creative writing has brought out the best in you!