The Haçienda (14 page)

At the Style in Our Time night in December, one of the models joining the Jazz Defektors and Frankie’s Angels was Paul Cons, who later became the club promoter and launched the seminal gay night Flesh.

In November, the Twentieth Legion performed at the Haçienda. Among their number was Damian Lanigan, who was so inspired by the experience that he decided to set up his own label. He thought better of it, however, and instead wrote the sitcom
Massive
, which starred Ralf Little (who played Peter Hook in
24 Hour Party People
) and was about Manchester lads trying to make it big in the biz.

‘I couldn’t find a DJ. They all wanted to talk, they were all so programmed. So in the end, I just thought I could do better and started doing the Friday night. It was a real
mélange
of music at first, everything from salsa to electro to northern soul, and it really took off.’

Mike Pickering, djhistory.com

In February 1985 the German industrial-rock band Einstürzende Neubauten brought a pneumatic drill to their gig. They started it up during their set then attacked the central pillar with it. The crowd were mesmerized. We were, too. We may as well have been fiddling as Rome burned because none of us moved to stop the guy – even though that one beam held up the entire building. We just screamed, ‘Yeah! Go on!’

I thought it was hilarious. Not so Terry Mason, who quite rightly panicked, ran over and started wrestling the guy with the drill to stop him from destroying the club. They shouldn’t have allowed him in with a fucking drill anyway, the idiots. At last Terry – with the help of a bouncer – prised the drill off him. The band relented and the show continued regardless. Listening to the music, you wouldn’t have known Einstürzende Neubauten were short a drill.They had another ten or so on tape.

One young lady, a very wacky Haçienda regular (she used to bring a train set with her, set it up in the cocktail bar and play with it for hours), decided to have a bit of fun with the band while they were playing. She enticed them off stage one by one to screw them in the stairwell. She got through three of them and the audience never even noticed, the noise was that horrendous. The gig ended when the singer’s throat burst and he started screaming blood all over the mic.Our sound guy Ozzie got onstage and knocked him out. ‘I’d warned him once,’ he said.

I must admit, I’m not usually a fan of that type of their music or their sort of anarchy. But as loud as they were the noise actually sounded fantastic. Dead powerful. Mega. When they got that jackhammer going I thought, ‘Wow, that’s fucking great. I think New Order could use one of those ...’

Though it ended in an outright ban for Einstürzende Neubauten, theirs was yet another legendary gig for the Haçienda.

Meanwhile, Hewan Clarke’s Saturday nights were still a bone of contention. In January the name was changed to simply ‘Party Night’, then in April it changed yet again, this time to ‘Body and Soul, Body and Mind’. Clarke’s days at the club were numbered, though, and in May he was replaced by the DJ team the Happy Hooligans.