The Haçienda (15 page)

‘Maybe the management felt they weren’t getting their Loft or Paradise Garage, so I had to go,’ he told writer Tim Lawrence.

However, the Hooligans’ night, Will Saturday Ever Be, was not deemed a success and Clarke was invited back, only for there to be a final parting of the ways towards the end of the year. Clarke would be remembered with great affection by the Haçienda faithful, and it’s to his credit that he introduced a dance floor expecting wall-to-wall Factory records to a broader selection of music; he had an inbuilt love of jazz-funk. But even so, he was old guard. He belonged to the era of Lulu and the
Thunderbirds
theme, and the winds of musical change were already beginning to blow at the club.

In June that year the Jesus and Mary Chain played, performing for just thirteen minutes under a hail of flying pint glasses as members of the audience attempted to storm the stage. ‘There were ten glasses – real glasses – in the air at every point during the set,’ gig-goer Andrew Perry told writer David Cavanagh. ‘The Haçienda has a balcony so a lot of these glasses were coming from very high up.’

Even so,the Mary Chain returned in November of that year,shortly after the club reopened after being closed for acoustic baffling to be fitted. Some things at the Haçienda never changed: it was still cold, the roof still leaked and the sound still wasn’t up to scratch.

I’ve got tapes of hundreds of shows I saw at the Haçienda. I recorded them all on the first-ever Sony stereo cassette recorder. Rob had bought us one each to record ideas and mine came in very handy; it was the same one I’d use to do all the New Order shows. Some of them sound fantastic. I’d stick the recorder on the stage or by the monitor board and capture them all.

When the Jesus and Mary Chain played on their infamous 17 Minutes of Feedback tour in 1985, I thought, ‘That sounds quite interesting’, so made sure I worked security that night.

They asked for a line of bouncers across the front of the stage, and I tell you they needed protection – they were shit. God it was awful,
Lou Reed had done it so much better. The show lasted exactly seventeen minutes, all of them excruciating. The entire set was just feedback, just as it said on the tin. It was done purely to provoke a reaction. To me, it came across as a real con. But if you’re going to act that way, you’ve got to be ready to take the flak – and not expect somebody who’s working security for a tenner a night to get battered on your behalf. I was so wound up after they’d finished, I pulled the bouncers off and let the punters at them.

The tour manager said to me, ‘I’m getting the band out of here now. Take our gear off.’

I said, ‘It’s your fault, mate, take your own fucking gear off.’

Man, did they panic. God bless you, Manchester. I’ve never seen equipment loaded out as quickly in my life. They soon fucked off back to the hotel.

Funnily enough, Bobby Gillespie was on drums that night. He went on to form Primal Scream. Now, I fucking love Bobby and the Primals. One of the only true rock ’n’ roll bands left. Us and them were separated at birth,I’m telling you.

In July the club hosted a Lesbian and Gay Miners’ Benefit which featured the Redskins and Pete Shelley, among others. It was promoted by Paul Cons, the first night he ever hosted at the Haçienda, having appeared there as model the previous year. The event did well. So in June ‘Gay Monday’ was launched, again promoted by Cons. This featured music and entertainment in the Gay Traitor bar, and would go on to include performances from Divine, the Communards, Gina X and Bill Nelson. It marked the beginning of a long and successful relationship with the gay community.

Unlike those of us involved with the bands or Factory, who thought of the building’s potential only as a concert venue, Paul Cons saw it as a theatre. He decorated the place fantastically so that when his customers came in it literally took their breath away.He certainly knew how to put on a production, that lad. They’d even send him to New York and other cities (lucky sod) to steal ideas or, as he put it, ‘to gain inspiration’, which he then incorporated at the Haç. Tony absolutely loved it.

For New Order 1985 was a watershed year. The
Low Life
album had been released earlier that year and by mixing rock and dance was leading the
way forward. They were also featured on the soundtrack of the John Hughes movie
Pretty in Pink
, before forging a huge link with the US
...

Suddenly things changed. We signed a licensing deal in America with Qwest, the label owned and ran by Quincy Jones – a great compliment to our production skills – and which was a part of Warner Brothers.So we went from being available only on import to being released on a major label, which meant massive promotion and distribution.

On the back of this huge increase in popularity, we set off on our first big tour of the States. It was a success, the first one where we made any money. We were ecstatic . . .

Until we were told we had to sign it all immediately over to the Haçienda to bail it out.

I remember the day well. We were called into Keith Taylor’s office to pick up our money and it felt like Christmas. Better than Christmas. This was sixteen thousand dollars each
. Sixteen grand.
The first time we’d been paid by a company that wasn’t Factory; the first time we’d had cheques made out to us, personally.

Then Rob asked us to countersign the cheques so the money could go to the Haçienda.
Shit
.

Well, we did it. I don’t think we had any other choice, and perhaps the decision was easier because we’d always got by without money. Still, though,it bloody hurt.And never mind the missus’reaction ...

But looking back there was one silver lining: after three years of ignoring what was going on,we started to take an interest.We became involved. At last my eyes were being slowly opened.

Because before that, mad as it sounds, I hadn’t really been paying any attention. None of us had been. We earned our £100 a week (plus bonuses whenever Rob deemed fit) and got on with the business of being New Order and doing a lot of unpaid production work for Factory. I produced records for Stockholm Monsters, Royal Family & the Poor and loads more; Barney produced 52nd Street, Section 25 and even a young Happy Mondays; and Steve did Red Turns to ..., Life and Thick Pigeon. And, while we might have been mad to do it for free, none of us minded. To a person, we loved music and wanted to use our status and state of the art equipment to help others – while gaining more experience ourselves, of course.

Which was all very well,but in the first two years of the club being
open we’d put £667,000 pounds into it; money from record sales, which came in to Factory Records, then was passed on by Tony to Rob to invest in the club. Not the greatest investment in the world, surely?

So, for three years, we’d been blissfully unaware of the problems. But now that things had gone so horribly wrong – so badly wrong that we had to sign over all our tour money – New Order
finally
had to take an interest.

So the band began attending meetings. Well, I did. Steve and Gillian went to some while Bernard only attended the crisis meetings when he absolutely had to, and he stopped going altogether after 1987.

The first thing we discovered at the meetings was that there were no answers. None. For example, when it came to this management committee we found out that everyone was more or less setting their own wages. When they thought it was time for a raise, they’d give themselves one, never taking into account the fact that the Haçienda was losing money. When we found out about this, we went fucking mental. Although, in fairness, they weren’t being told of the real scale of the losses.

There were so many stories like that. They had this huge safe downstairs; and for security reasons they changed the combination every week. This was too complicated for the staff; they kept forgetting the combinations and couldn’t open it. So instead they’d stash the money in a filing cabinet – which, after a weekend, amounted to quite a lot for a filing cabinet. Guess where they put the files from the filing cabinet? In the safe! Meanwhile, someone blabbed about the cash in the filing cabinet and over the weekend it got robbed. Because the money wasn’t in the safe, it wasn’t insured. Brilliant.

That stress of it all didn’t affect the quality of New Order’s songs, but it did affect our thinking when it came to
why
we were writing them. Bernard, most vocal among us, would say, ‘Why are we doing this if it’s all going to the Haçienda?’

As soon as we finished that tour of America only to hand the money over,we started asking ourselves if we really wanted to work so hard for the club. (How hard? I’d been away for eight and a half years of the ten years my first relationship lasted, performing and recording all over the world.) New Order had always excelled at letting problems simmer rather than dealing with them. But now they boiled over and we all felt the same way.

The band never got into fist-fights, although I sometimes wonder if we should have chinned each other every now and then – perhaps there wouldn’t have been such a build-up of resentment. Even Steve and Gillian, normally quite placid, spoke up when it came to what the club was costing us, because the fact was we still didn’t have much cash to our names.

Why didn’t we sack Rob and Tony, you might wonder. It never crossed our minds. Despite it all, we were an easy-going bunch. And loyal. We were all in this together, we felt, and as a band we disliked change.

In December, New Order took over the club to play two gigs – on the same day.

We performed two sell-out shows – a kids’ matinee and an evening concert – in December that year.We did the former because of fond memories from when Joy Division used to play at Roger Eagle’s club Eric’s in Liverpool: Roger always scheduled a show for the under-eighteens. Really thoughtful, and the kids loved it. We felt we should do the same at the Haç.

In typical Haçienda fashion the staff allowed over-eighteens to attend the afternoon gig, so it turned into a complete debacle. All the kids got crushed. Then, because our bouncers in these early years were too nice, they wouldn’t force the fans at the matinee to leave afterwards to make room for the evening crowd. A riot broke out on Whitworth Street as the evening audience struggled to get inside.

By now the management-committee situation had reached a head. The club began looking for an experienced, full-time manager, while the directors began casting around for ways to shore up the financial situation
...

We were looking for ways to dig ourselves out this money-pit we were in. The directors’ loans, our investment, made the Haçienda uninviting to outside investors because if we ever actually turned a profit the loans to us would need to be paid off. As soon as investors looked at the balance sheet, they left.

In the fullness of time, Rob and all of us in New Order simply agreed to forgive the club’s debts to us, which by now totalled about £2 million.

We had no choice but to do that: we had no hope of ever getting the money back.

At that point, in 1985, Steve and Gillian relinquished their share-holdings and distributed them to the rest of us because they wanted to be free of the company.

They were so sick of it, they literally walked away. They still had their personal guarantees for the initial loans/mistakes, but at least they had the satisfaction of knowing that they didn’t need to be involved in the business any more.

I don’t blame them.We were all badly hurt by what had happened to us financially, and very angry about it. Bernard and I hung on; we stayed optimistic, hoping it could still succeed. Plus, the shares Stephen and Gillian passed to us were quite a juicy carrot: it meant that each of us possessed a greater percentage of the company. The shares were worthless,of course,but we felt like we’d gained something:we owned more of nothing. Then again, if a miracle occurred – like it reversed course and turned a profit – we might actually stand to gain more.

Meanwhile, Rob actively tried to eliminate all the personal guarantees. He knew it had been a mistake. We spent a fortune on lawyers and all of them told us the same thing: you can’t get out of personal guarantees unless you pay them off.

I remember looking over the Haçienda’s accounts. I did the sums and in the first five years it had been open we’d lost more than £20,000 a month on top of the set-up costs . . .

Also in December, the club hosted A Transatlantic Happening, featuring Pickering’s Quando Quango and 52nd Street. The event was held to celebrate the birthday of Ruth Polsky, ‘the Queen of New York City’, and also included DJs Mark Kamins and Frank Callari. After this, Rob Gretton’s health took a turn for the worse
...

He was admitted to hospital suffering from a full-blown psychosis. It left him incapacitated for many months and with health problems for the rest of his life.

I presume Tony took over the running of the club. We briefly thought of getting our American manager,Tom Atencio,involved,trying to get him to manage both New Order and the Haçienda, but Tom didn’t have a clue about running a club. He was quite honest about that:
he wasn’t interested, plus he didn’t want to move – living an ocean away in California suited him. Trouble was, this left both New Order and the Haçienda without leadership and with no money – we literally couldn’t get money out of the bank without Rob. Taking pity on us, the promoter Phil McIntyre helped us out when he and Terry Mason arranged three gigs,starting in Warrington,and paid the band £10,000 in advance.That money literally allowed us to survive.

With all this on my mind, the daily operations of the club receded in importance for a while . . .