The Haçienda (23 page)

No, if you want to know what happens when you mix musicians with drugs, just look what happened to us. The drugs arrive and quality knocks off.

All this action had acid house as its soundtrack. To me, acid house was like a new punk – it had the same DIY aesthetic, the same freedom of expression. Technology had reached the point where people could write electronic music in their bedrooms, which was great, like a return to the punk-rock anyone-can-do-it ethos – which I liked.

The difference was that punk was aggressive. It was you against the world. It was all about anarchy, shock and upset. Acid house was inclusive. Its roots were in peace and love.

DJ Graeme Park had first played at the Haçienda in February 1988.A resident at Nottingham’s Garage – the other northern house music stronghold – Park appeared as part of the club’s Northern House Revue, and was there to witness the steadily growing popularity of house music in Manchester. After ecstasy arrived, however, things began to move more quickly; when he met Pickering for a magazine photo-shoot related to the burgeoning house phenomenon, Park was invited back to the club to cover for Pickering in July.

‘The difference in there was quite amazing,’ he remembers. ‘There was something really exciting starting to happen.’

He watched the club reach its peak over the next two months. ‘If it was wild in July, by August and September it was amazing, unbelievable.’

The legendary Haçienda queues were now beginning to form. ‘[The club] was full from the moment it opened until it shut every Friday,’ Park recalled. ‘Mike and I would arrive at eight thirty and there would be a huge queue. We would open at nine and people would run on to the dance floor. I’d never seen anything like it before. The Haçienda had a glass roof and there’d be a few nights in the summer where it’d be light for the first couple of hours, then when you left it’d be getting light again.’

‘When ecstasy hit it was like a Mexican wave that swept through the club over a three-week period,’ Pickering told the
Observer
. ‘I could just stop a record and put my hands in the air, and the place would erupt. The whole club would explode.’

It wasn’t like anything you’d ever experienced in a club before,’ DJ and journalist John McCready told the
Observer
.

At the Haçienda it was almost as if a generation breathed a sigh of relief, having been relieved of the pressure of the chase. The baggy clothes desexualized the whole environment. The rising heat from 2000 people dancing, even at the bar, in the queue for the toilets, damped down everyone.We all looked crap.If you held on to on the handrail on the balcony above the dance floor, your palms would be dripping in accumulated human sweat. You could feel the down when the music stopped. The room quickly went cold as all the exit doors were thrown open and we were herded out. Back to forbidding reality. Until next Friday. The whole experience was always far more addictive than the drugs. You started wanting it all to go on for ever.

That summer the Haçienda’s biggest nights were Nude, Zumbar and new arrival Hot, Paul Cons’s Ibiza-themed night, which was launched in July and held on Wednesdays. It featured a swimming pool on the dance floor and free ice pops for clubbers. Legend has it that it was Hot that finally convinced Factory’s Tony Wilson that dance music was the way forward.

Tony played an important part in promoting the acid-house scene.He saw that as his job and he was very good at it.Martin Hannett always called him ‘that fucking talking head, Wilson’. The way he saw it, Tony didn’t do anything,just enjoyed the limelight.If you ask me,Martin was wrong on the first count, right on the second. I remember Tony being voted the most-travelled record-company executive one year; somebody had worked out that he spent something like £300,000 flying around the world ten times,which – as Rob said – was very clever but achieved fuck all.

Throughout it all Tony maintained his career at Granada TV. He understood the power of the media. He saw it as a tool. He knew that the media likes a figurehead, so he set himself up in that role: to be the face of Factory,the Haçienda and Manchester,to get his message across. Mind you, he may have done a lot of talking but he didn’t talk much to the bands. He freely admitted that he thought musicians were stupid; so, if a problem arose with the Haçienda, he wouldn’t phone me up and ask my opinion. He’d never even get Rob to ask us. He couldn’t see why
he’d want to bring New Order into it, because in his mind we were just the investors.

We weren’t close in the sense of being two friends who’d go out for a drink. I’d see him a lot, but you couldn’t socialize with Tony because he wouldn’t sit still for one fucking second. He’d dart in and out of everywhere.He’d never stay in the Haçienda for more than an hour at a time, and yet the public perception in Manchester was that we all lived together above the club, in bed together like Morecambe and Wise. They couldn’t have been more wrong. He’d walk into the club, do what he had to do and walk straight back out. He used to say, ‘When you want me, I won’t be there. When you need me, I will be.’ And God bless him he was. I still believe that now.

Tony hadn’t been an early supporter of house music.He thought it wouldn’t go anywhere. Mike Pickering brought Black Box to Factory hoping to get the band a deal for ‘Ride on Time’, but Tony rejected them because he thought they were manufactured. Acid-house acts weren’t groups in the traditional sense of having a permanent, touring line-up,and he didn’t like that.Of course ‘Ride on Time’charted all over the planet. That was another of Tony’s great missed opportunities: in the same way, he didn’t sign the Stone Roses or the Smiths when he had the chance, and let James go from Factory to another label. Meanwhile, Rob’s attitude was the opposite to Tony. His philosophy toward the Haçienda – as well as to the bands he managed – was that you don’t talk about anything, you just do it, trusting the public to make the right decision and take an interest.He certainly wasn’t interested in grabbing the headlines for himself, like, say, Peter Grant, the manager of Led Zeppelin, or even Tony. No, Rob liked to stay right in the background.

So, polar opposites, then, and I consider us lucky to have had both of them: Rob was more of a musicians’ man; Tony, more the PR guy, banging the drum for Manchester.

As the Haçienda got bigger and bigger,Factory’s cultural stock rose and the label was inundated by artists wanting a deal.

At Factory, they kept a huge tea-chest full of demo tapes that nobody except the A&R man Phil Saxe ever listened to. At the same time, the Haçienda had mix tapes by DJs looking for a chance to perform. None of the big names really started out that way, but some would be given a night or even a weekend if they sounded good. The
other tapes were sent to Strangeways prison by Ang Matthews, so the prisoners there had something new to listen to. I heard some of them – the poor bastards. As if prison wasn’t enough.

Mike was right about Black Box, of course. Him and Graeme loved pianos, vocals, and Italian house. None of it grabbed me – it sounded too samey – but there are loads of people who associate that period with the Italian-house sound, just as there are loads of people who remember it for the Mondays,or even for Lulu.Everybody remembers it differently. In America they know the Haçienda from
24 Hour Party People
.They associate it with the birth of indie music and Madchester acts like the Happy Mondays or the Stone Roses, but not with acid house and dance music. It all depended on what night you went; which DJs you liked.

Me,I went every night.I felt like I was truly,truly home.

I loved the vantage point from the DJ booth. It became one of my favourite places to observe the club in all its glory.I just walked to the bar, got a Special and hung out in the booth, watching the madness unfold. On the best evenings, I forgot all my problems. That was the wonderful part of it:no matter how bad things appeared on a Thursday afternoon during the directors’ meetings, by the time I walked into the Haçienda the following night, everything felt magical, and would continue to feel that way until the drugs ran out – and I’d feel shite again.

On Monday morning, we’d deposit all the money we’d earned, guarded by our own armed men – boxes and boxes of it – into a Securicor van, only to see it disappear when it got to the bank: to cover our taxes, or our loans, or the costs of our daily operations. It was the night-time atmosphere we lived for,and every night was something different, new stories. I remember the indoor pool bursting during Hot, our summer theme night. Quite a laugh. Paul Cons also borrowed gimmicks from clubs in Ibiza, like the foam parties, which the punters loved. His knack for creating a dramatic setting took things to another level. Whereas we’d think about spending money on DJs, he’d focus his budget on decorating the building. These tastes didn’t conflict; they complemented one another.

Hot ran for just that one summer, yet is remembered as being one of the early rave scene’s defining nights. Dreamed up by Paul Cons after visits to Shoom and Future in London, it boasted all that we now associate with the
acid-house era: freaky dancing, gyropscopes, fluorescent necklaces and ice pops.Thick dry ice was pumped into the club,while lighting played on the smoke to give dancers an unreal, glowing effect, the hands-in-the-air would seem to rise out of the fog. Plus, most importantly – and for the first time at the Haçienda – there were podiums to dance on. It was just as it names suggests, Hot, and the parties were intense, their reputation quickly spreading and boosting the profile of the other nights – Nude and the Temperance Club – taking the club to the next previously undreamed-of level of popularity. Queues stretched around the Whitworth Street building. A fanzine was even distributed free to keep clubbers entertained while they waited.

Not all of the gimmicks were without hazards. In an article in the
Guardian
manager Paul Mason recalled the Hot pool being full of water from the previous night:

. . . and we had a bloody gig that night so had to empty it quickly somehow. Peter Hook turned up in the afternoon and said, ‘I know what to do, my kids have got a paddling pool which is the same design, just smaller. You just take one of the panels out – it’s much quicker that way.’ But we lost control of it and tonnes of water burst out of the cargo doors of the club. This little old dear was walking past the club pulling her shopping trolley and it washed her about 300 yards down the road.

Everybody remembers the golden period of the Haçienda as being such a fantastic time. That may be because a lot of them settled down afterwards. There were a lot of rays of sunshine in the summer of 1988. Anyone who went to the club then will always feel like they’re one up on anybody who didn’t.In that sense,it’s the same as the birth of punk in Manchester: everybody wanted to be at that first Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall.Factory cultivated that sort of ‘us and them’ mentality which made people feel like insiders or outsiders. If you lived through those times, it felt really exciting and special to be involved.

Really, though, the Haçienda experience doesn’t need to be exclusive and cool. When you put aside the mythology of the place and the mythology of the era, both of which are now gone, the music still offers something special. There’s a collective energy to it that’s worth pursuing. The songs and the spirit live on.

If you were there, though, it consumed a big part of your life. How
many kids would be devastated if they knew what their mums and dads got up to in there, dancing and going wild? I often like to imagine their parents reminiscing, ‘Remember when we used to go to the Haçienda and get trolleyed, love?’ How embarrassing . . . It’s the same with my kids.

We regularly, constantly, enjoyed ecstasy-fuelled full houses raving like there was no tomorrow. It felt like admitting defeat if you went home. We all wanted more time to dance, more music, and/or more drugs – more, more, more.

Strange, because later studies showed that drug-takers in the Haçienda, or indeed any club, were very much in the minority. Even at the era’s peak they reckoned that maybe 10 per cent of the audience – if that – took drugs. (Mostly the DJs, the doormen, our friends, and the key staff, I reckon.) That means that 90 per cent were just drunk or high on life – yet everyone presumed that they were all off it.Another myth shattered.Plus,back then,drugs were very difficult to get.You needed to know who to buy from to be really in on it. The image that normal people developed of the Haçienda was completely distorted.

In November New Order’s ‘Fine Time’ was released, the band’s first acid-house single and a massive worldwide hit. It was a declaration of the band’s love of the new dance culture, and further established New Order as a band with its finger on the pulse. The links between the group and its club became even more pronounced in media reports and in popular thought. Also making their presence known were the Stone Roses, whose ‘Elephant Stone’ (produced by Peter) was released in October, swiftly becoming one of the era’s defining records. Likewise the Happy Mondays, whose second album,
Bummed
, was proclaimed the rock equivalent of acid house, embodying as it did the spirit if not the sound of the scene, which could instead be found on the remixes. With the movement placed in a rock context, and thus easily understood and reviewed by the indie press, indie kids had yet another entry point into dance music: it was a landmark point in the development of the Madchester sound. And all of this was associated with the Haçienda, which was developing a reputation as the coolest club not just in this country but in the world.

The cash rolling through must have been immense. God, three nights a week × 2000 people × £10 each for admission + £15 per person spent on booze, plus cloakroom and food . . .

Except, they weren’t spending that much on booze any more.

Ecstasy had stopped people drinking alcohol – they weren’t interested in it – so club owners were instead profiting from sales of overpriced bottled water. But Rob thought bottled water was the work of the Devil;he wouldn’t stock it,insisting that we give everybody free water when they asked for it. A bit daft, really – you can’t rave holding a glass of water, can you?