The Haçienda (26 page)

Good idea, Chris. So what did we do? We got Vini Reilly’s girlfriend, Pauline – a lovely girl – to open a vegetarian macrobiotic salad bar. On Tony’s insistence.

A vegetarian macrobiotic salad bar. In Manchester. In 1989? We might as well have just chucked the stuff away.

Well, actually, that’s exactly what we did.

At the end of each day, Pauline threw all the salad away because nobody ever wanted it.Heartbreaking for her.Nobody in Manchester had heard of macrobiotic food, let alone wanted to eat it. We were too far ahead of our time again.

I remember asking them, ‘How do you lose £12,000 a year on salads?’

‘No,’ they said ‘it’s £1000 a week!’

Apparently I wasn’t well versed in the vegetable world. I went fucking berserk.

Exit Pauline. After her we went through loads of people as kitchen managers: Suzanne, my friends Debbie Nightingale and Bowser (Little Red Courgette), and numerous others – all of them tried really hard. It should have worked but nobody could pull it off. They cooked well and had great ideas, just no customers. Laurent Garnier (later to become a huge DJ/producer) worked in the kitchen until he returned to France to do his national service.

In the end I said, ‘Why don’t we farm it out? Let’s sublet it. Get somebody else to run it, then charge them rent.’

This actually happened when we opened Tommo’s Tasty Tapas. Tommo – another great friend of ours, a great character, mad as a hatter – was supposed to sub-let the kitchen and pay us rent. He never earned enough to cover expenses, but we bankrolled him because we liked his food so much.

I had a butcher’s assistant come up to me one night, completely off his head. ‘You used to get your meat from us for Dry, didn’t you?’ he slurred.

I went, ‘Did we?’

‘Yeah, because we’re doing that fiddle with you, weren’t we?’

I said, ‘What fiddle was that?’

‘You know: we sent you a bill for three grand, but we only gave you £1500 worth of sausages and we’d split the money.’

Hmm ...

Still we persisted with the food. What we didn’t consider was the clientele: speed freaks and smackheads, coke addicts and pill heads who survived on little more than drugs and alcohol. They ate only out of necessity, to stop themselves from falling over and dying. Me included.

There’s a saying in the pub trade that the time between lunch and evening is ‘the graveyard shift’ because there are no customers. Well, our friends were there then and none of our friends ate, and they looked so intimidating (the way only true zombies can) that normal people wouldn’t walk the full length of the bar to get to the restaurant at the back.Everyone was scared of the lunatics who frequented it;the atmosphere kept them at bay.

At least we were consistent:we did everything wrong.We couldn’t even get the drinking glasses right. Just as Tony had assigned the Haçienda a Factory catalogue number, FAC 51, he gave Dry its own, FAC 201. For years, we printed ‘Dry 201’ on the glasses, and people stole them all as souvenirs. That alone cost us a fucking fortune. You won’t believe this, but we used to change the glasses depending on what night it was. The same at the Haçienda. So, if it was Zumbar night, they get out the Zumbar glasses. Hot would have Hot glasses and so on. I dread to think how much that little indulgence cost us.

Wish I’d have read Peter Stringfellow’s book (
King of Clubs
) back then. Rob gave it me year’s later to read saying, ‘See? It wasn’t just us?’

Then,because everything in the place was decorated in light colours, keeping it clean was again ridiculously expensive. Just like in the Haçienda, the second anybody put a hand on the brass handrail, the oil on their fingers made it look shit. It took an hour a day to polish it up.

The furniture was over-designed and over-priced. The customers wouldn’t have been bothered whether they installed Yorkshire slate or Yorkshire Dales, and they routinely wrecked the place anyway. Tony loved the scallies at the cocktail bar carving their initials into the Morrison stools, and burning the Jasper Conran sofas with their fagends.He liked the idea of destroying art.A frightening thought.It wasn’t just the customers, either. I spent the opening night cracking bottles of Budweiser open on the £40,000,one-piece thirty-feet marble bar top. Oops.

We had loads of staff, a lovely bunch. I missed them like mad when
it closed. The interior was kept immaculately clean and bright, but even so ...Very few people ever came.

It turned out the beer pumps and fittings had been installed incorrectly. Because the wrong taps were used, we lost something like one pint for every four we sold.We brought in loads of highly paid advisors to identify our problem areas, but they told us nothing we didn’t already know: that we were overstaffed, that we were being ripped off and that we were idiots.

I could have told them that and saved us five grand a time!

Frankly, if Leroy couldn’t make it profitable, no one could. Paul Mason tried, then Ang. Instead, the place was again more like a social club. That’s how I used it, anyway, and I went through a phase when I was single when I socialized with the staff at Dry more than I did at the Haçienda; I even ate there occasionally before I fell over. I was the target audience. I loved it because I had somewhere to go during the day, before the Haçienda opened. I’d finish in the studio with Monaco at six p.m.,go to Dry,eat there,stay there till it closed,go clubbing with Leroy, go back home, have a shower and go back to the studio. Sometimes I’d ride there on my Harley Davidson; then, when I was wasted, the bar staff would put me in a cab and wheel it into the bar until I collected it next day. It could be there for weeks sometimes.

Once again Rob complained about me getting my drinks for nothing and borrowing money from behind the bar.

One Saturday night, after eleven, when Dry had closed, Leroy cleared out the bar and bundled all the booze to one of the first raves in Manchester, where he planned to sell it at a profit. He’d asked our permission to do it and we’d given him our blessing. A nice little earner, we thought. Dry’s holding stock of beer and spirits at the time would have been valued at around £5000.

Just our luck: the police shut down the rave. They took the sound system and lights (so the PA company were shafted) and the booze and all the money (so we were shafted). When we opened Dry the following day, the bar was bare and we hadn’t been paid for anything we’d sold. It was all gone, dead and buried.

I also remember that rave because the cops arrested my mate Jim, saying, ‘You must be the organizer.’

When he asked, ‘Why the fuck would you think that?’ the cops said, ‘Because you’re old.’ Great detective work.

Barney had been there as well, but they let him and the rest of the crowd go because there were too many people for them to even attempt to interview or hold in custody.

The actual guy running the rave hid in a pre-prepared panic room, where he’d stored all the ecstasy he was going to sell plus all of his own coke, smack and the money he’d made. Right at the end, as the police cleared everyone out, they heard him cough but couldn’t work out where the sound was coming came from. So they brought the dogs in and tracked him down. Sentences for drug dealing were strict in those days, so the guy (an arty, highbrow type who actually got married on stage at the Haç) turned Queen’s evidence and fingered everybody he could think of. He literally sat there and gave the cops a long list of names, a who’s-who of Manchester raving, many of whom had nothing whatever to do with the party.Weren’t even there,most of them.

Including me.

The cops pulled Leroy, Rob and me in, saying it was our rave. I had to go in to the police station on Monday morning and tell them, ‘I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.’

Interestingly, the coppers were all my age – and music fans – so they were delighted at roping me in: ‘Oh, let’s get him out of New Order. That’ll be a laugh.’

‘Look,’ I told them, ‘You know by now that we’ve got nothing to do with this.’

Leroy got off by claiming he’d lent the beer for a private party and took the rap, getting a very stern warning. I think Tony had a word because only the main guy got charged. He’d been caught with so much ecstasy and so much cash (indicating that he’d sold either a lot of tablets or a lot of tickets) that I think he got about ten years in jail. The police became the enemies of acid house as they cracked down on all the unlicensed raves.

This wasn’t the only rave to suffer. Tabloid hysteria over acid house had reached a crescendo by late 1989 and the authorities had started closing down ‘rave’ events such as Sunrise and Back to the Future, even though they were legal and well-organized. There was talk of an ‘acid-house rapid-deployment task force’ and MP Graham Stringer was pushing to introduce anti-rave laws. Manchester was one of the worst hit; the city’s police force was run by James Anderton, who had a hard-line reputation
gaining notoriety as ‘God’s cop’ after claiming to be an instrument of divine judgment. As the second Summer of Love drew to a close, the clamp-downs marked the end of an era.

We bounced around the idea of franchising Dry,and had a hell of a lot of interest in it (the nearest we ever got was in Glasgow). But nothing came of it. We had so many problems with the Haçienda, we couldn’t concentrate on anything else so any deal always fell through.

Now, every bar looks like Dry. Ben Kelly got it right again. Without a doubt,he revolutionized the industry’s design.

Even so, the financial problems grew. Now Dry lost money hand over fist. New Order were again called in too late, and then started questioning things and looking at the accounts. Yet again, we discovered a list of cock-ups as long as your arm. The Internet, for example. In the mid-1990s Dry offered Internet access to its customers. One of the first. The concept was revolutionary. Unfortunately, when people booked a session at the computer to get online, we charged them much less per minute than we paid to the Internet service provider – Internet access was very expensive at first.Dry covered the difference. We lost money every second that people logged on,but Tony would-n’t let them raise the rates, saying that would price it out of the budgets of our customers.He used to say,‘The computer is the new hearth for the family.’

Eventually Leroy told people the computers were out of order, just to save us the expense. Good boy.

With Leroy moving over to run Dry,Ang Matthews (who’d been going to the Haçienda since John Cooper-Clarke’s performance in June 1982) came aboard as assistant general manager, inheriting an operation that was now working on a huge scale and was beginning to attract the attendant problems. Manchester’s gangs were beginning to make their presence felt, and there were problems with drugs in the club.

Ang bought herself a ring the week before she started work,which she got engraved with the anarchy sign to remind herself of her roots now that (she thought) she was getting a real job and settling down. Little did she know what she was in for. Her career with us would prove to be wilder than anything else she’d ever known.

At the start she and Paul Mason had a close working relationship. Ang followed Leroy around for a month, apprenticing with him, and soon became very good at her job. As she likes to say, she became a part of the club simply by virtue of being there so much (her boyfriend in the mid-1980s would come into the club to paint canvases of the archway and other features of the building to sell to people for their homes;that’s how much it became a part of people’s lives).

For the next eight years, she’d hire and fire staff – and she did both, loads of times. If she caught them stealing, they were sacked. Petty theft ended many careers at the Haçienda, whether that meant somebody swiping a bottle or giving free drinks to friends. Only one employee got kicked out for using drugs, however. If somebody could work while off their heads, she’d let them stay.

Still the financial problems persisted, despite our success. We’d weathered the tax investigations and I sided with Rob in trying to keep the Haçienda going – the old ego was out in full force – but we were still in the shit. At a director’s meeting somebody joked that we should burn the place down, at which point our accounts guy – a proper businessman – said,‘If you’re going to start talking like that,I’ll have to leave the room.’

Either way, there was nothing in there that was flammable anyway. Just the dance floor and a couple of chairs.

We may have missed some opportunities to bring in extra profits, but we were denied the chance to pursue others. Today there are hundreds of mix CDs by Ministry of Sound,Creamfields and Renaissance – everyone,really – which have become a big part of our culture.When acid house took off, Rob immediately cottoned on to doing compilation LPs of the songs the DJ’s played in the Haçienda, but in those days it was difficult to get the Black Boxes of the world to licence their songs; they figured they’d make more money on their own. Now, of course, the acts know there’s a packet to be earned from compilations, so it’s a lot easier to get their permission. Back then, they just said no.

We could have made a fortune – and made the bands a fortune – from selling albums that replicated the sound of a night spent at the Haçienda, but the big names all turned us down. In fact, the
Haçienda Classics
CD I did in 2005 has gone on to sell more than 175,000 copies and it’s a triple CD; I was very flattered when Noel Gallagher voted it his favourite record of all time.

The closest we came to exporting the Haçienda experience was by hosting theme nights around Europe and America. Rob saw them as a way of promoting the brand further, which now is a very common thing to do but was difficult then. For a while, Ang co-ordinated them. She booked the talent, the idea being that that the promoters subsidized the tour. But the events all lost money, so what we hoped might be a source of revenue turned into a burden and had to be underwritten by us.You’ve got to be very,very clever to book a tour,because of the expenses. They proved to be demanding, and as soon as anything or anyone became demanding, Rob would always mutter, ‘Oh, fucking pay them off.’ He hated arguing about details. If a promoter argued about the hundred dollars it cost to take the DJs from an airport to a hotel, Rob would say, ‘Oh, fuck it. Don’t argue, we’ll just pay it.’ And that was it for the tours. However revolutionary the concept may have been, we never broke even.