The Haçienda (28 page)

FAC 51 Limited
Trading as: the Haçienda

Fac 201 Dry
28-30 Oldham Street, Manchester, England

Function:
bar

Proprietors:
the people who brought you the Haçienda

Telephone:
061-236-5051

Public Opening:
25 July 1989

Capacity:
500

Area:
450 square metres

Bar length:
24 metres

Specifications:
bead-blasted stainless steel, Delabole blue-grey slate, acid-etched coarse-stippled glass, Douglas fir, Japanese oak, utile, Junkers beech, black American walnut, telephone poles, mirror mosaic, blue-glazed bricks, Pantone 2685C Purple, International Orange, BS 10C33 Pollen, galvanized steel, Lapistone Marbo tiles, Turquoise MG35 glazed tiles, PVF2 Silver, polished stainless steel, linen-finish stainless steel

Lighting System:
18-channel Pulsar Rock desk, Lee low-voltage framing spots

Sound System:
Reinforcement by Wigwam Acoustics, Denon multiplay compact disc

Approach:
a bar on Oldham Street

Director:
Paul Mason

Manager:
Leroy Richardson

Design:
Ben Kelly Design (Ben Kelly, Sandra Douglas, Elena Massucco, Peter Mance, Denis Byrne, Fred Scott)

Graphics:
Peter Saville/Johnson Panas

Press Officer:
Paul Cons

‘Whereas music in clubs is now pigeon-holed and segregated, in those first years of acid house, the dance floor was open minded. In retrospect DJs have tried to convince us of their purist underground credentials; that wasn’t really the case. In the acid-house era you would have heard house, and techno, but also hip-hop records, like ‘Know How’ by Young MC, New Order and Euro-disco tracks by Italian production teams.’

Dave Haslam

‘It was never just a club. It became just a club with ecstasy and acid house.It was an artspace.We had bands,we had art installations.We had William Burroughs reading
Naked Lunch
, we had David Mack doing huge installations with 12-inch record sleeves. It was supposed to be a space for everyone to use, a meeting place. We’d all been to New York, and hung out at places like Danceteria, and the great thing about them – yeah they were fantastic clubs – but they were meeting places for like-minded people, creative people. Ecstasy changed it all. Because obviously everything went to the beat and to the instance on drugs. You know, the first two summers of ecstasy, of love, was the most special time you’ll ever have. But after that, it was just boring.’

Mike Pickering

From the minutes of a meeting held at Bromley House, Woodford Road,Bramhall on 8 February 1989:

20. RG [Rob Gretton] requested an up-to-date business plan to take account of all the revised costs [for the Dry bar].

(RG had a £100 bet with PM [Paul Mason] that costs would go up further and that the shareholders would be approached for more money).

As 1990 began, Manchester was at the centre of another cultural revolution. The city wasn’t just raving: it had taken the sound, the ethos and spirit of rave and reshaped it into something brand new – Madchester.

Suddenly indie kids were dancing too. Everybody was, and they were doing it at the Haçienda. The club lay at the heart of a previously unimagined surge in the city’s nightlife as the student population grew (at one point places for higher education in the city were ten times oversubscribed) and coach-loads of clubbers arrived in the city every weekend. Other clubs launched to capitalize on rave’s popularity. There was Konspiracy at the old Pips/Nite and Day venue, which would go on to become one of the city’s most infamous clubs – the subject of almost as many stories as the Haçienda itself. (The greatest of these being that Damien Noonan, who controlled the door there, was charging people to get out of the club – twice as much as it had cost them to get in.) On Osbourne Street, Newton Heath, was Thunderdome (the scene of one of Joy Division’s first successful gigs); and at Legends, Princess Street, London club Shoom hosted a residency and the Happy Mondays filmed their video ‘Wrote for Luck’. In the meantime a whole generation of music-makers were being inspired on the Haçienda’s dance-floor. Those having their eyes opened included Laurent Garnier (who worked at the club as a pot-collector); the Chemical Brothers, then student ravers; the Charlatans; and even Noel and Liam Gallagher, jobbing as floor-sweepers before they hit the big time (Oasis in fact played their first-ever gig as support to Peter Hook’s Revenge at the Hippodrome in Middleton in 1993); as well as the huge swathes of Madchester wannabes who sprang up in the wake of the Mondays and the Roses. London-based magazines began to pick up on the Madchester phenomenon and even America started to show an interest: that summer DJs Mike Pickering, Paul Oakenfold, Graeme Park and Dave Haslam went on a Haçienda DJ tour of America and were greeted like superstars; even
Newsweek
carried a Madchester cover story.

As the movement grew there were mutterings that it was already becoming too homogenized; that the baggy Joe Bloggs/Gio Goi look had become a uniform.The Fall’s Mark E.Smith even wrote a song about it,‘Idiot Joy Showland’.

At the Haçienda the management continued to investigate ways in which to capitalize on the club’s success. First Factory wished to buy the building, which would free them from the millstone of the twenty-five-year lease and make the club a much more attractive proposition. They’d made repeated offers to purchase since the club first opened and now, at last, the owner relented: Factory secured the property and immediately set about planning how best to utilize their newly acquired real estate.

I remember being asked about buying the building while New Order were backstage at the Free Trade Hall (although I can’t remember why we were there). Rob gave us literally five minutes to make our minds up – as in yes or no. We again went with the flow; but, knowing how punitive the length of the lease had been, owning the building did seem like a good idea.

One of the biggest criticisms of the Haçienda was that there was no cosy, funky part of it for people to hide away in. So it was around this time, with the money being apparently available (we were on the crest of a wave, remember), that the idea of developing the basement first came up: to form a club-within-a-club and drum up business for off-peak weekday nights and the smaller club nights. We’d used it for the occasional private party but we figured we could put the space to more lucrative use. We thought that it would generate yet more revenue. In the end, the idea went on the back-burner until 1994.

The death of Claire Leighton in 1989 had begun a protracted and expensive battle between the Haçienda and Greater Manchester Police that would plague the club for the next eighteen months to two years. A blow for the club was legislation introduced in February of 1990 that gave the police greater discretionary powers over local magistrates granting nightclub licences. The police also launched Operation Clubwatch, aimed at targeting drug use within the city’s clubs.

All of the Haçienda’s troubles had the police asking whether or not we should be allowed to renew our licence. Shit. Without that licence, we were just another empty building.

We tried to get the local community involved, to see if that could help us solve the crime problem. There was precedent for this: in around 1986 Paul Mason had joined the pub- and club-watch safety committee.(He got into it by default:every time somebody applies for a licence, all the other pubs routinely object because they don’t want the competition. We were a bit on the outside to say the least, so he joined the pub-and-club network to find out how the business worked. Paul became very passionate about it; he enjoyed being involved and even headed the organization for a while.)

To show our willingness to help solve the drug problems,we started a drug-confiscation scheme. When the door staff searched customers and found Es, dope, coke, whatever, the drugs were given to Ang, who put them in a safety-deposit box that was then locked in the safe. I’d harass her for it all the time, Pandora’s box, I called it, saying ‘gimme gimme’, dying to see what I could find inside, rooting around like a ferret. The doormen would even tip me off: they’d say, ‘I just handed over ten Es,’ and I’d nag her for them, enjoying the wind-up.

She took her job seriously, though, and always refused (mainly telling me to ‘fuck right off’).Happily,since I didn’t know the safe combination, there was nothing I could do.

Each Monday she’d remove the drug box from the safe and take it down to the police station. Before long, the police decided that she was putting herself at risk not only of being robbed en route but also of being arrested for transporting controlled substances. At that point they decided to come by and pick them up from her; this lasted a week, after which time she had to mither them constantly to come and collect the drugs. She’d sometimes be forced to destroy them, the stockpile having built up for weeks.