The Haçienda (31 page)

Cheetham Hill

Although Cheetham Hill in the north of the city is a relatively small area of Manchester, it boasted one of Manchester’s largest and best-organized gangs, a black and mixed-race outfit with a fearsome reputation.

Doddington

Operating out of the Moss Side area, this crew took its name from Doddington Close on the west side of the district and were notable for the youth of its members.

Gooch

Also based in Moss Side, Gooch was a mainly black gang formed in Gooch Close. Though it had many older, original members, it also boasted a youthful element with a fearsome reputation for violence.

Salford

Predominantly white, Salford was one of the older gangs if not the oldest in the city and was organized by family. As with other gangs, it was the younger members out to prove themselves who gained a name for extreme violence.

As the club entered 1991 it had a problem. On the one hand it was being asked to stamp out drug use; on the other, thanks to bands such as the Happy Mondays, it was helping to create a scene that glorified their use.

‘We are not responsible for the backgrounds of our artists,’ Tony Wilson told writer Mick Middles. Wilson was aware of the paradox, however: he was, after all, a casual user himself. So, to find his own moral cut-off point in the drug culture, he needed to look in the direction of organized crime.

‘What I am not into and am, in fact, appalled by, is the violence that sometimes comes with drugs and has caused problems at the Haçienda. What people might take or smoke or drink is up to them until the point where they might harm other people. Then it becomes an issue and we would have no truck with that.’

At the postponed hearing on 3 January the magistrates announced their pleasure at a ‘positive change in direction’ and renewed the club’s licence.

In order to try to build on the reprieve offered by the magistrates, the club revitalized its original membership scheme and imposed stricter conditions on the door. The fact that the Haçienda, cheerleader of the new rave revolution, was to impose such draconian measures didn’t sit well with the clientele, however. Queues became even more lengthy; the distribution of the fanzine
Freaky Dancing
and the entertainment provided by the club did little to make this aspect of the experience seem appealing. Furthermore, the new system failed to keep the troublemakers out – and those troublemakers were armed.

Up until this point our bouncers had never seen any real trouble and we still had a reputation for having the most wonderful, peaceful security of any club in England.

That peace was about to end.

After the police shut the Gallery the gangsters moved on to the Haçienda, saw how it had flourished and thought, ‘We’ll have some of that.’

Don’t forget that for a long time the club had had a reputation in Manchester for being empty and playing indie music. But now the dealers in the Haç could earn three to four grand on Fridays and four to five grand on Saturdays. Then they were mainly middle-class, university-educated boys from Stoke and a lot of them worked the club on a regular basis.

At first the gangsters were their customers, joining in with the hugging and general togetherness. But over a period of time they sussed out how much they could earn if they took over. They then began turning dealers upside down – literally, they used to shake them by the ankles – to take money and drugs off them and when that didn’t work the beatings were savage. Dealers wouldn’t press charges for obvious reasons.

As a result, crime increased nightly. And Dry suffered the same security problems as the Haçienda – the same gang members were regulars at both. There were some terrible incidents of violence that made us regret opening both places, but it was especially bad at the Haç. I don’t know of any place in England that suffered with violence the way we did here. We were unique.

On Wednesday 9 January the club celebrated its licensing reprieve with Thanksgiving, a night that featured Haçienda institutions Mike Pickering, Graeme Park and Jon DaSilva as well as a live performance from Electronic. The first Nude of the year was held the following Saturday, for which a membership scheme was introduced in a bid to stop troublemakers gaining entry.The next Saturday was the second Nude of the year – and in fact it was the last ever Nude to be held at the club.

There was an incident. At the time it was reported that a doorman had been threatened with a gun but there were no shots fired. According to Tony Wilson in his book
24 Hour Party People
,however:‘A Cheetham Hill subhead went walkabout in the Haç entrance. Waving a gun in the air. Shots were fired.’

Apparently the punter had not taken kindly to being refused admission under the new membership scheme.

It was the last straw. The following Wednesday, after days of meetings, Wilson called a press conference, held on the Haçienda dance floor.

‘The Haçienda is closing its doors as of today,’ he told journalists (looking ‘tired and haggard’ according to reports).

It is with the greatest reluctance that for the moment we are turning the lights out on what is, for us, a most important place.

‘We are forced into taking this drastic action in order to protect our employees, our members and all our clients. We are quite simply sick and tired of dealing with instances of personal violence.

We hope and we must believe we can reopen the Haçienda in a better climate. But until we are able to run the club in a safe manner, and in a way that the owners believe will guarantee the role of the Haçienda at the heart of the city’s youth community, it is with great sadness that we will shut our club.

It had always been on the horizon. The police were focusing on the drug issue while the owners of the Haçienda understood that guns and gangsters were the bigger problems. Since 1987 shootings in the city had increased and gang-style executions were taking place, such as the killing of ‘White’ Tony Johnson, a well-known troublemaker. The gangsters were primarily interested in heroin and cocaine, and not in what they felt was the low-level dealing usually to be found in a nightclub; but, as writer Andy Spinoza noted, ‘Gangsters like clubbing too’ – and their preferred night out was the Haçienda, the world’s most fashionable nightclub.

There they expected free and immediate entry and were not above flashing a gun in order to get it. In return the Haçienda had sent a message to the gangsters. Whether it was heard would remain to be seen.

At the press conference reporters were told that the club would be closed for about a month. It turned out to be five.

When the Haçienda shut its doors in January 1991 it was because of gang violence. It had become too dangerous. We had to press pause while we reassessed, which cost us a fortune: it actually cost more to run the club closed than open. In that five months alone we lost £175,000.

We fitted the building with an airport-style metal detector. Once everything fell into place,we issued a statement:

The Haçienda Press Release, 11 April 1991

It is with some pleasure that the owners of the Haçienda announce the reopening of the club on 10 May 1991.

We believe that the climate in which we work has changed sufficiently to allow us to make a fresh start.At last their [
sic
] seems to be a new understanding in the city.

We reopen in good faith, our faith in other people’s faith in Manchester.

For further information call Paul Cons on 061 953 0251.

In the meantime the Haçienda had a makeover: Ben Kelly came up with a new scheme, and the pillars were painted in brighter colours.

As far as security was concerned, an airport-style metal detector was installed (that never worked, according to Tony Wilson, because it was erected above a metal floor), thorough body searches were instigated, external cameras outside and inside infra-red cameras sweeping the areas police and the club recognized as being drug hotspots. The club was doing all it could to target the gangsters and eradicate drugs.

The revamp provided the opportunity for a DJ shake-up, too, and the club’s reopening party the Healing heralded a new line-up. On Saturdays an unnamed night was headed by Graeme Park, who was by now one of – if not the – UK’s biggest DJ names. On Thursdays Dave Haslam returned to his old Temperance Club spot, but with the night renamed Beautiful 2000. A new night was launched for Saturdays to replace Nude: Shine!, hosted by Mike Pickering with guest appearances by big-name DJs such as Sasha and David Morales.

It was at Shine! that a now infamous act of violence occurred.

When we reopened we hired Top Guard, an established crowd-management company that provided security at football games, venues and festivals to augment the few local doormen we’d chosen to keep. We even looked into getting them to escort Paul Mason to and from work, in case somebody with a grudge (or an eye on robbing us) followed him home.

Then we found out that, ‘Paul never locked up anyway. Ang did.’

She’d be there each club night, the last to leave, having carried all the takings upstairs to the offices,an easy target for anyone.Every weekend
we’d have a ton of cash on the premises until the banks opened on Monday morning – even more on a Bank Holiday weekend, when we were a particularly tempting target. When the insurance company finally realized that she was traipsing around an empty building, spending forty minutes locking and checking all the doors,then walking to her flat alone at three in the morning, they supplied her with a personal alarm to wear around her neck, an escort from work, and a deadbolt for her door at home. Big deal.

We focused on securing the Haçienda itself too. The three main doormen lived in a house on the outskirts of Manchester, while their crew travelled by coach from Birmingham. We reopened with something like twelve Dobermanns and fifty bouncers, who patrolled both outside and inside the club. Instead of dressing in white shirt, ties and Crombies (like our security used to), this lot looked like a paramilitary force – much more threatening. That opening night, strangely enough, was called the Healing, yet the Salford and Cheetham Hill lot kicked off immediately and nearly closed us back down. They were storming the doors trying to get in.I’d brought Arthur Baker along from New York to celebrate our reopening and we couldn’t even get near the door, the fighting was that intense; we had to wait across the road for an hour while security tried to calm it down.

On that first night our new doormen, who were mainly from down south, didn’t know what the hell they were taking on. Thinking that a show of force would take care of the problem, they clamped down on everybody,rather than negotiating with people and defusing situations. They didn’t know who to show respect to; the mood got leery very quickly, and the gangs just stormed the door.

It was a taste of things to come.

On another night shortly after this a doorman let some of the Salford lot in and, as they passed, muttered under his breath: ‘Salford dickheads’. A perceived slight.

In the club they calmly sat down used their mobiles to call the young firm. Then just sat in the corner waiting.

It was like a military operation. One lot came in normally, in ones and twos, slowly infiltrating us. Then a second lot arrived en masse. This lot again stormed the door – and then it really kicked off.

As our bouncers charged after them, the first bunch made their play, stabbing the bouncers in the arse as they ran past. A classic pincer
movement. The bouncers were severely outnumbered and they ‘retreated’ (shat themselves and ran away), fleeing through the club, creating panic as they went. Then they were cornered, by the main bar on the right by the fire exits, and it was complete pandemonium. Blood everywhere,clubbers screaming.Fucking chaos.

It was a classic example of younger gangsters doing the bidding of the older ones. It was a perfectly planned manoeuvre. Someone called the police but the TAG took forty-five minutes to come – despite the fact that the police were filming the building from the railway bridge opposite,to observe and count the number of people going in and out (they were trying to nail us for overcrowding).They didn’t want to help us. Can’t blame them, really. The wounded doormen were laid in a row until help eventually arrived.

The attack took place on Saturday 22 June. Inside the club Mike Pickering was presiding over the Midsummer Night Shine!, which had a specially extended licence until four a.m. The street was cordoned off after around 200 Tactical Aid Group officers turned up and clubbers were led from the Haçienda to run the gauntlet of police, with helicopters buzzing overhead, searchlights on. As the clubbers filed out, each one had their photograph taken
...