The Haçienda (4 page)

We often used to go the Ranch, which was owned by Foo Foo Lammar – Frank, to his friends. A nice guy, he was a female impersonator, a forerunner to Lily Savage, and with the Ranch and Metz he was one of the club owners who paved the way for the Gay Village. Every Thursday night was punk night: members of the Buzzcocks, Slaughter and the Dogs,the Drones,Manicured Noise and everybody else who played punk music in Manchester congregated there. You did have to be careful, though: right-wing Teddy Boys from God knows where would sometimes come down and lie in wait for us. Pub-and-clubland was still a dangerous place to be, wherever your allegiances lay.

Joy Division used to play at the Ranch, too. On one such occasion we’d already tried our luck at a talent night at the Stocks in Walkden near where I lived in Little Hulton. It was one of those nights where acts who wanted to be signed up performed in front of ‘judges’ (the bloke who ran the agency and his mate), who then decided whether or not they had potential. Before we went on Ian got a treat when he accidentally walked into the dressing room where the singer before us was getting changed and he saw her tits. He was made up about that.

The guy who introduced us, a proper old-school compere, said, ‘How do you want to be introduced, lads?’

We said, ‘Um . . .’ and looked at one another.

He said, ‘Well, what are you like?’

We said,‘Uh ...’

With no articulate answer from us he introduced us with the immortal words:‘If you like Deep Purple you’ll love these lads.’

We trudged on and did two songs. The power kept cutting off
because we were tripping the limiter. A coach-load of old ladies from Farnworth all had their hands over their ears.We absolutely bombed. Needless to say we weren’t seen as ‘having potential’ and weren’t signed by the agency. We were so wound up by the whole thing. Once we’d we thrown our gear in the back of my old Jag Ian said, ‘Come on. The Ranch is open. Let’s go and play there.’

So we did. They let us set up and play and we went down a storm. Those were the days.

Despite the Electric Circus closing in October 1977, by 1978 the Punk scene had really grown and there were gigs all the time. The only thing that stopped us going out every night was cash: one or two shows a week was our limit. When we could afford to go out, though, we were spoilt for choice:Rafters,the Ranch,the Factory nights at the Russell. There were gigs all over the city. One venue, called the Squat, had been taken over by hippies and all the punks used to go there; any passing group could set up and play. It was great for a time, a really good scene, but by the following year it had splintered with both the Ranch and Rafters closing to punk.

Out of ambition and necessity we expanded our territory. Joy Division pretty quickly became quite successful, so we performed not only around Britain but also in Europe. We felt so happy to be liked for what we did as musicians, we played anywhere that asked us; then, as the money came in and bigger concert promoters hired us to play,we earned enough to quit our day jobs.Everything seemed to be moving forward in the best possible way:Rob was running our careers,Martin Hannett was producing our records, Pete Saville designed the covers (convinced in his own mind that people bought our stuff because they loved his art rather than the music),Factory released it all,and we felt like we were really on our way.

By early 1980 plans were afoot for us to tour the United States. By now we’d released one album,
Unknown Pleasures
, with another one,
Closer
, already recorded.

All that came to an end when Ian killed himself, right before we were to fly to America. Personally, of course, we were heartbroken. Professionally, we were back to square one. As you can imagine, it was a tough time – but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, we picked ourselves up and Barney, Steve and I decided to keep going. We called ourselves New Order. Barney became lead
singer;we toured as a three-piece,with the songs from the album that would become
Movement
, and after a while Steve’s girlfriend, Gillian Gilbert,became supplementary guitarist and keyboardist.

If you liked alternative, underground and non-mainstream music in 1980, you read the weekly music papers and listened to John Peel. Indeed it was Peel, a huge Joy Division supporter, who first announced the death of Ian Curtis to a nationwide audience. Weeklies
Melody Maker
and the
NME
were on strike (the
NME
would return from its six-week break on 14 June with an Ian Curtis cover), so it was left to Dave McCullough in
Sounds
to provide the music papers’ sole contemporaneous obituary, almost a fortnight after his death. In purple prose somewhat derided at the time, he ended by saying, ‘That man cared for you, that man died for you’, reflecting the impact Joy Division had made in a relatively short space of time. Already beloved of the
NME
and Peel, their appeal was to go mainstream with the release of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ shortly after Curtis’ death. With the singer’s suicide lending an already jawdropping song extra poignancy, it propelled Joy Division up the singles charts and on to daytime radio, pulling
Unknown Pleasures
back into the mainstream album charts (it was already a permanent fixture on the fledgling independent charts, which had been introduced in January 1980), where it reached a high of number 71 in August that year – sales having been further boosted by the release of
Closer
, a number-6 album, in July.

Interest in both albums was of course generated by Curtis’s death but also by a mini-controversy surrounding Peter Saville’s sleeve for
Closer
, which showed a photograph of the Appiani family tomb and was thought to be a tasteless reference to the suicide. A bemused Saville pointed out that the design had been finalized prior to Curtis’s death.

As the year closed, the profile of Joy Division was at a high from which the band has never truly descended, and sales were giving Factory the financial health it would need to even consider projects on the scale of the Haçienda.

It was the year of the Iranian Embassy siege, of the continued reign of the Yorkshire Ripper, the ever-present threat of nuclear war and the assassination of John Lennon. A dark, moribund year.

The Oasis Club

On Lloyd Street, the Oasis was ‘the north’s largest coffee bar and rhythm club’ and ran during the early 1960s when it hosted all of the era’s big bands, including, of course, the Beatles. Towards the end of the decade it fell out of favour and its audience drifted towards the Twisted Wheel. After that it became Sloopy’s, then Yer Father’s Moustache.

The Twisted Wheel

The original Twisted Wheel opened in Brazennose Street in 1963 playing R&B and chart music before moving to Whitworth Street in 1966,where it gained a reputation as one of the country’s best soul clubs, staging all-nighters and hosting soul stars of the day, including Edwin Starr and Ben E. King. It was in a feature about the club that the term ‘Northern Soul’was coined.However,after problems with drugs the club closed in 1971. It reopened on Whitworth Street in 1999.

Pips

Based on Fennel Street, Pips had six dance floors during its heyday in the late 1970s, and was a hangout for many of those would go on become the big names in the Manchester music scene. You could expect to see Peter Hook,Barney Sumner,Ian Curtis,Morrissey,Peter Saville and Johnny Marr among the David Bowie and Bryan Ferry clones and for this clientele the big draw was the Roxy Room, where they could hear DJ Dave Booth of Garlands fame playing David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Kraftwerk. Later, in January 1978, Joy Division’s first concert as Joy Division was at Pips.Bryan Ferry,after a Roxy Music gig at Belle Vue, was famously refused entry on the grounds that he was wearing jeans. The club closed at the beginning of the 1980s but later reopened as the infamous Konspiracy.

The Reno

The Haçienda’s first resident DJ, Hewan Clarke, cut his teeth playing jazz-funk at the Reno on Princess Road in the late 1970s. It was situated below the Nile, which played reggae, and together the two clubs had a fearsome reputation – as opposed to Rafters and Rufus in town, where the sounds were more commercial. A mainly black crowd would pack Renos until five or six in the morning, the air heavy with weed smoke, the dancing serious. Clarke later moved to Fevers, where he came to the attention of A Certain Ratio and Tony Wilson . . .

Legends

Based on Princess Street, Legends took over from Pips as Manchester’s main alternative hangout, especially on Thursdays. Wednesday nights, however, were presided over by DJ Greg Wilson, who, later, would also play a major part in shaping the Haçienda’s musical direction,educating audiences in a new, streetwise sound that was set to drag dance music out of the cul-de-sac offered by disco: electro. More on him later.

Electric Circus

Along with the Ranch and Rafters, the Electric Circus was one of the main Manchester venues to cater for the interest in punk after the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 1976; indeed, the Pistols would play this Collyhurst Road venue twice,further inspiring the home-grown bands. Around these venues, and with the Buzzcocks at its core, grew what we know today as the city’s post-punk scene (though everybody simply called it punk at the time), championed by journalists such as Jon Savage, Paul Morley and Mick Middles and spawning labels Rabid,Factory and New Hormones.Rob Gretton was part of the same scene.As DJ at Rafters,he had first seen Warsaw there, then later saw them again as Joy Division at the Electric Circus; he subsequently approached Barney at a Manchester phone box with an offer of management and got the job. The Electric Circus closed in October 1977, though Rafters, the Ranch and the Oaks in Chorlton remained popular punk venues.

The Factory

Wilson and Erasmus hosted the Factory nights at the Russell Club/PSV in Hulme between May 1978 and April 1980, before the idea of the
Haçienda was mooted. As host of Granada TV’s
So It Goes
, Wilson was able to entice those who appeared on the show to play the Factory: thus the night hosted performances by a mouthwatering who’s-who of big names, including Public Image Limited, Pere Ubu, Magazine, Suicide, Iggy Pop, Stiff Little Fingers, the Pop Group, the Specials and Dexys Midnight Runners. Those who attended speak fondly of the Red Stripe, the goat pasties and the reggae played by the in-house DJ between bands.There was,they say,a very palpable sense of a scene developing.

It’s fair to say that many of those involved in the early stages of planning for the Haçienda expected it to be like the PSV, which was quite dark and stuffy, had low ceilings and complied with most people’s expectations of a music venue. The Haçienda was to overturn all of those expectations – indeed, it would be instrumental in creating many new ones.

It took a long time for New Order to recapture the ground we lost when Ian died, not to mention the emotional fall-out, which still gets me now. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of him and what we achieved. But by 1981 we were climbing the ladder again. We were touring and visiting great clubs in amazing cities. We liked the sleaziness of the places we discovered in New York, places like Hurrah, Danceteria, Tier 3 and Eden. In Manhattan at the time you’d find these steamy, sweaty, dark, low-end clubs, like the Fun House, a black-painted box that just felt vibey, and then you’d go into ritzy places with art installations, like Studio 54 and Area.

But whenever we returned it was to a Manchester scene that was still pretty stagnant. So it was, then, that Tony and Rob came up with the idea of opening their own place – they’d been impressed by what they’d seen in New York, and promoting the Factory nights at the Russell Club had gone well.

At first New Order didn’t really listen. We were concentrating on making music. Eventually we were forced to pay attention because whenever we’d get into conversations with Rob the club would always be his main subject. It got so it was all he’d talk about. His pitch centred around the notion that people like us deserved somewhere to social-ize;and this club would serve that need.He insisted that,as Manchester treated us well, we should give something back. (All very altruistic, of course, but we didn’t realize that he meant to give the city
everything
we had, financially and emotionally.)