The Haçienda (43 page)

It was agreed to distribute 1000 free tickets for April, subject to agreement from Luvdup.

Extract from the minutes of the weekly management meeting held in the Round House on Thursday 24 March 1994:

Transform

AM had prepared a budget for the April Transform. It was agreed that the DJ line-up of Alex Patterson, David Holmes and Fabio Paras was more than was necessary for the night and that we should look to drop
one of them from the line-up. It was agreed that the security was too much and that we should be looking to drop one regular doorman and one supervisor if possible.

Classics 88

PM asked if he could spend a total of £750 on props for the night and in particular buy a new swimming pool.He was asked to wait until after the weekend to see whether or not we could afford it or not.

Extract from the minutes of a Haçienda/Dry meeting held in April 1994:

Haçienda matters

Classics 89 – 196 tickets sold. £1000 for June, July, August.

The accounts will be ready week on Thursday.

Charlatans confirmed.

Oasis might get moved to Haçienda from University. AM to chase up. [The gig wasn’t changed. Oasis played the University that June and the Haçienda in September.]

AHW explained CD ROM to A Matthews.

RG has put AHW in charge of the Haçienda CD-ROM.

Ministry of Sound tour has sold badly.Keep price at £8 on the door, £6 for students.

Extracts from the ‘brief’ minutes of a weekly management meeting held in the Round House on 28 April 1994:

AM reported that the doormen felt that too many people were being knocked back on Flesh nights due to their alleged heterosexuality.

RG bet both PH and AK £20 that there would be more than 500 customers on Friday night.

There was to be one last shot at getting Jolly Roger up and running in June.

It was decided that this was not the best time for Dry to invest in a computer.

From the Haçienda monthly newsletter, 1995

In 1995 the Haçienda was brought to you by:

Rob Gretton: Managing Director
Paul Mason: Operations Manager
Ang Matthews: General Manager, Club Diva, Friend of the Stars
Andy King: The Trendy Accountant
John Reid a.k.a. Fred: Maintenance, Health & Vinyl Flooring
Anton Razak [
sic
]: Assistant Manager (Mr Lover Lover)
Jon Drape: Production, Man about Town
Andy Jackson: PR Princess PC: Creative Director (Graphic Design)
Mel Dymott: Office Manager & Merchandise
Bobby Langley: DJ & Tours Little
John: Publicity
Gavin Richardson: Cellar Dweller
Stephen Page: Lighting, Tour Production &
Guardian
Crossword
Thomas Piper:Sound
Catrina Bill: Cashier
John Nowinski: Maintenance & Paint

There was another setback in June 1997. Our licence had come up for renewal, so the licensing committee decided to have a look round the infamous Haçienda and see if it was worthy. The committee of seven magistrates turned up in a minibus and Rob and Leroy were waiting to greet them.Unfortunately we’d already had trouble,a minor skirmish, and at that precise moment the four Salford lot who had been thrown out earlier did a drive-by. They rode their car on to the pavement, leaned out of the window and hit the offending bouncer with a wheel brace, smashing his head open and sending his blood raining all over the licensing committee.

It didn’t help much, let’s put it that way.

‘That spelt another closure order from Great Great Greater Manchester Police,’ wrote Tony Wilson in
24 Hour Party People
. ‘One that even George Carman couldn’t save [us] from.’

Things got even worse. We owed Whitbread a lot of money and because we hadn’t paid them they stopped supplying us with beer. So we closed the doors one Saturday night. We didn’t know it then, but that would be the last night of the Haçienda. There was no farewell party,no final goodbye.We just closed.

A couple of days later Rob called a meeting of possible investors – as many as he could muster – who had been invited via New Order’s financial planner. There were some big investors there: about eight of the city’s biggest money men. Politely they listened to what we had to say and it was obvious they loved the romance of the place – its history, the whole rock ’n’ rollness of it. But, at the end of the day, they were businessmen, and rock ’n’ rollness doesn’t pay the bills. None of them would invest.

Now Rob was desperate. So, when Paul Carroll approached him with an offer of cash, he saw a way out. Paul stood to lose a lot from the Haçienda closing: the doormen were out of pocket by thousands every week it was shut.

Paul could lend Rob the money needed in order to get Whitbread off our backs and pay off some other outstanding debts: this amounted to £40,000.

Rob and Ang met Paul outside the club, where he delivered the cash in a bin bag. (Ang stuck her head inside and stared at all the money, incredulous.) Rob went to the bank straight away, having already made an arrangement with the bank manager whereby we could deposit the money and use it to get the club up and running again, without it going towards our debt with the bank. This was supposed to be bail-out money, used to reopen the club. But the bank panicked because the club was shut and illegally took the money to pay off our overdraft with them; our overdraft facility was simultaneously shut down.

Rob had got the money he’d needed then lost it all – in the same day! Now we weren’t even back to square one; we were deeper in trouble than we had been before, because suddenly we owed money to the creditors, to the breweries and to the fucking gangsters . . . And we couldn’t reopen the club.

Paul went berserk. Rob told him: ‘I can’t open the club. They’ve taken the money and used it.’

Paul’s immediate response was the same as anyone else’s would be: ‘I want the money back.’

‘I haven’t got it now. It’s gone.’

At that point Rob was given several options, none of them suitable for family reading.

Rob phoned to tell me what had happened.

‘Oh my fucking good God,’ was all I could say.

I ended up giving him the cash to pay Paul back. Ironic, really, since Paul had already phoned me to let me know what a bastard Rob was, how he’d disrespected him, etc.. And to advise me not to lend him the money because he needed to be taught a lesson.

Well, at least it was over.

At the same time, we were having problems with Companies House.

We had three years of accounts outstanding with them, which were accruing late fees every month. Companies House threatened to wind up the Haçienda and Dry if we didn’t file them immediately.

All we needed was our accountants to tidy up and submit them. And they chose that moment to announce that they wanted up-front the £10,000 it would cost to do the job, the bastards. They knew we were on our way out, didn’t they – they’d seen the accounts.

It was a tiny amount compared to what we had paid them over the years. They’d earned hundreds of thousands of pounds off the Haçienda, New Order, Joy Division and Factory, but ultimately pulled out over ten grand. Thanks, Mr Ernst and Mr Young.

By now the situation was hopeless. The club was shut, we couldn’t pay our debts or reopen and Companies House planned to make us bankrupt.

It was jumped or be pushed. So we jumped.

We agreed to go into voluntary administration;in other words,voluntary bankruptcy.

The liquidator told us everything would be easy.We would be able to reopen the club under another trading name and start again, with the lease reverting back to the building owners: us. Please don’t anybody ever believe a word a liquidator says to them.

I thought it was a bad idea. As far as I was concerned it was definitely time to bail out. But Rob as always wanted to carry on, his sense of honour still to the fore. He thought we would be able to reopen, lose the debts and then earn enough money to pay back the creditors.

I still loved the club but I was sick of throwing good money after bad into Martin Hannett’s ‘hole in ground called the Haçienda’ with not a cat in hell’s chance of seeing any of it ever again.

I was still paying the Haçienda mortgage – seven grand a month – to keep the building. At that point in my career I wasn’t even working, New Order being in hiatus. Try as I might, it was all slipping through my fingers. I was staring personal bankruptcy in the face.

My accountant told me, ‘You cannot sort this out. There is no way.’

*

So in the end it wasn’t the gangs, the drugs or the violence that brought down the Haçienda; it was a bunch of people doing sums – they were the biggest fuckheads of the lot. There you go: the calculator is mightier than the gun.

Heartbreaking or not,it was my escape route and I took it.Rob and I spoke over the phone.

‘Shut the fucking thing down,’ I told him. ‘I can’t handle it any more. I’m finished. I’m not putting any more money in. This has gone far enough and it’s not going anywhere.’

He was bitterly upset. ‘
Judas
. You betrayed me.’ He yelled. He screamed. ‘You stabbed me in the back.’

Afterwards it was very difficult, especially in the meetings about the building being sold. We banged heads many times but I suppose he had to talk to me because he was still managing New Order/Joy Division. His livelihood came from us, whether he liked it or not.

For many, the last ‘proper’ night of the Haçienda was the club’s Fifteenth Birthday Party on 15 May. The place was packed and it was difficult to move, with more than 2500 clubbers gathered to see Sasha and Digweed play the main room, with Jon DaSilva and Laurent Garnier downstairs.

The night also marked the launch of a long-awaited three-CD compilation, released through Deconstruction and mixed by Dave Rofe, Jon DaSilva and Pete Robinson. Fittingly, it was beautifully packaged yet exorbitantly expensive: its £27 price-tag proved to be off-putting to most (though the CD is now a much sought-after collectors’ item).

It was released on 26 May and was called
Viva Haçienda!
The irony was terrible.

Just a month later, the club closed for good.

Essentially we were too idealistic. We didn’t want to run the Haçienda as a business – we wanted a playground for ourselves and our friends. You need a different philosophy to operate a club as a business, especially if you want to make a success of it. We couldn’t bring ourselves to stop the staff from having a great time. We wanted everyone to enjoy it with us,so we treated it like a big party.The best Manchester has ever seen.

The last night of the Haçienda was Saturday 28 June 1997. Dave Haslam was DJing, and had no idea it was to be the last-ever night. The club was full and there was, for once, no violence.

I remember that after we’d closed one of the gangsters stopped me on Market Street in Manchester to lament: ‘We’ve got fucking nowhere to go now, man. It’s all downhill for Manchester.’

What a joke. All I could think was, ‘It was the likes of you who shut it, you fucker.’

Couldn’t say it, of course. And anyway it wasn’t quite true. When the Haçienda shut down the Salford lot who had taken up residence there went out and caused mayhem in every other club in town. They just charged right in, straight past the doormen, and took over.

I for one was delighted, to be honest, because we’d had to put up with them while all the other clubs in Manchester stayed quite safe and nobody had ever given us any credit for that. Now the other clubs shat themselves as the Salford lot ran riot all around town.

It quietened down after a while because none of the other clubs had the same allure as the Haçienda. Also cocaine use had spread like an epidemic. A lot of the gangsters stayed at home to get high and didn’t want to go out as much. That’s the difference between ecstasy and coke: you don’t want music when you’re on coke; you want to sit and talk shit.

The staff couldn’t quite believe we’d gone bankrupt. Some were uncommonly loyal.We’d seen a very low turnover of staff compared to that in other clubs, not because of great wages but because they loved the Haçienda/Factory ethos and Rob and Tony. With the building locked up, and the staff not allowed back inside, they gathered at Dry and we all sat together, in shock.

I remember that when we sold Dry, to Hale Leisure in October, Ang handed me the keys then burst out crying.I asked her what was wrong.

‘What do you think is wrong? That’s it for us. We’re done now. It’s over.’

Then Anton showed up, having been hired by Hale Leisure to run the place. He’d been poached, much to his embarrassment – although nobody minded; in fact many of the staff stayed on. Mind you, I think
they felt shocked at finally being treated as employees, not as friends, by the new owners: they’d be calling Ang up all the time, crying because they weren’t allowed more than one glass of orange squash per shift; they’d been used to getting pissed for nothing when they worked for us.

Hale Leisure also solved the problem of polishing that brass handrail by painting it black. Why didn’t we think of that? Because it looked shit, that’s why.