The Haçienda (44 page)

Even with the Haçienda gone we still had to tie up the loose ends. We got £1.2 million for the property minus costs,having bought it for £1.2 million plus costs in 1992 and been forced to sell it during a slump in the property market.Two years later it would be resold for £5 million, and then sold again at double that to the company that turned it into flats.

The sale of the building paid off the ridiculous bridging loan that had crippled us since we first bought it and also paid back Rob’s directors’ loans.

At the end, me and my mates grabbed whatever we could from the Haçienda. The only thing Rob took was the ‘FAC 51’ sign from beside the front door.

I took the six-foot mirror-ball, the doors, the mats, the bar-tops, the banisters, the bollards and the front-door plate that everyone walked over to get in (under which I found the hidden CCTV tapes of New Year’s Eve 1995: we’d had a lot of trouble that night so the bouncers must have hidden them where the police couldn’t find them. I’m going to put them out on DVD).

I felt I was losing something dear – very bloody dear – and wanted to keep any part of it I could. I don’t know what I’d thought I could to do with a bloody dance floor, but luckily I didn’t have the problem because Tony’s builders took it out (it ended up being thrown away).

Below the stage at the back was a closed-off section that had been used as a Factory storage area and later for the barrels. The barrels were on a platform and to keep the platform level someone had shoved a quarter-inch tape box underneath it.

I pulled it out. Covered in old beer and sweat and condensation, it was one of the master tapes of Joy Division’s debut album,
Unknown Pleasures
.

It made me smile. It was an absolutely perfect metaphor for the Haçienda.

Joy Division had held the whole fucking thing up.

The Haçienda Auction was hosted at Manchester’s Richard Conrad Building on Saturday 25 November 1997. An official website was created, www.hacauction.com, on which were featured the pieces of Haçienda history up for sale. Proceeds went to Manchester youth charities. The complete list of auctioned items was as follows:

1 × disc-jockey booth
8 × central supporting steel columns (RSJs),hazard-stripe design
10 × 1m
²
pieces of dance floor, cleaned, sanded, varnished and mounted on 18mm timber
5 × pieces of stage floor, cleaned and mounted on 18mm timber
1 × changing room
1 × sound-engineer/light-operator booth
1 × Kim Philby Bar
1 × first-floor Can Bar
1 × section of banquette seating
1 × ‘ruined’ arch (entrance to upstairs Can Bar)
1 × arch to dance-floor area
2 × feature columns adjacent to arch (sold as one lot) various sections of stage
various sections of stage surround in black and white hazard stripes
various sections of banquette seating from Mondays’ Corner (Salford’s, actually)
1 × handprint and signature set in concrete – signed ‘Tony ’94’
1 × handprint and signature set in concrete – signed ‘Hooky 94’
various bundles of fluorescent wall-light fittings
various bundles of electrical components and light fittings
3 × blue and red external perimeter light
5 × black and yellow acoustic baffles
3 × pallets of 200 mixed green-, blue- and red-glazed exterior bricks
3 × pallets of 200 plain bricks
4 × section of balcony balustrade
various stainless-steel sanitary ware from lavatories
various lavatory doors
kitchenware
freezers
4 × TV monitors
1 × cash register
1 × drinks-purchase book
6 × Victorian radiators in Haçienda and Round House
various lavatory mirrors,bar fixtures and fittings
notice boards
1 × pay telephone
various speaker supports
sale items
loose strips of dance-floor
loose green-, blue- and red-glazed exterior bricks

How did it last for fifteen years?

Tenacity. Rob’s mainly. Like a pit-bull terrier, even when everyone beat him with sticks he just wouldn’t let go.

I sometimes wonder how the club affected his family. He was so single-minded in the way he looked after it, which must have had a terrible impact on them; they had to live with the Haçienda and with him.

We never even considered that at the time – we were so up our own arses we never thought about the people who put up with us. Now I think about it,and all that they went through.Sorry.

Looking back on those years feels like narrowly missing a fatal traffic accident and marvelling that you weren’t among the casualties.My greatest times at the Haçienda were at the end of a night, after we’d closed and got all the stragglers out. The adrenaline would be flowing (everything was flowing) because it was all so dangerous and edgy and it felt nice to relax as a group, because we’d be down to the amenable drug-heads: the staff and some key punters. We’d all sit together to share a drink, savouring the fact that we’d got through it one more night. Phew.

After the building was sold we auctioned off souvenirs. The place was rammed with fans and collectors – all sorts of people. One guy bought the door to a toilet cubicle because he’d had sex against it and he wanted to remember the event. Another item was a lump of concrete from outside the door, into which Ang and I had carved our names. The auctioneers put it inside a frame; it looked quite nice. I bid on it and the price kept rising. Then Ang herself ran up to the podium, grabbed the microphone off me: ‘Stop bidding, Hooky, it’s me.’ She was the other person trying to buy it.Together we’d accidentally driven the price up. Typical.

Bobby Langley, an ex-Haçienda DJ, bought the DJ box. He’d heard a rumour that Cream was going buy it, and told me beforehand that
his bosses at Bench had set a limit of £8000 to keep it in Manchester (‘Don’t let the Scousers get it!’).I was the auctioneer for that particular lot.

I remember Bobby’s first bid: £100. Then a mystery bidder on the other side: £200.

Everyone looked but couldn’t see the other interested party. The bidding went on until the other guy dropped out, at £7900; Bobby got it for £8000.

When I told him years later that there’d been no other bidder he went effing mad. Turned out his boss had been joking and he nearly got sacked.

Ah well, it was a good cause. Tony had wondered aloud: ‘What’s he going to do? Run a burger bar out of it?’ (Actually Bobby brought it out for a Tribal Gathering event in Southport during 2002, where it was promoted as the main attraction. It was last seen rotting in a car park somewhere in the Northern Quarter.)

I bought two of the huge beams that held up the ceiling and loads of other stuff that I couldn’t store. They went missing. It is amazing nowadays how much gear I get offered from the Haçienda – stuff that people have stolen. Great that I get to pay for it twice.

Even before it closed people said how important the club had been in their lives. I usually just said, ‘Oh, right. OK. Excuse me.’ Then I’d run off, embarrassed but smiling.

Time’s a great healer. You get on with things. And now I find it easier to talk about the club. It was Eric Barker, 808 State’s dancer, who said to me at Glastonbury one year,‘It’s time to let it go,Hooky.’

He was right.

Rob died of a heart attack on 15 May 1999 (just a week short of what would have been the Haçienda’s seventeenth anniversary).

Rob Gretton, the ideas man, is the one to blame and to thank for everything that the Haçienda accomplished,good or bad.It truly was his baby.

Tony Wilson might have presented himself as the father of the club,but really he functioned as Rob’s enabler;left to our own devices, New Order never would have attempted to open the place. It was Rob’s goodwill and love of Manchester that sparked it all. He was the sort of person who wanted everyone to party with him. He always
loved company and was generous to a fault. Once he’d discovered at that first Factory Records Christmas party that it’s easier to give something away than to sell it, he never looked back.

He thought about things constantly, whether it was the club or the band. He stuffed his notebooks with plans and strategies, page after page of things to do or not to do, of problems to sort out. He wrote it all down.He was very positive – a doer,which to me is the mark of a good businessman. He hated networking in a formal manner. He couldn’t bear to mix with record companies. He thought it was all bullshit. You’d never hear him say, ‘Hi, I’m Rob Gretton, New Order’s manager.’ If somebody wanted him for business reasons they’d have to find him; and, if they did, as likely as not he’d tell them, ‘Oh, fuck off, leave me alone.’

If you’ve got a great band you can do anything.Rob was very lucky. He had two.

Today there are flats on the site of the club. I like that. If it had carried on as a club it would have been like seeing your girlfriend out with someone else.It’s a shrine.Everyone moaned at me for allowing them to use the Haçienda name, but I think it’s given the city a great focal point. In ten years’ time people may ask, ‘Why is it called the Haçienda Apartments?’They’ll get to hear our story and will be stunned.

The builders,Crosby Homes,paid a fortune for the building only to knock it down.Tony and I started the bulldozer.Then,blow me down, three weeks later the film company decided to rebuild the club as a set for the film
24 Hour Party People.
It cost £280,000.

Seeing the Haçienda reconstructed for the film ticked a few boxes, if you like. The movie may have been a distorted account of the rise and fall of the place, but it gave us a proper way to say goodbye – the closing party we never had,as Barney says.

And it was mind-boggling. To go back to the Haçienda, rebuilt down to the last detail – only the edges were different – was both a dream and a nightmare. It was the strangest experience of my life.

Paul Mason was there,everyone was there.That evening,while they were filming, I walked up to Barney and said, ‘Fucking hell, all that’s missing is Rob Gretton.’

He turned and went, ‘Look.’

There stood the actor Paddy Considine dressed as Rob.

I wanted to get drunk.I wanted to cry.It was so confusing,a weird and total head-fuck, too difficult to deal with.

But there was one terrific, hilarious postscript.

Apparently the Manto Group bought the movie set for £100,000 with the intention of moving it into a warehouse and running it as a club to cash in on our fans’ nostalgia. Had the bastards pulled this off I would have been devastated.They had no right to exploit the Haçienda’s memory.

And they didn’t.

While we all lay soundly asleep in our beds the morning after we’d all been to the Haçienda set to film the party scene, the film crew’s carpenter got on a walkie-talkie and asked the head of production, ‘Are we saving this? Yes or no?’

The head of production said, ‘No, it’s been sold,’ but the carpenter never heard anything after the word ‘No’.