The Haçienda (5 page)

He told us the club would cost around £70,000. Being a small label with limited overheads,Factory possessed some capital,which could be invested – money from the sale of Joy Division records, presumably – so the label would pay half. The other half would be paid by New Order and would be tax-deductible as an investment.

What?
We couldn’t believe it. £35,000. We were musicians living on £20 per week.Where the hell was this fortune going to come from?

‘We’ll use our profits from the sale of
Unknown Pleasures
,’ he replied. He had this habit of pushing his glasses up his nose when he spoke. ‘We’ll put that in. It’ll be a great investment – and on top of that we’ll finally have somewhere to go to. Double bubble.’

Mind you, if the money really was to come from the sales of Joy Division records, then Debbie Curtis – Ian’s widow, who received his share of band revenue – needed to be declared a partner in the club. But she never was. Rob left Debbie out of it by naming New Order, not Joy Division, as partners and stating that the money came from the sales of New Order’s records. However, I’d imagine revenue from both bands was used to pay for the club: if you think about it, Joy Division had at the time sold more records than New Order, so it’s only logical to assume that they served as the primary income.

Either way, we’d agreed to fund a club.

A new face had joined the Factory team by then.He was Howard ‘Ginger’ Jones, a local promoter who had impressed Rob by promoting a successful New Order gig at the Manchester Students Union. In conversation with Rob Gretton he’d said that one day he hoped to run a nightclub in the city that would provide an alternative to the Manchester raincoat-brigade scene. Gretton, who recognized a kindred spirit when he saw one, hired him virtually on the spot. Ginger’s task: to find a venue. One of those initially considered, then dropped, was the Tatler Cinema Club, but it was too small. They settled on a carpet warehouse on Oldham Street (near what would eventually be Dry), which was perfect. The purchase fell through, but the team were suitably fired up about the club and rushed into looking for another place. They found the International Marine Centre – a huge open space which was part of a building on the corner of Whitworth Street, not far from the Russell Club. Little more than a disused warehouse, it nevertheless fired the imaginations of Jones, Wilson, Gretton and Erasmus. Factory took the lease. Notably they didn’t buy the building, just took the lease. A mistake that would come back to haunt them.

As plans began to move forward, Mike Pickering came aboard. He was a friend of Gretton, having met him years ago, aged sixteen, when the two Manchester City fans were being chased by Nottingham Forest fans at an away game. ‘I just jumped in a garden and hid behind a hedge and he
did the same thing,’ said Pickering. ‘That was it then. We were best mates.’

In 1979 Pickering had relocated to Rotterdam, where he lived with Gonnie Rietveld. Together they formed the band Quando Quango and hosted nights at a squat in a disused water works. There he began DJing (‘Chic and Stacey Lattislaw’), as well as inviting Factory bands to play, having stayed in touch with Gretton.

Those who made the trip included A Certain Ratio, the Durutti Column, Section 25 and New Order – the latter’s second performance after the death of Ian Curtis. It was there that Gretton told Pickering about the Haçienda.

Gretton had legendary powers of persuasion.It is said that he was able to talk people into performing pranks on his behalf: pushing people into swimming pools, or trashing bars. So he had no problem talking Pickering into returning to the UK to take care of booking acts for the Haçienda. With the site still ‘a pile of rubble’, according to Pickering, he was back in Manchester preparing to launch a club that had yet to be built.

Rob and Tony wanted it run like a seven-days-a-week members’ club. They imagined that if someone popped into town they could stop by and get something to eat,have a cup of coffee or a beer.Furthermore, it could be somewhere you could go wearing whatever you liked. No dress code. Before it accomplished anything else, our place changed the face of clubbing in Manchester on that level because other clubs soon realized they needed to adapt.

Now all we needed was a name, which came from Tony. He’d got it from
Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International
, a book published in 1974 as a limited edition that became something of an underground classic. It featured essays from a magazine called
Internationale Situationniste
that said society had become boring, and that the only way to put everyone back on track was to create jarring ‘situations’ by combining all types of art, including architecture. Rob and Tony saw the club as a means of doing so. Situationism was their thing, not mine, although some of the concepts stuck with me and the people around us.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda
where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.

Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953

Tony picked up on that last phrase, ‘The hacienda must be built’, which became his call to action and gave us ‘hacienda’. To that was added a cedilla – so legend has it, in order that together the c and the i looked more like the number 51, which was to be the club’s catalogue number – and we had our name: the Haçienda.

‘Punk had levelled the ground,’ said Peter Saville. ‘It had burned for about eighteen months and all of us involved in that moment were wondering what you then build. There was a strong feeling that it was a post-revolutionary moment and that you had to then build the future.The Haçienda must be built was a great statement for that moment in time.’

However, Saville didn’t feel able to design the club. He was shown around the yacht showroom by Gretton and Wilson and was stunned by the space and flattered by the offer, but ultimately thought it a job more suited to Ben Kelly, of Ben Kelly Design.

London-based Kelly was a veteran of the punk years, having been at its epicentre: he was one of those arrested during the Pistols’ infamous Jubilee riverboat escapade; he spent the night in the cells and was later given a two-year suspended sentence. He had designed the shop front for Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary Seditionaries clothes shop on Kings Road, where anarchy shirts, bondage suits and parachute tops were available to London’s punks – a more fashion-conscious bunch than their Manchester contemporaries. He’d also designed the Glitterbest office, HQ for McLaren and the Pistols, then was asked to make their Denmark Street rehearsal rooms habitable. (Upon arriving there for the first time, he found himself being chased down the street by the Pistols’ drummer, Paul Cook, who was wearing just a pair of underpants.) Next he was asked by Steve Jones to do some work on his West Hampstead flat. The brief: ‘I don’t care what you do, as long as it impresses the birds.’ It worked – Kelly recalled seeing most of Hot Gossip leaving Jones’s bedroom one morning. So, for Factory,his punk-rock credentials were impeccable.

Kelly and Saville had already collaborated on the sleeve for a single by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (an ex-Factory band who have since
moved to Virgin, where Saville had links), plus a Section 25 release for Factory.Work on the Haçienda would be an altogether more complex and three-dimensional task.

‘I got on a train and went to Manchester to be met by Howard ‘Ginger’ Jones in a red sports car,’ Kelly told journalist Miranda Sawyer. ‘We went to this place and Mr Wilson was there, Mr Erasmus was there, we walked round it and Tony Wilson said to me, “Do you want the job?” And I said, “Of course I want the fucking job.”’

His first task was to deal with the often conflicting desires of the Factory people, with their imaginations sparked by trips to New York nightclubs: the Fun House, Hurrah, Danceteria, and Paradise Garage. Gretton and Wilson had returned from these trips full of adjectives like ‘dark’, ‘intense’, ‘sleazy’, while the New Order contingent had been seduced by the half-lit corners and sense of mystery they’d encountered.

Yet, as Gretton was also keen to stress, the club had to be much more than a disco. It needed to be a venue
and
a club, an idea taken from the huge three-storey set-ups they’d discovered on their travels, where fans of both dance music and rock music were catered for on different floors or in different rooms. The trouble – as would later become painfully clear – was that this just wasn’t a concept that existed in the UK at the time, despite the good work and forward motion of New Order.

Meanwhile, Wilson and Gretton each had opposing ideas about where the stage should be situated. Gretton proposed it be located at the far end, where the bar went; Wilson wanted it along the side, where it eventually ended up. Gretton and Pickering were alive to the possibilities of dance music, of DJs and discos; Wilson more comfortable with live music. Then there was the fact that the Haçienda needed to act as a meeting place, so would be open during the day. Gretton said later that he’d wanted the club to be a place in which to ‘ogle birds’, and in this respect it was a brief not dissimilar to that provided by Steve Jones – the difference being that Gretton was half-joking and, as journalist John McReady wrote, ‘in truth it had more to do with his secret artiness, and the need of a shop to talk shop in.’

So, at the last count, it needed to be a disco, a venue, a bar, a café, a restaurant, somewhere to ogle birds and a place in which to trade ideas and inspiration
...

The truth was that nobody really knew what the Haçienda was or what it should be, though in typical fashion Wilson would later spin this fact,
calling it a ‘community service’,‘a space where things can happen,a place where people can meet.’

One thing that was certain and propaganda-free was the collective desire to give something to Manchester, to inject something into the city – whatever that something might turn out to be. All were horrified by the Beatles model: you make it, go to London and spend your money there. The Beatles’Apple HQ on Savile Row was the antithesis of the Factory way.

‘The difference is Manchester,’ said Wilson. ‘10CC, for example, made a load of cash and built Strawberry Studios in the early 1970s, so when Factory came on stream we had an international recording facility just around the corner from us. Similarly, New Order make a pile of money and together with a load of other people they’re able to build the Haçienda
...
’

This isn’t to suggest that Rob and Tony stood on equal footing. From early on, everybody recognized the club as being Rob’s baby. As Tony put it, ‘The Haçienda was Rob’s idea because nowhere else in Manchester would let him DJ, so he had to open his own club to do it.’ (Actually, Rob never DJed there; he preferred to watch the girls and get drunk.)

I don’t think Tony would have even tried it without Rob’s backing. Rob was intimidating, a huge physical presence in the early days. He was what you’d call a bit bullish, to be frank, and he took advantage of our smaller natures to railroad us into going along with lots of things.

They incorporated the business as FAC 51 Limited. Ironically it was also then that I realized what a rip-off lawyers’ fees could be. Our solicitor charged us £5,000 for registering the company, when in fact the fee to do it yourself was £175. FAC 51 was the Factory Records catalogue number that Tony assigned to the club. It was a limited-liability company, which gave us as shareholders a degree of personal protection because it meant that creditors couldn’t come after us personally and seize our assets. There was a legal barrier between our personal lives and our lives as the directors of the Haçienda. This was good because one of the most important conditions of having a limited company is the filing of annual accounts. If the company fails to do this, the directors of the company will be prosecuted, the company itself can be dissolved,and assets can become property of the Crown.Even if an accountant is used, the ultimate responsibility of filing the accounts lies with the directors.

Try to remember this.It’ll all come back to haunt us,believe me.

Now, talking of accountants, we had a right one.

Prior to 1981 Rob had an accountant for the band who’d been chosen because he had experience with other groups. But things didn’t work out so, around the time we were going to open the club, we moved to another accountant: Keith Taylor.

He didn’t have any other clients like us; I think his other clients were two newsagents in Cheetham Hill. But for some reason Rob and Tony decided that Keith was the man to run the accounts not only for the Haçienda but for Joy Division,New Order and Factory too.Keith was Jewish and I think Rob and Tony liked the fact that we had a Jewish accountant while at the same time were being accused of being fascists because of the names Joy Division and New Order (which some people incorrectly said we used in reference to fascism) and the fact that another Factory band,A Certain Ratio,had used Nazi imagery on one of their sleeves. Keith always used to drive up to meetings playing the German national anthem, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles’, in his car, laughing. Maybe he was thinking of the fees?

Keith did stand up and say that he believed the Haçienda was being run badly – he insisted that it was overstaffed and not profitable, and that the staff were overpaid (which was all true) – yet we came to regret hiring him. He didn’t seem to have the skill or experience for the job and I felt he caused us loads of problems and made lots of mistakes.

Gradually, the affairs of New Order, the Haçienda and Factory became entwined with each other on every conceivable level and this happened without any of us in New Order noticing. We stayed on the periphery of it all – which was odd,not to mention foolhardy,considering the amount of money we had at stake. We were only consulted about what went on at the club when it slipped into dire financial straits. The rest of the time we were allowed (or encouraged, more like) to keep our noses out, which was fine by us. We were too busy getting pissed and travelling. We were never even interested in what we made from record and gigs, when that’s the first thing we should have asked. Even Barney, who could be notoriously ‘careful’, didn’t bother about how much money was at stake. It was
boring
and we wanted to leave it to Rob. That head-in-the-sand attitude is the only reason we all agreed to go along with it. The only people we have to blame are ourselves.