The Haçienda (6 page)

It still all seemed so surreal. The first time Rob took me to see the building that became the Haçienda it still had yachts in it. I walked around the interior with him going, ‘This is where the bar is gonna be . . . This is where the stage is going to be . . .’ and me saying, ‘Yeah!’ as if I shared his passion. But deep down I wasn’t interested.

I should have been.

Area

Open from 1983 to 1987, Area was famous for its ‘themes’: ‘Night’, ‘Surrealism’ and ‘Gnarly’, for example. The themes changed every six weeks or so and were created by well-known artists of the era so attracted a significant celebrity following.

The Loft

David Mancuso is often credited with giving birth to modern dance-music culture at parties held at his Broadway apartment. Begun in 1970, they were invitation-only and held for a love of the music, creating a scene – mainly gay, black and Hispanic – that also included clubs such as the Gallery,Salvation and Sanctuary.Insiders included legendary DJs Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan,who were introduced to the art of mixing.Knuckles relocated to Chicago where his residency at the Warehouse was to give the world house music. Levan stayed in New York and opened the Paradise Garage.

The Paradise Garage

Like the Loft, the Paradise Garage was not open to the general public and did not serve food or drink. Instead the hedonistic scene was fuelled by amphetamines, quaaludes and LSD. Music was paramount, and Levan played an eclectic selection with the emphasis on dance-ability: you’d be just as likely to hear the Clash’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ as Sylvester, while performers included Grace Jones and Madonna. The club inspired many a visiting Brit – including Paul Oakenfold, who would help kick-start acid house in the south of England,and the Factory crew, who would do the same in the north.

Danceteria

Based on 21st Street, Danceteria was
the
New York club between 1980 and 1986 and was equally influential on the Haçienda. DJ Mark
Kamins was the main draw, and it was seeing him at work that would eventually inspire Mike Pickering to shake up the Haçienda’s musical policy (more of that later). Another favoured hangout of Madonna, the Danceteria was used for the nightclub scene in
Desperately Seeking Susan
and featured four floors playing hip hop, post-punk, disco and chill-out in a wild, Bacchanalian environment.

Hurrah

A focal point for the city’s punk and post-punk scenes in the early 1980s, Hurrah was the base for Ruth Polsky, who was talent buyer there before moving to Danceteria. Polsky was crucial when it came to breaking UK post-punk bands in the US and was a major figure in creating the Manchester–New York connection; therefore she was important in the birth of the Haçienda.She had booked the May 1980 Joy Division tour and had also booked A Certain Ratio.They,along with Tony Wilson, spent about six weeks in the city in 1980, recording ACR’s debut album and absorbing the nightlife. There they came into contact with ESG,hip,young stalwarts of the club scene,who opened for ACR then recorded with Martin Hannett,forging yet another lasting link between Factory and the Big Apple.‘That was us taking a bit of New York back to the UK,’ said ACR’s Martin Moscrop. ‘and it’s the same with New Order. When they came to New York, they were still sort of in the rocky phase.But they started getting more dance-orientated. We were both taking New York back to Manchester.’

Fun House

Fun House at 526 West 26th Street reached its height in the early 1980s and was where John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez – later the boyfriend and producer of Madonna – made his name as a DJ. It was to Fun House in 1983 that producer Arthur Baker took an early version of New Order’s ‘Confusion’ for Benitez to test on the crowd – to an overwhelmingly positive response.

Roxy

Based at 515 West 18th Street, the Roxy was open from 1978 to 2008 and was initially the main competitor to the legendary Studio 54. At one point it had the world’s most expensive dance floor in the Floating Floor, a roller-skating rink that had cost the club $500,000.

WBLS and Kiss FM

Visiting bands were as impressed by the pre-club warm-up mixes offered by the city’s radio stations as they were by the clubs themselves. Tony Wilson had become fond of the DJ Frankie Crocker on WBLS, while New Order loved Shep Pettibone’s famous mastermixes.

Work on the Haçienda continued, with Kelly managing the expectations of the Factory bosses while enjoying the freedom allowed by the brief he’d been given: ‘Big bar, small bar, food, stage, dance floor, balcony, and a cocktail bar in the basement.’

Kelly said he took his inspiration from the building itself and ‘my arrogance in thinking I knew what a club designed for Factory and New Order should look like’.

Saville, meanwhile, agreed; the idea was for it to be a three-dimensional manifestation of Factory Records,he said.As a result,the Haçienda was to boast the same commitment to arty functionality, the same attention to detail.

All of which cost loads of money – which came from
...
?

New Order’s first album,
Movement
, their last to be produced by Hannett, had been released at the end of 1981 and standalone singles ‘Ceremony’,‘Everything’s Gone Green’and ‘Temptation’were mainstays of the indie chart. Yet the individual members of the band were seeing few fruits of their labour. Instead the money was disappearing down what Hannett would later describe as ‘a hole in the ground called the Haçienda’.

And it was a big hole. Though the initial budget was naively estimated at around £70,000, the eventual cost would be over £340,000. This was split between Whitbread Breweries, which parted with £140,000, New Order/Joy Division, who were initially asked for £35,000 but actually provided more than £100,000,and Factory,which came up with the rest.

Howard Jones, tasked with finding the cash to meet the cost of Ben Kelly’s vision, remembered having ‘raging rows’ with Wilson over money – though they would always end with Wilson handing over another cheque.

‘What Tony liked to express was did I know how much pressure I was putting Factory Records as a company under,to make FAC 51 happen,’he said.

Before we knew it,they started remodelling the interior and the budget had escalated to £155,000. It was around that time that Rob stopped consulting us about money.

As if Ben’s ambitious design wasn’t enough, they also appeared not to follow the local building regulations. They submitted plans featuring the existing wooden balcony, which unto itself wasn’t a bad idea – saving us the money on building a new one. Trouble was, we were told it didn’t meet fire regulations. So they had to rebuild it, which added something like £45,000 to the bill.

Think about it: the Haçienda cost £344,000 to build in 1981. That’s equivalent to about three million now. If you spent three million on a club today people would think you were potty.

In New Order we’d sit there laughing about cock-ups and cost overruns. Otherwise we didn’t get involved. It would have been a bit mind-blowing to watch someone squander that much money when each of us lived on £20 a week. As it was, it felt like someone else’s money.

The only time we were asked for our opinions was when we got involved with the argument over the placement of the stage: whether to put it at the end of the main bar or in the middle. We all wanted it at the end, and guess where they put it? The middle. I’m sure Tony asked for that,if only to be contrary.

My most significant input was the decision of where to put the stage and the dance floor. I didn’t want the stage at the end because it would dominate the space and make it a performance space, as opposed to the basic idea, which was that it was a discotheque. It was me who said the dance floor should go in the middle and the stage where it is. It doesn’t dominate the club but groups that have large lighting rigs just can’t play there, so I’ve had a lot of stick in the past for that choice.’

Tony Wilson, quoted in
The Haçienda Must be Built
, edited by Jon Savage

Then, as building work neared completion, it became obvious there was going to be a shortfall, so we borrowed the money from Whitbread to finish it off. That’s quite a common thing to do in the UK. You borrow the money but have to sign an exclusive contract with the
brewery; and once you take that loan you lose all bargaining power over the wholesale price of any beer you purchase. That was the deal. As far as the brewery was concerned:you can borrow the money from us, but you forfeit any discount on what you buy until the loan’s repaid. We didn’t realize the significance of that until we opened.

That contract locked us into a money-draining situation from which we’d never recover. Eventually we were among those selling the highest volume of beer in the northwest of England but we never made any profit on it thanks to that deal. Some little pub in Levenshulme may have been paying Whitbread 10p a pint, yet the Haçienda, which should have received a quantity discount, was paying £1 a pint.

We weren’t making any money on the draught or the brewery bottles and after a while the manager took to sneaking off to Makro to buy beer cheap to sell behind the bar for cash to keep the club going. (We weren’t actually the biggest beer-seller in Manchester;that honour went to the Old Monkey on Portland Street, a Holt’s pub that sells it at a pound a pint. Consistently the champion.)

Another big mistake made – again, because of inexperience – was the lease. The owners of the building, who would turn out to be a proper bunch of bastards, demanded a twenty-five-year lease. We settled on that. They even did the oldest trick in the book, the ‘we’ve got somebody else very interested,you better hurry up’ploy.Guess what? We fell for it.And became the proud owners of a very expensive club with a quarter-century lease.

Next the band made a mistake. Looking back, perhaps the biggest mistake possible.

We were persuaded to sign personal guarantees for the bank, the lessees, the brewery and to all intents and purposes the devil, which made us personally liable for all debts. Before, we had been shareholders in a limited company with our personal assets protected by that status. Now, if the club went bust before we repaid the debts, we would all be liable/fucked: the bank would be free to take our homes, cars, first-born – anything we had to our name – and sell them to recoup its losses. To Rob, an inveterate gambler, this amounted to an acceptable risk.

Once they became clear to us we were terrified of the potential consequences, and for years they hung over our heads like Damocles’s sword. At least Rob was in it with us. He’d signed a personal guarantee,
too, and on more than one occasion over the years to come nearly lost his own house because of it.

Of course, the money drain had started as soon as we employed our architect.

Somebody once asked me who I thought was responsible for the ultimate demise of the Haçienda. The answer at the time was Ben Kelly.

I know different these days, of course, I realize that none of us were blameless. But it was Ben who – appropriately for an architect – laid the foundations.

Everything he did for us – starting with the Haçienda then later our bar, Dry; the Factory Records office building; and even Tony Wilson’s own flat – came in massively over budget. The people in charge gave Ben complete freedom to do whatever he wanted to do and actively encouraged him to go totally over the top. He’s a nice guy, but he’d never worked on a club before and admitted as much. By the time it was finished, the Haçienda was 5000 per cent over-designed for its audience. On walking in, the initial impression was always ‘Wow’, but at the end of the day concert-goers don’t care about the architectural style of venues, they just want to see bands play without fucking girders in the way and shit sound. Later, during the acid-house era, people enjoyed themselves just as much dancing in shitholes that cost nothing as they did inside the Haçienda,which cost a fortune.So it’s debatable how much of the Haçienda’s success was down to Ben.