The Haçienda (7 page)

That said,he certainly came up with a unique,iconic design that has stood the test of time. You’ve got to give him that. It is still a landmark, a classic.

When finished the club would be described as ‘neither a venue nor a disco, a real-life stage-set built with the most mundane materials used to maximum effect.’

Walls were painted in shades of cool,airy blue-grey.Pigeon Blue BS409, to be exact. The structural elements of the building were emphasized rather than hidden. Supports and girders boasted black and yellow safety stripes, echoing Peter Saville’s graphic design and harking back to the early days of the Factory nights and the famous ‘wear hearing protection’ poster.

Kelly has described the design as boasting ‘visual puns’. The line of steel columns was colour coded to warn you: take care – you never know who
you might bump into on the dance floor. A formal disco environment was out of the question, he said, and sure enough he’d backed Wilson when it came to the placement of the stage, wanting to emphasize the function of the place as club not venue. Additionally, fly bars with theatrical lights were introduced so the management could tailor the lighting to the event, rather than have the event dictated by the lighting.

Overall, Kelly brought to it what’s been described as ‘an inside/outside tension’, a city within a city, a place of walkways, plazas and bars, complete with bollards and cats eyes, supports and stripes suggesting certain journeys through the building. The materials were hard-wearing. The dance floor was made of sprung maple, the material used in professional dance-rehearsal spaces and thus built to last; bar tops were made of concrete and granite. It’s a tribute to both the design and the materials that in fifteen years of the club being open the look remained the same, and refurbishment was mainly limited to extra coats of Pigeon Blue BS409.

Still the schizophrenia over its purpose persisted. Packed in was a café/restaurant, stage, dance floor, three bars – the Gay Traitor, the Kim Philby and Hicks – on three levels. It meant you could dance, drink, dine, see a band – all, according to the Ben Kelly book
Plans and Elevations
, in ‘an environment which was visually stimulating
...
Adaptable to a variety of activities, have flexibility within its framework to change with changing ideas and attitudes, and initiate change within an environment which questions the language and values of the established disco/club format.’

‘But there’s no back room,’ said Richard Boon, Buzzcocks manager and a promoter in the Manchester scene who supported us as Joy Division.

He was right. Unlike other clubs, the Haçienda didn’t have a VIP area. At the time, of course, that felt like a mistake, but during our heyday it was part of the club’s appeal.No VIP area meant that celebrities had to mix with the regular punters instead of hiding behind a velvet rope. You could go into the Haçienda and stand at the bar next to Shaun Ryder, find yourself dancing alongside Ian Brown.

Like I say, though, when it first opened it just felt like another cock-up to go along with the DJ booth, which initially was in an amp room by the side of the stage. It had a tiny window, which meant DJs could-n’t see the dance floor unless they stood on a crate. Plus, the decks were at the back of the booth, opposite the window, so DJs would
have to turn their back on the window to put records on. Absolutely useless. We ended up having to move it to the balcony.

The glass roof was never painted out. Why? I don’t know. Ben’s decision? I must ask him. I suppose he must have liked the look of it. But in the summer the club stayed light until late at night because of it. It was airy,though.A normal designer would have put in a low ceiling to give it atmosphere but Ben Kelly approached it from an architect’s point of view, not that of a clubber.

Everyone thought it was fucking mad, but on the other hand that’s also why they loved it so much.It looked great . . .for an art gallery.For a club, it was too bright, so un-club like – especially with only a few people in it. It was as though Rob and Tony had deliberately picked the building least favourable for creating a club in, a huge, empty shell, instead of getting some place purpose-made.That was very typical of Rob. He was always so stubborn. It was if he had looked at this yacht showroom and decided, ‘Right! You’re going to be a club.’

You could spend forever arguing whether or not there was a need to be so arty,but a less artistic club wouldn’t have pleased Rob or Tony and maybe not us, either. Then, we’d be just one more club owner among thousands.We wanted something extraordinary.

Apparently they didn’t consider how great their reputation was among music fans.The Factory tie-in alone would have earned them a fortune and an audience,whatever kind of place they’d opened,or perhaps their egos required more. No one ever changed the world by being normal. Everything comes down to leaving a great legacy. That’s why we ended up with the most avant-garde club in the whole world.

Aesthetically the Haçienda established its graphic style very early on. The black and yellow stripes are iconic. One look and you instantly know it’s the Haçienda. Rob commissioned Saville to design all of the club’s posters and advertisements,again giving him the freedom to do as he wished. The old joke about him being late on all of his projects stayed true, though, and over the years Rob and Saville fell out often; they were always at each other’s throats. Later, a Manchester-based designer named Trevor Johnson took over and handled a lot of the advertising, often using Peter’s work as a starting point. Eventually we employed an in-house design team to do the work.

As for the Haçienda, a lot of other clubs have since copied many
aspects of its style, and I’d like to think that their designers didn’t come in on time or on budget either.

‘About a week before we opened,’ said Tony Wilson, ‘I was showing somebody around and they said, “Who the hell are you building this for?” And we said, “Well, the kids.” And they said, “When was the last time you saw the kids? It was in Rafters, wasn’t it, nine months ago, and they were all wearing raincoats and long drab clothes, watching a band in the corner of the room. So why are you building a glossy New York discotheque?” I was rather stumped. I couldn’t answer that question.’

Martin Hannett remained deeply unhappy about the enterprise, loudly making his frustration clear to visiting bands in the studio. He had wanted to plough the cash back into what he considered to be the label’s core product: music. At best he wanted a studio, at the very least a new synthesizer:a Fairlight CMI Series II,which was being used by the likes of Kate Bush, Jean Michel Jarre and Hannett’s great rival, Trevor Horn.

Sure enough, shortly before the club was due to launch, Factory’s musical magician filed a lawsuit against the label he’d helped create, attempting to prevent the opening and claim more money from his stake in the label. It was the beginning of the end of his relationship with Factory
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Amazingly, the club only took up a fraction of the space available to us in the building. There were three floors above the Haçienda, as well as the entire left-hand side of the building, which we called the Round House (an area with its own, separate entrance), and they went mainly unused. There was always talk of renting those bits out, but nothing much came of that idea. Bands would use them for rehearsing (the Stone Roses for a while, the Doves and the Happy Mondays) but only for short periods. The only business willing to take a longer lease turned out to be a brothel – which Tony felt was a stop too far, even for us.

The basement was especially complicated. Down there we had the famous Gay Traitor bar. In that was a set of double doors. People were forever trying to go through but they stayed locked. If they had got through, they would have found a huge storage area full of posters and junk. Cross the floor and there was a set of doors with a ramp leading to them. Outside those: the canal bank. To the right, another door, another area. This was slightly less scruffy and would later become
Swing, our hairdressing salon, which doubled as a dressing room for visiting bands. Having got changed (and done whatever else it is that bands do in dressing rooms before a gig) it was then a case of going up a set of narrow stairs to get to the stage.

So,it seemed like we had everything we needed in the club.Even so, not long before opening night,Terry Mason,who provided a lot of the hands-on labour, and our roadie Corky Caulfield were in the building, helping Alan Erasmus with some last details. Corky, who’d worked in clubs before, looked around the building and asked, ‘Where’s the cloakroom? I’ve not seen it yet.’

‘Cloakroom? Oh, fuck.’

They’d forgotten to put one in. With no time left to build one, they took a tiny utility area by the door – a storage space – and decided to use that instead.

One great testament I thought to Factory’s popularity was the membership debacle. The licensing committee had worked their magic and decided that we would be limited to having a member’s-only licence. So we had to put a Plan B in place.

Only we didn’t have one; the thought of membership hadn’t crossed our minds. Once we put it onto operation, though, the response was fantastic.

Which reminds me: not long ago, a girl approached me and asked me to sign her Haçienda membership card. It was number 6724. First of all, I was flabbergasted because I thought we’d only issued 2000 memberships. Yet it turns out the figure is closer to 7000. At £5.25 each (and while we’re on the subject, why not £5.10? Think about it. FAC 51 – £5.10. How Tony missed that I don’t know), that should have earned more than £35,000 for the club. Later I asked Mike Pickering why it never appeared in the accounts. He had no idea.

People applied from all over the world, knowing they’d probably never make an appearance in the building, just wanting to be in on what we were doing. A great compliment. Many people still treasure their membership cards to this day.

Membership cards were designed by Saville and arrived late. Because of that,Factory had to issue temporary cards for the opening night – at great expense. While the standard membership cards are indeed collectors’ items,these temporary versions are even more sought after.Saville was also
responsible for the invitations to the opening, which were also late, but had been intended for the musicians, journalists, movers and shakers in the Manchester music scene – who turned up anyway. The kids for whom the club was supposedly built could come the next night to see Cabaret Voltaire, said Wilson.

For the night, on 21 May 1982, comedian Bernard Manning performed – to boos, abuse and feedback through a sound system that all agreed had room for improvement. DJ for the evening was Hewan Clarke and live music came courtesy of ESG, who, either by accident or design, perfectly articulated the ideals of the Haçienda.A trio of very young (they were chaperoned by their mother) sisters from New York, ESG played a bass-heavy, spare funk that has since been credited with inspiring new-wave, punk and hip-hop artists. At the time they were mainstays of the New York club scene from which the Haçienda drew so much inspiration, and had opened for Public Image Limited and A Certain Ratio, the latter performance bringing them to the attention of Tony Wilson. He then brought them to Factory in 1981 for an EP,
You’re No Good
, which had been produced by Hannett and featured the much-sampled ‘UFO’, one of the hippest and most influential tunes of the era.

‘We were kids at the time,’ said singer Renee Scroggins of the band’s Haçienda appearance. ‘We were excited to be in a new place – out of the Bronx. When people ask me what it was like being the first band to open the club
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The place was full of sawdust. They were still building the club. My memory is plenty of sawdust and coffee – wasn’t exactly a pleasant memory.They were still testing the sound system.It was crazy.’

The club was packed on the night. (‘It was the next five years that were empty,’ said Wilson later.) Guests struggled with a take-a-ticket system at the bar, similar to that used in supermarkets and based on what the team had seen in action at Danceteria. The system didn’t cross the ocean, however, and was dropped after some months. Those who were there recall the smell of paint,planks on the floor,the fact that it was so light and airy – and very cold.

I went to the opening with Iris, my girlfriend at the time. We got an invite in the post like everybody else.

As for the night’s entertainment,Hewan Clarke – a lovely bloke who had a trademark lisp – was the DJ. Because of his speech impediment, we teased him by saying, ‘The Hathienda mutht be built.’ He’d stick with
us for years. He was a nice, quiet guy. I don’t remember much about his musical tastes, but my memories of him are all good. The cult of the DJ hadn’t yet begun. On the opening night he DJed between acts but nobody paid any attention to what records he was playing.

Bernard Manning was the compère for the evening. Manning was a comedian who owned the World Famous Embassy Club on Rochdale Road in Manchester (which has outlasted even him and us), near where I used to live in Moston. Rob and Tony thought it was ironic, having him do a spot on the opening night. To them he represented the sort of old-school, working-men’s club environment the Haçienda meant to replace. The crowd were bemused, quite rightly. As for Manning, he took one look at the Haçienda and sussed out it was run by idiots. He laughed his balls off as we tried to pay him. He turned to Rob, Tony and me and said, ‘Keep it. You’ve never run a club before, have you?’

We stared at him, puzzled. What did he mean?

‘Fucking stick to your day jobs, lads, ’cause you’re not cut out for clubs. Give up now while you’ve got the chance.’ Then he walked off.

We chuckled, thinking, ‘We’ll show him.’

From what he’d seen that night, Manning thought it was doomed. Nobody in the audience could hear what he said over the PA because the sound system and acoustics were so terrible. It confused people. That’s probably another reason I don’t remember Hewan’s set: the dreadful sound. It was bloody awful. I might have felt a bit detached from the place at first but I ended up being so embarrassed about the sound – especially later,on club nights – that I got involved just to sort it out. And thank God I did. A few months later, when Chris Hewitt from Tractor Music took down the original sound system, he discovered that of the twenty speakers only two worked; the other eighteen had blown out immediately.(Another great bargain.This time by Court Acoustics, who’d charged us £30,000 for what we’d been told was a top-of-the-range system.)