The Haçienda (8 page)

It turned out that the Haçienda, one of the biggest clubs of its time, had been running on what amounted to a public address system.

In short, the night was a bit of a mess. And people never expected that from a club associated with Factory,which had a reputation for quality.

The night after the opening, Cabaret Voltaire did indeed play, as Wilson had said – attracting an audience of around seventy-five. It marked the
beginning of the lean years for the Haçienda, a time when the club was quite simply too far ahead of its time – ahead of trends in fashion and music and ahead of its target audience. Mike Pickering would often say, ‘If only we could move this place brick by brick to New York.’

Meanwhile, the resident DJ charged with shaping the sound of the Haçienda was Clarke,who played at the club every night it was open right up until 1984.Given that this was a venue associated with Factory Records, one of the archetypal indie labels, it speaks volumes of the club’s openmindedness (or sheer bloody mindedness) that the first resident was a Jamaican-born jazz-funk and soul DJ, a veteran of the Reno, then Fevers, where the groove of choice was jazz-funk.

How did it happen? Playing at Fevers, Hewan had begun to notice two polite-looking white kids who’d come and sit in the corner. One night they came over:‘We’re Martin and Simon and we’re in a band called A Certain Ratio.’ They were always asking Hewan for names of this stuff he was playing: Latin, Brazilian, Samba and jazz-Latin vocal. A Certain Ratio were, of course,signed to Factory,where they were managed by Tony Wilson.They were then going through a ‘transitional’ phase that would later be satirized in the
24 Hour Party People
film but did in fact see the band operating way ahead of the curve.About to embark on a UK tour,they’d decided not to have a support band, to have a DJ instead, and would Hewan do it? He would and he did, and in doing so formed a bond with ACR’s manager, the two sharing a favourite DJ, Frankie Crocker, who worked on WBLS in New York.

During their conversations Wilson said that he planned to open a club in two years’ time, and that he wanted to Clarke to be the DJ. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ thought Clarke. But when the Haçienda happened Wilson came good on his promise and hired him.

And so it was that the Haçienda’s first resident wasn’t spinning Joy Division, New Order and the Smiths; he wasn’t playing bands on Factory and Rough Trade and Cherry Red.He was playing Sugarhill,Roy Ayers,Gil Scott Heron and Herbie Hancock, mixing it up with the more commercial hits of the day when he needed to fill the floor. A typical month’s top five might read:

Yazoo – ‘Situation’ (Francois Kevorkian’s Dub Mix)


Sharon Redd – ‘Can You Handle It?’


Q – ‘The Voice of Q’


D Train – ‘You’re the One for Me’


The Peech Boys –‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ (Original 12” Dub Mix)

The Thompson Twins, Heaven 17 and ABC also featured; plus, some of the emerging electro hits would find their way into his set: ‘Buffalo Girls’ by Malcolm McLaren, impLOG’s ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ and ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Rockers Revenge.

It was a musical policy encouraged by Wilson; indeed, Clarke recalls Wilson telling him that black music was going to be the next commercial dance music, even as the newly opened Haçienda began to fill with curious punks and Goths who were expecting a continuation of the Factory nights at the PSV. ‘Mohicans and everything,’ remembers Clarke, who became paranoid when none of the punks would dance to the usual funky black tunes guaranteed to fill the floor at the Reno. ‘Tony would come into the DJ box saying, “Wonderful, keep it up, darling,” and I’m thinking, ‘but nobody’s dancing.’

They would, though. Given time.

For the moment, the Haçienda would be best known as a live venue, hosting some legendary shows.

The difficulties we had getting the place open only worsened from that point on. Yes, the premiere night was packed (the booze and entrance was free – what do you expect?), but after that you could literally count on your fingers the punters who turned up each night.

Even so, Tony and Rob went full tilt, keeping the club open seven nights a week, plus lunchtime on Saturday and Sunday, the ethos being we always offered the members somewhere to go. Now, if you ever saw the Haçienda, you’d know it was hardly the most convivial venue for an afternoon club. The glass roof made it too bright during daytime, and the size of the place made it cold and uncomfortable. It was like trying to relax in a museum café,and nobody really wanted that kind of atmosphere.

We also employed a chef. I ate there because he was really good. He concocted these wonderful stuffed-chicken pancakes with a creamy sauce that I thought were amazing. Of course, as a co-owner I didn’t have to pay to eat at the Haçienda, so I thought I was getting a bargain. Little did I know I was actually paying a fortune for them.He didn’t last
that long – just a matter of weeks – because he didn’t cook for anyone apart from me.Shame.He was a great chef.

The hopes for the place were ridiculous, really, because no club is open seven nights a week. Common sense should have told us that after the first month – when we hadn’t made any money at all during the daytime because nobody came and the place was fully staffed for a non-existent clientele – we should have changed things immediately. Yet we stayed open that way for what felt like two years before anybody had the brains to ask, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ Bizarre.

And what the fuck
were
we doing? Probably Rob gambled on people having a change of heart and coming in again in record numbers. He was compulsive that way. I once saw him on a ferry going to France, placing bets till he was the last one standing. He turned his pockets out, doing his elephant impression, and when his money was all gone he went to bed.

Initially,entry to the Haçienda was free between Monday and Thursday (for members this was; the club had a members-only licence for the first two years). Those who came through the door tended to congregate in the Gay Traitor bar. ‘We’d have fifty or sixty people just sitting round having a drink, and those people loved it,’ said manager Howard Jones. Big gig nights – New Order, Culture Club, Bow Wow Wow – could do well, attracting up to 1400 people, and weekend club nights were also attracting ‘never less than 1000 people’, according to Jones. ‘What caused the financial problem was that club was open seven nights a week, for six months from the opening night.’

I remember it being more like two or three hundred on even the weekend club nights,but everyone’s memory is different.

The best thing about the early days of the Haçienda was that each night revolved around the club itself, not any one DJ or concept. It offered an overall aesthetic experience. We hired Claude Bessy to produce the video installations,which became very important in setting the tone. The first thing many people noticed were the film collages – cutups – that he projected on the screens. Steve Morris got involved with that too for a little while in the early eighties. We got in trouble over it with the Jewish community in Manchester because Bessy utilized
a lot of Nazi stuff,intercutting Hitler speeches – in a very punky way – with all kinds of footage,creating a sort of editorial comment on events of the day.

Someone picked up on it,imagining all sorts of pro-Nazi messages, similar to what had happened with A Certain Ratio and New Order, and the
Jewish Chronicle
held Tony to blame. It never went anywhere once everybody understood the context, but Tony was pleased to end up in the
Jewish Chronicle
– it was his first front cover.

To a degree,we tried to turn it into a hip-hop sort of place,like the clubs in New York, with different rooms and events: fashion shows, gigs, things like that, but for years we couldn’t establish it as anything but a concert venue.Nothing else really took root.

The New York influence came through Ruth Polsky. Ruth – one of the unsung heroines of the era – had been the first US promoter to dive into the British punk and post-punk scene, bringing a lot of the bands over for their first tours of America.

The thing that most impressed us about the American clubs was that we got in for free. Everyone was so in awe of groups: ‘Oh, man, you are New Order? Come on in.’

If we went to a club in London, we’d say, ‘Hi, we’re in a group,’ and they’d go, ‘Yeah? Fuck off.’

America dazzled us. For a young guy from England, it seemed like somebody giving me the keys to a sweet shop, saying, ‘Take what you want.’And the girls in America were very easily impressed,whereas in England they couldn’t give a fuck if you were in a group. Americans were much more friendly, much more open about sex. In England you just about had to be married before you slept with a girl. In America, if you carried a guitar or had an English accent, somebody’d shag you. We had a wild time over there.

That’s why New Order toured the USA so much during the 1980s: the weather was great, and we could go everywhere for free. Europe was shit in comparison. For years, we concentrated on America with great success,and did tour after tour there.Unfortunately,we later discovered that nearly all of the money we’d earn from playing over in the states got sucked up by the Haçienda’s black hole. Our shows became benefit concerts to keep the club open.

New Order first played the club on 26 June 1982.

The first time we played in the Haçienda Rob told our sound guy Ozzie to fit a huge PA. We were setting the club off, I suppose, by being the loudest thing yet. We sound-checked OK but, when we came to play, on the stroke of the first chord the power for the stage blew out straight away.Seems they were trying to save money (for the first time) by putting in a thirteen-amp stage supply instead of a fifteen-amp as it should have been. Ozzie put silver paper around the fuse so we could carry on, while a roadie was fanning it to keep it up cool. Great gig, though. A total sell-out. The money earned, the same with all our gigs there, disappeared into the club’s coffers.

What often happened with New Order, gig-wise, was that whenever the Haçienda really needed money we would play there and the club would take the profits – much to Bernard’s annoyance; it drove him fucking mad.

Plus, while we were living hand-to-mouth, we were pretty generous to other bands who played the club. Right from the start, Rob paid groups who played the Haçienda a flat fee, rather than a door deal based on how many tickets they sold. That’s unusual: in the days of Joy Division promoters would tell us something like, ‘We’ll give you £100 up front, plus 50 per cent of what we make at the door up to 400 people, then 90 per cent of what we make at the door from 400 to 600 people. Blah blah blah . . .’

It was a sliding scale that rewarded you for bringing in larger crowds, and protected the club owners in the event that nobody attended.

Easy enough system? Well, Rob hated it. He thought it was too complicated and boring. His ultimate aim was to spare other bands the pain that Joy Division went through when we toured: promoters who’d offer a generous deal, only to later come up after the gig and say, ‘Oh, you put loads of friends on the guest-list. I can’t pay you.’ He wanted to do things even more simply by telling musicians, ‘Come play at the Haç. We’ll give you a thousand quid regardless of how many people come in.’

He wanted it to be a musicians’co-op,which made it a very popular spot. Even if the acoustics inside were shite, the money was great so the response was fantastic.

A fine example was Teardrop Explodes in May 1982. They were
massive at the time and Rob paid them £3000 to do a ‘secret’ gig (nudge-nudge, wink-wink, but you’re supposed to let the word out so everyone will come).

We kept it so secret only eight people turned up.