The Haçienda Read online

  I make my way towards the bar. Seems to take forever. I’m fucked. I need another drink. I meander to my corner at the bottom of the stairs where Ang Matthews and Leroy Richardson, the co-managers, hang out. I take in the club and watch the shenanigans. The bouncers are all laughing now about my evening as a failed doorman. Bastards. Stav comes by – to ‘watch over’ me, he says. But I know that the true reason is that he loves to share my drugs. He’s always getting a bollocking off Paul for it, but we have a laugh.

  I settle in. This is a good night, a constant parade of people: friends, acquaintances, drug dealers, load of girls. I’m single but never can quite seem to make it with the women here. It’s more like they come for the occasion, not to cop off. Either that or I’m too fucked to get it together.

  It’s really busy, so I go up to the DJ box. I bang on the door for what seems like an hour and finally Graeme Park lets me in.

  ‘Oh Hooky, here’s a tape for you,’ he says, handing it to me.

  ‘Great, a Saturday-night tape from last weekend,’ I think. ‘That’s nice of him.’ (Not realizing that he’s been selling them on the quiet for £10 each and making anywhere from £500 to a grand extra per night. Good lad; wish we’d thought of that.)

  Where were we? Right, lines. I bring out the charlie, chop them out and survey the madness:a sea of hands,flashing lights,all moving to the bang, bang, bang of the bass drum. God, it’s good to be alive and owner of the Haçienda. What happened earlier? Can’t quite recall.

  Later I rejoin the lads. My mate Travis is in.

  ‘Go and get us a couple of little fellas from the Salford lot,’ I say, and he departs to the back corner of the alcove. The alcoves are famous. Each contains a different gang,but we call this particular one Hell.This is gang-member territory.If you wander in without approval you get a slap and you’re shoved back out if you’re lucky. Even I won’t go in there without Cormac or Twinny. My lot are in the second alcove; they’re the older Salford lot. Travis takes ages, comes back with a bloody nose, says they’ve fucked him right off.

  I’m angry now, so I storm off to the door to get hold of Paul or Damien, shouting, ‘How long do we have to put up with this ...?’

  Nah, nah, nah. I sound just like a baby, screaming, ‘These little fuckers . . .’

  ‘All right,’ they say, ‘don’t be a twat all your life.’ Laughing again.

  ‘Right,’ I say, and storm back in to see Suzanne, who runs the kitchen.

  ‘Your bucket’s over there,’ she says.

  This is one of the perks of management: because we didn’t put in enough toilets when we built the bloody place, you can never get a piss. Plus I always get hassle in the bogs anyway. So I’m the proud user of a Hellmann’s mayonnaise bucket with my name on it, which stays in the kitchen.It’s a source of great hilarity to everyone (until they want a piss too). Suzanne actually has a great trick of getting people to hold it for a while. Then, when they ask ‘What’s this for?’ she tells them. Ah well, little things please little minds.

  However:‘No,I don’t want a piss,love,’I tell her.‘Just a breather.’

  Refreshed, I come out and spot a line of bouncers wielding baseball bats, all of them heading for the back corner. They go in and beat the shit out of some gangsters.

  Turns out that they’d twatted a pot collector. Damien is very protective of the staff.

  So far tonight there have been four fights, one gun pulled, two bar staff assaulted, rough justice in the corner, drug dealing and drug taking on a normal scale (well, normal for us).

  I leg it back to the DJ box to lie low. That ploy is soon forgotten, though,as I join everyone else in being too wasted to notice anything. We’re ’avin’ it LARGE. The police come in to look for bail-jumpers, or spot drug use, and to generally give us grief. They’re escorted around by the bouncers,who protect them from the crowd.The cops depart, covered in spit and beer but they don’t retaliate. (Why do it at all? I wonder. Call that a show of force?).

  Next the licensing authorities are in and they’re hassling Ang. At one forty-five a.m. you’re supposed to stop serving, then you have fifteen minutes to collect all the open drinks. This, of course, causes the most trouble because no one wants to hand over their drink – especially the gangsters, who openly defy the rule. So the licensing go mad and threaten us.

  After what seems like a few minutes – too soon – it’s two a.m. and it’s all over. The music is switched off, the crowd are screaming: ‘ONE MORE TUNE. ONE MORE TUNE.’

  I tell Graeme, ‘Go on, put another one on.’

  He asks, ‘Are you sure? Does Ang know?’

  As licence-holder, Ang is responsible for making certain we close at the proper time, or the authorities will bust us for operating after hours.

  ‘Of course. She said it’s fine,’ I lie. ‘Anyway, I’m the boss, ha ha.’

  He puts it on Candi Stanton: ‘You Got the Love’. I throw my hands up in the air (just like Candi does in the lyrics) and sing, ‘I know I can count on you.’ What a twat.

  The place erupts.

  ‘Yeah,’ I’m screaming. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

  The moment quickly ends. Ang bursts into the DJ box and cuffs me. Graeme ducks and Ang flicks the needle off the record.

  ‘The licensing are in,’ she shouts. ‘Fuckin’ pack it in.’

  Oops, I’ve done it again. I may be co-owner of the Haçienda, but I’m not the one who runs it. Thank God. I step out of the booth feeling rather sheepish and follow her downstairs.

  ‘Can we have a lock-in, Ang?’

  She presses something heavy into my chest. ‘No. Here’s a bag of beer, now fuck off,’ she says.

  Charming.

  I rally my mates and we head for the door, me clutching the bag. We’re all in a Ford Escort, two doors, heading to an after-party in Salford. We set off. The driver’s tripping.

  ‘Don’t worry,’Twinny tells me,‘he’s not had a drink.’

  We break out the cans, pop a cassette into the stereo, turn the volume up and settle in. We stop at the lights on Regent Road. Oops, there’s a cop car behind.

  A cop car. Christ, we’ve got more drugs on us than Hope Hospital. I’m trolleyed.

  ‘Keep calm, it’s OK,’ says the driver, but when the lights change he doesn’t pull forward; he’s tripping so much he’s gone colour blind.

  Suddenly the cops are on us and it’s all over. We’re kicked out of the car and our driver is carted off.How are we going to get home?

  Just then a copper turns to me. ‘Are you Peter Hook from New Order?’

  ‘Oh, fuckin’ excellent,’ I think, ‘he’s a fan.’

  I smile, look him in the eye, and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me. Can you drop me off in Salford please, occifer?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he says. ‘I always preferred the Smiths.’

  We set off to walk home. Coming down, I’ll stay at Twinny’s tonight, get back in the Swan for the first pint at eleven. Drown my sorrows.

  Top night.

  I started going to pubs and clubs when I was fifteen, in 1971. They didn’t check ID back then, so if you looked tall enough – as in over five feet – you could get in and they’d serve you.My first time,I went to a pub on The Precinct, Salford called the Church with my old schoolmate Terry Mason,who I’ve known since I was eight (and who later became Joy Divison’s manager for a while).

  We were suedeheads, post-skinheads. I walked up to the bar and ordered a pint. I was shaking. ‘Can I have a beer?’

  Bartender:‘Do you want mild or bitter?’

  Me: ‘No, beer.’

  Fuck knows what he gave me,but I was pissed as a fart on one pint. When I came out I slipped and fell in some dog shit, which was a great start to my drinking.Quite prophetic,really:you start drinking,you end up in the shit, ha ha.

  I’d met Bernard Sumner at school. Back then we were best friends and would be for years. When we left school I worked in the Manchester Town Hall, which was where I first DJed: I played records at the To
wn Hall Conveyancing Department’s 1975 Christmas party, would you believe.

  Barney and I used to go to all the regular clubs in Manchester, where the traditional crowd was girls in high heels and boys in white shirts and jackets, a pretty formal dress code and not really what we were about. By 1977 punk had happened but the shows were isolated events and once the concert was over it was back to normal. People like us still didn’t have anywhere to go dressed how we wanted – nowhere regular, anyway. Even back then, all those years ago, the need for the Haçienda was there. The seeds were being sown.

  After seeing the Sex Pistols perform at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, Barney and I formed a band. First we were called Warsaw, then Joy Division. When the line-up settled, it was me on bass, him on guitar and Ian Curtis as our lead singer.After one or two drumming turkeys had been and gone, we found Steve Morris; he’d answered the advertisement for a drummer that Ian had put in a record shop in Macclesfield.

  Now, because we were in a group, we were able to go to a lot of places and perform for fun, which was great for us, of course, but still the Manchester club scene stayed unhealthy. My favourite spot back then was Rafters.Barney,Terry and I used to go there to see gigs promoted by Music Force,which was run by Martin Hannett,who played bass in a band called Greasy Bear. He shared a booking agency in Manchester with another guy named Alan Wise (who had an undeserved reputation in those days as the fastest promoter in the north, because of his habit of legging it with the money, ha ha). Together with Alan Erasmus (a local actor and band manager) they put shows on all over the city.That’s how Martin started his career,before he began producing records for Joy Division.

  Next, Alan Erasmus, along with the Granada TV presenter Tony Wilson, began hosting club nights they called the Factory, where Joy Division also performed.

  The Factory club night was held at the 800-capacity Russell Club,Hulme, or ‘The Russell Club, Royce Road, Moss Side’ according to designer Peter Saville’s now-legendary mis-spelt poster.The first,on 19 May 1978,featured performances from the Durutti Column and Jilted John. Joy Division first played on 9 June that year, while Iggy Pop and UB40 would appear at subsequent events, their presence testifying to the night’s growing kudos and popularity. Later that year, Factory Records was formed to release A Factory Sampler, a four-track EP mainly produced by Martin Hannett, who had made his name producing the Buzzcock’s seminal Spiral Scratch EP. It featured contributions from Joy Division, the Durutti Column, John Dowie and Cabaret Voltaire, and was catalogue number FAC 02. (The poster was retrospectively awarded the FAC 01 number at Saville’s insistence, kicking off an idiosyncratic cataloguing system.) Run from a first-floor flat at number 86 Palatine Road, Manchester – the home of Alan Erasmus – Factory Records was at first made up of Erasmus, Tony Wilson and Saville, with Gretton and in-house producer Martin Hannett joining as partners during the first year.

  It was the two Alans, along with Tony, John Brierley (owner of Cargo Studios in Rochdale) and the designer Peter Saville who launched Factory (although John bowed out early, opting for a one-time pay cheque rather than a share of the company), while Rob Gretton, who DJed at Rafters on most nights, became our manager. It was a very small, insular community.

  I’d been aware of Tony’s family since childhood, way before I actually met him. His father was a tobacconist with a shop on Regent Road in Salford where my mum used to take me to buy her cigarettes. I would have been about three, but even at that age I could see how outlandish Mr Wilson looked compared to everyone else. He wore really loud dicky bows and a suit, completely out of place for Salford in the 1950s. I later had the shock of my life when I realized that Tony was his son.

  Tony stood out as a maverick among television personalities of the time. He looked scruffy, had long hair and seemed at odds with the rest of the TV industry,which was very square.He got away with it because of his flamboyance. He was very much like Martin Hannett. Similar demeanour and appearance. Both of them dressed strangely, like an early Dr Who.

  Tony was quite religious, which seemed at odds with his character. He was slightly older than us and it felt like he belonged to a different generation.We viewed him as the boss,not as a peer,and he was very much the man in charge.Every so often he’d check on the band to see how we were doing and I suppose we felt a bit in awe of him because of his success on television:he was a star,a very important mover and shaker, whereas we were just working-class tossers from Salford. There were many times when his passion gave us the drive to carry on. He was very enthusiastic and always worked hard for things he believed in. Ideas were his thing but, as in time I came to realize, he glossed over details. They slowed him down, bored him and stopped him from moving on to the next project, which he had this compulsion to do. It meant he’d put things in motion then leave others to implement them without always ensuring that the lieutenants he put into place were qualified.The day-to-day running of Factory he’d leave to Alan,but Alan (unlike Tony) wasn’t very good with people – I suppose they complemented each other’s weaknesses in that respect.

  Our manager Rob was one of the most important people in my career. At the time he began working with us, Rob lived in a one-room bedsit in Chorlton and had no money. He was a working-class Wythenshawe boy from a big family with a sister and two brothers. Relationships mattered a lot to him. Throughout his life he needed to be surrounded by people he felt close to. Loyalty defined him, as did his love for Manchester: promoting anything to do with the city was his passion.

  Rob hated his previous job, working for Eagle Star Insurance in Manchester. Getting rich didn’t motivate him as much as freedom and enjoying himself. He disliked being told what to do, so he looked at ways of making his own opportunities.First he promoted events at the Oaks in Chorlton (I went to see Siouxsie and the Banshees there, and still have the ticket),then he started his own record label to release a single by the Panik – funnily enough stealing our then drummer, Steve Brotherdale, from us – plus he worked as a roadie for the band Slaughter and the Dogs, as well as producing and creating a fanzine for them.

  Rob and Joy Division ran parallel to one another for some time before he decided to ally himself with us. If anything, we came into his scene,rather than him into ours,because by the time we started playing Rob was very involved locally. Like I say, it was a real community back then.There were no fortunes to be made or lost so financial concerns never came into our minds. We played for a sense of achievement and in the hope of one day educating and changing the world. It felt like us against the establishment. We were rebels.

  Rob – like virtually everyone associated with Factory – was raised Catholic (Bernard and I were the only two Protestants on the label, which became the source of some amusement). Rob didn’t talk much about his spiritual life, although he and his girlfriend Lesley Gilbert once worked together at a kibbutz in Israel. He’d decided to take a year off for it,but got pissed off because of the scary,oppressive atmosphere and the fact that he had to carry a rifle. He never did well with mechanical things and he disliked guns – I’m surprised he didn’t accidentally shoot Lesley, or himself.

  The band didn’t have much to do with Lesley. Perhaps it’s because Rob did his level best to keep our professional and personal lives separate. He didn’t like girlfriends (or, as in Ian’s case, even wives) coming to shows. To him, what happened backstage stayed there – and a lot of what went on wasn’t particularly compatible with family life. Rob structured things so that we could be different people on the road; it became a bit Jekyll and Hyde.

  I remember we were forever looking for places to play. At the Factory Records’ New Year’s Eve concert in 1979, Joy Division performed, along with the Distractions and another Factory band, Section 25.

  Earlier that afternoon Tony told Rob, ‘Buy some cans of beer and we’ll sell them to everybody for 50p each.’

  And so during the sets Rob stood behind the bar, hoping to earn some cash on this scheme. Of course, nobody had exact change in their po
ckets and he didn’t think to set up a till. In the end he muttered, ‘Fuck it, let’s just give it away.’ Which is exactly what he did.

  We often used to go the Ranch, which was owned by Foo Foo Lammar – Frank, to his friends. A nice guy, he was a female impersonator, a forerunner to Lily Savage, and with the Ranch and Metz he was one of the club owners who paved the way for the Gay Village. Every Thursday night was punk night: members of the Buzzcocks, Slaughter and the Dogs,the Drones,Manicured Noise and everybody else who played punk music in Manchester congregated there. You did have to be careful, though: right-wing Teddy Boys from God knows where would sometimes come down and lie in wait for us. Pub-and-clubland was still a dangerous place to be, wherever your allegiances lay.

  Joy Division used to play at the Ranch, too. On one such occasion we’d already tried our luck at a talent night at the Stocks in Walkden near where I lived in Little Hulton. It was one of those nights where acts who wanted to be signed up performed in front of ‘judges’ (the bloke who ran the agency and his mate), who then decided whether or not they had potential. Before we went on Ian got a treat when he accidentally walked into the dressing room where the singer before us was getting changed and he saw her tits. He was made up about that.

  The guy who introduced us, a proper old-school compere, said, ‘How do you want to be introduced, lads?’

  We said, ‘Um . . .’ and looked at one another.

  He said, ‘Well, what are you like?’

  We said,‘Uh ...’

  With no articulate answer from us he introduced us with the immortal words:‘If you like Deep Purple you’ll love these lads.’

  We trudged on and did two songs. The power kept cutting off because we were tripping the limiter. A coach-load of old ladies from Farnworth all had their hands over their ears.We absolutely bombed. Needless to say we weren’t seen as ‘having potential’ and weren’t signed by the agency. We were so wound up by the whole thing. Once we’d we thrown our gear in the back of my old Jag Ian said, ‘Come on. The Ranch is open. Let’s go and play there.’