The Haçienda Read online

  Anton Razak [sic]: Assistant Manager (Mr Lover Lover)

  Jon Drape: Production, Man about Town

  Andy Jackson: PR Princess PC: Creative Director (Graphic Design)

  Mel Dymott: Office Manager & Merchandise

  Bobby Langley: DJ & Tours Little

  John: Publicity

  Gavin Richardson: Cellar Dweller

  Stephen Page: Lighting, Tour Production & Guardian Crossword

  Thomas Piper:Sound

  Catrina Bill: Cashier

  John Nowinski: Maintenance & Paint

  There was another setback in June 1997. Our licence had come up for renewal, so the licensing committee decided to have a look round the infamous Haçienda and see if it was worthy. The committee of seven magistrates turned up in a minibus and Rob and Leroy were waiting to greet them.Unfortunately we’d already had trouble,a minor skirmish, and at that precise moment the four Salford lot who had been thrown out earlier did a drive-by. They rode their car on to the pavement, leaned out of the window and hit the offending bouncer with a wheel brace, smashing his head open and sending his blood raining all over the licensing committee.

  It didn’t help much, let’s put it that way.

  ‘That spelt another closure order from Great Great Greater Manchester Police,’ wrote Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People. ‘One that even George Carman couldn’t save [us] from.’

  Things got even worse. We owed Whitbread a lot of money and because we hadn’t paid them they stopped supplying us with beer. So we closed the doors one Saturday night. We didn’t know it then, but that would be the last night of the Haçienda. There was no farewell party,no final goodbye.We just closed.

  A couple of days later Rob called a meeting of possible investors – as many as he could muster – who had been invited via New Order’s financial planner. There were some big investors there: about eight of the city’s biggest money men. Politely they listened to what we had to say and it was obvious they loved the romance of the place – its history, the whole rock ’n’ rollness of it. But, at the end of the day, they were businessmen, and rock ’n’ rollness doesn’t pay the bills. None of them would invest.

  Now Rob was desperate. So, when Paul Carroll approached him with an offer of cash, he saw a way out. Paul stood to lose a lot from the Haçienda closing: the doormen were out of pocket by thousands every week it was shut.

  Paul could lend Rob the money needed in order to get Whitbread off our backs and pay off some other outstanding debts: this amounted to £40,000.

  Rob and Ang met Paul outside the club, where he delivered the cash in a bin bag. (Ang stuck her head inside and stared at all the money, incredulous.) Rob went to the bank straight away, having already made an arrangement with the bank manager whereby we could deposit the money and use it to get the club up and running again, without it going towards our debt with the bank. This was supposed to be bail-out money, used to reopen the club. But the bank panicked because the club was shut and illegally took the money to pay off our overdraft with them; our overdraft facility was simultaneously shut down.

  Rob had got the money he’d needed then lost it all – in the same day! Now we weren’t even back to square one; we were deeper in trouble than we had been before, because suddenly we owed money to the creditors, to the breweries and to the fucking gangsters . . . And we couldn’t reopen the club.

  Paul went berserk. Rob told him: ‘I can’t open the club. They’ve taken the money and used it.’

  Paul’s immediate response was the same as anyone else’s would be: ‘I want the money back.’

  ‘I haven’t got it now. It’s gone.’

  At that point Rob was given several options, none of them suitable for family reading.

  Rob phoned to tell me what had happened.

  ‘Oh my fucking good God,’ was all I could say.

  I ended up giving him the cash to pay Paul back. Ironic, really, since Paul had already phoned me to let me know what a bastard Rob was, how he’d disrespected him, etc.. And to advise me not to lend him the money because he needed to be taught a lesson.

  Well, at least it was over.

  At the same time, we were having problems with Companies House.

  We had three years of accounts outstanding with them, which were accruing late fees every month. Companies House threatened to wind up the Haçienda and Dry if we didn’t file them immediately.

  All we needed was our accountants to tidy up and submit them. And they chose that moment to announce that they wanted up-front the £10,000 it would cost to do the job, the bastards. They knew we were on our way out, didn’t they – they’d seen the accounts.

  It was a tiny amount compared to what we had paid them over the years. They’d earned hundreds of thousands of pounds off the Haçienda, New Order, Joy Division and Factory, but ultimately pulled out over ten grand. Thanks, Mr Ernst and Mr Young.

  By now the situation was hopeless. The club was shut, we couldn’t pay our debts or reopen and Companies House planned to make us bankrupt.

  It was jumped or be pushed. So we jumped.

  We agreed to go into voluntary administration;in other words,voluntary bankruptcy.

  The liquidator told us everything would be easy.We would be able to reopen the club under another trading name and start again, with the lease reverting back to the building owners: us. Please don’t anybody ever believe a word a liquidator says to them.

  I thought it was a bad idea. As far as I was concerned it was definitely time to bail out. But Rob as always wanted to carry on, his sense of honour still to the fore. He thought we would be able to reopen, lose the debts and then earn enough money to pay back the creditors.

  I still loved the club but I was sick of throwing good money after bad into Martin Hannett’s ‘hole in ground called the Haçienda’ with not a cat in hell’s chance of seeing any of it ever again.

  I was still paying the Haçienda mortgage – seven grand a month – to keep the building. At that point in my career I wasn’t even working, New Order being in hiatus. Try as I might, it was all slipping through my fingers. I was staring personal bankruptcy in the face.

  My accountant told me, ‘You cannot sort this out. There is no way.’

  *

  So in the end it wasn’t the gangs, the drugs or the violence that brought down the Haçienda; it was a bunch of people doing sums – they were the biggest fuckheads of the lot. There you go: the calculator is mightier than the gun.

  Heartbreaking or not,it was my escape route and I took it.Rob and I spoke over the phone.

  ‘Shut the fucking thing down,’ I told him. ‘I can’t handle it any more. I’m finished. I’m not putting any more money in. This has gone far enough and it’s not going anywhere.’

  He was bitterly upset. ‘Judas. You betrayed me.’ He yelled. He screamed. ‘You stabbed me in the back.’

  Afterwards it was very difficult, especially in the meetings about the building being sold. We banged heads many times but I suppose he had to talk to me because he was still managing New Order/Joy Division. His livelihood came from us, whether he liked it or not.

  For many, the last ‘proper’ night of the Haçienda was the club’s Fifteenth Birthday Party on 15 May. The place was packed and it was difficult to move, with more than 2500 clubbers gathered to see Sasha and Digweed play the main room, with Jon DaSilva and Laurent Garnier downstairs.

  The night also marked the launch of a long-awaited three-CD compilation, released through Deconstruction and mixed by Dave Rofe, Jon DaSilva and Pete Robinson. Fittingly, it was beautifully packaged yet exorbitantly expensive: its £27 price-tag proved to be off-putting to most (though the CD is now a much sought-after collectors’ item).

  It was released on 26 May and was called Viva Haçienda! The irony was terrible.

  Just a month later, the club closed for good.

  Essentially we were too idealistic. We didn’t want to run the Haçienda as a business – we wanted a playground for ourselves and our frie
nds. You need a different philosophy to operate a club as a business, especially if you want to make a success of it. We couldn’t bring ourselves to stop the staff from having a great time. We wanted everyone to enjoy it with us,so we treated it like a big party.The best Manchester has ever seen.

  The last night of the Haçienda was Saturday 28 June 1997. Dave Haslam was DJing, and had no idea it was to be the last-ever night. The club was full and there was, for once, no violence.

  I remember that after we’d closed one of the gangsters stopped me on Market Street in Manchester to lament: ‘We’ve got fucking nowhere to go now, man. It’s all downhill for Manchester.’

  What a joke. All I could think was, ‘It was the likes of you who shut it, you fucker.’

  Couldn’t say it, of course. And anyway it wasn’t quite true. When the Haçienda shut down the Salford lot who had taken up residence there went out and caused mayhem in every other club in town. They just charged right in, straight past the doormen, and took over.

  I for one was delighted, to be honest, because we’d had to put up with them while all the other clubs in Manchester stayed quite safe and nobody had ever given us any credit for that. Now the other clubs shat themselves as the Salford lot ran riot all around town.

  It quietened down after a while because none of the other clubs had the same allure as the Haçienda. Also cocaine use had spread like an epidemic. A lot of the gangsters stayed at home to get high and didn’t want to go out as much. That’s the difference between ecstasy and coke: you don’t want music when you’re on coke; you want to sit and talk shit.

  The staff couldn’t quite believe we’d gone bankrupt. Some were uncommonly loyal.We’d seen a very low turnover of staff compared to that in other clubs, not because of great wages but because they loved the Haçienda/Factory ethos and Rob and Tony. With the building locked up, and the staff not allowed back inside, they gathered at Dry and we all sat together, in shock.

  I remember that when we sold Dry, to Hale Leisure in October, Ang handed me the keys then burst out crying.I asked her what was wrong.

  ‘What do you think is wrong? That’s it for us. We’re done now. It’s over.’

  Then Anton showed up, having been hired by Hale Leisure to run the place. He’d been poached, much to his embarrassment – although nobody minded; in fact many of the staff stayed on. Mind you, I think they felt shocked at finally being treated as employees, not as friends, by the new owners: they’d be calling Ang up all the time, crying because they weren’t allowed more than one glass of orange squash per shift; they’d been used to getting pissed for nothing when they worked for us.

  Hale Leisure also solved the problem of polishing that brass handrail by painting it black. Why didn’t we think of that? Because it looked shit, that’s why.

  Even with the Haçienda gone we still had to tie up the loose ends. We got £1.2 million for the property minus costs,having bought it for £1.2 million plus costs in 1992 and been forced to sell it during a slump in the property market.Two years later it would be resold for £5 million, and then sold again at double that to the company that turned it into flats.

  The sale of the building paid off the ridiculous bridging loan that had crippled us since we first bought it and also paid back Rob’s directors’ loans.

  At the end, me and my mates grabbed whatever we could from the Haçienda. The only thing Rob took was the ‘FAC 51’ sign from beside the front door.

  I took the six-foot mirror-ball, the doors, the mats, the bar-tops, the banisters, the bollards and the front-door plate that everyone walked over to get in (under which I found the hidden CCTV tapes of New Year’s Eve 1995: we’d had a lot of trouble that night so the bouncers must have hidden them where the police couldn’t find them. I’m going to put them out on DVD).

  I felt I was losing something dear – very bloody dear – and wanted to keep any part of it I could. I don’t know what I’d thought I could to do with a bloody dance floor, but luckily I didn’t have the problem because Tony’s builders took it out (it ended up being thrown away).

  Below the stage at the back was a closed-off section that had been used as a Factory storage area and later for the barrels. The barrels were on a platform and to keep the platform level someone had shoved a quarter-inch tape box underneath it.

  I pulled it out. Covered in old beer and sweat and condensation, it was one of the master tapes of Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures.

  It made me smile. It was an absolutely perfect metaphor for the Haçienda.

  Joy Division had held the whole fucking thing up.

  MARCH

  Tuesday 4th Gabrielle’s Wish

  Wednesday 5th Gabrielle’s Wish; High Society

  Tuesday 18th Hopper

  JUNE

  Tuesday 24th Dave Haslam

  Saturday 28th Dave Haslam

  The Haçienda Auction was hosted at Manchester’s Richard Conrad Building on Saturday 25 November 1997. An official website was created, www.hacauction.com, on which were featured the pieces of Haçienda history up for sale. Proceeds went to Manchester youth charities. The complete list of auctioned items was as follows:

  1 × disc-jockey booth

  8 × central supporting steel columns (RSJs),hazard-stripe design

  10 × 1m2 pieces of dance floor, cleaned, sanded, varnished and mounted on 18mm timber

  5 × pieces of stage floor, cleaned and mounted on 18mm timber

  1 × changing room

  1 × sound-engineer/light-operator booth

  1 × Kim Philby Bar

  1 × first-floor Can Bar

  1 × section of banquette seating

  1 × ‘ruined’ arch (entrance to upstairs Can Bar)

  1 × arch to dance-floor area

  2 × feature columns adjacent to arch (sold as one lot) various sections of stage

  various sections of stage surround in black and white hazard stripes

  various sections of banquette seating from Mondays’ Corner (Salford’s, actually)

  1 × handprint and signature set in concrete – signed ‘Tony ’94’

  1 × handprint and signature set in concrete – signed ‘Hooky 94’

  various bundles of fluorescent wall-light fittings

  various bundles of electrical components and light fittings

  3 × blue and red external perimeter light

  5 × black and yellow acoustic baffles

  3 × pallets of 200 mixed green-, blue- and red-glazed exterior bricks

  3 × pallets of 200 plain bricks

  4 × section of balcony balustrade

  various stainless-steel sanitary ware from lavatories

  various lavatory doors

  kitchenware

  freezers

  4 × TV monitors

  1 × cash register

  1 × drinks-purchase book

  6 × Victorian radiators in Haçienda and Round House

  various lavatory mirrors,bar fixtures and fittings

  notice boards

  1 × pay telephone

  various speaker supports

  sale items

  loose strips of dance-floor

  loose green-, blue- and red-glazed exterior bricks

  How did it last for fifteen years?

  Tenacity. Rob’s mainly. Like a pit-bull terrier, even when everyone beat him with sticks he just wouldn’t let go.

  I sometimes wonder how the club affected his family. He was so single-minded in the way he looked after it, which must have had a terrible impact on them; they had to live with the Haçienda and with him.

  We never even considered that at the time – we were so up our own arses we never thought about the people who put up with us. Now I think about it,and all that they went through.Sorry.

  Looking back on those years feels like narrowly missing a fatal traffic accident and marvelling that you weren’t among the casualties.My greatest times at the Haçienda were at the end of a night, after we’d closed and got all the stragglers
out. The adrenaline would be flowing (everything was flowing) because it was all so dangerous and edgy and it felt nice to relax as a group, because we’d be down to the amenable drug-heads: the staff and some key punters. We’d all sit together to share a drink, savouring the fact that we’d got through it one more night. Phew.

  After the building was sold we auctioned off souvenirs. The place was rammed with fans and collectors – all sorts of people. One guy bought the door to a toilet cubicle because he’d had sex against it and he wanted to remember the event. Another item was a lump of concrete from outside the door, into which Ang and I had carved our names. The auctioneers put it inside a frame; it looked quite nice. I bid on it and the price kept rising. Then Ang herself ran up to the podium, grabbed the microphone off me: ‘Stop bidding, Hooky, it’s me.’ She was the other person trying to buy it.Together we’d accidentally driven the price up. Typical.

  Bobby Langley, an ex-Haçienda DJ, bought the DJ box. He’d heard a rumour that Cream was going buy it, and told me beforehand that his bosses at Bench had set a limit of £8000 to keep it in Manchester (‘Don’t let the Scousers get it!’).I was the auctioneer for that particular lot.

  I remember Bobby’s first bid: £100. Then a mystery bidder on the other side: £200.

  Everyone looked but couldn’t see the other interested party. The bidding went on until the other guy dropped out, at £7900; Bobby got it for £8000.

  When I told him years later that there’d been no other bidder he went effing mad. Turned out his boss had been joking and he nearly got sacked.

  Ah well, it was a good cause. Tony had wondered aloud: ‘What’s he going to do? Run a burger bar out of it?’ (Actually Bobby brought it out for a Tribal Gathering event in Southport during 2002, where it was promoted as the main attraction. It was last seen rotting in a car park somewhere in the Northern Quarter.)

  I bought two of the huge beams that held up the ceiling and loads of other stuff that I couldn’t store. They went missing. It is amazing nowadays how much gear I get offered from the Haçienda – stuff that people have stolen. Great that I get to pay for it twice.