The Haçienda Page 7

  One spring day my mate Andy Fisher (who had done well for himself as a promoter) rang me; as we chatted he said to me, ‘I can always tell the Haçienda bar staff when they’re walking home from the club.’

  He laughed. I laughed, too. It was a joke, right?

  ‘No, it’s true,’ he said. ‘I can always tell the Haçienda bar staff when they’re walking down Oxford Road on their way home at night.’

  ‘How?’ I was puzzled. They looked just like any other bar staff. It wasn’t like we had a dress code.

  He said, ‘You want me to tell you?’

  ‘Go on,smartarse.’

  ‘They’re always carrying a crate of beer.’

  It was true: at the end of a shift they’d each grab a crate and leave. Suddenly it all made sense. Whenever there was a stock-take everything was missing and nobody could figure out what happened to the beer.Seems some of the staff certainly knew.

  It even got to the stage where I was sick of asking, ‘Where’s everything going?’; ‘Where have all the lights gone?’ The trusses, the dimmer racks, the par cans, the slide projectors – some or all had disappeared and we were left with a right cheap, tatty-looking set-up. It turned out that one of the lighting guys, a disgraced ex-roadie, had somehow wormed his way in with Rob – was now running his own lighting company out of his South Manchester flat: renting out our bleeding lights. He only got caught when he’d tried to hire them to a tour manager I knew. Apparently he’d smuggled everything out bit by bit during the day, stored it all in his flat and eventually went into business for himself. If a band phoned up saying, ‘We need twenty lights, some racking, couple of dimmers and a lighting desk,’ he’d hire out the Haçienda’s stuff to them. When we found out, the lads went over and got it all back off him and sent him packing with a good clip round the ear.

  Years later he came back to the club and spoke to our receptionist, who was then Fiona Allen (who went on to find fame in Smack the Pony): ‘You all right? Can I come in?’

  She looked at him,gobsmacked – couldn’t believe the sheer nerve of the bloke.

  ‘Damien,’ she called to the head doorman, ‘throw this fucker in the canal.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  So he did. Picked him up and chucked him in the canal. Damien came back, sat back down, and – I loved this – didn’t even ask her why.

  Back then theft on this scale was an everyday occurrence. The security in the early 1980s was so lax that video players, turntables, lights, speakers, tills, etc., etc., disappeared every week. Everything that could be stolen got stolen. Because of the size of the building, you needed to police it really well or else whenever some twat wanted something they’d just go down to the Haçienda and take it! It would even happen when we were open. The sheer scale of the place made it easy to miss what was going on.

  On any given night one of the employees would invariably come by and go, ‘Oh, somebody’s just nicked the video out of the video booth and run off with it.’ We were being eaten from within and without.

  I remember Andy Liddle, New Order’s lighting guy, putting the rig together for our American tour in 1993 – the Technique tour – and taking great delight in showing Rob the two slide projectors he had hired from a Birmingham lighting company. They still had ‘FAC 51’ scratched on the side. They had been stolen, sold on, then rented back to us. Rob had paid for them out of his own money to jazz up the club.

  On top of all this, costly mistakes were still being made. It turned out that D.G., a drinking buddy of ours who looked after the sound, was making a fundamental error that only came to light when Chris Hewitt kept telling me – laughing about it, actually – how much he was making by replacing speakers in our system. Five hundred quid a month. I couldn’t figure it out. Why did the speakers need replacing so often? I’d go in screaming at the DJs, who’d assure me it wasn’t anything to do with them. I was completely mystified. Then one night I was in the club, plastered,biding my time in the DJ box,and D.G.came in and started turning off the decks, etc., before he’d turned off the amplifiers. The bloody popping of the speakers exploding was deafening. Ah well another mystery solved.D.G.thought it was normal ...

  So, our employees were either nicking from us or making a balls-up of their job; the club was always empty and our opening policy was misguided and costly.At least we were using the club to promote Factory’s bands, right?

  Wrong. The Haçienda was rarely used as a platform for Factory bands. The groups’ managers would ask Tony for a night at the Haçienda, but it seemed like neither he nor Rob were ever that inter-ested.Tony used it as a bigger and better version of the original Factory club in Hulme, booking arty bands. Unfortunately, the bands (for the most part) tended to be small while the venue was huge. When you consider how much it cost to run the place, the folly of it looks worse and worse. We’d need a nearly full house just to cover expenses yet put on acts who could only attract 400 people. That kind of recklessness shows how little planning went into it, but the idea was to champion groups that we loved, which – at the time – tended to be proper indie British post-punk bands.

  There was a small army of regulars: arty, delicate types who might not go to a place like Fagin’s or the other normal clubs in town (because they were full of lager louts), but who came to the Haçienda because they felt safe. But actual ticket sales remained a serious issue. We struggled to expand our clientele. The building itself put off a lot of people, the crappy sound kept proper music fans away, and when we did get people through the door, they’d come in find the place empty and lacking any atmosphere. As a result, groups started talking about not coming back, despite the generous fees.

  It was the year ‘Blue Monday’ was released. It came out on 7 March and charted twice – the second time as a result of having been a massive hit with holidaymakers, who’d heard it abroad during the summer, returned to the UK and bought it (often going into shops and asking for ‘New Order’ by Blue Monday).

  As a result it went on to become the biggest-selling 12” of all time, spending a total of thirty-four weeks in the chart.

  Thanks in no small part to the 24 Hour Party People film, enduring myth has it that each copy of ‘Blue Monday’ lost Factory Records money because of Peter Saville’s intricate die-cut sleeve. This isn’t completely true. It was, indeed, die-cut by hand three times (the most expensive thing on the sleeve were the pieces people didn’t actually get, according to Steven Morris) – meaning that the design lost Factory 10p on each copy sold during the initial run of more than two million.. On the subsequent ‘holiday hit’ pressing, however, printing costs decreased when a less expensive sleeve was used, ‘the problem’ having been spotted.

  ‘Blue Monday’ wasn’t the only Factory product losing money thanks to over-ambitiousness. So too was the Haçienda.

  Visiting bands spoke in glowing terms of the club’s dressing-room hospitality, for example. How the rooms were filled with flowers and booze, how it was far more comfortable than other venues and how at the end of their performance they were given a video by the video-maker Malcolm Whitehead. Where other clubs might have attempted to profit from the footage, Haçienda simply gave it away.

  That year, Frankie Goes to Hollywood played and Rob Gretton insisted that the Haçienda’s hospitality should match that of the Paradise Garage in New York. The dressing room was even more beautifully decorated than ever, piled high with fruit and flowers, while the main hall played host to more grand flower arrangements.

  Bar manager Leroy Richardson recalls the club being over-generous with drinks given out to staff, and the stock-take revealing a huge shortfall. Staff weren’t ‘stealing’ the drinks, Richardson maintains; it was just that nobody was keeping a tally of what was taken. There was an unusual system for serving customers,too:one member of staff took the order then passed it to another to complete – so it took two members of staff to serve one customer. This was yet another somewhat ill-advised and costly idea transplanted from New York.

&nb
sp; You’d think that being 3000 quid down on the too-secret secret Teardrop Explodes gig would have taught us a valuable business lesson. But no. We carried on doing business the same way – like it was a badge of honour.

  So, our promotion continued to be haphazard (remember: the poster timings could be variable), plus we were treating visiting bands like they were kings. Rob’s attitude was, ‘If somebody plays in my club, I treat them like I’d expect to be treated’– which unfortunately meant that we’d lose money each time we booked a gig and the bands would be thinking, ‘It’s great playing here, isn’t it?’ (Credit where it’s due, though: Tears for Fears played for the £150 they’d arranged before they’d got to number 1 – then played to a sold-out house. Very honourable, well done, lads.

  We frittered cash away each day. On special days we threw it away – ‘like a man with ten arms’, as Barney liked to say.

  I remember going to the Haçienda’s first birthday party in May, walking into the dressing rooms and being delighted to see them full of beer and booze – all free. It felt like we’d died and gone to heaven; because we were still living on the breadline, yet here at the Haç was everything we wanted – which, back then, amounted to beer and food – laid out for us.

  Only years later did it occur to me that New Order had paid for it all anyway. What a bunch of dickheads. We just got stuck in, like pigs at a trough. It’s easy to divert a musician: just show him free booze and he’ll forget (or forgive) just about anything.

  I made so many wrong assumptions. I never associated what I saw at the Haçienda with our money. I believed that everyone who worked there had the same objective in mind as me: to make it a success. I assumed that everyone knew what they were doing.I was wrong on all counts.

  For his review of the club for the Local Times that year, correspondent Robert King interviewed Rob Gretton in the downstairs Gay Traitor bar.

  ‘What sort of people are you aiming to attract?’ he asked.

  ‘The kind with two arms and two legs,’ sighed Gretton in reply.

  The sort of people actually turning up, wrote King, were ‘a hairstyle exhibition’. ‘There can’t be too many clubs where men wear dark overcoats well into June,’ he added.

  At least they were coming in. A gig by Culture Club in 1982 had kick-started a successful Saturday night, ushering in a trendy crowd who danced to Heaven 17, ABC and Soul Sonic Force. Even so, the numbers still weren’t enough. Plus, it wasn’t quite the sort of clientele Factory had been hoping to attract.

  ‘There is nobody on Earth who loathes Simple Minds as much as me,’ moaned Tony Wilson to the writer Mick Middles following a gig by the band. ‘I’m offended by this crap, by the fact that it is taking place in our club, and that this is our fullest night to date. If this is really what the Manchester public want, then we have been completely wasting our time. Still, I’m happy to let this night subsidize a few more important evenings ...’

  The truth was, however, that the gig had still only been half-full. Simple Minds hadn’t done much subsidizing at all.

  Which meant that not only was the club failing to deliver financially, but also that it wasn’t satisfying the aim of being more about the music than the fashion,of being somewhere for Factory and their friends to hang out, wearing what they wanted. Instead, it was a bit ‘trendy’, in inverted commas. Plus the Friday night still hadn’t sufficiently made its mark.

  All that was about to change thanks to Pickering. That year he’d visited New York with his band, Quando Quango. The DJ and then-boyfriend of Madonna Mark Kamins had remixed their ‘Love Tempo’, which had in turn been played by legendary Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan.As a result, Quando Quango were asked to play a live PA at the Garage. Enjoying the New York nightlife, Pickering also visited Danceteria, Fun House and the Loft. Like New Order, he experienced a musical epiphany.

  At the Danceteria Pickering saw Kamins mix electro such as Man Parrish with indie records. Back home this just wasn’t done. Meanwhile, at the Paradise Garage, a place Pickering later described as ‘heaven’, Rob Gretton told him, ‘This is it. This is what we’ve got to do. This is what our club should be like.’

  Here was a club where the emphasis was very much on music and people – alcohol wasn’t even served – and in contrast to DJs back home, there was no use of the microphone. In fact, the DJs were mixing. This was just the vibe Pickering wanted. To help create it he wanted to attract the black audience who were attending Legends back home. The white trendies in long dark overcoats would just have to get used to it, he reasoned.

  To achieve his aim, he first called on DJ Greg Wilson, who was then a mainstay at Legends. There Wilson was famous for having introduced Manchester to electro.

  A New York-based movement spearheaded by Afrika Bambaataa, electro was to provide the building blocks of techno and house on which the Haçienda’s name would be made. It was inspired by the emerging hip-hop movement, by the sleek, robotic rhythms of Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk, and by the distinctive noises produced by the Roland TR-808 drum machine. A cold, yet undeniably funky sound, its Mancunian appeal was obvious.

  And it was making Greg Wilson’s name at Legends. He’d done away with DJ banter and introduced mixing, packing the club out in the process. In the same month as the Haçienda opened in 1982, he appeared on Mike Shaft’s legendary Piccadilly Radio show, TCOB, playing electro and ushering in an era of mixes that inspired a generation of the city’s musicians and DJs (not least Gerald Simpson, a.k.a. A Guy Called Gerald, who fondly remembers rushing out to buy C90 cassettes in anticipation of their broadcast).

  Wilson had also appeared on Channel Four’s The Tube that February, demonstrating this new art of mixing to presenter Jools Holland. As a result of his appearance, the traditional white Factory crowd had begun tuning into his shows on Piccadilly. This fact caught the attention of Pickering, who had returned from the States inspired by what he’d seen at Danceteria and Paradise Garage and determined to push the musical envelope at the Haçienda. He secretly resented the fact that the club had to put bands on and wanted it to operate more like these New York clubs: with a great sound system, packed with a mixed crowd dancing to a wide variety of music.

  Thus he set about shaking up the Haçienda’s music policy, hiring not only Greg Wilson but John Tracey and Chad Jackson too. Wilson was given the responsibility of shaking up Friday nights with an electro-based sound, ‘bringing what I was doing at Legends to a new audience’.

  The night was called Fridays Go Truly Transatlantic, promising ‘DJ Greg Wilson with the newest in Funk and Dance’ and it debuted on Friday 19 August. From then on, Friday nights would be a largely black-music night (though the club still struggled to attract the black crowd it wanted), while Saturday nights catered more for the traditionally white Factory audience, with the odd slot from a moonlighting Greg Wilson in an attempt to familiarize the crowd with the sound of Fridays.

  So, on Friday night you could expect to hear Wilson play ‘White Lines’ by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel (which he’d received on import that September) among the new sounds of hip hop and electro, while on Saturday night John Tracey played a mix that included Simple Minds, Willie Hutch, Iggy Pop and Sharon Redd. His top tune was ‘Shout’ by Lulu and he often ended the evening with the Thunderbirds themetune.

  In addition to his Saturday-night slot Tracey took over Tuesday nights, hosting The End: A No-Funk Night. It went on to become the club’s most popular night until mid-1984. Again Greg Wilson was asked to play a slot during the evening, the club being absolutely determined to open its audience to new sounds – despite opposition from customers, some of whom even wrote to complain about the proliferation of ‘jazz, funk, disco, whatever it’s called’. Nevertheless, while this policy of playing different styles of music may have bewildered the audience at the time, it was to pay dividends in the future. The Haçienda was educating its customers, priming them for the genre-mashing rave and Madchester years ahead.

  What’s more, Wils
on’s legendary tenure at Piccadilly was doing the same thing. After Wilson came Stu Allan, widely credited with being the first radio DJ to champion Chicago house music in the mid-1980s, and switching on a generation of DJs in the process; names like Laurent Garnier and (once again) Gerald Simpson, who was inspired to make and send his own house tracks into the show. Allan gave the latter’s cassette its first-ever airplay, introducing it as being ‘by a Guy called Gerald from Hulme’. The name stuck, and the destinies of the Haçienda and ‘a guy called Gerald’ were soon intertwined.

  Greg hosted black and funk nights aimed at white men. I remember him coming up to me, asking if he could remix ‘Blue Monday.’ I told him to fuck off, thinking it was the most disgusting thing anyone had ever suggested – why should we let someone tamper with our work? How times change. Nowadays the remixes are often better than the originals.

  I don’t remember much of Greg beyond that episode, although I know he mixed ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Rockers Revenge into New Order’s ‘Confusion’, which was ingenious. The first mash-up.

  Greg Wilson also managed the Broken Glass Crew, a troupe of break-dancers that included Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge, who would later form Black Grape with Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays.

  The focus of a piece in the Observer in November that year was the Broken Glass Crew, a ten-strong team of breakdancers who regularly performed at the Haçienda. Whether they encouraged the overcoat brigade to dance or simply terrified them further is not clear, but it was an impressive spectacle. Manager Howard Jones informed the Observer that having breakdancers was never part of any masterplan: ‘All we’re interested in is if something’s happening, to make sure we give it a chance.’ In the same piece Sue Smith, a club regular, admitted to being somewhat baffled by the club’s musical policy, the ‘American dance music’.