The Haçienda Page 9

  Wednesday 28th The Durutti Column

  Thursday 29th The Durutti Column (unconfirmed)

  Friday 30th GINGER’S GOODBYE PARTY

  FAC 51 Limited

  Trading as: the Haçienda

  REPORT OF THE DIRECTORS

  The Directors submit their report and the audited accounts for the year ended 21 May 1983.

  Principal activities

  The principal activity of the Company is that of proprietors of a licensed club and recreation rooms.

  Review of the business

  In view of the fact that this is the Company’s first year of trading, the Directors feel that the loss level is as expected. High priority is being given to the strict control of the Company’s cash flow and a significant improvement in the results for 1984 is expected.

  Tax losses currently available to the Company are in excess of £94,500.00 and these can be offset against future profits.

  Results and dividends

  The results of the Company are as shown on pages 3 to 8. No dividends are proposed or were paid.

  Directors

  The Directors who served during the year and their interests in the Company at the end of the year were as follows:

  A.H.Wilson (held in trust for Factory Records)

  R. L. Gretton (Communications) Limited

  H. M. Jones

  A. Erasmus

  The following Directors are retiring by rotation and being eligible offer themselves for re-election:

  A. Erasmus

  R. L. Gretton

  Taxation status

  In the opinion of the Directors, the Company is a close Company within the meaning of the Income and Corporation Taxes Act 1970 (as amended).

  Auditors

  A resolution to reappoint the auditor Mr Keith Taylor FCA will be proposed, at the Annual General Meeting.

  BY ORDER OF THE BOARD

  [Signed by Alan Erasmus]

  Secretary

  FAC 51 Limited

  Trading as: the Haçienda

  In October 1983 a staff outing saw everybody pile on to a bus bound for Blackpool. Nathan McGough (later to become the Happy Mondays’ manager) was dressed as a scout, members of staff were refused at pubs for having colourful hair and photographer Kevin Cummins was sick on a fair ride.

  In November 1983 Dave Haslam launched his Debris fanzine, which dealt with the indie scene in Manchester. Debris hosted events at the Haçienda; and Haslam, of course, would later become one of the Haçienda’s resident DJs.

  ‘I was always going away with New Order and Quando Quango and I was always going away to New York. “Love Tempo” by Quando Quango was really big in the Paradise Garage. We actually did a PA there,when Larry Levan was DJing.I went to the Loft,and I was gob-smacked by it all, because I was just this little scally. So I went back to the Haçienda and I was, “This is what it’s got to be like.” So I ripped out the microphone; this is the future, you know.’

  Mike Pickering,on djhistory.com

  ‘It seemed like the BBC of nightclubs. It was like a subsidized, creative centre that didn’t have to be that successful . . . that could explore and experiment.There were no grants,it seemed like it was all courtesy of New Order.’

  Promoter Paul Cons

  The SOS Band – ‘Just Be Good to Me’

  The B Boys – ‘Two, Three, Break’

  Captain Rapp – ‘Bad Times (I Can’t Stand It)’

  Cybotron – ‘Clear’

  Hashim – ‘Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)’

  Hot Streak – ‘Body Work’

  Shannon – ‘Let the Music Pay’

  Time Zone – ‘The Wildstyle’

  Two Sisters – ‘High Noon’

  Unique – ‘What I Got is What You Need’

  A 1983 end-of-year review of Manchester’s club scene in City Life magazine said this of the Haçienda: ‘Greg Wilson’s faith in New York’s mind-hammering electro beat was confirmed with both growing crowds and colour supplement coverage ... interestingly, the sound flopped in the vast chasms of the Haçienda.’

  Greg Wilson didn’t hang around to bathe in the City Life glory, however. He retired from DJing altogether in January 1984,having decided to spend more time managing the Broken Glass Crew and maybe to try his hand at music production. (He has since come out of DJ retirement.) His departure may well have suited Pickering, who hadn’t been convinced about Wilson’s concentration on electro. Pickering liked electro; possibly he preferred it to the diet of hairdresser and Goth music played on other nights. But he wanted it as part of an overall music policy,not to the exclusion of everything else.

  ‘I said that same thing to Greg as I said to Hewan,’ he later told writer Tim Lawrence. ‘I said that I wanted this across-the-board mixture of music I’d heard in New York. I wanted electro as part of a night, but I didn’t want electro on its own – or any music on its own.’

  Having previously been edged out, Hewan Clarke now returned to Friday nights, where the policy was a mix of electro, jazz and soul, enlivened by jazz dancing from Foot Patrol and the Jazz Defektors.

  So, as 1984 began, the Haçienda had an enviable line-up of DJ talent, while still retaining its cutting-edge, stylish reputation and the enduring kudos of its association with Factory. The perfect place, then, for Channel Four to film a special episode of The Tube based around a rising New York-based singer, the girlfriend of famous New York DJ Mark Kamins. You know the one ...

  I believe Madonna appeared as a personal favour to Mark Kamins, a friend of ours who managed her.

  He asked us if we could get her a gig, and because there was an episode of the The Tube being broadcast from the Haçienda Rob decided to put her on. You can see it on YouTube. Jools Holland and Paula Yates presented.

  She lip-synced to two songs during the afternoon’s filming. So there you go, Madonna’s first appearance on British TV was all down to us: it was an inside job. And once again we were ahead of the trends. We already knew of her through her association with Kamins, Jellybean, and Arthur; she had no profile in the UK at all. That appearance at the Haçienda changed it all for her. The first step on her journey of world domination, God forgive us.

  The Factory All-Stars also performed on The Tube that day, a band consisting of Barney, Donald Johnson, Vini Reilly and a few other people on the label. I didn’t play – I don’t know why. I’ll play at every opportunity usually. Instead, I spent three days programming the DMX drum machine for a medley they intended to perform of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’,A Certain Ratio’s ‘Shack Up’,and Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

  The morning of the show, I had to take the wife to a furniture shop, then rush back home to finish programming the drum machine in time to get it to the All-Stars sound-check early enough for them to practise.

  I got her to the shop, tore back home, finished programming the machine then jumped in the car and raced to the Haçienda. On the way, the coppers pulled me over and gave me a ticket for speeding. Bastards. Then, when I arrived at the club, Barney told me he’d changed the songs anyway. Why that surprised me I don’t know. It was fucking typical.

  Even so, the taping went well. Because this was an episode of The Tube, it attracted a different crowd to the one we normally drew; but by then we’d grown used to a bit of national exposure, so the historical significance of the day didn’t dawn on us until much later.

  Rob and I watched Madonna and were impressed.

  ‘We should get her back here afterwards, to perform tonight,’ he said, so we walked to the dressing room, where we found her with her backing dancers.

  Rob said, ‘Uh, hello. I’m Rob Gretton. I manage the club. Do you want to play later tonight? We’ll give you fifty quid.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she drawled in her whiny Noo Yawk accent before turning away. That was it for the night. But there are two other stories that came out of her appearance.

  The first was that somebody went into her bag in the d
ressing room and when she got back to her hotel room she found it had been completely cleaned out.

  The other legend goes that she and Mark Kamins were staying at Mike Pickering’s house in Chorlton, so, after they’d finished at the Haçienda, and they were both the worse for wear, they got a taxi back to Mike’s place for the night. Now, English terrace houses tend to have a porch door and a front door, each of which opens with a key.

  Mike had given the keys to Mark and Madonna so they could let themselves in, and they turned up, both completely drunk. They successfully unlocked the first door, stepped into the gap, and then the door slammed behind them with the key still in the lock.

  At which point they were stuck. Mike woke up the next morning to hear that his missus had opened the door, causing Mark and Madonna to tumble into the house.

  I don’t know which story is true.

  The other highlight of The Tube day was an interview with Morrissey and Rob. Now I don’t know why, but Morrissey had always hated Joy Division. Maybe Rob got it right when after a lively debate as the cameras were turned off he turned to Morrissey and said, ‘The trouble with you, Morrissey, is that you’ve never had the guts to kill yourself like Ian. You’re fucking jealous.’ You should have seen his face as he stormed off. I laughed me bollocks off.

  Admission was free to those holding invitations, which had been given away.

  The day included a performance by the Factory All-Stars, as we’ve heard, but also on the bill were the Jazz Defektors.

  Managed by Ellie Gray, the Jazz Defektors were led by Salts, a club regular who recalls being one of the few black people to regularly visit the club during that era. Whenever possible the group would take over the club, gaining fame as much for their look as their music – the look being colour-co-ordinated 1950s suits, high-waisted trousers bought from secondhand clothes shops and charity stores. They’d been due to perform for a TV audience on The Tube but when the day came Madonna’s people insisted that she lip-sync to two songs, rather than one, meaning an act had to be cut for the running time. That act was the Jazz Defektors. ‘She couldn’t dance as well as us,’ noted Salts ruefully.

  There’s a postscript to the event. Years after, Tony Wilson found himself sitting opposite Madonna at dinner.

  ‘I eventually plucked up the courage to look across the table to Madonna and ask, “Are you aware that the first place you appeared outside of New York was our club in Manchester?”

  ‘She gave me an ice-cold stare and said, “My memory seems to have wiped that.”’

  Miaow.

  Meanwhile, DJ Greg Wilson wasn’t the only one to leave the Haçienda. Howard ‘Ginger’ Jones, a director and the club’s manager, had left at the very end of 1983.His farewell party was held on 30 December.

  He wanted something new, he said. Having heard the Stone Roses, he was thinking about a career in music management – and indeed went on to manage them briefly – so he handed in his notice during the club’s Halloween party. As result 1984 began with nobody at the helm of the Haçienda, nor with anybody who was either qualified for or even wanted the job. So began the era of the infamous ‘management committee’, a co-operative including Mike Pickering, bar manager Penny Henry and Ellie Gray, plus input from Gretton and Wilson.

  Gray had been receptionist since the club’s opening, and was aware of financial problems from the very beginning.‘Debtors were always trying to get hold of Ginger and he was never available to them,’ she told Jon Savage. When the management committee was formed it was up to her keep the bailiffs away. However, she remembers the committee working well at the beginning of its life, ‘although no one knew what they were doing’.

  By this time nearly everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. We should have brought in a professional club manager at this point or earlier, but we always employed our mates because we liked working with them, even if they knew fuck all about the job.

  So when Ginger left in late December 1983 he was replaced by Penny. She lived at Alan Erasmus’s house, which doubled as the original Factory office building on Palatine Road,and she had all the necessary credentials to be put in charge: she was an old friend.

  I think it was she who came up with the idea to run the Haçienda as a collective, and suddenly, she, Ellie and Mike Pickering were putting everything to the vote. Price increases, for example. Obviously the staff didn’t want the club to be expensive for their mates. They didn’t care whether the Haçienda made a profit or not. So every time a price rise came up, they voted against it:

  ‘Right, the wholesale cost of beer has gone up this week, we need to raise the price of a pint. Anybody in favour?’

  Inevitably no one was. Prices stayed low, but at the same time nobody took action to bring expenses down, which meant that the club was losing even more money than before. Saying that, ‘the people’ loved us. Not only did we sell we the cheapest beer in Manchester but also we didn’t put the prices up on Saturday. There’s an unwritten law among pub and club owners that on Saturday night the price of everything goes up 10p. You charge extra simply because the market will bear it (i.e., everyone’s pissed). The Haçienda never did that because the staff voted against it.They never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as the saying goes. As long as money to fund the club came in from New Order and Joy Division and Factory,they didn’t care how much cash flew out.

  To me, the decision to run the club as a co-operative was ridiculous because the members of the co-operative weren’t risking anything. I think the staff decided, ‘Oh, they’re rock-star millionaires, fuck them, we’ll keep it cheap for our mates.’

  Rock-star millionaire? Where?

  Seemed like everybody had that perception, though. One night I drove into town and parked my car outside the club. A brand-new Audi, it was, a company car – as in, a New Order car. When I came out later, it had been kicked to fuck. I mean, whoever had done it in had really done a number on it, lights, doors, roof, windscreen. I stormed back inside, steaming, only to bump into Tony Wilson on his way out.

  ‘Hooky,darling,what’s wrong?’he said.He called everyone darling,all the time.

  I pointed back up the street to my mangled car, seething, ‘A bunch of fucking twats have kicked my car in. Fucking car’s trashed.’

  ‘Well, darling,’ he said, ‘they paid for it,’ and off he flounced, me lost for words in his wake.

  Put it this way, Tony’s words were no solace.

  We continued to make mistakes. For example, the place would be repainted every week,which cost a fortune.But,rather than wash out the paint tray and rollers, staff would throw them in a pile then go to B&Q and buy new ones. I found that pile after we went bankrupt and it was like fucking Everest, had two Sherpas and a base camp on it. We were just spunking it up the wall, as we say in Madchester.

  We got robbed literally, too, not just figuratively. One Monday morning the staff counted the weekend’s revenue before taking it to the bank to deposit it all. The cleaners were in the club, too, tidying up. Standard procedure after a weekend.

  Suddenly armed men burst in, held everyone at gunpoint, tied ’em all up, and took the money.

  Police investigated but got nowhere, so we tried to put the experience behind us. About three weeks later, though, one of our staff said to a cleaner, ‘That’s a great tan, been on holiday?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Want to see my piccies?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The cleaner took out her photos from Barbados or wherever, and uncovered a shot of her on the beach with an arm around one of the pricks who’d robbed us: her boyfriend.

  Gotcha.

  Whatever else was going on, though, the Haçienda was still a great place to hang out. Downstairs, Swing, the hairdressers, had advertised for female students with a ‘models wanted’ advert. Once there, the male hairdressers would work their mojo, promising them free entry into the club. Talk about grooming.

  It primarily served as a place to hang out.It became a cult
thing,certainly not a profit centre. All the Factory band members were there. Although I did get my first freebie there – a haircut, courtesy of Neil, Neil, Orange Peel. The only rent they ever paid. Swing eventually closed, though the basins remained – a weird reminder of what once had been.

  Hewan Clarke’s notes complaining about the siting of the DJ box had become legendary and in 1984 it finally happened. Reluctantly – the one thing that the Haçienda didn’t need was an extra cost – it was decided that the booth would be shifted from a room at one side of the stage (from where DJs couldn’t see the crowd) to the balcony, where a wooden structure was built. Ben Kelly apparently objected, but it would turn out to be a smart move, paving the way for the era of the superstar DJ when one of the club’s most enduring images would be of the smoke-shrouded DJ overseeing the carnage below, hands outstretched, in an almost Christ-like pose.

  That was to come, though. In the meantime, the club continued to operate more like a venue.But still hosting some legendary concerts.

  I was still watching groups all the time, whenever New Order were home. I’d occasionally see Barney there, although we’d never hang out together. We might nod and say, ‘All right,’ to one another, but he and I never socialized. We had different circles. If we went anywhere together, it was as New Order.

  We were spoilt rotten by the number of big groups that came through during that time. Some I enjoyed, some I didn’t. In either event, I never fraternized. I firmly believe in the maxim ‘Don’t meet your heroes’. What if they turned out to be horrible, or even ordinary? Ooooh! I got better at that as I got older.

  I remember seeing Jonathan Richman, at his maddest, insisting on playing without a PA – just him and his acoustic guitar. Two hundred people came and nobody could hear him. They were either laughing at him – he looked like an escaped lunatic – or ignoring him. That night was a complete debacle, though, hilarious. And the funny thing was, I later saw him do the same set at Alan Wise’s club, Six Six Six, on Fennel Street a couple of months later, and he was absolutely fantastic. In a small venue it worked, whereas in a big place it didn’t. Some shows are like that. The setting makes all the difference.