How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (41 page)

Despite two singles and a video for ‘Wrote for Luck’, which consisted of a pre-teen nightclub crowd enjoying the track under the disco ball and strobes of Manchester city centre’s Legends,
Bummed
failed to find an audience. Wilson and McGough were
frustrated and felt that the band had stalled. Happy Mondays had made one of the first Ecstasy albums, and judging by the queues starting to stretch around the Haçienda, the market for Ecstasy was constantly growing. Happy Mondays may have been making a profit out of the demand for the drug while running a lucrative sideline in the club’s Acid Corner, but their music had yet to become synonymous with the drug.

‘The issue for me and Tony was that by the time you get round to the Easter of 1989, this had become front-page tabloid fodder,’ say McGough, ‘but the band, who were pivotal in all of this, had kind of been left behind and out of the picture because this was the rock ’n’ roll version. So we decided that we needed to get a club mix done of one of the tracks, and get that out there and hope we could build a bridgehead.’

A year after
Bummed
had been recorded, Factory released the 12-inch single,
W.F.L
. It contained two mixes of ‘Wrote For Luck’, one by the DJ Paul Oakenfold and one by Erasure’s Vince Clarke. A new video was commissioned. The location was once again a nightclub, but this time it featured the band and their friends dancing under lights in what looked like a user’s guide to Happy Mondays and the right conditions for experiencing their music.

A poster featuring the
Bummed
sleeve, an enlarged close-up of Shaun Ryder’s head in garish pastels, had been fly-posted around Manchester and the north. In late 1988, in a witty Warholian gesture, the walls of a disused building in Charles Street had been entirely covered in the poster. The address was the recently purchased site for the new Factory offices. In a career that alternated between large, magnanimous gestures and recklessness on the grand scale, Factory’s purchase of the Charles Street building marked the high point of hubris on behalf of the label, and especially, Wilson.

As Rob Gretton’s ill health continued to affect his abilities,
Rebecca Boulton had become more involved with the running of New Order’s affairs. In contrast to Factory’s plan for a new suite of offices, most of the day-to-day running of New Order’s business took place in Gretton’s front room. ‘Factory were struggling, because they moved from Palatine Road and bought this huge great building on Charles Street,’ says Boulton. ‘Tony was getting a bit ahead of himself, and they had a lot of employees at that time. Tina left before they moved into Charles Street. She had come up with projections and figures to show that if they continued with the Charles Street building, they would go bankrupt within two years.’ Tina Simmons had started to tire of the lack of financial controls at Palatine Road.

Factory was selling records internationally, but the company’s ambitions were increasingly complex and grandiose. The Haçienda was finally working at its capacity and thriving as a cultural masthead in the manner in which Wilson had imagined. Its success prompted further ideas from Wilson about redevelopment, but the basic tenets of running a record company – royalties and accountancy and the tedious business of fiscal housekeeping – were subjects he still largely ignored. Wilson’s outlook and ambitions were being hardened by an increased use of cocaine. When a case of wine was delivered to Palatine Road, he complained that the company was being misunderstood: Factory was a drug label, he insisted, not a drinking one. His friends and associates also noted that, after the dominance of New Order, Wilson was finally enjoying the success of Happy Mondays, a band with which he felt more of a sense of ownership and conspiracy. The band’s air of licentious hedonism also gave Wilson an opportunity to demonstrate the difference between Factory and the suburban, shoegazing, middle-class,
indie-dancing
south.

Although the Haçienda was seriously over-capacity most
nights of the week and the epicentre of a youth movement, all the debts it had accrued leading up to its success remained prevalent. Undeterred, Factory launched a new property venture, Dry Bar, a cafe/bar space in Oldham Street that was designed by the Factory architect, Ben Kelly, and the first of its kind in what would become Manchester’s emerging Northern Quarter.

‘Tony was looking at New York brunches and things like that,’ says Tina Simmons, ‘and the idea of somewhere to go after the night before. It was another thing that was totally different from anything else in Manchester at the time.’

Launched in 1989 during the city’s Madchester zenith, Dry Bar had received the blessing and financial backing from New Order, whose company Gainwest had financed the venture in partnership with Factory. ‘The Haçienda finally clicked for a bit,’ says Stephen Morris, ‘so everything’s great, and now they want to do Dry, so things were positive and the records were doing great.’

In April 1990 Happy Mondays unequivocally connected with an audience when their single ‘Step On’ reached no. 5 in the Top Forty. ‘“Step On”, to this day it still sounds fucking amazing,’ says McGough, ‘and it felt like we were exploding – when you have a hit record it changes everything.’ Paul Oakenfold had produced the track, adding an Italian house-style piano vamp. He had added a similar flourish to his mixes on the preceding Madchester
Rave
On
EP, which had been released in late 1989 and seen the band enter the mainstream. The Madchester EP’s artwork consisted of the record’s title in a Hanna Barbera-esque font, accompanied by a registered trademark symbol, the circled R, ®. McGough had convinced Wilson to brand the moment of the Haçienda’s ascendency and give the media a name with which to celebrate and investigate its euphoric momentum.

The album that followed ‘Step On’,
Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches
, continued the band’s ascendency, entering the charts inside the
Top Ten and the band’s popularity was such that they could book a date at Wembley Arena. Whatever McGough’s ambitions had been for his charges, the scale of the Happy Mondays’ crossover far exceeded his, the band’s or the label’s expectations.

‘I think we shipped 150,000 albums, first week,’ he says. ‘We knew a month before. You feel the heat and the energy, you know it’s gonna land out there and make a fucking huge explosion. And we knew that about
Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches
.’

Factory had delivered Happy Mondays into the Top Ten and the band had ridden a cultural wave, one that they had helped create. ‘What a major label would’ve done is, it would’ve had its first second and third singles lined up, it would’ve had its videos in commission. There was none of that planning. That’s where we came down. We made a huge explosion with that album, it sold really well, I think it did 400,000, but if we’d have been smart we could have gone on to do more.’

New Order added to the celebratory air of the city by releasing ‘World in Motion’, the England team’s official Italia 90 World Cup theme song. Even by the band and the label’s standards, its genesis was an unusual one. Had events turned out differently ‘World in Motion’s familiar melody might have been used in a wholly different context. ‘We were about to start a project with Michael Powell, the film director,’ says Rebecca Boulton. ‘He wanted to do a short. He’d cast Tilda Swinton and he wanted New Order to do the music for it. They all met up and they were going to do it.’

While the band were discussing the possibilities of working with one of British cinema’s most celebrated auteurs, an official at the Football Association had approached Tony Wilson. ‘Tony was friendly with someone at the press office at the FA,’ says Boulton. ‘I think they’d had dinner, and New Order doing the World Cup song got pitched as an idea. Tony brought it to the
band and I don’t think they were desperately keen at first, but Steve and Gillian had been working on an instrumental theme for a TV programme called
Reportag
e
and that track was the basis of “World in Motion”.’

Though New Order missed the opportunity of working with Powell, ‘World in Motion’ remains the solitary example of a football song worthy of more than a cursory listen. Italia 90 was also one of England’s most successful World Cup campaigns, one that helped sales of the single and enhanced the feeling that, over the spring and summer of 1990, Factory and Manchester were effortlessly in command of the
zeitgeist
.

In true Factory style, the gesture of making an England World Cup song was of more interest than the possible remuneration. Most of the single’s profits went to another record company. ‘“World in Motion” was a joint venture with MCA,’ says Boulton, ‘because in effect the footballers were signed to MCA.’

*

‘Alan Erasmus was very good at finding properties and things like that, so we found the building on the corner of Charles Street. It didn’t have much of a roof,’ says Simmons, ‘but apart from that it was a shell. We bought the freehold for [£]85,000 and that was going to be the office. We were expanding and poor old Alan’s flat really couldn’t fit us in any more.’

The desire for offices was born out of necessity. Part of Factory’s charm, and a source of its general irreverence towards the music business, was the fact the label had released a succession of million-selling albums from Alan Erasmus’s flat. It was a situation it had now outgrown. ‘
Substance, Technique, Bummed
we’d done a tremendous amount out of a flat,’ says Simmons, ‘but we were getting too big, we’d got the building and Ben Kelly was brought in again to do the designs.’

Rather than move into an already functioning and
purpose-built
office and sustain the company’s momentum, Wilson insisted that the Factory offices follow the specification and vision of the Haçienda. The crippling costs of the seven-year time lag between the Haçienda opening and its newly found success were ignored as Kelly was given a brief for a state-
of-the
-art office suite. To compound matters, New Order’s sessions on their next album were stalling and Happy Mondays’
Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches
had been a more expensive record to make than its predecessor.

‘That building, along with all the other things that were happening,’ says Simmons, ‘including the drug-taking and the fact that New Order’s album was running late, meant all the forecasting we’d done on projected sales and when those were coming in were getting further and further away and also the costs of the new offices were escalating.’

While the Haçienda’s success made it a media cause célèbre, it’s over-capacity nights represented a false economy to its owners. The additional running costs it incurred were large. Worse, its shift to ‘cultural phenomenon’ status meant that the police took a more robust interest in its operations. Once the Cheetham Hill gang started to target the club as a sales patch for drugs, the ensuing turf wars meant that the Haçienda was forced to shut down, a decision Wilson took without consulting the other partners in the club, including Gretton.

Events started to accelerate as the pressure on Factory’s finances began to grow. Although Madchester was still in full swing, its pioneers were facing possible bankruptcy.

New Order were kept abreast of the situation while in the studio. Their album was being recorded in strained circumstances and the intrusion of Factory’s financial problems into their
slow-moving
creative process only worsened the atmosphere. ‘There were loads and loads of meetings,’ says Boulton. ‘I remember
going down to Real World and people from Ernst and Young were always there. So the band were having to deal with meetings, and record an album, so that’s not great.’

New Order weren’t the only Factory act ensconced in a studio and struggling to finish an album. To record the follow-up to
Pills ’n’ Thrills
, Happy Mondays had shipped out to Barbados where Shaun Ryder had developed a crack habit. ‘The writing was on the bloody wall,’ says Morris. ‘Sending the Mondays to Barbados – we’d just done the same thing and got absolutely nothing done in Ibiza, why the hell do you think you’re gonna get anything done in Barbados?’

With both of the label’s major artists in the studio, Wilson anticipated moving into the Charles Street offices with two albums ready for release and the launch of a new Factory era, one that completed the transition from Palatine Road to the three floors of corporate offices. To ensure the company’s profile remained distinctive, Wilson even commissioned a Factory style guide from Peter Saville Associates.

‘It was Tony’s ego gone mad,’ says Simmons. ‘The first q[uantity] s[urveyor’s] report came in and it was going to cost over [£]400,000, just to refurbish it. The commercial estate agents said a fully functional building that size as offices would be worth [£]150,000 – this is when I started having alarm bells. Tony had gone on a jaunt to see Tom Atencio in LA, so Alan spoke to Ben Kelly and said, “Right, you’re going to have to rethink all these specifications. All these materials have to change.” Tony’s come back and is furious with Alan and I.’

Kelly’s design, which included such early Nineties signifiers as exposed brickwork and aluminium girders, was certainly elegant. It made use of the building’s three floors by creating a
triple-height
space for a floor-to-ceiling atrium and featured details such as bespoke slate roofing and a series of interior gutters that
contained treated pebbles. It was a space that would have been highly coveted by any media or advertising company, or the kind of thrusting property developer that wished to appear culturally relevant. Whoever the building’s occupants, they would certainly have to have been solvent to meet its running costs. Factory’s precarious cash flow was not guaranteed even to cover the costs of the building’s brushed steel gates that featured in their design a perforated rendering of the label’s new corporate logo.

Factory’s income stream remained impressive, but its outgoings consumed the label’s monies as soon as they had been collected. ‘The first cheque for a million pounds from Pinnacle arrived one Christmas,’ says Simmons. ‘I think it was after
Substance
. Then it was, “Here’s another one,” and then another one. We were getting these big cheques in but everything was still costing a lot of money and Tony wouldn’t ever look at the balance.’