The Haçienda (11 page)

‘But I’m prepared to put up with the music for the dead-genuine people,’ she enthused. ‘I just love it so much.’

The club put the Broken Glass Crew on the road as part of a Haçienda-sponsored tour, along with Quando Quango and Greg himself: our attempt to bring the experience of being at the club to the rest of England. I’ve no idea how well it did, but I can imagine it didn’t work. Change comes slowly; you have to seduce people. Look at the club nights during the early years – very few people attended because nobody knew the music.

As a money-making venture the club was still a failure, but little did we know that we were helping to create today’s whole bloody DJ culture by paying the DJs to be exclusive to our club.

I myself have always been cynical about DJs. I thought they were overpaid, arrogant twats. So when I became one I fitted in perfectly. These days someone like Carl Cox can charge a fortune to appear. One New Year’s Eve he earned a million for performing at one party, then flew over the dateline and headlined somewhere else for another million. That culture would never have occurred without the Haçienda. We’re responsible for it. We got people into the mindset of appreciating DJs as stars /entertainers in their own right,which was mainly down to Rob, who was very forward-thinking that way. He always talked about opening a Haçienda DJ agency because very early on he realized the power that a good one could wield. ‘DJs are the next big thing, the next superstars who we should nurture,’ he’d say, and he was putting on house-music nights way before the dance-music explosion. He just couldn’t get people into it at the time, was too far ahead of the curve. Along with Mike Pickering, he was always on to something new well before it went mainstream.

As a band our biggest education came from the record producer Arthur Baker.Michael Shamberg,who produced our videos and ran the Factory USA office in Manhattan, said to Rob, ‘This Arthur Baker is great. Get New Order hooked up with him’, so we flew to New York to record in his Shakedown Studios.

Arthur Baker was the
crème de la crème
of New York producers. He was like a cuddly, fun version of Martin Hannett. Through Arthur, we discovered hip hop and dance music: Freeze’s ‘A.E.I.O.U.’, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaata. Arthur was right on it. He was an electronic punk and at first it was terrifying working with him. It was the first recording session we’d ever done without writing anything beforehand. But ‘Confusion’ turned out great. He taught me to love making electronic music.

This was the year in which the Happy Mondays first played at the Haçienda, in one of the regular Battle of the Bands competitions organized by Pickering. It was their second-ever performance, it was a complete shambles, and they came last in the competition. However, the bassist, Paul Ryder, was Peter Hook’s postman, and according to Hooky, ‘He always slipped demo tapes through my door. It was when I got a tape of ‘The Egg’ that I passed one along to Tony Wilson. The Mondays came from Little Hulton (like me), I was really up for giving them a chance so I was livid with Tony
when he gave the job of producing them to Barney. They ended up being the only other successful act on Factory.’

This was the year the Smiths broke, and they played the Haçienda three times, the first supporting 52nd Street in February. They were back, headlining, in July, when the stage was strewn with flowers – the beginning of what would come to be a vital part of the Smiths’ image and identity. ‘They’re symbolic for at least three reasons,’ Morrissey told
Sounds
.‘We introduced them as an antidote to the Haçienda when we played there; it was so sterile and inhuman. We wanted some harmony with nature. Also, to show some kind of optimism in Manchester, which the flowers represent. Manchester is semi-paralysed still. The paralysis just zips through the whole of Factory.’

By the time the Smiths returned to the Haçienda in November the place was full of customers (this and the New Order gigs were the only times the Haçienda sold out during its first two years) and full of flowers, producing a memorable atmosphere for what would later be regarded as one of the club’s best-ever gigs. Not least among those who considered it so was Tony Wilson, who told writer Johnny Rogan: ‘It was one of the great moments in the Haçienda’s history. I was proud. There have been certain great gigs in Manchester’s history:the Eagles at the Palace,Lou Reed at the Free Trade Hall, Joy Division at the Derby Hall, Bury. These are concerts you always remember, and the Smiths at the Haçienda was one of the great gigs.’

It might have become part of music history but I didn’t see the Smiths at the Haçienda, though I did catch them by accident when they supported Richard Hell at Rafters. I wasn’t impressed, but I’m too competitive so I’ve always been very anti-Smiths right from the word go – probably because I thought that musically they sounded very twelve-bar rock ’n’ roll, the antithesis of what I liked. For that reason I wouldn’t go and see them. That said, if I’m honest, it was obvious how good they were, and how big they were going to be.

I like the Fall. Always have, and they played at the club loads of times. I think Mark E. Smith is a twat, though. A right obnoxious bastard. And he’s proud of it. One of his ex-girlfriends told me that he sometimes has for breakfast Guinness and cornflakes with his favourite stimulant sprinkled on them. He denies this, which is quite funny. Must be why you’ve got such great teeth, Mark. We’re great friends.

I remember when OMD played; they sounded great because they
had a huge PA and blasted the bad acoustics out of the place. Their lights were stunning,too.Must have cost a fortune,but it added up to a great show.

If the Haçienda filled up you’d get an excellent gig, despite the bad sound, because of the atmosphere; the crowd worked as a sound baffle, cutting down the echoes, improving the acoustics a lot. But at poorly attended shows you had few people and thus bad sound, one compounding the other. It was an awful predicament.

Some of the most interesting concerts were largely ignored by the Manchester population and turnouts for some gigs could be really bad.

John Cale comes to mind. One of my heroes. I love his work with the Velvet Underground and the record he produced for Nico,
Chelsea Girls
, and his solo stuff.

I got into his solo material before I discovered the Velvets, whereas for most people it’s the other way around. It happened when I was working at the docks in the 1970s.I worked in the canteen part-time during dinner, selling meal tickets. I ate free because of it; I was skint at the time so this was a great incentive. Anyway, the guy who worked during the lunch hour loved John Cale, weirdly a massive fan. Through talking to him on our five-minute changeover between shifts, I ended up borrowing all his LPs. From then on I was a massive Cale fan too. That’s why the evening at the Haçienda pissed me off so much: it was a fantastic performance, but just forty people turned up.
And
most of them talked all the way through the show. Cale played piano and acoustic guitar,and the music was very quiet.All the chatter drove me insane. Marc Riley from the Fall – a radio presenter now – was as incensed as I was and we walked through the crowd, poking them telling them to shut up.

Cale lived in Manchester with Nico for a while in the 1990s. I never met him but he’d been suggested to produce New Order a couple of times, though nothing came of it.

Nico herself played her last gig at the Haçienda, in 1986. Another Factory band,Stockholm Monsters,were on tour with her at the time. At this point she was living in Manchester with the promoter Alan Wise. She used to say – in her flat, German accent – ‘Hello, Peter, how are you?’

‘I’m fine. Are you all right, love?

‘Yes. But I hate Alan. He’s a cunt.’

She forever went on about how she despised Alan for always trying to fuck her up the arse. He loved her, but Nico was a long-term drug addict and addicts are just not interested in sex. The drugs rob you of your libido.

She was a very grumpy and miserable lady.Hardly surprising,really – she’d gone from Jim Morrison in LA to a bedsit in Prestwich.

Whenever New Order weren’t in the studio or on the road I worked as a humper at the Haçienda – looking after the visiting band’s gear and PA – for a tenner a night to supplement my income. Ironic, really, considering how much of my money the club was losing every night. Then I got put in charge of backstage security, aided by members of the Stockholm Monsters: Slim, Chop, Ged, Shan and Tony.

I did live sound for the Monsters – I toured with them for two or three years – and I produced their records, so it was easy for us to work together and we were a great team.

We had a right laugh. I enjoyed doing the shows and I liked lording it over the bands. Naughty, I know. Like the time I threw out Pete Murphy of Bauhaus for saying those six immortal words to Slim when he’d forgotten his backstage pass: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

‘Ha, ha, yeah, I do,’ I said. ‘You’re out, arsehole.’

The tour manager begged us to let him back in, so we relented. Pete Murphy still remembers it – he mentioned it to me when I DJed for him at an aftershow in 2008. How embarrassing. The Bauhaus gig was a good one, though. After we let Pete back in, that is. I remember pissing myself laughing because the bass player left his shades on during the show to look cool. Then, pissed up, he played ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ on the wrong string on a fretless. I’m glad it wasn’t just me that sort of thing happened to.

Working security was great because I got to watch the bands from the stage.The fact that I was part-owner of the club meant nothing to me – what I was really thrilled about was being on stage with the bands.

The Birthday Party,in particular,ranked among my favourite groups of all time. One of the few bands I wished I had been in. Tracy Pew was my hero. They had a great image and the music was wonderful. They were my type of musicians, to be honest.

When they split in 1984, Nick Cave went on to form Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (although they were called Nick Cave and the Cavemen
for a while). They played the Haçienda that year. I worked on that night, too. I’ll always remember that somebody rolled a dimpled pint pot onstage, Nick Cave punched it and smashed it into pieces. I was well impressed.It must’ve hurt,but he didn’t show it.Pure class.

Another favourite were Bow Wow Wow. Rob and I had seen them at the Red Parrot in New York in September 1980 (this was during New Order’s first tour of America and was the night after our first gig at Maxwell’s, New Jersey, where we had all our gear stolen) and liked them a lot. As a group, they were very, very impressive: the bassist, drummer and guitarist were fantastic,and everybody loved the singer, Annabella Lwin. But they had the most obnoxious road crew I have ever met, a right bunch of bigmouth cockney bastards, and I don’t know how we kept our tempers that night. They kept stage manager Terry Mason very busy.

Those gigs were well attended, but other times it was patchy. We fell foul of the usual attitude promoters have, which is, ‘If we put one band on tonight, we’ll attract 400 punters. If we put three on, we’ll get 1200.’ But it never worked like that. The same 400 people liked all three bands so we could never pull a bigger crowd – it was always the same people. We lost a lot more on the less popular gigs than we made on the successful ones.

We had a few rap concerts;and,despite the reputation they’ve got, none of them were ever heavy. I don’t recall every having trouble with rap shows – or any shows – at the Haçienda, except a shitty Jesus & Mary Chain gig in 1985 I’ll tell you about later. By the mid-1980s, though, rap shows didn’t work. We’d haemorrhage money on them, so Rob stopped booking them, and they’d find deals elsewhere.