The Haçienda (20 page)

FACT 51 Limited
Trading as: the Haçienda

FACT 51 Limited
Trading as: the Haçienda

Great excitement, we have Sham 69 visiting our Ibizan bolt-hole tonight. The Hersham boys are thinking of making their next album in the studio we’ve been using, Studio Meditterraneo – a grand name for a not-very-grand studio – so they’re being given the full sales pitch and tour. One of the selling points, of course, is that New Order are currently using it, busy recording their next album, the one that will eventually become
Technique
, and if it’s good enough for New Order . . . But actually we haven’t been good enough for it!

We haven’t exactly been busy, and we haven’t done very much recording. Almost precisely none, in fact.

Instead,I’ve been partying.Every single night I’ve been out until the small hours only to rise some time the next afternoon, refreshed and ready to start again.Tonight,I suspect,will be no different.

Sham 69 arrive and are met by the two owners of the studio, a couple of right heavy-metal throwbacks: imagine Status Quo crossed with Judas Priest and you have an idea of the hair and wardrobe on these guys. They give Sham a tour of the studio then we all adjourn to the bar. There, I discover that Sham are doing a gig tonight at San Antonio harbour but have no soundman.

Step forward Peter Hook, a great fan, ably assisted by Andrew Robinson.

It’s going to be wild, we’re assured.

Oh, how right they are.

So we get to San Antonio where it turns out that Sham 69 will be playing the gig – an early Ibiza Rocks – on a big raft that’ll be towed out into the middle of the harbour. Sounds good. Trouble is, they’re not playing until much, much later – the early hours – and right now it’s only nine p.m., giving us a suicidal amount of time to kill. You can see exactly where this is going, can’t you?

We make for the backstage area, which is a barge with a public bar upstairs plus a downstairs dressing room with cabins and a private bar.

We get stuck in and by midnight everybody is off their face. I mean, completely out of their tree. Everyone’s a right mess, not least of all Sham’s lead singer, Jimmy Pursey, who’s mithering me for coke: ‘It’s for me piles. They’re killing me,’ he moans.

Meanwhile, my mate has cornered the two studio owners. ‘Have you tried this?’he says,holding out his hand.‘It’s great.Everyone’s on it.’

What he’s offering them is the main reason I’ve done nothing during our four months in Ibiza. It’s ecstasy, and I’ve taken to it like a duck to water ...

We’d read about ecstasy before we arrived in Ibiza, of course, but none of us had seen or tried it; I’d never really used drugs up to that point. But every time we went out and about, buzzing around Ibiza, it looked like everyone was dropping E and having a fantastic time.They were, as we say, mad for it.

So, one day, after another half-hearted attempt at recording, we were sent to track some down.

There was a bloke named Paco who ran a bar near the studio and who once served the Rolling Stones up when they were on the island. Ronnie Wood was his favourite: ‘
Uno grande
guy:
uno
gram,
uno
line,’ he’d say.

Paco introduced us to a dealer named Pedro, who we got to know well during our time in Ibiza. Pedro had only one arm. I kept asking him what happened to the other one but his English wasn’t too good – or mine wasn’t – so he never understood what I meant and I never found out. Pedro was shit hot on a moped. Work that one out.

Anyway, we got some off him. Spent a lot of money on them, too – £90, all told. We returned to the studio like the guy with the magic beans. What was he called? Oh yeah: Jack. Only, we didn’t swap them for a cow. With hindsight I wish we had, but hindsight is good like that. Instead we went up our own beanstalk.

After we’d explained how much they cost everyone suddenly looked very uninterested, so we were stuck with these tablets. Very, very annoyed, we charged into San Ann. Once we’d pounded back a few drinks and calmed down I said:‘I know.Fuck it.Let’s try a half.’

We swallowed. Waited ten seconds. Then, as soon as Andy said, ‘Is yours working yet?’ I experienced a need to shit like I’d never felt before and I ran around like a maniac trying to find a bloody toilet.

Once I’d accomplished that mission, the next sensation was like
having a rocket up my arse. It felt like nothing I’d ever known before. My God, it was unbelievable. We lost control. We was off.

Tripping, we got split up in San Antonio. I came to my senses about ten hours later, five miles away in Ibiza harbour, sat on a bench and watching the sun rise. God knows how I got there but, as I stared blankly out to sea, I thought I saw a little black thing come out of the water. It looked like a periscope. It looked round; it
was
a periscope. A flaming submarine rose up and docked. All the sailors emerged from inside and lined up on the deck; someone whistled, they saluted, then all disembarked, walked past where I sat, then marched into town.

It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen.

I still have no idea what navy they were. I just thought, ‘Fuckin’ hell. I’m going home.’

Once we’d recovered from that night, we couldn’t wait to do it again. Like Alice in Wonderland we found we liked it down the rabbit hole and we spent all our time partying.We were on the guest-list for all the clubs: Pacha, Ku, Space, Eden . . . My favourite was Amnesia – especially the roof terrace – but we haunted them all: the tranny bars of Ibiza Town, the after-hours clubs in San Antonio. And, God forgive us, we drove everywhere, too, all over the island – everyone did. Each morning there’d be a different set of rolled cars all over the place. We wrote off eleven hire cars ourselves.

It was fantastic. A permanent holiday and we’d tell anyone who’d listen at home how great it was – except the wives, of course.

Then somebody said, ‘We’re having such a good time, why don’t we invite the Happy Mondays over?’ Perfect.

The Mondays were friends of ours; they were like our naughty younger brothers. Though sometimes I absolutely hated their stinking guts, especially when they misbehaved. I remember them wrecking a room we’d hired at Birmingham NEC for a Dry staff party when we were playing there. They broke in, grabbed the booze and wrecked the room.I went berserk.Me and Terry were ready to throw them out but Rob said no. Shaun’s only riposte was: ‘What do you think cleaners are for, Hooky?’ I was livid. Ah well.

That said, they embodied true rock and roll. Like Iggy Pop, Nick Cave and other people I admired, they didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought.They made Pete Doherty look like Cliff Richard.

So I was delighted when they came to Ibiza. They arrived with our great friend Gordon the Chef (‘Hundred and forty short orders, Hooky, one night’), and brought a couple of ounces of speed to sell to pay their way. They didn’t manage to sell any of it because everyone preferred E – and after we’d introduced them to Pedro, our one-armed dealer,so did they.The rest is history.The last we saw of them they were driving off with a couple of our rentals. Into the night.

Needless to say, progress on the next New Order record now ground to a complete halt – in fact, if anything it went into reverse. There just wasn’t enough time to party
and
make the record, and every night brought its tales.

Like the night Andy and I met Paul Oakenfold, and Brandon Block I think – or it could have been Danny Rampling – in a club. These were the guys who then took Ibiza and acid house back to London, so you can imagine: it was a massive night. Along the way we’d hooked up with two lads from Stretford and at the end of the night me and Andy offered to give them a lift home.

Which would have been a great idea if either of us had known where we were going. We didn’t, but we weren’t going to let a small thing like that bother us. Definitely not.

I was absolutely battered – no way could I drive. I could hardly even see straight. So it was Andy in the driving seat, me in the passenger seat, the two Stretford lads in the back. Tunes on. You’ve seen
Wayne’s World
, right? The bit where they’re all singing along to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’? That was us. Only we were doing the Ibiza version, the house remix, making boxes and gurning.

All the same, though, there was something wrong. Something not quite right.

‘There’s summat up here, Andy,’ I was saying . . .

‘No it’s fine,’ he said. Foot hard down.

‘No there’s something wrong? I can’t figure out what it is . . .’

Then –
crash
.

We were on the wrong side of the road and we’d hit another car head-on. A right shunt. Andy and I both butted the windscreen – I swear the glass had a Peter Hook-shaped dent in it – and the two lads from Stretford came flying over the seats from behind us, scraping their shins on the seat backs and ending up in our laps, bleeding. Nasty.