The Haçienda (32 page)

There were many more incidents, culminating in the head doorman being chased out of the club by an Asian kid holding an Uzi. The doorman ran out the back door, jumped into his car, sped home to London and never came back.Poor bastard.That ended everything.The other doormen packed up and left too. ‘We’re not fucking standing there, even if we’ve got a hundred Dobermanns. There are too many little kids running around with guns.’

Clearly we were fucked. We’d reopened but now we had no bouncers. With clubs, punters and even cops failing to stand up to them, the gangsters had just got more and more cocky. Obviously what we needed was someone a bit more sussed, someone who knew the score, exactly what was going on . . .

It was at this point that the Haçienda’s owners turned to Paul Carroll (one of the advisers to Top Guard) and Damien Noonan. Both had underworld links and Damien was a member of the infamous Noonan family, a huge
family in which all of the siblings’ names began with the letter D. His brother Desmond had been charged but then acquitted of the murder of ‘White’ Tony Johnson, and had a name as a gangland fixer, while his younger brother Dominic had more than forty convictions for armed robbery,assaulting police, deception, firearms and fraud. Together, Carroll and Damien Noonan would now run the club’s door.

Yes, they were the bad boys but they were all we had left to turn to. We hoped that with the protection of the Noonan family we could control the violence. That was the idea, anyway.

Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. My mate is a policeman in Salford. He told me about an unwritten rule whereby if Damien Noonan got pulled over they had to let him go, no matter what he’d been doing.

One time a new recruit on the force was patrolling Langworthy Road.

He stopped some guy for drunk driving, got on the radio and said, ‘Can I have some assistance? I’ve pulled over a guy called . . .’ and then nobody could make out what he’d said, but it sounded like ‘Oonan’.

Everyone at the station froze.‘Noonan? Did he just say Noonan?’

Everybody started shouting,‘Let him go!’

‘What?’ he said back at them. ‘You’re breaking up.’

They all shat themselves because they had to go give him assistance and they knew Damien would leather them all. That kid got a right bollocking when he eventually returned to the station.

You felt like other gangsters did things just for sport, but the Noonans acted like proper businessmen. When I’d drive past Damien’s house – before I knew him – I always wondered, ‘Who lives there?’ He’d create the most outrageous Christmas-light display you’ve ever seen in your life. It used to cheer up the neighbourhood a treat. Nobody else would have dared do it – it would have got stolen or wrecked – but Damien dressed his home up like a fairy castle.

The Noonans ranked very high up in the gangs’pecking order,which was just what we needed.

Many of the Salford gangs were family-based. The older ones – including a lot of my mates from school – were pretty civilized and enjoyed partying (too much). They weren’t as violent as the younger Salford lot, who loved fighting. The young guys were heavy, bad boys:
violent and unpredictable, very territorial, sensitive to any perceived slight,yet very loyal to their area and the elder statesmen.You needed to be careful not to cross them, and the older ones would get the younger ones to do their dirty work for them.

There were also a lot of these great characters around. One of my great mates could be a really nice guy, but he turned super-bad when he was off of it. He’d bait the police by driving around drunk in stolen cars, wait until he’d been spotted by a copper, then get in a car chase. To him, this was a great laugh, and he was gutted if he ever accidentally stole something a bit too fast because that meant he could outrun the police.He’d start a chase with the coppers then,if he lost them,go back looking for them. One time, he engineered the chase so that a police car got stuck in an entry and the officer inside couldn’t open the doors. He was waiting and beat the shit out of the cop car before it could escape. I had a first-hand witness account of that one because Suzanne from the kitchen was in the car with him. She ended up screaming trying to get out but he’d locked her in.Took ten years off her life she said.

He wasn’t the only one, either. The bad boys knew where the police patrol cars went for repair, so they’d go round to the garage, smash them up, burn them, film the whole thing and send a VHS of it to the Crescent,the divisional police headquarters.It was a game to them.A wind-up.

Under our new arrangement, these were the kind of guys we now had running our door.

Looking back now, the whole thing could have been a bit of a set-up. Talking hypothetically, the gangsters could have engineered the assaults on the door. Word had spread about how much we were paying, with people joking that even the Dobermanns were on great wages. So maybe the gangsters, thinking we had money to burn, decided to move in.

They charged us £400 a night each for two controllers’services,plus about £150 per night for each member of their team, who they then commissioned I heard (in other words, the Haçienda paid £150 but the bouncers only pocketed £80).

We had no choice but to pay. We even defended Damien before a special tribunal with a barrister and lawyer to get him his Doorsafe badge. He had a criminal record for aggravated violence and armed
robbery.We needed him to run the door,so Tony told the judge that he’d reformed – ‘he’s learned his lesson now m’lud’ – a very dodgy wicket, really. How we got through it all is a miracle, but the Doorsafe badge made his position a bit more solid. He was very proud of that badge, too; he loved the respectability he got from doing the door.

Paul and Damien were neutral when it came to the gangs, so their job was to act as a peace-keeping force, or like teachers trying to keep the hard lads from killing each other in the playground. Gangs were still allowed in, but rival gangs had to stick to their corners, and violence against staff was strictly off-limits. Every so often in the past, when the gangs had felt particularly cocky,they’d raided the bar just to prove they were invincible. Two or three would hop over and grab a few bottles.If a bartender tried to stop them,he got a slap.

That stopped. Damien wouldn’t tolerate attacks on the staff – he was very protective of them – and he’d retaliate if anyone stepped over the mark. Eventually the raids stopped, too, when he cut a deal with the gangsters, giving them cut-price drinks.

This compromise we reached allowed all the big knobs in the Salford lot to buy their champagne at cost. As long as we gave it to them cheap, they wouldn’t steal outright or harass the staff. If someone else tried stealing from us, however, they’d get battered. The Gooch and Moss Side gangsters kept pretty quiet at the Haçienda because Salford controlled the door. To my knowledge, Salford and Cheetham Hill had an uneasy alliance.

Again, as had been the case with my mates freeloading, we gave booze away. There are two kinds of bad treatment. Your friends do it with a kid glove. The gangs do it with a gauntlet.

Initially the gangs had just enjoyed the buzz of the acid-house scene; they were content to sit back and watch all the characters who turned everybody on,like Gordon the Chef standing on the podium shouting, ‘Come on, Manchester. Come on, Salford.’ He was the ringleader and cheerleader of the Haçienda before the hardened criminals moved in.

Gordon was a great character:a small,cheery guy of about my age on the fringes of the Salford gangs. He made a name for himself when he and his brother ran raves in Manchester. They threw a really big one in Rochdale called Joy, which was fantastic, then ran off with the money. Everyone thought that was hilarious – apart from the poor sods who had invested in it.

I’ll remember Gordon that one night when we were both off our tits. I was moaning, ‘I’m really bored with the Haçienda.’

‘Well, let’s go somewhere else. Number One?’ he suggested.

We ended up at the Number One club in Manchester, One Central Street as it is now, run by Leroy. Then we moved on to DeVille’s, by which point we were proper off it, both of us high as kites – especially him, because he had the bag. I spotted this beautiful older woman dressed all in silver, with silver thigh-length boots and really dark, coppery-red hair.She sat at a table with a friend,and I was entranced.

‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘She’s gorgeous.’

Emboldened, I walked over and said, ‘Hello, hello. I love your outfit.’

She replied, ‘Oh gee, thanks.’

Ah, an accent.

‘You’re American?’

‘Yeah, I’m from Georgia.’

‘What you doing here?’ I asked.

She said, ‘I’m a singer.’

‘Oh, you’re a singer. I play in a band as well. What band are you with?’

‘I’m the singer of the B-52s,’ she said.

At that moment Gordon the Chef walked up, poking me and pulling my arm. I was so off my head I thought I might make it with this bird from the B-52s, so I whispered, ‘Gordon, fuck off, don’t bother me.’

‘Hooky. Hooky,’ he exclaimed. ‘We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go.’

‘Fuck off, will ya,’ I repeated.

At which point the girl asked me, ‘What band do you play in?’

Just as I said to her face, ‘I’m the bassist of New Order,’ Gordon the Chef threw up all over her boots.

She screamed. I grabbed Gordon and rushed him out the door. Dear God in heaven. We went back to the Haç then. I still wonder to this day if she remembers that. I hope not.

At the Haçienda queues continued to stretch around the block. Madchester raved on. In a poll that year 40 per cent of with-it New Yorkers said that Manchester was the UK city they most wanted to visit. Meanwhile the music was evolving. It had moved from house to acid, then to garage. The Haçienda crowd hadn’t really taken to the harder end of techno, which was becoming a ‘British’ sound, and Manchester has always preferred soul and funk from overseas; so, very gradually, the Haçienda began to carve a
niche for itself as the club for house connoisseurs. On one hand this was fortuitous, in that it would help distance the club from the nuttier end of the rave scene’s ongoing love affair with ecstasy. On the other, it left the club a little out on a limb when it came to adapting to the fast-shifting trends in dance-music culture.

You’ve heard about the drugs and the rock ’n’ roll. What about the sex?

The fact is that very little of it actually occurred – well,to me anyway. Everyone was so off their heads, I’m sure they only thought about it when they were at home coming down, when even the keyhole looks appealing.

I still enjoyed the Haçienda, standing on tables, dancing with a load of fucking idiots whom I thought I knew but whom I wouldn’t have recognized in the morning at all. And, while I was single (my two years of freedom, before I met my first wife), I hung out with the staff from Dry, Ken and Pottsy, the bouncers too, the Swan lot, as well as Paul Mason and his wife, Karen – a really nice, friendly bunch.

I literally spent seven days a week at Dry before going on to the Haçienda. Others fell into the same pattern. The staff became very incestuous; inter-staff relations and affairs happened, and some lasted but some didn’t. Despite all the bad stuff associated with the club, I could run about flirting with the female punters; but it was more of a hangout for meeting friends and getting off your head than a copping joint.

For the most part.

One night my mate Rex and I were bored so we stopped in to the Jolly Roger night. There were about twelve people in, including these two pretty student girls,both pissed as farts.Because I had the devil in me, I went to Rex and said, ‘Go talk to them.’

He started chatting them up and – gesturing toward me – announced, ‘This guy owns the club.’

The girl said, ‘Oh, fuck off, I bet you always say that.’

Now, I’d always told the staff: ‘If anyone asks you if I own the club, just deny it.’

As a rule, I avoided explaining myself to strangers, because it’d take up too much time. Well, this girl expressed an interest, and I figured that it would help the evening along if she believed me. Now I needed somebody to verify my credentials.

This nice little fat lad worked behind the bar. He wore a hat and I always sent him running around looking for drugs for me. He would vouch for me, I thought. I told the girl: ‘I know. I’ll prove to you that I own the Haçienda.’

I took her behind the bar, called this kid over and said, ‘Go on, tell her that I own the club.’

‘You don’t.’

‘No. It’s OK. Tell her that I do.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Oh, you bastard.’

It all went proper tits-up from there.

One time our bouncers actually caught me in the ladies’ loo – with a lady, of course. It looked very nice, actually. The girls’ bathroom was much nicer than the boys’ and about three times the size. I never realized.

Everybody said that if you wanted to cop in Manchester you’d just have to go to the Ritz. On occasion you’d hear about people fucking in the DJ booth, or getting blowjobs in the lighting booth, and now and then you’d see a couple getting carried away in a corner. I remember one couple going at it on the shelf by the staircase and everyone was walking past cheering on their way to the cocktail bar.

One of the Haçienda’s biggest nights around this time was Flesh, promoted by Paul Cons and Lucy Scher. Staged on Wednesdays, it boasted a controversial ‘no straights’ door policy and soon gained a name as the UK’s most outrageous gay night out, attracting a nationwide clientele. It went on to win the Best Gay Club Night of the Year in the
Pink Paper
and, along with Nude and Hot, is recognized as being another of
the
landmark nights of the era.

The ‘no straights’ policy did ruffle a few feathers, though, with Paul Cons labelled ‘Third Reich’ by one punter who screamed, ‘Fucking came marching with you for Clause 28 and now you don’t want me at your club for being straight. Fucking fascist.’

Flesh kick-started a series of Wednesday-night events: DJ Sasha was given his own night; he had by now become legendary on the rave circuit but had first been inspired on the club’s dance floor. It was a sign of the times, a gratifying acknowledgement of the huge part the Haçienda had to play in the birth of dance culture. The first of Sasha’s nights played host to
K-Klass – another well-travelled rave-era act who had met and found inspiration at the Haç.