The Haçienda (35 page)

Then, as we altered the schedule, the nights blurred together and so did the punters.Criminals showed up every night,fighting,preening and jockeying for position. Other clubs were safer because all the gang members were in ours.

There were four corners under the Haçienda balcony and each belonged to a gang: Salford young and Salford old, Wythenshawe,
Cheetham Hill and Gooch. They each took their own little section and if an opposing-gang member walked into the wrong corner it would really go off. Just about the only people allowed to move freely around the club were the musicians: me, Barney, the Mondays and the Roses. Even innocent punters would get a slap if they staggered in by mistake and this became one of our bugbears: some student would get a bit pissed, sit in the wrong corner, get a slap (if he was lucky), and then – quite rightly – complain. Whenever we asked Paul or Damien for an explanation, the pair of them invariably replied, ‘Well, they shouldn’t have fucking been in that corner anyway, should they?’ To them, territorial rules explained it all away. I’d just think, ‘Bleeding hell . . .’ and we’d bribe the offended parties with free drinks.

That didn’t always work. Some of our customers knew how to contact solicitors and were the kind of people cops listened to. In a funny way, the Haçienda brought working-class crime to a different segment of society. It spread out of our doors right around Manchester.

The cops insisted on making occasional night-time inspections, walkthroughs, knowing full well that them doing so would drive everyone mad. They’d arrive without warning. Ang would lead them in and our bouncers would have to escort them as they walked around the club. This wasn’t one lone copper – I’m talking about as many as ten at a time.

People spat and threw drinks on the police but they didn’t retaliate: they’d let our doormen wade in and chin whoever was responsible. Ang thought the cops took this approach because they had some kind of secret agenda, and I can see her point. It was like they were deliberately trying to wind up the gangs.A strange way of doing it.

A few of the big nights were recorded for broadcast by Terry Christian, a local DJ from Piccadilly Radio; he played me one of them, in which Mike Pickering stopped the music to tell everyone the police were outside about to storm the club.Scary.

Sometimes we’d have a snatch squad sent in to grab some kid who’d broken his bail conditions or whatever. An undercover cop working inside would give the tip-off and the snatch squad would run in and drag them out of the building. We never had any advance notice of such raids, so we couldn’t protect innocent bystanders: punters would get trampled and battered as the cops moved in, and knocked out of the way as they left, getting injured when fights broke out because somebody had tried to escape.

Gangs terrorized everybody.The honeymoon period being by now well and truly over, there were non-stop full-on violent episodes and the mood of the club – and of the entire scene – went downhill.

And it wasn’t just the gangsters to blame, either. There’d be complaint after complaint about the doormen slapping people. We’d been concerned about their treatment of women until we found out that the female punters were just as bad as the boys.

The Salford gangsters staked out separate sides of the alcove based on gender. They’d never sit together. The men were on one side, the women on the other – and God help anybody who crossed the girls. They were often worse than the men.

The funny thing is that, although we had trouble with Cheetham Hill outside the Haçienda, the ones who gave us the most trouble in the club were the Salford lot. Their affiliation with the Noonans ended once they passed through the doors and Damien couldn’t seem to control them. Only the kitchen remained a gang-free zone. Suzanne was well protected because she got along with the older Salford lot who kept the younger ones in check; she was too much of a she-devil for them to rip her off – and anyway they were too busy elsewhere.

Bernard still socialized in the Haçienda a lot then. He met his wife Sarah in the Haçienda – ‘the vision’, we called her – and he had as many ecstasy buddies as I did. In addition to hanging out with the Mondays and A Certain Ratio,Barney was very well thought of in Moss Side and used to go to a lot of the house parties there.Afterwards he’d tell me about guys driving stolen cars into the cul-de-sacs, racing around and baiting the police all being part of the evening’s fun.

I used to spend a lot of time at the Kitchen club in Hulme. It was in two flats knocked together, run by a guy called Tim, and was an after-hours club that opened once the big places had closed for the night. I’ll never forget the first time I went. Entrance was £2 and in exchange you were given two cans of Harp lager. The Mondays were in the upstairs flat watching a band jam; there was this huge black guy playing bass and when I came in Bez got the bass off him and gave it to me. ‘Here, give it to Hooky, Manchester’s best bass player,’ he was saying.

I played it for a while, all the time getting daggers off this geezer, then gave it back to him.

Bez turned and said: ‘What you doin’, man? Give it back to Hooky.’

The guy was still giving me daggers. I thought he was going to fill me in, so I played for seconds, gave it back to him and fled.

Shit. Can’t have been an indie fan. Being in a couple of great bands meant I could usually get away with murder.

Amazingly, aside from one time when somebody threw a kid off the fourth-floor balcony (the kid survived the fall),there wasn’t any trouble at the Kitchen, even though a lot of Gooch and Moss Side went there. Salford guys weren’t welcome. As in the Haçienda, though, Barney and I could move about freely – I even parked my new company car right outside, a gunmetal XJS. We were allowed to do what most other people weren’t allowed to do. So each of us continued to swan around, enjoying the assets of the city – free drinks, free drugs, perks like that – while the very criminals we’d fallen in with destroyed the Manchester club scene.

For instance, Mike Pickering left the Haçienda for good following an altercation with some kid who was banging on the door of the DJ booth. The kid was requesting a song: ‘This music’s shit; play this track for me.’

Mike said: ‘I’ll play it later.’

The kid came back: ‘Are you gonna play that track or what?’

Mike: ‘Oh, fuck off, you cunt, what do you fucking know?’

The guy pulled a gun out. ‘Play the track.’

‘Right. It’s on next . . .’

He quit that night and never came back.

From that point on everyone was scared,even the DJs.

Over time, the heavy atmosphere had an impact on the music. When drum ’n’ bass and hip hop became popular in 1995, we ended up being unable to hold so-called ‘black-music’ nights because there was so much trouble. Even the police encouraged us not to promote these shows and our bouncers eventually refused to work at them, too – and don’t forget that our bouncers were lunatics themselves (in the nicest possible way). But even they said these nights couldn’t be policed.

On his second-ever trip to the Haçienda,Peter Saville inadvertently went to a soul night and ended up getting accosted on his way to the bar by a huge aggressive black guy who said to him, ‘What are you doing in here, you honky bastard?’

He beat a hasty retreat and never came back.

Rob really loved the music, though, and the black-music nights were financially successful so he looked for ways to deal with the issues. I must admit, the music sounded absolutely wonderful. Once inside I’d run to the DJ box and spend the night up there, just listening. I could-n’t move about so I’d just stay put, relying on Anton to feed me drinks.

An independent black-music promoter told us, ‘I can pack this place every night for you’; and the events were profitable, so Leroy didn’t want us to pull them. But the nights continued to be miserable: the bouncers and the bar staff wouldn’t work, and our usual customers wouldn’t come in. Horrible. So, against Leroy’s wishes, we finally stopped doing them. We were on our way down from the summit.

And then Factory went to the wall.Ultimately the company became unable to support the financial weight of its commitments.Dry had been opened; then there was a shop in Afflecks Palace, called FAC 281: The Area; then Factory moved offices from Alan Erasmus’ flat on Palatine Road to a famously palatial building on Charles Street; plus there had been costly album projects, such as New Order’s recording trip to Ibiza and the Happy Mondays’ infamous recording trip to Barbados. Bankrolling all of the above soon brought the company to its knees. A deal had been mooted with London Records: Wilson had in 1988 struck up a relationship with the company’s Roger Ames; the two had over the years kept in touch and gradually the idea of a London Factory began to take shape. But things moved too slowly to bail Factory out – it became apparent to London that Factory were in trouble and in fact they went into liquidation before anything was signed. Another deal was made, but this simply allowed London to acquire the aspects of Factory that made money.

The early 1990s was a tricky time for Factory.FAC 281:The Area was run by Fiona Allen and her sister Theresa. It specialized in overpriced, oversized T-shirts and posters.At one point someone even ordered a gross of one particular Haçienda shirt, yet most of them were still in the club when it eventually closed. The shop failed very quickly and very expensively. Its location didn’t help, being right at the top of Afflecks, literally the last stall.

Meanwhile,we couldn’t remortgage the Haçienda building because of the property crash in Manchester and the state of the company accounts. Nobody would lend us the money. When we bought the
building the purchase was funded by New Order and Factory,who paid £700,000, while the remaining £500,000 came through a bridging loan. We were paying 14 per cent over the base rate on it. We just presumed someone would lend us the money afterwards but because of the crash there wasn’t enough equity in it so nobody would give us a mortgage.

The same mistakes happened with the new Factory offices. Rather than take over some of the empty areas in the Haçienda building, Tony found a different spot to house the record company. This was a rundown building near the BBC on Charles Street that I was, ironically, also trying to buy to re-house my Rochdale recording studio, Suite 16. I wanted it but I was told there was another client who was bidding against me. These guys seemed to have pots of money and bid well over the asking price of £72,000; I finally dropped out at £110,000. Little did I know I’d been bidding against Alan Erasmus and Factory – who were using New Order’s money, for fuck’s sake.

Then they brought Ben Kelly in to renovate it. The project went over budget. At one point Manchester airport complained because the lights he’d fitted on the roof were so bright they were distracting pilots on their approach to land – never one to do things by half our Ben, eh? The building and offices looked wonderful, however. Beautiful, I must admit.It cost £695,000 pounds to build in 1990.They tried to remortgage that,too,but again the property crash meant they couldn’t.

So that,plus overspending on Dry and on albums by Revenge (sorry, Tony),the Happy Mondays and New Order,saw Factory crumple.

Mismanagement lay at the heart of it all – but I’m bound to say that, aren’t I? Admittedly, New Order’s cost overruns on
Technique
had been everyone’s fault, but none of us had wanted the party to end. Once we’d completed the tour that followed, and split up for the first time, the revenue that New Order traditionally brought to Factory via record sales had begun to dry up,while the label’s debts continued to mount.

I’ll accept the blame for Revenge: Tony gave us a more or less open budget for our album
One True Passion
, and nobody checked how much I was spending until it had escalated out of control. It was a hell of a learning curve.

In the meantime the Happy Mondays continued to destroy their reputation with drunken interviews and misconceived outbursts. This
curbed their American record sales and again lost a lot of licensing revenue for Factory.

They had a complete and utter backlash. Their album
Yes, Please
flopped, with sales plummeting from 175,000 to 1,000, so there was no way to recoup the expenses. Factory fell into administrative receivership.

Around this time, New Order reconvened to record the album
Republic
. Tony and Rob hoped it would sell enough to bail them out and hurried us along. The pressure didn’t help the band dynamic, which was at an all-time low (most of us being completely off our heads).

To my mind, the experience gave us our last great song of that period, ‘Regret’, and one of my favourite songs, ‘Ruined In a Day’ (remixed wonderfully by K-Klass). Both were well worth the process but recording under those circumstances was horrible. We made the record on sufferance; the problems of Factory and the Haçienda exacerbated the tensions within the band and to be honest things got so bad I’m surprised we ever made another record after that. It was a spiral that we were stuck in, and it needed to stop.

As it all fell apart, Rob and Tony fought like cat and dog. Tony resented the club because it sucked up Factory’s money. I remember him saying to me, ‘If it weren’t for your club, I’d still have my record label.’

Once Factory went bump, Tony all but gave up on the Haçienda because he didn’t have either the investment money or the heart to keep up with Rob and me; he turned his attentions instead to In the City, a series of music seminars he held in Manchester. He attended directors’ meetings occasionally and was very verbal when it came to offering ideas – even towards the end, when he couldn’t do anything about the Haçienda from a financial point of view – but I think his interest had waned.

Aside from the emotional fallout it caused, the collapse of Factory had direct impact on the Haçienda because the label stopped bailing it out. Ang once told me that at least £16 million passed through her hands during the time she worked there, but the Haçienda still required external funding on a regular basis. Profits on ticket and drink sales alone couldn’t keep it open and pay the costs.