The Haçienda (46 page)

I could do that! I could be a DJ!

So, then and there, I become a fully fledged celebrity DJ – my career just beginning, the whole world my oyster. But for now the bouncers arrive again, calm things down, and we manage to get another tune on before a proper DJ turfs us out. A great night. Thanks, José.

Cue mists of time again, and a couple of weeks later I’m off to my second gig, this time arranged by Clint Boon (Inspiral Carpets/XFM) who is over the moon that I’m now a DJ.

‘You’re one of us at last!’

The venue is the Castle in Oldham, an old pub that has been turned into a new music venue. I’m playing for a mate of his, Aaron, who newly owns the club. Now, the last time I performed in Oldham was in 1977, when Joy Division played the Tower Club. We’d been booked because Sad Cafe had sold out the week before so the owner thought any punk band would sell out. Unfortunately we didn’t and we got the princely sum of thirty quid and no one came. So I’m a little apprehensive and nervous tonight, but full of my celebrity-DJ self. I arrive and it’s pretty rocking. Another old mate is here: Gilly, who DJs at South in Manchester and is also the Inspiral Carpets drummer.

He introduces me to Aaron and I say, ‘Who’s putting my records on?’ (They’re CDs, actually.)

‘What?’

‘Who’s putting my tunes on? I’m a celebrity DJ – I can’t actually do it,’ I scream over the music.

‘Fookin’ hell!’ he retorts.

By this time Gilly – who, it turns out, is also the resident DJ here – has disappeared, so Aaron reluctantly agrees to do it. We go in to the DJ box, I hand him the first CD and he cues it up. It goes down well and the next one is duly handed over.

‘This is shit! You should do it yourself. You’ve got two minutes thirty-four seconds!’

‘What! Don’t be daft, I’m a …’

Before I can finish he’s gone. I’m on my own. I look down at the CD player’s time display: two minutes twenty-eight seconds, twenty-seven seconds … SHIT! I start panicking, spinning round like a headless chicken, but somehow I manage it. I learn to bloody DJ! After a fashion. I put the next one on and get away with it. Phew! So far so good, but I kiss goodbye to my newfound celebrity-DJ status and have a pretty good night.

Over the next few years I DJed for Aaron many times: Newcastle, Brighton, Manchester, Huddersfield, Oldham. He had quite an empire and turned out to be a big Joy Division/New Order fan too. We became friends – cue violins and falling hearts.

During that time, he was always asking me if I would like to open a club again. He’d heard how I had gotten involved with Bar Cuba in Macclesfield, so maybe that spurred him on. We even got to the point of nearly looking at a property in the Northern Quarter, but my heart wasn’t really in it. My ego was, but that’s another story.

So, cue those pesky mists of time again and I am doing a book signing in Newcastle and who should turn up but Aaron.

He gets his book signed and says, ‘Are we going to do that club, or what? I’ve got a great idea for us. You’ll love it! I’ll phone you next week!’ And then he disappears.

RING RING!

‘It’s Aaron. I’ve got a property! I know you’re going to love it. Come to town now and I’ll show it to you!’

Very soon after that I’m walking around a dilapidated but very familiar building, on Charles Street in Manchester, that I once tried to buy then ended up paying for anyway.

The old Factory headquarters. Bloody Hell! I said before that the wife’d kill me if I bought another club; now I know she will. Turns out the building had become a victim of the credit crunch. It had been sold to a developer to be turned into apartments (just what Manchester needs, more apartments) but before it was finalized the developer had gone bust. It was now on the market for rent, but it was also back on for sale at the princely sum of £3.5 million – a slight improvement on what Factory paid for it: £103,000 pre-build, £674,000 post-build. (Factory went bust on the Friday, Rob Gretton and I went to see the liquidator on the following Monday morning to buy it for New Order but were told it had already been sold. Very puzzling. It had cost us £674,000 to build and was sold for £225,000. Can’t resist a moan!) Caroline Ainscow, who became the owner after Factory went bust, very successfully ran it as the Paradise Factory from 1993 to 1996 with her partner, Peter Dalton. My favourite Thursday night out. Heady days.

This time ego and heart were in sync. I won’t bore you with the business details but I am now the proud partner/shareholder with my friend Aaron in our new venture, the Factory, FAC 251. My former boss’s office. I can’t quite believe it myself. We had agonized over the use of the name and it became the source of much debate …

It rages on still. Surely we were using the past as a platform for the future? Using our bad experiences, our mistakes, so we could get it right this time? Here would be a new venue, run by old hands, experienced old hands. Let’s face it, with all our mistakes we couldn’t be more experienced, could we? Here to help New Musicians, New Promoters, New Bands, etc., I was spurred on in other ways, too. I’d been hearing a lot about bands being made to pay to play in Manchester, in the guise of selling tickets for their gig – the upshot being that if they didn’t sell enough tickets there was
no gig
. This was even spreading to new DJs: if they sold twenty, thirty tickets for the venue/night, they could play; if not, they couldn’t. I thought this was disgusting. Not good for Manchester at all. I mean, with an attitude like that we’re going nowhere. So, weighing up all the odds, and with a few delicate lawyer’s meetings and
almost
everyone’s blessing, we went ahead.

The new Factory headquarters were born – reborn even.

We immediately approached Ben Kelly with a view to restoring it to its former glory, with a close eye on the costs this time, of course, and a much more businesslike attitude right to the fore. Ben was delighted and here is what he wanted to do …

The Ben Kelly approach to the redesign of the former Factory HQ

The client wanted to make subtle references to the legacy of Factory. It was agreed that we would attempt to produce a design which referenced Factory but also looked very much to the future. We attempted to achieve this through the use of materials, colours and graphic references. The first and most important thing was to put the main fabric of the building back to its original form. Over the years the building had been hacked about and treated without any respect. The first move was to infill the opening which had been cut out of the first-floor level. This helped to create the maximum floor area for the new club. Secondly we wanted to allow views from the ground-floor entrance up to the new DJ booth at first-floor level. This was achieved by designing a part-glazed cantilevered DJ ‘box’ which hangs out over the double-height entrance space.

All three floors were required to have bars and DJ booths. This gave us the opportunity to make a new statement on each floor of the building. We aimed to layer and thread a new language throughout the building. We referenced the blue-glazed bricks, which were originally used at either side of the double-height entrance slot. These have been used to build low walls at the reception and around each DJ booth and also around the ground-floor sound desk. The glazed bricks offer a robust protection to these areas. We also developed a powder-coated steel structural-support system that is common to all three bars. All the bar tops are made from a dark blue/grey slate which matches the original slate window sills throughout the building. For the ground-floor bar we introduced a back-illuminated orange translucent material called AIR-board. The first-floor bar has an adhesive striped yellow and white prismatic material applied in stripes on to the front bar panels. When this material is illuminated it has an amazing reflective glowing effect. This is the same material that is applied to the sides of police cars and ambulances. For the third-floor bar we referenced an Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark album cover designed by Ben Kelly and Peter Saville. This is a perforated album sleeve. The bar front is a hugely scaled-up version created from mirror which has angled laser-cut lozenge shapes cut out.

All columns have been painted with coloured striped sections. A Haçienda-style yellow neon-striped chevron wraps around the silver-painted first ground-floor column and greets all the customers. The stairwell housing the main accommodation staircase is decorated in International Orange. The main body of the club is painted Pigeon Blue to match the original Haçienda colour scheme.

Aaron thought that we should use as many people as possible from the past to work with us towards the future. Kevin Cummins to document the rebuild, Peter Saville as a design consultant, Leroy Richardson as bar manager, same accountants … Only joking on that last one! Some could help and some couldn’t. It was very exciting and when we announced it the reaction was fantastic. There were a few keyboard terrorists but we were too busy to get involved in that. Internet criticism, the new deadly disease, frightening people to death worldwide. It has been very hard work but seeing it develop and grow, watching the business come together, a delicate blend of idealism and realism. I’ll leave you to guess who was responsible for which. And on 5 February 2010 it triumphantly opened – a little rushed, but isn’t everything? There’s an old suspicion in club circles that if you’re not screwing the toilet-roll holders on the wall five minutes before the doors open you’re not doing it right. I’m glad to say we stuck to it. Another week and it would have been perfect. (I’m thinking of putting that on my bloody gravestone. It seems to apply to everything I do these days.)

Ben Kelly has done a great job and is involved in a lot of aspects of the club even as it runs, improving it all the time. The next big project is an outdoor smoking area over the canal, to go with that Victorian overhanging toilet next door. (We’ve had to leave in place the plumber’s merchants next door because the aforesaid toilet is Grade 1 listed.)

I’m very proud of the club. Bringing the building back to life has been a labour of love for us all, and we are building up a great team. Many of the management and staff are regulars who have worked for Aaron for many years, a great testament to the organization, which also includes a few of the original owners/artists’ kids. I feel very blessed at my time of life to have been handed an opportunity like this, dealing with this club in our new Manchester of 2010, which is an absolute pleasure compared to how it used to be. We now liaise with the police on all aspects of security, at last making sure that staff and customers are totally safe. One interesting and positive aspect of our European immigration rules is that we now have a team of Polish doormen. The great thing here is that, if any of our local villains do appear at the door, these wonderful men, each built like a brick shithouse, have no idea where Gorton, Moss Side, Gooch, Longsight or even Salford is so there is no discrimination, respect-wise, as the bouncers don’t have a clue who’s who or where’s where – so one aspect of the gang problem has been solved at a stroke. The day-to-day running I leave to the experts, but do like to stick my oar in regularly with ideas for improvements that I’m sure seem more of a hindrance than an asset. In fact it makes me wonder if I could bring the whole of his empire down with a little more effort. We have had a healthy list of DJs and bands already, with the Haçienda Saturday Night in the Board room being responsible for quite a few old and new faces. For opening night, Aaron suggested I ‘do something’. I thought he meant DJ but he had something else in mind.

‘How about playing? Like that Monaco night you did at the Ritz for Oxfam? A retrospective of your long and illustrious career?’

I literally froze, this had not crossed my mind.

The thought was intriguing. At the Ritz in Manchester, David Potts and I had done some Monaco tunes with a smattering of Joy Division and New Order – well why not? So I duly rang him. No reply. I rang his mum and she informed me he was in Argentina, backpacking, off to find himself. Shit! So I was on my own, phoned round a few compatriots and recruited the following:

Paul (Leadfoot) Kehoe, drums, Monaco
Andy Poole, keyboards, Monaco
Nat Wason, guitar, Haven/Freebass
… and me!

If I was going to sing we’d need someone to play bass. This was tricky. Mani? Too busy. Rourky? Now living in New York. So who? Then I had it. Another ‘Eureka!’ moment. Jack, my son: he was a pretty good player already – though he had shattered me with some news the year before.

‘Dad? I’ve got some bad news for you.’

‘What, son?’ My mind was boggling.

‘I’m giving up my group to concentrate on my studies.’

Where did I go wrong?

So, keeping it in the family, he was duly enlisted/press-ganged and the Light were born and rehearsals began. Now, there is always a feeling of guilt about playing these songs outside of Joy Division/New Order; I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it does feel like I am doing something wrong. Obviously there is an entitlement to play them, as I was part of the writing process, but it’s like a weird kind of protocol has been implanted in my brain that says I shouldn’t be playing them without the others. We even had this in New Order with Joy Division songs. But I soldiered on. I wanted the opening-night performance to feature all my incarnations, including my new one, Freebass, so a set-list was duly drawn up:

‘Dark Starr’ (Howard Marks vocal/Mani bass); ‘Dark Starr’ (Gary Briggs vocal/Mani bass); ‘You Don’t Know This About Me’; ‘Dreams Never End’; ‘Ceremony’; ‘Sister and Brother’; ‘Shine’; ‘What Do You Want from Me’; ‘Atmosphere’ (Rowetta vocal); ‘Insight’ (Rowetta vocal); ‘Shadowplay’; ‘Pictures in My Mind’; ‘Interzone’; ‘Warsaw’; ‘Transmission’; ‘Sunrise’; ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’; ‘Blue Monday’