Walking through today’s regenerated and gentrified Manchester in northwest England, it’s almost impossible to recall how dark and depressing the city was in the late 1970s. The home of the industrial revolution was at a low ebb and the only people who believed any kind of revolution was now possible were the romantic idealists behind Factory Records. Emboldened by the spirit of punk and an excess of civic pride, Factory’s founders, in particular Tony Wilson and Robert Gretton, believed in Manchester more than they believed in themselves.
The Hacienda club, launched in 1982, was the physical realization of their vision; Wilson found the name in an essay by French theorist Ivan Chtcheglov entitled Formulary for a New Urbanism (“We are bored in the city, everybody is bored, there is no longer any temple to the sun ... you’ll never see the Hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The Hacienda must be built.”)
Inspired by New York clubs like Paradise Garage and Danceteria, the Hacienda was initially funded not just by Factory but also its star band, New Order, managed by Rob Gretton. The band, including bass player Peter Hook, were co-owners and US$160,000 of their money was diverted into the venture, even though, as Hook recalls, “we were living on US$32 a week.” Manchester in 1982, however, wasn’t quite ready for a New York discotheque.
Hook was always the most visual and garrulous member of New Order and spent, or misspent, more time than most in the Hacienda. Told chronologically, with a chapter for each year, his book is a personal, chatty, insider’s account of the club’s history, from the early years when it opened every night, almost as a civic duty, despite the fact that it was often empty, through the euphoric years when it brought acid house to the UK, to its demise, dogged by gang violence. Factory were idealists, but as Hook’s tales of ineptitude illustrate, they didn’t have a clue about running a nightclub.
Many of the anecdotes are already the stuff of club folklore, but other more personal stories provide fresh insight. Paul Mason is widely credited as bringing a more professional approach when he took over as manager in 1986, but even at the club’s peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the people making real money were the DJs, drug dealers and gangsters.
At times, Hook’s account reads like Carry on Clubbing, as when the takings are set alight by indoor fireworks on New Year’s Eve and Hook finds Mason on his hands and knees desperately trying to smother the flames. At other times, it’s much darker, as the club battles against the Greater Manchester police’s attempts to revoke its license. Hook recalls how he spent a night on the door in 1991 and in a couple of hours witnessed “four fights, one gun pulled, two bar staff assaulted, rough justice in the corner, drug dealing and drug taking on a normal scale (well, normal for us).”
If Hook doesn’t quite capture the euphoria of being on the dance floor at the Hacienda’s peak, that can be excused. After all, many of those who were there have spent the last 20 years fruitlessly trying to recreate those halcyon days.
The Hacienda was, as Hook says, in many ways the perfect example of how not to run a club — if you view a nightclub as a moneymaking business. But if, like the baggy trouser philanthropists Factory, you see it as an altruistic gift to your hometown and a breeding ground for the next generation of youth culture, it was, accidentally, purposefully, shambolically, anarchically, thrillingly, scarily, inspirationally, perfect. Hook appreciated the need to give something back but, he jokes, he didn’t realize that you had to give it all back. But then, as Wilson remarked: “Some people make money, others make history.”
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