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A relatively early addition to the Haçienda’s team, Paul Cons was head of press and PR at the Haçienda throughout the acid house boom and responsible for a lot of the more diverse nights coming to club including Zumbar and the fantastically successful Flesh. Credited for a lot of the maverick ideas at the time by many, as this interview highlights Paul had a keen grasp of nightclub affairs which was bound to benefit his later career as owner of Manchester nightclub “South” and as a highly respected promoter on the UK’s gay scene with major clubs across both Manchester and London.
Q: So how did you first get involved with the Haçienda?
I accidentally fell into a job at the Haçienda in 1985 after doing a fashion show at the Haçienda in 1984, as a model, a show listed in your diary as Style In Our Time. There are some photographs. I met Ellie, who was manager of the Haçienda at that point. I was also involved in a group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, and I had to organise a benefit, which was a major success. Ellie helped me out a lot with it, and I started working part-time for the Haçienda, answering the phone, doing leaflets, stuff like that.
Q: How big was the staff then?
There was Ellie, Theresa, another woman whose name I forget, then Mike Pickering was doing the booking, and Leroy was the bar manager. It was about what it is now, but different people. There was no-one actually doing press and promotion, and that's what I started doing, part-time at first. In the summer of '85 I started a gay night on Mondays, called Gay Monday, which wasn't very successful. We had some good nights, but it never worked as a weekly event. We put on the Joan Collins Fan Club on when he was unknown and Jimi Somerville when he was first in the Communards, but overall it didn't quite gel. The Haçienda then was perceived as far too left-field, went for quite a political night, not appealing to the mainstream gays, which then was Hi NRG, clones.
In December '85 there was one of the club's periodic upheavals. About three grand was stolen from the office, and the whole crisis of the club's losses over the past three years came to a head, Ellie could probably tell you more about this, but as a result, Paul Mason was brought in as general manager, from Rock City.
Q: The Haçienda had been losing money?
Including everything, the cost of building, and the interest payments, about a million.
Q: Why was it allowed to run at such a loss?
It's difficult to say. Rock'n'roll, probably. I think it took the directors a long time to learn how to run a nightclub. First they tried to run it themselves and didn't do a very good job of it. Then finally they brought in a professional. Ellie was great, but she didn't know about running nightclubs, she started on reception and found herself running the place. It was a DIY approach that failed. So when they brought in Paul Mason, a professional, he made a couple of very simple and very obvious changes, like stopping nights that didn't make money, and dropping the door price if there was no-one in.
Q: What do you think is involved in professionally running a nightclub?
There's a lot of ways you can lose a lot of money if you're not very tight. Stock control on the bar, for example, you can lose thousands and thousands of pounds, when simple techniques and controls can stop that happening. If you don't have them, you can lose a lot very quickly. The same with overheads.
I would say that the Haçienda could have made money right from '82. Nothing changed outside the Haçienda between '82 and '86 when it started to make money, had it been run properly.
Q: Initially it seemed to be run as a gig venue.
When it opened there was a lot of naive idealism about why it was there. Opened with pub prices, no charge to get in from Monday to Thursday, they opened it every night, without focusing on particular entertainment. When they built it, they put the deejay box in a stupid place, it didn't have a cloakroom. All sorts of basic things. Ben Kelly, bless him, is a great designer, but he's not an architect, and he never built a nightclub before in his life.
The entertainment programme was, I have to say, very uncommercial. Mike was a brilliant booker, in that he booked some brilliant acts, but he had absolutely no concept of making them pay. Once he'd booked an act there was no follow-up in terms of promotion and marketing of it. So you had these great bands being seen by one or two hundred people. The music they played was very obscure. Simon Topping and Andrew Berry were playing interesting music, but not music that was going to fill a club which has to hold 1200. I think it was a bit of self-indulgence on all parts, staff and directors. It was a bit of a game.
Q: The building itself is fantastic.
The trick has always been to introduce a crowd of people who have never been before. Students in '86 with the Thursday nights, and its worked this year with the gay crowd on Wednesdays. It's the most marvellous facility anyone could have, and it just goes mad. You have a huge mushrooming of demand. Anything that can attract two or three hundred in a venue like where you went last night, put it in the Haçienda and you can double or triple the numbers. One of the things we're planning is a women only night, which is the same sort of thing. I'd like to do a rock night, and a children's disco, all crowds of people who don't get the advantage of the Haçienda.
Q: When did it start really taking off?
'86 was the first year the club actually made a profit.’87 was building from that, and my initiative was to start a wednesday night called Zumbar in the autumn of '87, which is when the Haçienda exploded into action. The three nights were successful, they were the same every week, and there wasn't a lot of room for excitement. Wednesday was hosted by Fred, the maintenance manager of the club, who I had done cabaret with when I was unemployed, which is why I thought of him. It was based on a fashion show and entertainment each week. The entertainment varied from Vera Duckworth doing songs, through to the Amazing Chantay who swallowed string and pulled it out of his stomach. It was a lot of the stuff that was on Jonathan Ross at the time. The music was disco, Seventies.
Zumbar led straight into the greatest night the Haçienda has ever done, which was Hot. We came to the summer of '88 and I'd run out of ideas for Zumbar, so we did this thing that would last the whole summer, which was a beach party idea. We had palm trees, we put a swimming pool in the club by the dancefloor, gave out ice pops that night coincided with everyone being on ecstasy for the first time, and the whole acid house thing, it was in those six weeks that it all took off. It was perfect, it was fun. Now if you go to a rave, it’s serious, it isn't fun anymore, but then everyone was just having fun. The other thing about Hot was that everyone wore shorts, and no clothes, and by the end of the night, everyone was in the swimming pool, with their clothes on, or off, or whatever. It was the total antithesis of the Haçienda when it opened. It had been cold, unfriendly, high fashion, and it went full circle.
Q: How long was it before the media started to get interested?
Not very long. It lasted until Christmas, when I decided to stop it while it was still good. What happened with the Ecstasy at the club, it started coming in January '88, when Happy Mondays were selling it in what was then and is still called E Corner. As you come in through the arch, the first alcove under the balcony on your left. It was legendary, the Mondays used to stand there with their friends and first there was twenty of them, then fifty, then a hundred of them, and then suddenly one week they all switched from that balcony corner to the stage. This was happening on the Fridays mostly, but a bit on the Wednesday. By the time Hot started, everyone in the club was on it; it was as simple as that. It was massive, but totally confined to the Haçienda - there were a few small, midweek nights that the E dealers did, but no other main club was doing it.
Q: You're talking about Hot being the first peak. How long did that peak last?
There were peaks before that, but that was the peak.
Q: And when did it start to go down?
All through '89, it was brilliant, but to be honest I got bored of it pretty quickly. You'd come to the club and you didn't have to do anything. For a year my job became redundant, 'cos everyone was so into the Ecstasy and the music that you just opened the doors and it was packed, Wednesday to Saturday, all the way through '89, and I spent most of that year abroad, doing Haçienda nights in different countries. We did the seventh birthday party in Amsterdam, we did nights in France, in New York, all really good. But it was like one long E year.
Somewhere along the line it mutated into the Happy Mondays and the bands, because they were so connected with the drug scene.
Q: Wasn't it that it became so successful that the underworld wanted to move in anyway?
Exactly. It took the police a long time to realise what was happening. They were surprisingly ignorant. They could see that everyone was on drugs, but because they hadn't read about it in any paper that they understood. They had "acid house" but it didn't mean anything to them. It wasn't until '89 that they started to say, come on now, you've got to stop this. And we started getting pressure from the police to do something.
Q: Because of Clare Leighton?
That didn't help. We'd had pressure before that, but it intensified. The uncorroborated though it may be, that the parents wrote to the Home Secretary complaining about the Haçienda and the fact that the police had done nothing about this kid's death. There was also an article in the New of the World about the same time, and the Home Secretary got in touch with the head of the Manchester police and told him to close it. Whether you believe it.
Q: What form did the pressure take?
Lots of meetings, saying, you've got to get it under control. What can you do? Everyone was on drugs. We basically had to close the club to get it under control. At that stage there was no violence. The violence mutated later, down the road. May '90 was when the police said they wanted to revoke our license, so it took them nearly two years. To be frank, I'd say they were very reasonable, in terms of what they allowed us to get away with, from their point of view. I think it was the pressure from up above, and from the media is what swung them into action. Someone panicked.
Q: Can you explain what you think the closure meant? Did you think it likely at one point that you would lose your license?
Yeah. We avoided it by destroying the club. That cleft stick. We had to ruin the club, in the short term, in order to save it. It knocked back a lot of the people who were coming, all the nights were half empty, the atmosphere went, from May 1990 until the closure in January 1991, it was really depressing, and everything went down the fucking chute, basically. By the autumn of 1990 we were looking at three half-full nights, and a reasonably full Saturday. None of them were happening.
Q: When did the violence start?
That affected the Haçienda, but wasn't caused by the Haçienda. During the period when we were stopping people coming in, which was May '90 to Jan '91, there was a noticeable increase in the number of gang people coming into the club. What happened was, because the Ecstasy culture is a criminal culture, it’s illegal, you put a lot of people who were inside the law into contact with a lot of shady elements, they got sucked into the equation. Not because they were controlling the supply of Ecstasy, because they don't. The gangs concerned deal in heroin and cocaine, but because one illegal person is likely to talk to another. So gradually the gangs got sucked into the nightclubbing culture. Initially the police had their eye on the drug problem and totally ignored the gang problem. Suddenly we'd have forty or fifty gang people in the club, causing mayhem. Over a period of about three months in late 1990, it got completely out of control.
Partly it was down to the national publicity that we had in May 1990, when the police tried to close us down, perversely that made us attractive to that criminal element.
Q: Why did you have to close down anyway?
The head doorman got threatened with a gun. It was a heightened, tense situation anyway. In retrospect it was probably not the right thing to do, but everyone felt the situation was out of control, someone was going to get killed, and no-one had the bollocks to keep going, they just wanted out.
It was a shit year, the club was on its arse. Had we been very successful, and optimistic, and had lots of exciting projects going, we would have ridden it out, and said, we're not going to let these bastards close us, but everyone was very depressed about the court case and the fact that the club was half empty. That and the violence as well, was just too much for everyone.
Q: Was the doorman threatened with a gun because he wouldn't let someone in?
Yeah. The old security staff had been replaced. The old doorman had tried to negotiate with the gangs, a policy of appeasement which hadn't worked, and it mushroomed from ten people in the club to sixty, so he left, and a new head doorman and a new security firm were brought in, and the first weekend they were in operation, the gangs made a concerted effort to say, you're not going to fucking knock us back, and threatened the head doorman with a gun, chased him round the building, threatened to shoot him, and he wouldn't work again, and we therefore had no security. Either we backed down and let them in, or effectively we had no security for the next night, so we had to close down.
What I'd love to do is a black gay club, which is where it all began. I'd like to leave the Haçienda like that. Patrick Lilley is engaged in a similar project in London with Queer Nation, creating a black gay scene. Two years ago I was saying, there's no way you could do it in Manchester. First of all I didn't know any black gay people, plus there's no connection between house and the gay scene. Well that's changed now, the gay scene has embraced house, and there were maybe thirty five or forty black gay people at the last one. That to me is the interesting culture coming out of Manchester, the black gay culture. Long term, it's really exciting. At the moment, it’s really retro, what they're listening to is seventies New York disco, funk, things like that, but the groups that emerge out of that could be really interesting.
Q: It’s interesting that you can promote things by being in charge of a club?
I said to Tony when we shut, and I wasn't joking: if the worst comes to the worst, would you re-open the Haçienda as a gay club? And he was into it. That's something that lurks in the back of my mind. It’s a gay scene that you can do things with. The straight scene is too rough, too violent, too many problems.
Q: Why has it become so violent?
It’s society in general, the city we live in. It’s the same in New York. What straight dance clubs do you know that don't have problems? Are there any left? All the interesting dance clubs in New York are gay, or mixed-gay, like Shelter, or Sound Factory. All the Puerto Rican dance clubs have been shut down because of gang violence.
To me, the radical option is to go gay. That's where the Haçienda could have another ten years of life.
Q: What do you think the tenth anniversary is going to achieve? Just more publicity?
We've got into a rave ghetto, if you like, because we've been so closely defined by what happened in '88, '89. We've got to remind people of what went before, in order to broaden the parameters of what the Haçienda is about, so that we can go forward. To remind people that we're not just a rave club. You open up the options. The idea is to give us a history and a sense that there's more to come. If it becomes just a celebration of what was, it will be a nightmare.
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"It was all Rob's fault/idea" is a common cry expressed by the Factory family about The Hacienda but if Gretton has to take the blame, he most also take the glory. An ever-present at the club, it was perceived very much as his baby and he was always there, right until the very end of the club when he tried to move heaven and earth to keep it open.
Originally Joy Division’s and then New Order’s manager, Rob’s taciturn wit and self professed anti management strategy proved to shape the individualism of both bands and the club. A ferociously proud Mancunian boy from Wythenshawe, it has often been said that The Hacienda was his life and to Gretton must go much of the credit.
Rob died suddenly in May 1999 and is sorely missed. Ever publicity shy, this remains one of the few interviews which he gave.
Q: Whose idea was it to start the club?
I can't remember. There was nowhere else to go. Was Rafters still going?
Q: Well once the idea for the club had been had, whoever had it, were you involved in the design, and the buying of the building?
Yeah but not too closely. Ginger did a lot of the work. One of the most unfortunate things was where the stage is, really. Originally there was a wooden balcony, and that was why we decided to put the stage there. Then we had to rebuild the balcony, which cost an absolute fortune which the fire people told us to do after we were about six months into it. The obvious place to have put the stage was where the main bar is. The balcony was this little wooden thing, which the fire people told us at the start was okay.
Q: Did Ben want the stage where it is now?
Tony wanted the stage where it is. Tony had this theory that groups were dead at that time. That was a few years before dance was dead. Groups were dead then.
By that time we'd been to clubs all over the place, and the idea was considerably cheaper than it turned out. The idea was to do a New York type club. There was nothing like it. The Blue Note club in Derby was quite a nice club but no-one had ever done a big New York type club. Now there's good clubs all over the place.
Q: What clubs did you used to go to when you first started going out?
Top of the Town, Taki's, there were a lot of youth clubs around Wythenshawe, and there were like cricket clubs, dances every Saturday or whatever. Youth clubs used to play soul, and have soul bands on. You might have expected them to play cabaret clubs or something, but they were playing youth clubs.
Twisted Wheel as well. When I was older I used to go to northern soul nights. But we'd only go into town once a week or once a fortnight. There were wild scenes on the all-night buses.
Q: Who found the building?
Alan, probably.
The big mistake we made with the Hacienda was not buying the building in the first place. We could have done, I think, but we didn't think we were going to spend very much money, so it didn't seem worth it. It was mad, really, we didn't own the building, and we spent an absolute fortune on the inside of the building. It was dim. It enhanced the value of somebody else's building for them.
Q: Wasn't it more of a venue than a nightclub to begin with?
We used to have big gigs on, so they would usually take precedence. But we had club nights right from the start, Hewan was playing club music. But there was no club scene like there is now. Ten years ago, even in London, you had like two hundred people who'd go to a different place every night, and if they were there, the scene was there.
The DJ culture thing is a bit weird, really, but there's a lot better DJs around than there used to be. It's a New York thing, but the DJ turned remixer turned producer is quite a big thing. There don't appear to be as many groups now, just DJs.
Q: Do you think the club really took off when the house thing started?
When you say dance music, they've always played dance music didn't they? It's got busier, which makes it a good place to be. Some beautiful girls there as well.
Q: Did you notice the E thing coming up?
You couldn't fucking help but notice it, really. I remember thinking, everybody's gone mad.
Q: Were you very involved in the running of the club?
Yeah. Lots of meetings. When Ginger resigned, I helped run it for a while.
Q: Did you get involved in the police thing, or did you leave that to Paul?
No, I got involved in that, went to see the police chief, down at Bootle Street, and the leader of the council.
Q: Was there a serious danger that the club would lose is license?
Oh yeah.
Q: What swung it?
Who knows, with the police? I don't know.
Q: Were you involved in the decision to close the club?
Yeah. In retrospect I don't think they should have done it. It cost us a lot of money. They should have come up with some other way. Should have got a lot more bouncers in or security.
Q: Would you do it again?
I wouldn't mind having a club again, but it would be considerably smaller. It's a bit like managing a band, really. Factory Records and the whole fucking thing, its ups and downs all the time. Just add a few noughts.
Q: What was the relationship between the Hacienda and Factory?
I think the Hacienda has always been perceived as a Factory thing.
Q: Was there a sense that you wanted to give something back to Manchester?
I'm so used to hearing everybody's different reasons; I can't remember what mine was.
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The fabulously mercurial drummer with Joy Division and New Order who came up with Blue Monday’s infamous drum patters, Stephen legendarily had to pay in at the opening night of the Haçienda, something he has raised in multiple interviews since.
Nevertheless as a director of the club and drawn into its financial affairs, he had a front row seat on the development of the club and also how it began to impact on New Order’s band affairs. Here he discusses the influence of New York clubs on the Haçienda, as well as the recording of Technique in the midst of the Second Summer Of Love.
Q: How did the idea to start the club come about?
I think Rob was the main instigator. I'm not sure why. Rob persuaded them to do it, because they'd done the Friday nights at the Russell. Or was it just to further Rob's career as a disc jockey? His previous occupation. He said we should go along with it, because it would be a good way of getting money out of Factory. I don't know where the building was, International Marine. I thought they'd just got a corner of it. I'd never been down.
Q: Was there a sense that you wanted to do something for Manchester?
No, that was when Tony invented praxis. That's why we did it. I had absolutely no idea of the scale of it when it started, how much it would cost. It's a shame Hannett’s not around, cos he had very strong opinions about why it wasn't the thing to do. His theory was that Manchester didn't really want a focal point, it just moved about, and if you did this club it would be in for three weeks, and that would be it. He was very opposed to it. He wanted a Fairlight, and Rob wanted a club. Who was right? Well, you can pick a Fairlight up for a song nowadays! Probably even less reliable than Jags.
No I don't think we were thinking about the people of Manchester at the time. We were doing it for selfish reasons.
Q: Were any of the band involved in the planning of the club?
I don't think we were at all, initially. Hooky tried to sort the PA out, later on. We had absolutely no experience of how to run a club successfully. The Russell was just a night.
Q: Were you asked to put up money for it?
We were asked to go into it with Factory, and just leave them to it, which we did until I think the first time I went, it was massive. One particular embarrassing time was going to see Liaisons Dangereuses there, I remember a long walk to the bar, going past the six punters, who were just looking at you. That was the longest walk of my life. The walk to the bar, and back. It looked bleeding awful when it was empty. And it was empty, for a good while.
Q: Why do you think that was?
Nobody knew what they were doing, really. Is it the spur of punk, or gross stupidity that makes you decide to do something, and you do it and find out you're not quite equipped to do it successfully. Clubs were different then, it more just somewhere to go and have a drink, rather than being part of some club culture. There wasn't any club culture, at that level. If there was, we didn't know about it. It was an experience. We trusted people too much. But you only find out from making mistakes. At the moment, my attitude is, it’s nothing to do with the Haçienda as such, it’s again purely selfish, and I don't want anything to do with it anymore. I don't want to rely on it, it's not the money, but it only takes one person with a gun, and its nightmare time again. That's really it, at the moment. But when it started, we just let it go on, let other people do it.
Once they realised it was going over budget, and that was our first experience of seeing sums of money you'd never seen in your life, and we were talking about needing other huge sums of money to do this that and the other, we wondered what we'd got ourselves into. And you felt you should take an interest in it, because it’s obviously more involved in it.
Q: And your livelihood was on the line.
It was at the time, yeah. But the turning point was getting Paul Mason in. If you're going to run a club, you have to run a club, and not do it just to make a statement. I couldn't understand why they called it the Haçienda in the first place.
Q: Whose idea was the name?
I think it was Tony's. From his "Leaving the Twentieth Century”. I think it’s in there somewhere. That's all above my head. I think the big mistake, one of them was that it wasn't a club, it was a venue. Live bands have a small scale, the bands that played rafters and the Russell, and then there's the Apollo, and from that point of view I didn't think it was a very good venue, because of the design thing. That was a bit of a disappointment.
Q: But the design makes it a better club?
Oh, definitely. I envisaged it on Russell Club terms. You wouldn't get a very good view of that letter-box slit of a stage from the bar at the Haçienda. You were always battling against the acoustics of the place. You thought they should lower the roof, or something.
Q: Did it influence the music you made at all? Was there any exchange between the Haçienda and New York, or would you have gone to New York anyway?
You would have gone to New York anyway, but it helped in that it gave you an awareness of what was what was different about it. You looked at other people's clubs in a slightly different way than before. You looked at how it all worked, Dancetaria was on loads of different levels, Pips was a flattened out version of that! It got you out into clubs. There was more of a club scene in New York then than there was in Manchester, definitely. When we first went over you could go out every night of the week: Area, Paradise Garage, and the Fun House - that was an example of a particular crowd that went for one particular kind of music. That was bizarre, with punch balls and fun fairs, and staying open till seven or eight. They played electro hip-hop.
Q: What got you over to America?
Arthur Baker, wasn't it? It depends whose interview you read. We thought he must be a black guy. Michael Shamberg in New York played him the tape, and he wanted to work with us. That's when we realised there was a big dance music scene over there then. All that still didn't convince me it was worth being involved in a club, but it got me into the club scene, and doing that sort of music.
Q: When did you see the club really taking off?
We'd been away for every birthday. I suppose it was after Technique, and being in Ibiza, reading about Balearic beat and all that, then there was the E thing, and we went back to the Haçienda, and it was packed. Not just that it was packed, but packed with a good meaty vibe, as it was. It wasn't just students, and it didn't matter if you were black or white. That was my fondest memory of it. Going back and seeing people enjoying themselves, instead of sitting in corners, scowling over their pints.
Q: How long were you doing Technique for?
Three months in Ibiza and three months here. '88. But at the same time, on the same island, you had the other side of the coin, your Rotters type crowd, in suits and dicky bows, knocking back the ale and getting into fights. That was another thing we wanted to get away from in doing the club. When we first did it, Rotters was the only place, and it was very heavy. In a way, the only I idea of how it could be was how it shouldn't be. You knew what you didn't want to do.
Q: Did you go to the club a lot while it was like that?
Oh yes. I never went when they had the swimming pool, Hot. But those were the days. The other great thing apart from the E vibe was warehouse parties, getting a big space and sticking loads of people in, that sort of thing changed what you expected the club to be like, 'cos after you'd been to a few warehouse raves, going to the Hacienda was positively intimate.
Q: What do you think the club can do now?
It's a lot better now than it was, but there'll always be an element of uncertainty about the whole thing. When things are happening, it’s really exciting and interesting, but eventually it runs out of steam, which is what's happening now, nothing's really happening, everyone moans about nothing happening, and no-one does anything about it. I'd like to see them opening up the cocktail bar area, getting a smaller club vibe in there. I think the cocktail bar's too small anyway, so knock out one of the walls and putting a little PA in there.
Q: The design is blank enough so you can get a new generation of people in there.
I forgot about that, and that's the main thing. The more successful the club has got, the younger the people going there, which I think is very healthy, although it does make you feel very old.
Q: Do you like the design of it?
Yeah, I think I do, now. A lot of its completely impractical, but yeah. I've come to terms with it. It's like everything they do, it’s over the top.
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Broadcaster, record company owner, club owner, cultural iconoclast, proud Salfordian, the list of epithets that could be applied to Tony Wilson could stretch all around the world, something that his untimely death in August 2007 highlighted. For somebody who liked to term himself as merely “a regional TV presenter”, he would have found it deeply ironic that the news of his passing made headlines as far away as Sri Lanka and New Zealand.
“Tone” to his mates, Wilson was a tremendously affable and encouraging persona, entirely dedicated to Manchester and the promotion of new talents as his life’s work showed. Here in a typically forthright interview, he discusses in his inimitable style the opening years of the Hacienda and its pleasures, pains and passions.
Q: Whose idea was it to do the club in the first place?
It was Gretton's idea. I remember meeting on the top floor of my office, the top floor of Old Broadway, and both Erasmus and myself saying, listen, we've had a club. We'd opened the Factory in Hulme and run it for about a year. We've had a club and there is no more painful experience than when you've got a club and you've got a band on and you're paying forty quid for the club and £110 for the band, and there's two people bought tickets. It's so depressing. We'd been successful but we'd had the pain, and we weren't sure we really wanted to do it, but Gretton wanted to do it. And we all got into it.
Q: How involved were you with the planning and preparation of the club?
Very, we were all very involved. We looked at a cinema that had become a carpet warehouse in Oldham Street quite carefully, that was a possible site. Somewhere else, and then suddenly, this yacht showroom, and that was pretty quickly it.
Peter Saville said he knew the man to design it, and we met Ben and all agreed that. My most significant input, for which I got blamed for many years was the decision of where to put the stage and the dancefloor. I didn't want the stage at the end because it would dominate the space and make it a performance space as opposed to the basic idea which was that it was a discotheque. It was me who said the dance floor should go in the middle and the stage be where it is. It doesn't dominate the club, but groups that have large lighting rigs just can't play there, so I've had a lot of stick in the past for that choice.
Q: Was the Haçienda conceived as a nightclub or as a venue?
Neither, it was very much conceived as a space. We'd just been to America, New Order and ACR's first tours, clubs like Danceteria and Hurrah's, and these clubs were discos and venues, venues and discotheques. All groovy spaces. About a week before we opened I was showing somebody around and they said “Who the hell are you building this for?” And we said, “Well the kids”. And they said, “When was the last time you saw the kids? It was in Rafters, wasn't it, nine months ago and they were all wearing raincoats and long drab clothes, watching a band in the corner of the room. So why are you building a glossy New York discoteque?” I was rather stumped, I couldn't answer that question. Of course, as it turned out, it worked out briliantly, and works brilliantly at this very moment.
We were complete morons, we opened every night of the week, there'd be three people in on a Monday and two people on a Tuesday. It was terribly depressing and lost lots of money, it took us about nine months to get realistic about when we opened it. The economic story with the Haçienda is it doesn't work unless two or three nights work. One night would work, get a thousand people in, but none of the others. Then year two and year three, the gigs worked well, cos the Haçienda was in sync with a generation of bands that was playing in that area. Then you get a really good era, the Thunderbirds theme period, Buffalo Girls period. '84, very nice dance scene, it wasn't hot or hip, but there was a lot of good records, when Arther Baker was around doing Confusion, electro, it was a bright period. But it was still only one night.
All this time, we've got Alan Erasmus saying, I know a really good guy in Nottingham who runs Rock City, and we're all goin, “oh shut up, Alan. Rock City's mainstream, fuck off”. After three or four years, whenever it was, we gave in and said alright Alan, bring this guy up. And there was this famous meeting where he brought up Paul Mason from Rock City, and he arrived and talked to me, Alan and Hooky, and Rob arrived. Rob says, “What’s going on?” and I said “if you'd arrived on fucking time, two hours ago, you would have known what was going on”. And Rob goes, “right you cunt - and you can shut up”, he says to Paul Mason, who he's never met before, you just wait - and proceeded, we had one of our massive fucking mega-world war threes, in front of this guy Paul Mason sitting there. After the night was over, I thought, he must be going back to Nottingham thinking, not only would he not work with us, but how could he possibly even think about it? Mason, although he was mind-blown by that, was still interested, and we took him on in the spring.
He got the club more efficient, but it didn't turn round. I was out in LA for the summer, Rob was there as well, with our families, and I remember a phone call. Mason decided to put on a Thursday student night, with boring straightforward crap, and a bus out to the university, which started in May, and it was alright. There was this phone call in mid-August. We'd done the Festival of the Tenth Summer, Mason had done a lot of work on that, and somehow the buzz that was created in that week filtered around, and suddenly the Thurday night took off in mid-August. Student nights, and no students. We've always done well with student nights when here are no students, we've got the biggest campus in the world, but our student nights are even better when its not term time. So with Saturdays and the Thursday student night with Dave Haslam, the club started to work.
Then you get to '87, and Paul Cons, who was brought in by Ellie Gray, put on Zumbar, and the next thing is when Zumbar turned into Hot, and the John DaSilva, Hot night was May '88, that Oakenfold always describes as being the in crowd dances to techno in Ibiza on Ecstasy in the summer of '86, everybody in Ibiza dances with their arms in the air to techno in the summer of '87, and then late spring, early summer of '88 was when, as Oakenfold puts it, Balearic was everything techno, including Cindi Lauper. You'd come back from holidays and think God, this is so un-hip. Mike Pickering had been playing house music on a Friday night, which was quite successful, but that obscure house night suddenly came into the Balearic dancing scene, it meshed on the Wednesday night with Hot, and that was the next big take-off. It never looked back from there.
In '89 when the London acid house clubs moved to weird acid house and then weird indie acid house, our Thursday night with Haslam arrived at the same place coming from the opposite direction. Suddenly the Haçienda had at least three nights a week that worked.
Q: When did you first go into the club and notice the E thing happening?
The second or third Hot night. I'd done a TV thing in the spring of '88 about how to make house records with cheap equipment, and we were off the air over the summer so the first night after the summer I took a video 8 camera down to the club, to video what was happening on Wednesdays and Fridays. Everyone had their arms in the air, and blowing whistles. When the arms came down in January '89, someone said, “I knew the hands would come down”. I was in Acid Corner in November and I saw Shaun and Bez dancing, and I heard Sean shout at Bez, “Get your fucking hands down”. So we knew that everyone's hands would come down.
In '87 the Mondays were selling this obscure drug, and Bez was dancing, we didn't know it but it was Ibiza style, on his own in the middle of the stage. What the fuck's that? Of course, a year later, it all becomes clear.
Q: When did the Mondays start coming to the club?
I don't know. They played a few gigs, and Mike Pickering brought them in. They played a gig at the Haçienda which was an important moment. Typical thing with Factory, we all go along to a gig, and we all go yeah, or no. We all went yeah.
Q: Do you want to talk about the gang thing?
The police's story is there was a soft drug explosion which took everyone by surprise. The media concern was about Ecstasy, my reading of the last five years is marijuana, which had become an old-fashoned thing, still lingered on amongst working class youth and then suddenly, there was the explosion of the soft drink, soft drug culture. No-one would have ordered an orange juice in the Haçienda in '82 or '85. By '88, Orangina or Lucozade, absolutely fine. That took everyone by surprise. No-one was really up to dealing with a massive drug culture, either the police or us. The police's way of dealing with it was to tell us to clean up our act, and at the time they didn't understand the problem that we had, that hand in hand with the drug culture was a gang culture.
There is a gang culture in every city in the world. It stays in its own area. In LA, you can go out to a lovely club in West Hollywood, go home to the Hollywood Hills, the other side of Mulholland, and you can hear automatic gunfire coming up from the valley. The gang life in LA doesn't interfere. Gangs wouldn't want to go to the Haçienda in '85 and watch bright young people dancing to Buffalo Girls. Suddenly, here was this culture which had come from working class holidays in Ibiza, a working class marijuana explosion, so they felt at home. At last the happening culture in Britain was something that a gang person could feel at home in, so they came into the city centre, and that's what happened. That combined with the drug explosion made for a very difficult time. The Haçienda then cleaned up its drug scene brilliantly, by about 80% which about as much as any club in Britain could ever do, satisfied the police, but the gang thing grew and grew.
We had a very good head doorman in the early days, who used to make prosthetics in his day job. New arms for amputees, he was a lovely man. He went, and we had our own team there, Fred and people. When the gang thing began to happen, we had Roger, who was brilliant, he was in control. We got the drug thing under control, the police were satisfied, and Roger decided two or three years was enough, he wanted to do other things. We then knew with Roger going, how do we replace Roger? We chose one outside team, who came in and they were very good, but it was a red rag to a bull, someone ran into the club waving a gun one night, trying to shoot the head doorman. It was such a frightening event, we sat down here on the Sunday night and said, we've got to do something. With my trade union background, my idea was withdrawal of labour, go on strike. Closing the club is actually going on strike. Everyone else agreed that was one way out of it, to re-group, re-design the entrance, and that's why we closed. It caused exactly what one wanted, it was a major statement. The police began to work very hard on the problems.
Q: When did the club finally get into profit?
It began to break even in August '86, when the second night took off. Then with three nights working in '88, we were actually making money. In 1990, when it was clear we had to clear the drugs out, we had to almost destroy the culture. That was when it started losing money again, we had to throw everybody out, and it became very difficult. Obviously, when we were closed we lost money. When we re-opened we lost a bit of money, but then from last summer, we've been fine again.
It's been a very expensive private education. But boy, we've learned a lot. Hopefully we've learned enough. We're coming up to the Tenth Birthday, and we're right in the middle of what has to happen, the cultural changes. There's a decision to stay with the innovative DJs, even if they're not working, even if those nights are getting five or six hundred people, ‘cos we believe in them. Looking at what's going on in the world, how much to charge to get in, who the DJs are, that's what Paul Cons and Paul Mason do so brilliantly, and we get involved as well.
Q: How do you think he Haçienda fed into the Manchester scene over the last few years?
I always thought that in some ways it was Factory paying royalties to the city. You don't get a group like Joy Division, great pop music comes out of cultures, there's always a culture behind it. The culture that we loved so much in the late Seventies, the Electric Circus culture, the Rafters culture. Part of the genius of Joy Division was the culture of Manchester, and we were repaying some of those royalties, by building it for the city. It's been there, feeding in all the time. It was a great place for Morrissey to come and throw gladioli around that first time around. It's been part of the health of Manchester throughout. There's no doubt that the Happy Mondays, to quote the Daily Telegraph, were “the most important musicians in Britain over the last three or four years”, because the drummer and bass player of the Happy Mondays adapted the dance rhythms of Black America of the 80s to British pop music. That happened because there was a place in Manchester called the Haçienda where they could go and listen and dance to this music. I remember going to Driffield when they were recording Bummed, which was a great rock album with Martin Hannett, and it was a darkened room with the Mondays hanging out, dancing to house records, while they were recording Bummed. It feeds in constantly like that.
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