For those of you that know, Ang Matthews needs no introduction and we are delighted that she agreed to be first in a series of interviewees. 

For anyone that doesn’t...

A regular from day one, Angela “Ang” Matthews was, as much as anyone immersed in the Haçienda , witnessing the development of the club through the 80’s into the explosion of acid house and the DJ culture of the late 80’s / early 90’s.

Ang became assistant manager of the Haçienda in 1989 and manager and licensee in 1991. 

Like a lot of people in the Factory-Haçienda story, you moved to Manchester to do a degree? What attracted you to the city?

“Well basically Factory Records had started about 18 months prior to me coming down or I’d just heard of them then. I was really into that sort of scene. I was going to Erics in Liverpool at the time and really into the whole, thing so I came to Manchester to do my degree. I couldn’t believe what Manchester was like at the time I came.

Manchester is nowadays regarded as a modern European city, was it very different back then?

“There was nothing here and I didn’t know anyone and it was quite strange cos it didn’t stop raining, for the first twenty days. I remember going to Expose and the first person I ever spoke to was Johnny Marr and that was quite strange cos he was a shop assistant then and he invited me down to some practise rehearsal they were doing.....and the rest is history I suppose they say. It was quite weird, there was nothing going on, just gigs every so often and some discos but I never went to any of the discos.

You became involved in promoting at The Manchester Students Union, working with Elliot Rashman, what sort of grounding in promoting did that give you, prior to coming to the Haçienda?

“I worked with Elliot Rashman cos he was trying to get a deal for Mick at the time so I sort of covered for his job he was the entz officer and I was still a student so I actually got to do every job going, sometime I’d do the cloakroom, sometimes the dressing room and sometimes I had to pretend I was the entertainments officer for him. Over 18 months I just learnt everything there was about promoting gigs and then I wanted to become an agent but there were no female agents back then and I didn’t get a job doing it. I just started working with bands in Manchester, including being a driver if anyone needed one, and then The Boardwalk opened and I started putting on gigs. Then they needed someone to take Leroy’s place when Dry first opened.”

How do you become involved initially with the Haçienda?

“As soon as it opened I was a customer there and I was also on the guest list all the time. I had a free card and would go in every night, like sometimes there would only be about 6 of us. In 1983 I got a job behind the bar when I was still a student and I was bar person for about 18 months there till my exams started and then I went back as assistant manager about four years later.”

Where else was there to go out in Manchester apart from the Haç?

“No. There wasn’t anywhere else to go.”

The management reshuffle with Leroy going to run Dry in 1989 saw Rob Gretton offer you the assistant manager’s job in 1989? How did you feel about being offered the job?

“I was assistant manager. Leroy had been the assistant manager and then I got his job. Then what happened about a year later there was all the trouble with the drugs and everything and they shut us down for 5 months. During that time the police said I had to become the manager and the licensee as well so that’s when I became the general manager and licensee.”

Did the fact it was New Orders and Factory’s club lend it a cachet in your eyes?

“Oh I really wanted to be there, I loved the place and it was exiting and also when I got the promotion. At that time I was the first woman to hold a licence for that amount of people. I think we were 1500 capacity then and I was the first woman in the UK who’d held a licence for that size of building so that made it quite special yeah.”

Factory’s sometimes referred to as a “boys club”.  How was it being a woman, although not the only one, amongst this?

“They were only a boys club in terms of what they were into, they were into football, drinking a bit, some of the younger ones, drugs, but no I never found there was any problem with them at all. I’d gone through doing a degree, being really left wing and going on feminist marches and everything so I was and still and a staunch feminist and I never had a problem with anyone at Factory Records.”

What was the atmosphere like when you first took the job and how did it begin to change?

“When I first started as assistant manager, it was June 19th 1989 that was my first day there. Oh it was full on, it was absolutely fantastic. But it took me a week or so to realise that you shouldn’t actually take drugs in there cos the management  actually should be objecting to people doing them in there because no-one had ever tried to stop me doing them in there. Everything was so relaxed. And then the problems started, we were getting visits from the police and getting calls and then they said we had to close down.

“When we reopened it was as exciting again and Tony did comment to me when it reopened that he didn’t think it was going to happen again like that. But it did and I’d say that lasted about two and a half years and then it went quite bad, all the gangster stuff really started getting very bad.”

Did you feel exposed by the nature of your job, having to handle drugs boxes, amounts of cash, and locking up the venue late at night?

“No that sort of thing never worried me. I was more worried that the police would do something to me, put fake charges against me or something. I felt very protected. I had to wear a body alarm so that if I had been attacked at work I just had to press that and an alarm would go off at the police station. But I never had to press it and nobody ever threatened me, except once which you’ve probably read about in Hooky’s book.

“It didn’t worry me at all that sort of thing. I think had I been male it would have felt threatened. I thought nobody’s going to hit me because they would look so bad hitting a girl.

“Tony’s concern for me was like when I was dealing with all the money on my own in the building; he was worried that something would happen in terms of a robbery. That at the end of the night before the money had been put in the safe and he said that it that ever happened to just give anything and everything to them and just say “There’s more where that came from if you just leave me alone.”

It’s often said that the police and the Haçienda had a very us and them attitude? How difficult did this make it to run the club?

“Well it made it very difficult when drum and bass came out Rob Gretton really wanted to have what he called black nights and he really wanted to put them on. And we did a couple of them and they were very successful but the police just stopped us doing them. They said we couldn’t do any more.  So there was always that feeling that they could do anything they wanted or they’d appear and they’d ruin the whole atmosphere of the club as they were walked around the club by the door staff.

Even though you and Tony actively solicited support and went for grants with the council and the like, nothing was ever forthcoming, nowadays the powers that be seem to look more fondly on it all.

“Yes it absolutely totally changed It sometimes annoys me really that the straighter organisations like the council or like the police are looking back almost with fondness about it and how good it was. Well they didn’t at the time, well the council started to help us but the police were positively unhelpful.

What are your favourite nights from your time at The Haçienda?

“Well the 10th Birthday was a great night but you were just so busy, you couldn’t do anything, it was just so busy. I think my favourite nights on a regular basis were Mike Pickering’s Shine nights. They were the first nights I promoted there after Paul Cons had gone and the music was always harder edged than the Saturday which I liked. I thought Mike always used to keep the faith from Northern Soul which was what I used to be into as well. So they were my favourites and also the Ibiza nights I did in the summer of 95 when I used to fly the DJ’s over from Ibiza.

You also used to book the tours for The Haçienda?

“I did the Cream Of  Manchester tour which Boddingtons gave me a ton of money for and they also let us redesign a can of Boddingtons for the posters and we started that in Cream in Liverpool so that used to bring in quite a lot of money. Rob was really into that because we did need a lot of cash at that point it was just filtering out so fast.  So that always added income.

Did you realise at the time the influence of the club and how it would ultimately pass into history?

“I realised at the time because I was treated a little bit differently, I don’t mean famous but there was obviously, you could tell that other people thought it was fantastic and special. Tony did realise all that cos I remember me and him looking down on it and he said “we are actually making history here.” And yes it did feel like that.

Right towards the end of The Haçienda, you swapped jobs with Leroy at Dry, what was your thinking behind this?

“It was just the last six months, and you couldn’t do anything about it, the violence had just escalated, All of a sudden there was a lot of physical fighting in the club and also all the people who had originally been our regular customers, and although I might not have known their names I knew them to say hello to, all those people seemed to have gone. I don’t know whether it was the age cos we were coming up for ten years, we were moving into the next generation but I don’t know whether they’d stopped coming cos the atmosphere was so aggressive.

“I also sometimes wonder whether it happened because cocaine became the drug of choice as opposed of ecstasy. I often wonder about that.

“I did actually resign from the club because of it all at a directors meeting and then Anton also resigned with me. They just asked me to go out of the meeting and wait and they called an emergency meeting where Hooky had to come in and Tony was brought in and they said they didn’t want me to go cos I was the last person who knew the full history of the Haçienda really. Cos Factory had gone, Paul Mason, Paul Cons had gone and just did the work there cos they were saying that Dry might have to be sold if anything happened with the Haçienda so I said “Yes, I’d be happy to do that” and moved over to Dry. Six months later Dry was sold.

It was the end of the Empire, the Haç went after the 15th birthday, Dry was sold in a very quick but messy manner to Hale Leisure, Hooky mentions you cried handing over the keys, how difficult was this time for you personally?

“I think it was the first time that anyone connected with Factory Records or The Haç saw me do a girly thing and saw me crying.  We were downstairs in the office and we were with Becks who I’m mates with as well and Hooky just said “Right I need the keys love” so I said okay and I was the last employee, I’d been the last employee for about two weeks. I started crying and he goes “what the fucking hell are you crying about” and Becks said “what do you think she’s crying about” so yeah that was it then, it was over.

Hooky’s also said that it’s taken years for him to confront it, was this same for you?

“Yes I think so, I think I didn’t realise the effect it had, it was quite stressful. Every Sunday there’d be the grief about the video cameras who was on it, who’d been there when they shouldn’t have been there, and  how we would get them covered up because the video’s were supposed to be handed over to the police as well.  So that was a constant worry, in fact it was constant all the time, when at the end of the day I was just a girl doing my job who was really into the music, all that gangster stuff was just nonsense.

What do think of The Haçienda Apartments?

“The flats, there’s an irony with those apartments cos I had never heard of like apartment blocks, y'know people living in old warehouses and in 1989 we went over to New York because of the United States Of Haçienda tour, and before I went Tony said I want you to have a look at the apartment blocks over there because I’m thinking we could build Haçienda apartments and then I never heard him mention it again, or at any other time. So it’s quite strange that the Haçienda did ultimately become apartments. And also his joke about it was instead of us always going down south and staying in hotels, the Southerners would have to come here and stay at the apartments here.”

Do you feel that another use could have been found for the building?

“I had hoped that the council would have kept it, I remember the first time I walked into the Haçienda and I just couldn’t believe it/ I like that sort of art work. I find Ben’s work, Peter Saville quite moving, I am quite arty farty, and I am stunned that the council didn’t keep it on, especially because of the glass roof as some sort of gallery space.  It should have been an art gallery for modern art, it was there, it was big enough. Ben could have just redone it up and kept it like that. I think Tony would disagree with that, I don’t know what Rob would have thought but with Tony I think he was glad it was all finished.”

Is there anything you know about The Haçienda that no-one else does?

“Yes but then I might do my book. Put it this way I have in writing off Tony and in it he says “Jesus Christ Ang, only you know the truth.” He’s signed it so there’s probably a couple of things I might know. Ask me in a couple of years”

What did you do after The Haçienda?

“I DJ’d for a while and then I went to work for a company in London, The Slug And Lettuce Company and absolutely detested it. I’m at Vivienne Westwood now and I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before. Now I travel Europe in a VW campervan in the summer, me and Eastie and work at Vivienne Westwood in the winter.”

If you could go back and do anything differently, would you?

“No, not at all”

Any regrets or is life too short?

“No I don’t regret anything. Not a thing.”