The Haçienda Read Online Free PDF

Manhattan at the time you’d find these steamy, sweaty, dark, low-end clubs, like the Fun House, a black-painted box that just felt vibey, and then you’d go into ritzy places with art installations, like Studio 54 and Area.
    But whenever we returned it was to a Manchester scene that was still pretty stagnant. So it was, then, that Tony and Rob came up with the idea of opening their own place – they’d been impressed by what they’d seen in New York, and promoting the Factory nights at the Russell Club had gone well.
    At first New Order didn’t really listen. We were concentrating on making music. Eventually we were forced to pay attention because whenever we’d get into conversations with Rob the club would always be his main subject. It got so it was all he’d talk about. His pitch centred around the notion that people like us deserved somewhere to social-ize;and this club would serve that need.He insisted that,as Manchester treated us well, we should give something back. (All very altruistic, of course, but we didn’t realize that he meant to give the city everything we had, financially and emotionally.)
    He told us the club would cost around £70,000. Being a small label with limited overheads,Factory possessed some capital,which could be invested – money from the sale of Joy Division records, presumably – so the label would pay half. The other half would be paid by New Order and would be tax-deductible as an investment.
    What? We couldn’t believe it. £35,000. We were musicians living on £20 per week.Where the hell was this fortune going to come from?
    ‘We’ll use our profits from the sale of Unknown Pleasures ,’ he replied. He had this habit of pushing his glasses up his nose when he spoke. ‘We’ll put that in. It’ll be a great investment – and on top of that we’ll finally have somewhere to go to. Double bubble.’
    Mind you, if the money really was to come from the sales of Joy Division records, then Debbie Curtis – Ian’s widow, who received his share of band revenue – needed to be declared a partner in the club. But she never was. Rob left Debbie out of it by naming New Order, not Joy Division, as partners and stating that the money came from the sales of New Order’s records. However, I’d imagine revenue from both bands was used to pay for the club: if you think about it, Joy Division had at the time sold more records than New Order, so it’s only logical to assume that they served as the primary income.
    Either way, we’d agreed to fund a club.
    A new face had joined the Factory team by then.He was Howard ‘Ginger’ Jones, a local promoter who had impressed Rob by promoting a successful New Order gig at the Manchester Students Union. In conversation with Rob Gretton he’d said that one day he hoped to run a nightclub in the city that would provide an alternative to the Manchester raincoat-brigade scene. Gretton, who recognized a kindred spirit when he saw one, hired him virtually on the spot. Ginger’s task: to find a venue. One of those initially considered, then dropped, was the Tatler Cinema Club, but it was too small. They settled on a carpet warehouse on Oldham Street (near what would eventually be Dry), which was perfect. The purchase fell through, but the team were suitably fired up about the club and rushed into looking for another place. They found the International Marine Centre – a huge open space which was part of a building on the corner of Whitworth Street, not far from the Russell Club. Little more than a disused warehouse, it nevertheless fired the imaginations of Jones, Wilson, Gretton and Erasmus. Factory took the lease. Notably they didn’t buy the building, just took the lease. A mistake that would come back to haunt them.
    As plans began to move forward, Mike Pickering came aboard. He was a friend of Gretton, having met him years ago, aged sixteen, when the two Manchester City fans were being chased by Nottingham Forest fans at an away game. ‘I