The Haçienda Read Online Free PDF Page B

just jumped in a garden and hid behind a hedge and he did the same thing,’ said Pickering. ‘That was it then. We were best mates.’
    In 1979 Pickering had relocated to Rotterdam, where he lived with Gonnie Rietveld. Together they formed the band Quando Quango and hosted nights at a squat in a disused water works. There he began DJing (‘Chic and Stacey Lattislaw’), as well as inviting Factory bands to play, having stayed in touch with Gretton.
    Those who made the trip included A Certain Ratio, the Durutti Column, Section 25 and New Order – the latter’s second performance after the death of Ian Curtis. It was there that Gretton told Pickering about the Haçienda.
    Gretton had legendary powers of persuasion.It is said that he was able to talk people into performing pranks on his behalf: pushing people into swimming pools, or trashing bars. So he had no problem talking Pickering into returning to the UK to take care of booking acts for the Haçienda. With the site still ‘a pile of rubble’, according to Pickering, he was back in Manchester preparing to launch a club that had yet to be built.
    Rob and Tony wanted it run like a seven-days-a-week members’ club. They imagined that if someone popped into town they could stop by and get something to eat,have a cup of coffee or a beer.Furthermore, it could be somewhere you could go wearing whatever you liked. No dress code. Before it accomplished anything else, our place changed the face of clubbing in Manchester on that level because other clubs soon realized they needed to adapt.
    Now all we needed was a name, which came from Tony. He’d got it from Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International , a book published in 1974 as a limited edition that became something of an underground classic. It featured essays from a magazine called Internationale Situationniste that said society had become boring, and that the only way to put everyone back on track was to create jarring ‘situations’ by combining all types of art, including architecture. Rob and Tony saw the club as a means of doing so. Situationism was their thing, not mine, although some of the concepts stuck with me and the people around us.
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the haciendawhere the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.
    Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953
     
    Tony picked up on that last phrase, ‘The hacienda must be built’, which became his call to action and gave us ‘hacienda’. To that was added a cedilla – so legend has it, in order that together the c and the i looked more like the number 51, which was to be the club’s catalogue number – and we had our name: the Haçienda.
    ‘Punk had levelled the ground,’ said Peter Saville. ‘It had burned for about eighteen months and all of us involved in that moment were wondering what you then build. There was a strong feeling that it was a post-revolutionary moment and that you had to then build the future.The Haçienda must be built was a great statement for that moment in time.’
    However, Saville didn’t feel able to design the club. He was shown around the yacht showroom by Gretton and Wilson and was stunned by the space and flattered by the offer, but ultimately thought it a job more suited to Ben Kelly, of Ben Kelly Design.
    London-based Kelly was a veteran of the punk years, having been at its epicentre: he was one of those arrested during the Pistols’ infamous Jubilee riverboat escapade; he spent the night in the cells and was later given a two-year suspended sentence. He had designed the shop front for Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary Seditionaries clothes shop on Kings Road,