Reviews

The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club
By Peter Hook

When I read recently that ex-Joy Division, ex-New Order bassist Peter Hook was touring Australia in September to perform - 'with friends' - the complete Unknown Pleasures album, celebrating thirty years since it's first release, my first thought was: why? Without Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis it seemed to reek of, well, just plain bad taste.

At least New Order had the good grace to come up with a new name when they continued on after Curtis's tragic suicide in 1980. Surely, I thought, Peter Hook couldn't be that hard up for cash?

Then I read Hook's account of his years co-running the famed Haçienda Club in Manchester, and thought, shit, maybe he does need the money! For fifteen years, between 1982 and 1997, Hook and his cohorts literally poured money down the toilet, as they presided over the most legendary club in England. Hook has since worked out that it cost him 10 quid for every punter who walked through its doors during that period. That's a serious amount of money to lose.

The Haçienda, of course, is most commonly associated with the music of Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, Factory Records, acid house, along with a colourful cast of characters - Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, designer Peter Saville, architect Ben Kelly, and producer Martin Hannett. The story of its rise and fall was brilliantly retold in Michael Winterbottom's film 24 Hour Party People, with Steve Coogan playing the role of Tony Wilson.

Peter Hook's book, however, comes with a different agenda. Though it's shot through with humour, he's most of all trying to make sense of what possessed him in the first place to get involved, and stay involved, with this total madness.

The Haçienda Club was the brainchild of New Order manager Rob Gretton and Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, who'd both been impressed by some of the clubs they'd visited in New York. The idea was simple - use the profits from Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures to fund half the Club, and New Order would throw in the rest, thereby becoming partners in the venture.

Suitable premises were found at Whitworth Street in Manchester in 1981, and, on the advice of Peter Saville, architect Ben Kelly was brought in to design the space. From the outset, it should have been clear to anyone with half a brain that things were not going to plan. Kelly's iconic design, years ahead of its time, saw costs sprial from a projected £70,000 to £344,000, leaving a hole in the budget that just kept getting bigger.

For years, New Order would continue to sell vast quantities of albums, and successfully tour the world, only to see all profits sucked into the bottomless pit that was the Haçienda. Meanwhile, they were frugally living on 100 quid a week. Such was the mindset, that Hook felt like a winner every time he got a free drink at the Club, never quite realising that, as owner, he'd already paid for it, along with pretty much everyone else's. In the first two years, New Order put £677,000 of their profit into the Club. Hook later worked out that, after five years of running the Club, they'd lost £20,000 for every month they'd been opened.

In its earliest years, the Haçienda played host to bands like the Smiths, Cabaret Voltaire, the Birthday Party, John Cale, the Violent Femmes. But, by the mid-1980s, it was deemed more cost-effective to host DJ only nights. Bizarrely, visitor numbers went up accordingly, with hordes invading the dance floor.

For better or worse, the Haçienda bears more than a little responsibility for the directions that club culture took in the UK in the late 1980s and 1990s. With the explosion of acid house, fueled by ecstasy, the Haçienda's ship finally came in. By 1988, the second Summer of Love was in full swing, and long lines could be seen snaking down the streets of Manchester, with punters queuing for hours outside the Haçienda.

With renewed confidence, riding the wave of Madchester, the owners invested yet more money by buying the premises in 1992 for £1.2 million. As Hook says of this period: "The cash rolling through must have been immense. God, three nights a week x 2,000 people x £10 each for admission + £15 per person spent on booze, plus cloakroom and food...".

But of course, the cash wasn't rolling in at all; mis-management saw profits wasted, staff were ripping off alcohol and letting in friends for free, the crowds were buying ecstasy, not drinks, and the only people getting rich were the dealers working the floor. They, in turn, attracted the local gangs, who sniffed a new business opportunity, and the presence of guns and violence at the Club began to escalate.

On top of this, Rob and Tony convinced Hook that they should open a bar in a different part of Manchester to 'cash in', and thus the Dry bar was born, again fitted out by Ben Kelly, who brought the job in 50% over budget. Pretty soon Hook and cohorts were another £700,000 in the hole.

Hook recounts this woeful tale year by year, even going so far as to include an extract from each year's balance sheet at the end of each chapter. He muses over the dull and delusional monthly meetings, where tabled profit projections were little more than the stuff of fantasy. In the end, the Haçienda sucked up all the profits of Factory Records, effectively killing it off. Rave culture was changing, the crowds moving elsewhere.

As debts mounted, creditors started to circle, till finally, on 28 June 1997, DJ Dave Haslam spun discs for the last time, and the Haçienda was history. It was sold off in the middle of a property slump for the same price they'd paid for it, and new owners demolished the club, erecting in its place an appartment complex, ironically named The Haçienda.

So what has Peter Hook learned in all this? He acknowledges they ran the Haçienda more like a personal playground than a business. That along the way he became an alcoholic and drug addict. That there was a certain amount of stupidity involved, or, as he says: "What a fuck up we made of it". His book sets out to tell us "how the Haçienda changed the shape of clubbing in England. Where it all went wrong, and how what should have been a dream come true became a cautionary tale". If you are dreaming about running a club, read it!