Few nightclubs have sent more musical waves of influence around the world.
Yet for the first time New Order’s Peter Hook, one of the men responsible for the bliss and the blow outs speaks candidly about the misadventure, mismanagement and missing money from Manchester’s most enduring legend.
All week we will be running extracts from his new book “How Not to Run A Club”, an auto biographical account of the mayhem, excess and music that became arguably the word’s most famous nightclub.
In our final episode of extracts straight from Peter Hook’s mouth we see the gangs and violence that were emanating from the Hacienda finally crush the venue’s spirit and finances.
After a decade of turbulence the gangs of Manchester became too much for everyone to bear. As the New Order bassist laments. From here it was downhill as DJs were threatened with violence and the police continued to offer no help.
1992
By now the Haçienda’s wildest period, from 1988 to 1990, was well behind us; looking at the accounts for the years that followed, the profits came down very gradually by about 10 to 15 per cent per year. As Manchester had got hipper, more clubs had opened and investment came into the city. In some ways the Haçienda became a victim of its own success: people we’d drawn to the area opened their own places, which took our customers and made us look old-fashioned. And, because of our ongoing financial dire straits, we couldn’t afford to fully renovate the club to keep up with the times.
Furthermore, like punk before it, acid house lost something as it got older: the innocence of nobody knowing the rules, or even if there were any. That initial explosion of ecstasy – coupled with the music – had revolutionized the world. Everything that followed could only be an imitation.
Despite all this, though – despite the fights among gangsters, and trouble with the police – some nights made us forget it all. It was like London during the blitz, or the band playing on the bridge of the Titanic as the ship sank. We partied to spite fate. No matter how badly some people behaved, they couldn’t completely stop the great bits.
Even so, the comedian Keith Allen always said to me that you know you’ve got a drug problem when you feel like you’re a god when you’re not on it. And that was us: we had a problem. We were still off our heads. When the Haçienda celebrated its tenth anniversary, in May 1992, we built a bridge over the canal to a purpose-built Haçienda fairground.
The event cost us £10,000. We’d intended to use that money to fund a Haçienda compilation CD, but Rob spent it on this fairground and renting rides, thinking we’d get the money back on the door. My mate Cormac ran the dodgems and handled the announcing: ‘You want it to go faster? Put your arms up,’ etc., etc. At one point he boomed into the microphone: ‘OK. All of you who are on an E, I want you off of these dodgems right now!’ Exodus. Nearly every car got vacated. Only Manchester’s Lord Mayor and his deputy were left, sat right in the middle of the ride in a car of their own.
Criminals showed up every night, fighting, preening and jockeying for position. Other clubs were safer because all the gang members were in ours.
There were four corners under the Haçienda balcony and each belonged to a gang: Salford young and Salford old, Wythenshawe, Cheetham Hill and Gooch. They each took their own little section and if an opposing-gang member walked into the wrong corner it would really go off. Just about the only people allowed to move freely around the club were the musicians: me, Barney, the Mondays and the Roses.
Even innocent punters would get a slap if they staggered in by mistake and this became one of our bugbears: some student would get a bit pissed, sit in the wrong corner, get a slap (if he was lucky), and then – quite rightly – complain.
In a funny way, the Haçienda brought working-class crime to a different segment of society. It spread out of our doors right around Manchester.
Gangs terrorized everybody. The honeymoon period being by now well and truly over, there were non-stop full-on violent episodes and the mood of the club – and of the entire scene – went downhill.
We were surrounded by a fortune we couldn’t keep and thugs we couldn’t control. When a gangster from the Salford lot celebrated at the club one night Ang received a shock: he walked into her back area, a bottle of champagne in hand, looked around and told her, ‘One day I’ll be telling my son that this is his to inherit.’ It made her wonder how much power the gangs truly had over us, or at least how much they thought they had.
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Read previous extracts from ‘The Hacienda: How Not to Run A Club’ covering the years, 1981, 1983, 1988, 1990
