Peter Hook

The Haçienda: How Not To Run A Club

It’s been a while since the days of the Haçienda, what made you want to write a book now?
I actually started it three years ago and it’s taken me that long to learn how to do it and be happy with it. It was one of those things really: quite flippantly and quite offhandedly a mate said to me: “You’ve got so many anecdotes about the Haçienda, you should do a book.” I thought, “Yeah, alright, that should take me an afternoon…”
Anyway, now I have a growing admiration for people like yourself that have to do it all the time. To be honest, I thought it was going to be easy, but it was very difficult. I must have rewritten it about forty times, so it’s been a proper labour of love.
As far as the timing of it, I was looking at the compilation mixes for places like Ministry of Sound and Cream and Gatecrasher and just thought: ‘They’re shit!’ So I mentioned this to someone and they said to me: ‘Alright smart-arse, you’re so fucking clever, you do it then.’ And so originated the Haçienda Classic CDs. And while we were doing the sleeve notes, the idea for the book started. I never expected it to take more than a few months, so I got the shock of me life.

It’s a very personal account, isn’t it?
Yeah, I mean, I’ve read a lot of music books in my time and they're mostly always collections of people talking. And I felt, over the years with New Order and Joy Division, no-one’s spent more time together than me, Bernard and Stephen, and every single person remembers it completely differently. I thought, if I’m gonna take the wrap for it then I need to please me completely. I knew if I brought someone in who started to contradict me, I’d be unhappy.

In the book, stuff gets imbibed, drank, consumed and abused on a regular basis. How difficult was it actually remembering any details from the Haçienda era?
Well, most of the business meetings were during the day anyway. And those bits of it were quite divorced from the evenings. It was a bit Jekyll and Hyde to be honest, that was one thing that came out of it really, and it made me quite Jekyll and Hyde too, sadly. There were definitely two divisions.
I had to be careful what I put in the book because we definitely glorified that way of life in 1988 and 1989, along with the Mondays, and everybody else on Factory thought we’d find the answers to the world’s problems – but really it was fucking rubbish. All that happened was that there were more problems waiting for us after we’d finished fucking around.
It also took a lot of people out; our flippant and hedonistic attitude caused a lot of problems. Several of my friends have unfortunately gone to the big rehab in the sky. With hindsight it was something we shouldn’t have championed and shouldn’t have appeared to be so solid behind.

The book is split into years. Was this always the way you wanted to approach it?
It wasn’t like that originally. Originally it was split into categories. Then I realised that some of the categories were much more interesting than others.
Thing is, I love lists in books, I’m a bit of a trainspotter really, so doing it by year meant that I could include the playlists at the end of every year and, because we were a limited company, we had to do the accounts every year, so I listed them too. Funnily enough, in most cases it was the first time that I’d seen them, which tells you a lot about how we ran the place.

What year was the most "memorable" at the Hacienda?
My most "memorable" and "unmemorable" would have been the same year – 1988. We'd come back from Ibiza, back to Manchester and it actually felt like Ibiza by the canal. All Hell broke loose and it was fantastic. Everything in the real world was ignored while we were just like pigs at a trough. Again, relationships and families suffered because of that. And looking back now, the madness of it was quite hysterical.

What was your most "self-indulgent" year?
When the Haçienda went I suppose I thought I was going to feel a new lease of life, but it was very depressing. It was really hard watching something that we’d worked hard for six/seven years go the way it did. Because of the way it did go – the drug wars and the gangsters and stuff – it was quite depressing. And quite self-indulgently, I just buried my head in a barrel.

What was the most "outrageous" year?
Again, it would be 1988/89. That was when all the raves were. You were running round the country, which was quite funny, and you’d arrive at a rave and you didn’t know where you bleeding were. It was quite an odd scene really, geography escapes you. It was a real era of hedonism, and yeah, probably my most outrageous era. Of my age group, 53 down to about 45, I think you’ll find it peaked with most people around that time.

Can you tell us your top three moments in the Hacienda?
The opening night when Bernard Manning was on. We hadn’t had much to do with it, the Haçienda itself escaped us. I didn’t even realise that I’d paid for it. It just appeared y’know, from the station on the end of Whitworth Street.
My second one would probably be from 1987 when Sasha DJ’d, and it was the first time that he’d headlined at the Haçienda, and it was unbelievable. Somehow it just caught everything that was good about that summer of rave, summer of love, and the place just went off like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t a drug-induced euphoria, we just somehow caught a moment at the right time with the right DJ and the right crowd, in the right club. In many ways, we were always chasing that first high for the club and in many ways we never found it again.
For my third best moment, I think I’d probably go for the last time I went, just before it closed. I had a really good time and it made me feel quite bad about the bloody place closing.

Who were top three players in the Haçienda? Who were the people that made it work?
Rob Gretton – without a shadow of a doubt. The motivation for starting the club was because we had nowhere to go - a very simple premise. People like us in 1982 in Manchester did not have anywhere to go. And I think Rob decided to take it on himself; having to entertain Manchester on his own.
Tony Wilson did all the PR, all the promos, he also got heavily involved in fighting the police when they were really down on us and trying to get the Local Authorities to help us during a really difficult time, and he was always very frivolous whereas Rob was quite down to earth.
The other player would have to be Leroy Richardson. He was the bar manager and it was him that we always turned to whenever we had a problem in the Haçienda with the gangs or anything. He would be the brains that would smooth everything out and make it work again, basically.

What do you miss most about those times?
To be honest, it took me ten years to get over the stress of it all and the awful realisation that whilst you may do things to help, they can sometimes backfire in your face. Now that I do the Haçienda nights, you get the good bits without the bad bits, so I’d have to say I don’t really miss it that much because the responsibility was strained worrying about 2,000 people every night.

What is it about the Haçienda that still intrigues people today do you think?
Well, stories like that are very unusual, aren’t they? New Order, very philanthropically, decided to fund the entertainment for a whole city for 15 years - that’s quite unusual. I can’t imagine U2 doing that. Or Pete Doherty. Or anyone else for that matter.
The other unusual aspect of the club is that it wasn’t made for business; it wasn’t opened to make money, it was opened for people because they had nowhere to go. I think people relished the idea that you were doing something fundamentally nice.
The other thing is the story of Factory as an independent record label bringing through bands like Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, which would be a springboard for a band like James, running in tandem with The Smiths and The Stone Roses and how the whole thing eventually became so culturally significant to Manchester. It’s a heady dream, eh?
Someone should really write a book about it!

The Haçienda: How Not To Run A Club by Peter Hook is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £18.99 http://www.Fac51TheHacienda.com

Oh, Peter, by the way, what’s the best cure for a Haçienda hangover?
I’ve not found it yet…

	The Hacienda was opened for people because they had nowhere to go. I think people relished the idea that you were doing something fundamentally nice.