It would take a good six years before Ecstasy would be used in the Haçienda to achieve a similar level of communal euphoria. Meanwhile the building, through trial and error, revealed itself to have terrible acoustics, especially for live music.
The early Haçienda booking policy was a hybrid between the same kinds of acts that had played The Factory club – buzz bands on the independent circuit – and the contacts Pickering had made in New York. Mirroring Danceteria’s excursions into multimedia, the Haçienda proudly printed VIDEO MUSIC DANCE on its flyers, placing the emphasis on its desire to be a contemporary performance space, somewhere between an arts centre and a warehouse party. Claude Bessy, now resident in Manchester, was the club’s in-house video-jock, splicing together bondage films with animation and black-and-white B-movies, that he edited in the basement of Wilson’s house, which had been fitted with a small editing suite. The Haçienda performances were all initially videoed by Malcolm Whitehead, a Factory associate who had set up a fledgling video partnership with Wilson called Ikon. By opening a club and starting a video company, Wilson realised the name Factory Communications was starting to feel like an apposite definition of the company’s activity rather than one more piece of elegant pretension on his behalf.
The likes of Divine and Annette Peacock, who both played in its first year, were certainly proving that the Haçienda had one of the most progressive booking policies in the country; its lack of dress code and desire for an egalitarian audience was also anathema to the sophisticated habitués of mid-Eighties London nightlife.
For all the thrill of cultural experiment, the fact remains that the Haçienda, while magnanimous in handing out membership to anyone with a passing interest, was struggling to find an audience. Richard Thomas was one of the many Factory associates who had been bussed up from London for its opening night and had been a regular visitor since.
‘There are videos of the Violent Femmes and there are twenty people in the audience,’ he says. ‘Mike Pickering was probably too good a booker: he was doing the promotions in a way that an A&R person would work. A year later most of the bands he booked were huge and were too big to play there.’
‘Wilson breezed across the club saying “Darling”,’ says Harper, ‘but it was Pickering who was putting on the gigs. It was depressing as hell, a shit crappy venue; awful sound, grim, people didn’t turn up, really, except for New Order.” The lingering feeling was that outside of Factory’s wider circle most people in the city were bemused as to what the building was for. However lavishly appointed in elegant and witty designs, it remained a huge area to fill. While the Haçienda’s state-of-the-art design may have looked piercingly current in Blueprint and the style media, the scale of its ambition was beginning to be tested. Richard Boon had also been around the New York clubs. As an observer at first remove from Factory, he could see that the idea was potentially fraught with problems. ‘Hurrahs, Danceteria, they were just fantastic, but the Haçienda was kind of out of place, out of time. You’re not gonna fill these places unless you have dance, and as northern soul had proved, people in Manchester want to go out and dance. But not that many of them want to go out and listen to Cabaret Voltaire with looped videos of nonsense, certainly not enough to fill a 1,600-capacity club. And crucially, for the first year the sound was terrible.’
‘It was empty a lot of nights,’ says Pickering, ‘just twenty of us in … but Rob insisted it should be open every night … No club can do that, especially in those times so … but we had a massive Friday night, which was the first of its type, which had a reverse door policy just let everyone who wants to, come in. We had scallies dancing to salsa, it was brilliant.’
One of the Haçienda’s early regulars was Johnny Marr, whose flatmate Andrew Berry ran – and cut customers’ hair at – the Haçienda’s salon, Swing, ‘the most talked about hairstylists in the north’. ‘It was the same eighteen people with nothing to do on a Wednesday night,’ say Marr, ‘so if you were going to go and eat a vegeburger, you might as well go and do it in the Haçienda and get free vodka-and-orange that would last you all night.’
Gretton’s policy of being open every night except Sunday, to comply with the licensing laws, was an act of inclusivity. He wanted as many of Manchester’s citizens to share in the project as possible and, as a diehard City fan with an infinite collection of northern soul 45s, was deeply familiar with the currents and codes that carried British street culture. ‘Rob wanted to open it up to everyone,’ says Pickering. ‘He was interested in the fusion of it all. He loved it when people like the Jazz Defektors and a few of the dance troupes from Moss Side would get on the empty floor and do their bit.’
The Jazz Defektors were a Mancunian take on the nascent acid jazz scene, and would be joined in their zoot suits by Kalima, both bands continuing Factory’s move away from its early associations of austerity towards a sophisticated soul music. A young red-haired student at the Polytechnic, Mick Hucknall, was a regular at their shows.
Slowly, at the weekend at least, a new version of Mancunian nightlife started to coalesce around the club. Greg Wilson, a DJ who managed the break-dancing crew Broken Glass, was resident at both Legends and Piccadilly Radio, where he played sets of tough electro imports. Invited to do the same by Pickering at the Haçienda on Friday and Saturday nights, Wilson began drawing an audience into the Haçienda from outside the club’s early raincoat constituency. ‘The Saturday night was what I called The Face crowd,’ says Pickering, and just a hint of the energy and euphoria Gretton had imagined was starting to generate in the club. Johnny Marr was one of the audience who was enjoying the cross-fertilisation of the club and its new possibilities. ‘I hadn’t really put The Smiths together yet … and I had only, like, a fiver in my pocket on a weekly basis, but it didn’t really matter because if you were around you did think that New York was an extended part of Manchester. You didn’t have to be in some amazing in crowd to be a beneficiary, you just had to be around and you just had to be interested. Ironically, given its image, Factory was very inclusive, not at all elitist.’
Despite letters from members complaining about the preponderance of dance music, being exposed to the Haçienda’s music policy was having an impact on some of its more free-thinking clientele. ‘When I wrote “Girl Afraid”, we’d been literally listening to the Ze compilation all night,’ says Marr. ‘I was trying to marry something with that kind of urgent electro beat, and saw a correlation between that and making it like a Sun record on our instruments, but it’s essentially “Busting Out” by Nona Hendryx.’
Pickering’s attempts at a Mudd Club-style cross-pollination now read like the envy of any twenty-first-century curator/operator in the culture industry. ‘I had William Burroughs doing readings,’ says Pickering. ‘Gil Scott-Heron, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, fashion shows, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy and David Mach the conceptual artist doing an installation’. While these events may have drawn a crowd anywhere from twenty to two hundred, their resonance would linger. In perhaps one of the best examples of the extent of his connections in international subcultures and their customs, Williams Burroughs, noticing Claude Bessy making his way up to the video booth, was sufficiently moved to say, ‘Claude, what the fuck are you doing in Manchester?’
*
Along with Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ August Darnell taking up residence in the Britannia Hotel, and the Haçienda hosting a birthday party for Ruth Polsky, the most widely seen moment of reciprocation between Manchester and New York occurred on 27 January 1984, when The Tube was filmed at the Haçienda early in the evening on a wet Friday.
The event, Fac 104, featured the first appearance by Jellybean Benitez’s girlfriend Madonna on British TV, miming to her second single, ‘Holiday’ (although it was not, as Wilson would later pronounce, her first-ever appearance in the UK: she had done a PA at the Camden Palace several weeks earlier*). The other acts on the show were a testament to how vibrant Manchester’s love affair with New York and electro
had become: one of Factory’s latest signings Marcel King sang his electro soul masterpiece ‘Reach for Love’ and Broken Glass body-popped on the Haçienda floor. The feature was the first time most television viewers had seen inside the Haçienda and the programme also featured interviews with Wilson and Paul Morley. The crowds turned out to appear on television and admission was ticketed but free. The programme gave the impression that the Haçienda really was the street-cultural hub, one that still only really existed, give or take the odd Friday night, in Wilson and Gretton’s heads.
The reality, once the cameras disappeared, was that the Haçienda and the label were still struggling under the weight of their ambitions. ‘Factory were adrift,’ says Harper, ‘living off New Order. The Durutti Column and ACR were doing what they were doing. The rest of it felt like The Face in Manchester, but no one outside Manchester, and certainly in London, really cared.’
One of Factory’s releases that was met with a wall of indifference was Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’, an exemplary piece of modern soul music that had been produced by Be Music, the production company that the members of New Order had set up to put their newly found studio smarts to use.
‘We’d explored studio technology through parting company with Martin, and all done the production to a great or lesser degree,’ says Stephen Morris. ‘Hooky ended up going into what used to be Cargo Studios and buying into it and that became Suite Sixteen in Rochdale. Bernard and Donald out of A Certain Ratio got together, and then if anybody had deep psychological problems they’d be foisted on to me and Gillian.’ Marcel King’s ‘Reach for Love’ came out of this loose affiliation: a track that combines heartbreak and, in its refrain of ‘We’ve got to keep on struggling’, inner-city frustration. “Reach for Love” was Bernard and Donald and it is absolutely fantastic,’ says Morris.
For a city that was feeling the full force of Thatcher’s local spending-cuts programme and a police force run by an evangelical Christian whose draconian application of licensing law would be a long-term problem for the Haçienda, ‘Reach for Love’ felt like a rallying call of resistance from the heart of the city. The track also sounded as urgent, funky and melodic as anything played on Radio 1 in 1984.
‘Reach for Love’, however, was destined to follow the usual Factory code of anti-promotion: very little or no advertising and the belief that the legend that was Factory Communications and a cutting-edge sleeve would secure it an audience. Such a tough-sounding piece of dance-floor soul was a stretch even for New Order’s audience, but none of this as such should have prevented ‘Reach for Love’ being a hit: it was as smart and direct a piece of pop music as Factory would ever release.
‘It’s intrinsic in the downfall of Factory,’ says Morris. ‘It wasn’t that it was good at cool – it was good at a certain shambolic coolness – but when it actually had a genuine pop moment like “Reach for Love”, it couldn’t translate those things to the extent it should have been. It should’ve been a massive record and it was Factory’s fault, because it couldn’t get beyond that wall of cool.’
Wilson still enjoyed the gamesmanship of taking a stance against the industry, insisting that Factory was above the orthodoxies of trying to promote records. Factory advertised only subtly and reluctantly (whereas the Haçienda had a weekly advert in NME events/live section), a policy that was placed in a far more mundane context by the fact Alan Erasmus was adept at keeping the city’s fly-posters happy and engaging in the low-level kind of quid pro quo arrangements that had been synonymous with achieving radio play since DJs first appeared on the airwaves.
‘There was a heated debate that me and Gillian had with Tony once, as we were sitting in the studio for hours waiting for Bernard to redo his guitar for the umpteenth time,’ says Morris. ‘We said. “It’s all right for you, Tony, this not promotion, no promotion,” – there were plenty of backdoor promotions that were going on – “you’re letting the bands down.” We were told, “The trouble with you two, you’re money-minded, that’s your bloody problem.” But “Reach for Love” is a case in point, it’s a fantastic record’.
The tension between running a business and running a creative, at times almost borderline absurdist, project was encapsulated by the newly introduced concept of Factory board meetings. The fact that Factory Communications didn’t have a board was not going to prevent Wilson and his colleagues enjoying a good opportunity to argue over the finer points of whatever agenda was in their heads. ‘Martin Hannett turned up at one and pulled out his gun,’ says Pickering. ‘It usually ended with Wilson and Gretton on the floor trying to land a punch on each other. Random people would be invited but no one knew why. They spent the whole time slagging Factory off, the whole thing was ridiculous.’
*
‘Tony’s personality kept Factory driving forward,’ says Harper. ‘He had bullet-proof skin. I met him once in Liverpool when Granada had moved out to Albert Dock. We met at the studios and he drove us back to Palatine Road. They were all so poncy about their cars – he was driving a Merc that was dechromed and had been resprayed matt black, everything was matt black. He gets in his car with his Armani saddleback and he says, “Right, Harper, we’re going to drive out of Liverpool now so be prepared, because everyone calls me a cunt and calls me a wanker.” He was so recognisable and the car was recognisable. We’re driving out of Liverpool and everyone’s going “Wanker” and he turns to me and says, “They love me,” and he waves at them like the queen.’
Thanks to Wilson’s regional media profile and Granada’s willingness to make culturally enriching programmes on a regular basis, Factory and Wilson were almost permanently on the north’s television screens. From schools and colleges broadcasts, featuring Wilson giving lessons on running a business and how a recording studio works, to Wilson interviewing The Fall and The Smiths early in their career for the evening news supplements, Factory had a presentational advantage over all its rivals. It received a disproportionate amount of television coverage that located the label and its front person at the head of a finely tuned cultural project. Wilson was a natural in front of the camera; the more nonsensical his monologues on the essence of Factory, the more sure-footed and beguiling he and it, whatever ‘it’ was, seemed.
But to dismiss Factory and Wilson as merely media savvy is to neglect the fact that Factory, amid the gestures and the postures, was making incredible creative decisions.
Along with the decor of the Haçienda and the sound of many of its records, the label glistened with a modernity that was streets ahead of its counterparts, particularly its London major-label rivals, to Wilson and Gretton’s ongoing delight. While shunning miming on Top of the Pops, New Order were slowly compiling a series of videos which belonged as much in an installation space as on late-night MTV.
For ‘The Perfect Kiss’, film-maker Jonathan Demme, a year after finishing Talking Heads’ ‘Stop Making Sense’, shot the band playing the track live in their rehearsal space. The 35-mm cinéma-vérité performance is around eleven minutes long and captures the band’s instrumental alchemy at a creative peak. Demme’s use of almost hyper-naturalistic lighting gives New Order and their equipment a luminous depth as one of their most epic songs weaves into a dense groove of Hooky’s bass notes, hand percussion and the track’s famous frog samples. Though on paper the treatment might have looked ominously banal, ‘Band play song in rehearsal space’, the film shimmies with the high-end cutting-edge aesthetic which was Factory at its very best. Low-Life, the album from which ‘The Perfect Kiss’ was taken, was promoted with a poster, ‘It isn’t only Low Life who record for Factory’. The strapline was more or less an admission that apart from New Order there was very little interest in the label’s other releases. The sales figures of the records listed – Section 25, Thick Pigeon and the Royal Family and the Poor – reflect a lingering sense that, however well-designed and executed a sleeve, not everything connected with the record buying public.
A large TV audience was given an insight into th
e Factory modus operandi by the film New Order Play at Home. Commissioned by Channel 4, Play at Home was a six-part series in which bands were asked to make documentaries about themselves and their home towns. With many of the bands enjoying the lack of editorial constraint, the series was at the vanguard of what made Channel 4 a creative powerhouse in the period.
An American voice-over reads the opening credits: ‘Factory Records, a partnership, a business, a joke,’ setting the tone for the programme’s witty self-analysis and deadpan character assassination. Alongside a photo of Wilson, who is shortly to be interviewed naked in the bath by Gillian Gilbert (who is wearing a dress) is the introductory line, ‘He thinks he runs a record company in his spare time.’ What follows is an insightful and hilarious series of interviews and monologues as Hannett and Liz Naylor tear into Factory’s current thinking – most noticeably the Haçienda. Rob Gretton appears interviewing himself, regularly saying, ‘That’s a good question.’ Alan Erasmus is interviewed on the back of Hooky’s motorbike and a narrative develops in which all three of the company’s directors openly contradict and blame each other for the chaos of Factory.†
In the Haçienda’s Gay Traitor bar Wilson is interrogated by members of Durutti Column, Section 25 and ACR as to where the accounts are and why Wilson is so hard to get hold of. For a band and record label offered a prime-time window to their audience, the programme takes Factory’s anti-promotion strategy to new levels of self-deflation. However, the brio and candour of the cast and the unassailable sense that whatever the grievances (nearly) all concerned are having incredible fun, makes Factory and Manchester look like one of the most exciting places in the world. Asked of his future plans Wilson mentions he ‘wants to do lofts in Manchester’. Having been exposed to Soho loft-living in the mornings after the nights before in the downtown clubs, Wilson was clearly inspired by the downtown scene’s living quarters as well as their working conditions, so much so that the idea was given a Fac number – Fac 101 Lofts Concept. The empty warehouses around the Haçienda that feature as an interview backdrop in Play at Home would all be developed in time, and Wilson and Saville would decades later become ambassadors and consultants for the regeneration of Manchester. Just as the artists who colonised lower Manhattan and lived cheaply in its run-down warehouses were dangled as aspirant and edgy neighbours offering the frisson of cool to Wall Street bankers, Manchester developers would consistently present Factory, and particularly the Haçienda, as a template for New Emerging Manchester, the Richard Florida metropolis in excelsis – though neither Wilson nor Saville would enjoy a part in the regeneration riches offered to the developers as the totemic Factory founders added a curatorial sheen to Manchester’s creative class property gold rush.
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 19
