How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (21 page)

The loosening up of Factory through its exposure to NYC clubs was reflected in its release schedule. Alongside staples like New Order, Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio were 52nd Street and 
Pickering’s own band, Quando Quango, all of whom were more interested in the free expression of the dance floor rather than the introspection of the bedsit.

‘We all loved electro music and the
NME
hated us, absolutely hated all of us,’ says Pickering. ‘They thought we were soul boys, but we didn’t give a fuck. We could go to New York and Quando Quango played two nights at Paradise Garage as guests of Larry Levan and New Order.’ And if Quando Quango were dismissed at home, the club audiences of New York voted with their feet sending the band’s second single, ‘Love Tempo’, to no. 4 on the
Billboard
Dance chart.

A growing release schedule and a raft of new signings meant that for the first time, whatever
NME
might make of them, Factory were willing to consider hiring a London PR company. Dave Harper, who was about to quit Rough Trade and go freelance, was recommended to Gretton by Richard Thomas, who was now managing The Fall and had been impressed by Harper’s ability to cope with Mark E. Smith’s fluctuations in mood.

‘I had to go up to Factory and meet Tony and Rob and Alan Erasmus,’ says Harper. ‘I was intimidated, obviously. Tony Wilson was his usual charming self. Alan Erasmus was odd and Gretton was … he was a very clever man, Rob Gretton, but he could have had a job in human resources … “Let’s cut through the crap … Why the fuck should you do the press for Factory?” So I made up some nonsense and he went, “Uh.” He still had that old punk attitude. Rob was one of the funniest people in the world and was able to stare down the barrel of a gun. Compared to anything else, particularly Rough Trade, it felt so exciting and completely untutored.’

The notion of opening a New York-style club was no longer fermenting but being discussed as a possibility as Wilson and Gretton started scouting the city for premises. With New Order 
permanently in the position of being Factory’s main creditors, Gretton approached the band for their approval to invest in the idea. ‘The downside of no contracts was that it also meant no accounting,’ says Morris, ‘and so there was a lot of money around. The way it was explained to me by Rob was that, we’re going to do a club, and the reason we’re going to do this club is because it would be a good way of getting money out of Factory … and we all said, “Yeah, I can see that.”’

Factory had started as a club before it became a record company, and had found early success in doing so. Back in Manchester, Wilson and Gretton’s ideas for the club were now far more ambitious and on an altogether larger scale. The band had seen the idea germinate from a stoned conversation into an ambitious project involving bricks and mortar, one that was producing in Wilson, even by his standards, new levels of empirical grandeur. Although still positive about the idea, New Order were growing a little sceptical.

‘I imagined it would be like The Factory,’ says Morris. ‘Go and rent a space and do the same sort of thing. Then Rob said they had a building in mind, International Marine. I knew International Marine. I’d been driving past this place for years, so this place had this element of mystery. I didn’t feel like I should go in, in case someone expected me to be a potential boat buyer, which I clearly wasn’t. But one thing I did know was that it was bloody massive.’

A space large enough to accommodate gin palaces and
ocean-going
yachts, International Marine was as large as any of the buildings on Whitworth Street West, which was in 1982 a series of mainly empty warehouses that backed on to the Rochdale Canal. Even for the recession-ravaged property market of early Eighties Manchester, the building’s wholesale renovation was a substantial investment in real estate, an investment that was 
given added risk by the fact the label had only secured the leasehold on the promises.

The Funhouse and Danceteria both used space to encourage the interaction between the crowd and the dynamics of the music played in the clubs. Wilson and Gretton’s New York epiphany grew into the conviction that a wide-open space in Manchester for the city to experience freedom of movement and no dress restrictions would be a revelatory break with the basement dives and
late-licence
watering holes that represented the city’s nightlife, a point that many of the city’s DJs and clubbers, who enjoyed the vibrancy of venues like Legends, would find contentious. The club’s design by Ben Kelly combined the utilitarianism of Factory’s early sleeves with a similar re-imagining of functional objects – traffic beacons, cat’s eyes, galvanised steel. The mix of industry and sense of airy possibility spreading upwards across its three storeys was Factory’s identity in three-dimensional form.

However, two crucial elements of the New York clubbing experience were missing in Manchester. ‘I remember going to The Loft and just thinking, “Wow”,’ says Pickering, who was now firmly part of the New Order inner circle. ‘I didn’t really feel a total part of that ’cause I didn’t know what Ecstasy was and a lot of them were on it and it was very gay, but the very fact that clubs were built round sound systems rather than drink culture was amazing. At Danceteria I met Mark Kamins and heard him play the Anne Clark record on Rough Trade and mix it in with Afrika Bambaataa, and I’d never heard anything like that and I thought, this is how it’s gotta be, this is just amazing.’

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.