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You are: Home > Cover story > Hacienda

Once upon a time in Manchester

It had it all: thrilling music, cutting-edge design, style, mystery and personalities the size of the universe. As the Hacienda 25 exhibition continues at Urbis, we revisit the legendary club through the memories of Peter Saville, Ben Kelly, Graeme Park and Peter Hook.

Peter Saville,
Factory Records partner and art director

The History

"Tony Wilson and his best friend Alan Erasmus organised a club night once every two weeks in the Russell Club in Hulme that was called The Factory. That was 1978 and it was the year that I graduated from Manchester Polytechnic. And I heard that they were organising this night so I went along and said 'can I do something?' Tony said 'well, do a poster', so I did the first poster for The Factory in 1978.

"At the end of '78 Tony suggested that we release a record from the club to help some of the groups that were playing get a record deal. The first question that Alan and I asked was 'Tony how are we going to pay for this?' And Tony said, 'I have £5,000 my mum left me, we'll pay for it'. So we made an EP with four bands on it and I put on the back of it 'Factory Records - 86 Palatine Road Manchester 20', which was the address of Alan's flat. And that was the beginning of Factory Records, with myself, Tony and Alan as founders.

"One of the bands on that EP was Joy Division. They were offered endless deals, didn't wish to take them and suggested to Tony that they release an album independently on Factory Records. So we released an album produced by Martin Hannett, and Factory Records became a partnership of five people - Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, Peter Saville, Martin Hannett and Rob Gretton (Joy Division's manager).

"Joy Division's first album, Unknown Pleasures, became a cult hit. There was no single, no air play, no advertising, but they sold quite a lot of copies. Joy Division were a legend in the making. They went into the studio to record the second album - at that time they had a single called Love Will Tear Us Apart - and then shortly before the release of the single Ian Curtis committed suicide. So the writer of the songs underscored his work with his life. That took Joy Division to instant mythology.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart and the album, Closer, sold thousands of copies. Suddenly 86 Palatine Road Manchester 20 and Joy Division (who still had day jobs) had a lot of money and no-one knew what to do with it.

"Tony and Rob decided that the money should be given back to the young people of Manchester who had supported Factory and Joy Division, so they gave it back by founding The Hacienda. Martin Hannett adamantly disagreed - he said 'the company makes records, you don't know anything about opening a club'. Martin was right. They knew nothing about running a club but they decided to dig a big hole in the ground in Manchester and throw all of Joy Division's money into it. And the partners in The Hacienda were Factory and Joy Division and by default New Order."

The Graphics

"So Rob and Tony decided to open the club and because I was Factory's art director they invited me up to Manchester and showed me a 20,000 sq ft boat showroom and said 'can you design it'? And I said 'I'm flattered that you think I could but I can't'. But I had a friend in London, Ben Kelly, who I believed could, so I sent him to Manchester. And Ben created The Hacienda. All I had to do was the graphic identity for it.

"We used Gil Sans because it is perhaps the classic 20th century font of British industry and so lend itself to the visual style. All Factory projects were given catalogue numbers so The Hacienda was given the number Fac 51 as if it were a product. And Rob and Tony settled upon the name 'The Hacienda' from a Situationist text of which Tony was fond of quoting - the line 'The Hacienda must be built'. The house must be built. In a way, the house of this new independent gesture in pop culture had to be built. Factory still didn't have an office, it was still operating out of Alan's flat, and The Hacienda was in a way Factory Records' physical statement within Manchester.

"One thing that I was particularly proud of was the discovery right in the middle of the word Hacienda - which was a strange name to give to a club - of the number 51. If you look at the cedilla on the 'c' and then the 'i' that follows the 'c' it looks like 51. So we made the cedilla look like a 5. It was complete chance that the numerically allocated catalogue number 51 appears in the middle of the word Hacienda, which I took as a sign."

The Design

"The Hacienda was a landmark in more than one way. First of all it was an architectural design landmark, a radical approach to club design. Located in a former industrial building, it employed high-tech design, which was about the use of industrial materials as an aesthetic in their own right outside of the context of industry. We're so entirely familiar with it now that we take it for granted, but it was an innovation in the 70s. Clubs had never looked like that before; nightclubs had always been envisaged as palaces of some sort, glitzy and luxurious. Ben Kelly's approach was to say 'it's a warehouse'. So he articulated a very early version of what we now call post-industrial.

"Symbolically The Hacienda suggests a phoenix rising out of the ashes of former industrial Manchester, so it acts as a symbol of regeneration, a symbol of life ongoing. No-one was talking much about regeneration 25 years ago. Britain was still reeling in the shock of the end of its industrial heyday. It's only in the last decade or so that the former industrial cities have started to reinvent themselves. Yet within this old warehouse in Manchester a way to understand the future was proposed. You could walk into The Hacienda in 1981 and imagine Manchester repurposed for the now. Some saw it as a purely visual experience but for others it connected philosophically. It inspired them to go further. If you can do this with one old building, well we have a city full of old warehouses and factories whose purpose is gone, whose pride is gone and look what can rise out of them.

"If you were to speak to Nick Johnson, creative director of Urban Splash, and ask him if he can join the dots between The Hacienda and New Islington, he would say 'damn right I can'. He would say that Urban Splash comes out of The Hacienda. Nick saw The Hacienda and saw the future; he saw what you can do in Manchester."

The Crowd

"So The Hacienda was a fantastic symbol but it stood relatively empty in the early years. People didn't know what to make of it. That changed with the first gay nights. The club was an alternative space, unlike other spaces, so the first group of people to find a sense of home there were the alternative lifestyle people. And then, notoriously, the new ecstasy-related dance culture made The Hacienda its home. It was an alternative place for what became an alternative entertainment. So in the late 80s it finally found its audience, it found its crowd. And a crowd bigger than it could contain. That's the point when it came alive and became infamous. It took four or five years for The Hacienda and its audience to find one another. In rave culture they did. It made sense."

The End

"The club was never profitable - even at the end, when it was packed out many nights a week. In the early years you could buy a drink in The Hacienda cheaper than you could buy it in an off-licence. No one cared how to run a business let alone a club.

"Tony and Rob saw it as a symbol of hope, the symbol of youth culture in Manchester. And they supported it year after year after year. They let the profits of the record sales disappear in The Hacienda - like going and buying some ridiculous old house in the country and always spending money fixing it, it was like that, that was The Hacienda.

"When the club closed, as it was almost certainly destined to do, I think it would be fair to say that both Factory and The Hacienda as part of the cultural and psychological equity of Manchester were not appreciated at civic level.

"Here we are in 2007 acknowledging in retrospect the importance of Factory, the importance of Joy Division and New Order and the importance of The Hacienda because the Manchester of today that is perceived to be young, vibrant, happening is directly traceable to them. There's lots of talent that's come out of Manchester but the unique thing about Factory and The Hacienda was that they were here in Manchester and they brought the attention of the nation and the world to Manchester and not just to themselves.

"I think that if someone had realised the value to the city, they would have either retained the building and found a way to repurpose it so it would remain a landmark in Manchester, or, if the building had to come down, they would have made a fitting tribute to this legacy. If on the site of The Hacienda was an important building, no matter what its purpose, that people came to Manchester to see then that would be fitting. But what we have is a very mediocre apartment block standing there now that cheaply borrows the legacy by using the name.

"It's a case of you don't know what you've got till it's gone. The single most important element of the cultural equity of Manchester of the last 25 years is gone, but not in our memories."

Ben Kelly, designer

"We met Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus and I think Rob Gretton and we walked the empty building, which had been a showroom. And I knew that they were going to have DJs and there was going to be more than one bar but that was it. There wasn't a specific brief. I had a blank canvas and it was the biggest commission that I'd had up to that point in time professionally. I had never designed a club before and they had never commissioned the design for a club before so we were all, I would say, really quite naïve. And in many respects I think that was the strength of it.

"At that period of time the only nightclubs in the UK that I was aware of were either the Stringfellows type, with chandeliers and glitz, or black holes in basements. I'd worked with Peter Saville before and I knew about Factory's work. And what I've concluded more recently is that I thought I could manifest something three-dimensionally in the same spirit that Peter did two-dimensionally with the record sleeves. It was to do with the spirit, the ethos, the attitude of Factory.

"It became a special place I think because of the legacy of Factory, the legacy of New Order, the template that Peter set with the record sleeves and this was the first big manifestation of the Factory ethos with an interior.

"The opening night was pretty spectacular - they had Bernard Manning as the opening act and Manning came on and tried to do his normal act and people started booing so he walked off stage and everyone cheered. I remember parties held in the basement, where I'd never seen such dry eyes in my life. And in the early 90s, when Madchester and the E-generation took over, I remember standing on the balcony one evening looking down at this heaving crowd, the sweat and the steam rising from bodies, and the sight was just extraordinary."

Graeme Park, DJ

"Every birthday and New Year's Eve was special. The atmosphere was always electric and the sense of anticipation always began outside as people joined the lengthy queue that snaked around the corner and over the canal. The fairground that was erected at the back of the club by the canal for the 10th birthday was very memorable indeed. The sight of clubbers who were, shall we say, a little worse for wear being thrown around by various fairground rides before heading straight back to the dancefloor looking even more bemused than normal was quite surreal. As was the smell of the fried onions from the hot dog & burger van that wafted throughout the club. Not a smell you want in a packed, heaving, sweaty nightclub.

Peter Hook, co-founder of Joy Division

"My favourite anecdotes cannot be told! They include very famous people doing unspeakable things to each other and innocent parties - these stories must never see the light of day. Well, until my book comes out anyway! We flirted with danger and lived to tell the tales, be they true or not, who's to say, no-one can remember anything anyway. Consumption, compulsion, contradiction and chaos? it makes me smile even now to think of those moments."

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