The Haçienda by Peter Hook

police it really well or else whenever some twat wanted something they’d just go down to the Haçienda and take it! It would even happen when we were open. The sheer scale of the place made it easy to miss what was going on.
    On any given night one of the employees would invariably come by and go, ‘Oh, somebody’s just nicked the video out of the video booth and run off with it.’ We were being eaten from within and without.
    I remember Andy Liddle, New Order’s lighting guy, putting the rig together for our American tour in 1993 – the Technique tour – and taking great delight in showing Rob the two slide projectors he had hired from a Birmingham lighting company. They still had ‘FAC 51’ scratched on the side. They had been stolen, sold on, then rented back to us. Rob had paid for them out of his own money to jazz up the club.
    On top of all this, costly mistakes were still being made. It turned out that D.G., a drinking buddy of ours who looked after the sound, was making a fundamental error that only came to light when Chris Hewitt kept telling me – laughing about it, actually – how much he was making by replacing speakers in our system. Five hundred quid a month. I couldn’t figure it out. Why did the speakers need replacing so often? I’d go in screaming at the DJs, who’d assure me it wasn’t anything to do with them. I was completely mystified. Then one night I was in the club, plastered,biding my time in the DJ box,and D.G.came in and started turning off the decks, etc., before he’d turned off the amplifiers . The bloody popping of the speakers exploding was deafening. Ah well another mystery solved.D.G.thought it was normal ...
    So, our employees were either nicking from us or making a balls-up of their job; the club was always empty and our opening policy was misguided and costly.At least we were using the club to promote Factory’s bands, right?
    Wrong. The Haçienda was rarely used as a platform for Factory bands. The groups’ managers would ask Tony for a night at the Haçienda, but it seemed like neither he nor Rob were ever that inter-ested.Tony used it as a bigger and better version of the original Factory club in Hulme, booking arty bands. Unfortunately, the bands (for themost part) tended to be small while the venue was huge. When you consider how much it cost to run the place, the folly of it looks worse and worse. We’d need a nearly full house just to cover expenses yet put on acts who could only attract 400 people. That kind of recklessness shows how little planning went into it, but the idea was to champion groups that we loved, which – at the time – tended to be proper indie British post-punk bands.
    There was a small army of regulars: arty, delicate types who might not go to a place like Fagin’s or the other normal clubs in town (because they were full of lager louts), but who came to the Haçienda because they felt safe. But actual ticket sales remained a serious issue. We struggled to expand our clientele. The building itself put off a lot of people, the crappy sound kept proper music fans away, and when we did get people through the door, they’d come in find the place empty and lacking any atmosphere. As a result, groups started talking about not coming back, despite the generous fees.
    It was the year ‘Blue Monday’ was released. It came out on 7 March and charted twice – the second time as a result of having been a massive hit with holidaymakers, who’d heard it abroad during the summer, returned to the UK and bought it (often going into shops and asking for ‘New Order’ by Blue Monday).
    As a result it went on to become the biggest-selling 12” of all time, spending a total of thirty-four weeks in the chart.
    Thanks in no small part to the 24 Hour Party People film, enduring myth has it that each copy of ‘Blue Monday’ lost Factory Records money because of Peter Saville’s intricate die-cut sleeve. This isn’t completely true. It was, indeed,