The Haçienda by Peter Hook Page A

die-cut by hand three times (the most expensive thing on the sleeve were the pieces people didn’t actually get, according to Steven Morris) – meaning that the design lost Factory 10p on each copy sold during the initial run of more than two million.. On the subsequent ‘holiday hit’ pressing, however, printing costs decreased when a less expensive sleeve was used, ‘the problem’ having been spotted.
    ‘Blue Monday’ wasn’t the only Factory product losing money thanks to over-ambitiousness. So too was the Haçienda.
    Visiting bands spoke in glowing terms of the club’s dressing-room hospitality, for example. How the rooms were filled with flowers and booze, how it was far more comfortable than other venues and how at the end of their performance they were given a video by the video-maker Malcolm Whitehead. Where other clubs might have attempted to profit from the footage, Haçienda simply gave it away.
    That year, Frankie Goes to Hollywood played and Rob Gretton insisted that the Haçienda’s hospitality should match that of the Paradise Garage in New York. The dressing room was even more beautifully decorated than ever, piled high with fruit and flowers, while the main hall played host to more grand flower arrangements.
    Bar manager Leroy Richardson recalls the club being over-generous with drinks given out to staff, and the stock-take revealing a huge shortfall. Staff weren’t ‘stealing’ the drinks, Richardson maintains; it was just that nobody was keeping a tally of what was taken. There was an unusual system for serving customers,too:one member of staff took the order then passed it to another to complete – so it took two members of staff to serve one customer. This was yet another somewhat ill-advised and costly idea transplanted from New York.
    You’d think that being 3000 quid down on the too-secret secret Teardrop Explodes gig would have taught us a valuable business lesson. But no. We carried on doing business the same way – like it was a badge of honour.
    So, our promotion continued to be haphazard (remember: the poster timings could be variable), plus we were treating visiting bands like they were kings. Rob’s attitude was, ‘If somebody plays in my club, I treat them like I’d expect to be treated’– which unfortunately meant that we’d lose money each time we booked a gig and the bands would be thinking, ‘It’s great playing here, isn’t it?’ (Credit where it’s due, though: Tears for Fears played for the £150 they’d arranged before they’d got to number 1 – then played to a sold-out house. Very honourable, well done, lads.
    We frittered cash away each day. On special days we threw it away – ‘like a man with ten arms’, as Barney liked to say.
    I remember going to the Haçienda’s first birthday party in May, walking into the dressing rooms and being delighted to see them full of beer and booze – all free. It felt like we’d died and gone to heaven; because we were still living on the breadline, yet here at the Haç was everything we wanted – which, back then, amounted to beer and food – laid out for us.
    Only years later did it occur to me that New Order had paid for it all anyway. What a bunch of dickheads. We just got stuck in, like pigs at a trough. It’s easy to divert a musician: just show him free booze and he’ll forget (or forgive) just about anything.
    I made so many wrong assumptions. I never associated what I saw at the Haçienda with our money. I believed that everyone who worked there had the same objective in mind as me: to make it a success. I assumed that everyone knew what they were doing.I was wrong on all counts.
    For his review of the club for the Local Times that year, correspondent Robert King interviewed Rob Gretton in the downstairs Gay Traitor bar.
    ‘What sort of people are you aiming to attract?’ he asked.
    ‘The kind with two arms and two legs,’ sighed Gretton in reply.
    The sort of people actually turning up, wrote