At length we were invited to have a look at the building itself. The moment we saw this huge, cavernous place it was obvious that this was never going to be a small disco with a few mirror balls: this was something on a much larger scale. The term wasn’t yet invented, but this was going to be a ‘super-club’. Ben Kelly, the designer, was brought in and we were shown some initial drawings. I wasn’t completely convinced – I thought the whole thing looked a bit like a very large public toilet with bollards – but it reminded me a little of the clubs we’d been to in New York and was clearly a step up from the schmaltzy, Mecca disco-type establishments in the UK. This would be the first club of its kind here, a huge risk, and we were jumping in at the deep end. While we were buoyed by the zeroes-to-heroes status we had achieved with Joy Division, in retrospect, in those early days, we could well have been looking into the abyss with New Order, so it was a massive gamble. But if Rob thought it was a goer and we could afford it, then hey, why not? We liked the idea of opening a club; it seemed like a fun thing to do. We were young, we had a little money, we were very hedonistic and, as young people tend to, we thought we were bulletproof. To quote one of my own lyrics, we had ‘too much to drink but not enough to lose’.
The original budget for the Haçienda was £50,000. Almost immediately, they needed another £50,000, then another £50,000, and from there the figure just kept rising. As Steve put it, ‘I knew we had a 50–50 profit share deal with Factory, but I didn’t realize that referred to the amounts we were spending.’
When the Haçienda opened in May 1982, a massive space with large windows in the ceiling that looked like no club that had ever gone before it, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that ‘if you build it, they will come’. There was barely any marketing, and before long no one was turning up except us and our friends. There was a big party to celebrate the first night, which was pretty well attended – and, bizarrely, featured a turn by Bernard Manning – but reality set in when it was routinely empty after that. It was too alien, too ahead of the times: the Haçienda didn’t look like any other club and people were initially bemused by it. ‘What the fuck is this place?’ they thought. ‘It’s not even dark. And, anyway, where’s the DJ?’ There was no DJ booth, just a slit like a letterbox in the wall behind which the DJ played: all you could see were two eyes occasionally peering out at the dance floor. Such a large space with a high ceiling also meant the sound was horrendous: the music just bounced around the walls to the point of being practically inaudible. The sound system they’d installed had cost a fortune but the acoustics hadn’t been taken into consideration and the system simply couldn’t fight the building. The selling point for the lighting rig was that it wasn’t going to be anything like the lights in other clubs. But it was going to be crap, it turned out. Right from the start, there was a catalogue of issues that just hadn’t been thought through.
An early by-product of the Haçienda was that it caused a huge argument between Martin Hannett, Tony, Factory and Rob that would culminate in Martin leaving Factory altogether. Martin – who was against the idea from the start, remember – had called me one day ranting about the amount of money going into the club. ‘It’s a ridiculous idea!’ he said. ‘Just stupid! What we should be spending the money on is a Fairlight synthesizer.’ One of the most exciting developments in electronic music in the early eighties, the Fairlight was the first decent computer-based instrument on the market. The drawback was that it was phenomenally expensive – you could have bought a house for the price of it. Martin fell out irrevocably with them over that, the argument escalated and there ended up being a court case, which, Factory being Factory, was given its own catalogue number (FAC61).
Things began to pick up a little for the Haçienda when we started staging live gigs. Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, the Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses all played, among others, and Madonna’s first ever British appearance was at the Haçienda. We played there two or three times ourselves, and the place was packed to the rafters. The club nights still weren’t doing very well, however, so we rejigged things, at my behest, and installed a proper DJ booth on the balcony, recently rebuilt at great expense because of fire regulations. (If there was a way to lose money, the Hacienda would always be sure to find it.) Still, at last people could actually see the DJ at work without having to peer through a letterbox: I’m sure people must have enjoyed several nights at the Haçienda convinced we were just playing dance compilations.
The era that defined the Haçienda and sealed its place in the history of popular culture was when the acid house movement began to take hold in the mid- to late eighties. During that time the Haçienda became the place to go, certainly in the north of England. In my opinion, acid house truly started in the north. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t born in Ibiza; it started in the UK and had its strongest roots in Manchester, Glasgow and London. Shoom and Spectrum opened up in London in 1987 and 1988 respectively, exciting things were happening at the Sub Club in Glasgow around the same time and, along with the Haçienda, these venues came to be the main focus of the movement. How it earned the name ‘acid house’, I’ve no idea. I think it was a daft thing to call it, but it was a handle to identify a specific kind of music; one with trademark squelchy bass sounds that sounded fantastic if you’d had an E (I presume).
Acid house was a little reminiscent of punk, except with a very different kind of music. Where punk’s energy came from a three-chord thrash through distorted amplifiers, this was dance music created entirely with synthesizers and computers – and it was a fantastic thing. In fact, while acid house and the Haçienda found each other in a happy union, New Order’s relationship with the scene dated back to a track we’d written, ‘Ecstasy’, as far back as 1982. We’d played a gig in Dallas, gone out to a club afterwards and got talking to the promoters. These were the days when Dallas was massive on the television and they told us that some members of the cast and crew would go to this club ‘where they liked to drop an E’.
‘What do you mean?’ we said, baffled. ‘What’s an E?’
‘The drug Ecstasy,’ they replied. ‘Haven’t you heard of it?’
We hadn’t. They told us all about it and how the club had been busted a few weeks earlier. When the lights came up, the police found something like a thousand tabs of E that had been hastily discarded on the floor. Ecstasy hit America as early as 1982, but apparently had not spread much further than this little scene we’d found in Texas.
Ecstasy arrived in Britain about five years later and we soon realized it was the same drug that we’d heard about in Dallas. The music here was very different, though: over there it had been electronic dance music, radically different to the tripped-out dance sound that took off like wildfire in the UK. The acid house scene became absolutely massive and the Haçienda finally took off properly. We dabbed our brows with relief at this because, the odd gig aside, the club had been really struggling.
While I’m convinced that the origins of house music lie firmly in this country rather than in Ibiza, which gets most of the credit, the Balearic island and its clubs would play an influential role in the recording of our album Technique. If we’d thought Ibiza was just a nice, quiet, sunny place where we could get away from it all and focus on recording what would become one of our most popular albums, we were, frankly, deluded, because when we arrived on the island in the spring of 1988 the whole Balearic beat scene was taking off.
As New Order became more successful we started to venture further afield to make albums. The official line was that there was no studio good enough in Manchester, but the real reason was that we had a whole load more fun when we went away somewhere. The thought of going to Ibiza greatly appealed to us. We’d been advised that the recording studio itself wasn’t particularly good, but we were willing to risk it, mainly because the complex had a 24-hour bar with its own dedicated barman who could make stonking cocktails, there was a swimming pool and it wasn’t too far away from the nightclubs. In any case, we felt w
e’d earned the right to make an album in a sunny place for a change, having served our dues recording in grim northern landscapes. When we got there, we found that the place was built in a Spanish hacienda style and located in a secluded spot at the end of a long, dusty road. It wasn’t as good a studio as we were used to and the bedrooms were all a bit Scarface – everything was big and white – but it was perfectly fine and, when we arrived in the late spring, before it became oppressively hot, we looked forward to getting down to work.
We’d brought a few ideas with us which we’d written back in the UK, but what we tended – and preferred – to do was write mainly in the studio itself. We started the Technique process by finishing the ideas we’d brought, and we really made the most of our surroundings: I recorded the acoustic guitar part for ‘Guilty Partner’ outside under a tree with a microphone in front of my nylon-strung guitar while the birds twittered in the background (it was great recording outdoors because, inside, you get a really flat resonance from the building).
Steve’s not a fan of the heat and the sunshine, so he spent quite a long time inside recording his drums, which left the rest of us filling in time by the pool drinking cocktails. It didn’t take much longer for us to properly discover the nightlife either, at which point our productivity slowed considerably. Most of the clubs were either in Ibiza town or San Antonio, with two of the main clubs, Ku and Amnesia, on the road between them. We developed a routine of starting with a few drinks in a nice bar we’d found in a town called Santa Eulalia, a lovely spot where one night we saw Denholm Elliot enjoying a few drinks. From there, we’d move on to Ibiza town, which was more upmarket – a bit too upmarket for the likes of us, to be honest – and then we’d move on, usually to Amnesia, back then an open-air nightclub. We’d get completely smashed there and stay until about 9.30 a.m., when we’d gravitate to a club called Manhattan in San Antonio before heading back to the studio at about midday, before it got too hot. (The journey back was often eventful: I remember once having to give the car keys to a farmer in a field and ask if he’d drive us the rest of the way.)
Basically, we had a great time. So great, in fact, that word filtered back to Manchester and people began flying out to visit us. Bez from the Mondays arrived at one point with a few people from the Haçienda and, for some reason, I lent him my driver’s licence. Why on earth I did that I’ll never know, as it was a nailed-on recipe for disaster. The first time he got behind the wheel he’d promised to come by the studio with a guy called Geoff the Chef to pick up my girlfriend Sarah and me at ten thirty, and we’d all go into town. It was a wet night and when ten o’clock became eleven o’clock, and eleven o’clock became eleven thirty with no sign of Bez, we started to become a little concerned. It was shortly after midnight when a bedraggled, soaking Geoff the Chef turned up at the door, minus both Bez and any form of vehicular transport.
‘Bez has only gone and crashed the fucking car, hasn’t he?’ he announced, rain dripping from the end of his nose. ‘It was raining so hard he said he couldn’t see the road signs, so pulled over to read one and just drove straight into it instead.’
I can’t say I was surprised. Bez is convinced he’s a good driver but, as anyone who knows him can confirm, he really isn’t. The rain had stopped by this point, so we trooped out after Geoff the Chef, walked down to the scene of the accident and found the car practically wrapped around the road sign. Bez was standing next to it, kicking it and swearing his head off, not because he’d totalled it but because he thought his night out was ruined.
Despite everything, however, we managed to get into town, where I overindulged quite spectacularly, to the point where one of the few things I remember is being carried out of a club by Sarah, Bez’s girlfriend Debs, and another girl who’d come out from Manchester. Not Bez, though: he was already outside, had somehow got hold of another car and was standing next to it, grinning like a Cheshire cat and jangling the keys.
We were supposed to fly back to England the next day for a couple of weeks off, but instead of waking up at the studio ready to go to the airport with everyone else, I woke up in Bez’s apartment with Sarah looking at me, worried half to death. I was in a pretty bad way, as you can imagine, and as Sarah tried to revive me I could hear Debs’s voice from the next bed saying, ‘Stop it, Bez, not now. Not with Bernard and Sarah in the room.’
And they say romance is dead.
It was a hell of hangover, which took until well into the evening to recede enough for Bez to drive me back to the studio. He’d clearly not learned anything from his close encounter with Spanish signage the previous night, and took anyone overtaking him as a personal affront to his honour that could only be satisfied by an immediate restoration of prime position. He also cheerfully confessed that he was white-lining it, just watching the line down the middle of the road in order to drive in a vaguely straight line. We got to the studio unscathed, but I was a complete nervous wreck by the time we arrived.
Everyone had gone back to England except the studio barman, Herman the German (who wasn’t German, he was Spanish, but just happened to be called Herman), and as we pulled up outside Bez’s eyes lit up and he said, ‘I bet Herman the German’s got some drugs.’ When we walked into the bar area, we found Herman on his own and completely off his face, something Bez spotted straight away. He grabbed him by the shirt, hauled him over the counter and demanded to know where his drugs were. A terrified Herman’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates and, as soon as he’d extricated himself from Bez’s clutches, he ran for it. Bez set off in hot pursuit and chased him all round the building. The screaming and shouting that accompanied the chase were more than my frayed nerves could stand, so I grabbed Sarah and we disappeared to our room. As we weren’t supposed to be there for two weeks, we found the beds stripped, no towels, and our suitcases by the door. But we didn’t care: we locked ourselves in and decided to lie low until the coast was clear, which could conceivably have involved the actual dismemberment of Herman the German, judging by the sounds we were hearing. (I did see Herman again, however, and was relieved to find that he’d survived his traumatic encounter with the Happy Mondays’ maracas virtuoso.)
When we finally got home about three days later I picked up a copy of the NME and discovered that, just prior to leaving for Ibiza – indeed, the night before his flight – Bez had crashed into five cars outside the Haçienda. Which probably explained the absence of his own driver’s licence when he arrived.
He really was an absolute nightmare behind the wheel. When we returned from Ibiza we finished Technique at Real World in Bath. Bez came down with a couple of mates and was going to drive us to a house party we’d been invited to in the town. He was late turning up because, guess what, he’d had a crash in the car and the front wing was all smashed in. ‘Sorry I’m late, Bernard,’ he said. ‘I’ve had another crash, but this one wasn’t my fault: someone had parked their car in the street right in the way.’
We set off on the customary white-knuckle ride, and when we turned into the street where the party was taking place Bez announced he was sure he’d been there before. When we pulled up outside the house and he emitted a lengthy string of popular swearwords, it became obvious why: of all the cars that were in and had passed through the city of Bath that night, Bez had managed to total the one belonging to the guy whose party we were going to.
Moral of the story: never get in a car with Bez, never lend him your car and definitely never lend him your driver’s licence.
Back in Ibiza, Terry had the brilliant idea to add the studio to the itinerary of an 18–30s party bus tour. Goodness knows how he came up with it, but he’d gone to a hotel in San Antonio, spoken to the rep and offered them a regular weekly barbecue and the opportunity to see New Order in the studio. Sure enough, once a week, a coach would turn up dutifully at the studio packed with holidaymakers, who proceeded to eat and drink as much as they possibly could before throwing up all over the place. It sounds insane, I know, and even as I write it now I
can hardly believe it myself. Back then, nothing seemed to faze us; nothing seemed wrong. No one died, so why not have a busload of hedonistic strangers let loose on the recording of an important album? I think this went on for about three weeks, until the puke got too much: we put a stop to it when we found a pancake of sick smack in the middle of the pool table.
Apart from that, we had a great time out there. With characteristic timing, we’d arrived at just the right time to immerse ourselves in Balearic beat house music. And I remember meeting my first proper E casualty in Amnesia. He was a young guy from London who was saying, ‘Awite mate, checkin’ aht the Balearic beats, are ya?’ One of his hands was swathed in bandages and when I asked what he’d done he told me he worked in a sawmill, had one too many E’s and had accidentally sawn off four fingers. He didn’t even seem that bothered about it; he was having a great time. It was just the spirit of the time: nobody gave a fuck.
With all the island’s distractions, we didn’t get as much of the album done as we’d have liked, but we did write and record ‘Fine Time’, the most overtly acid house track on Technique. We were wrecked, though, all the time, and the whole thing cost us an absolute fortune.
We worked very hard when we got back to Real World, with only the odd foray into the clubs of London and the occasional terrorizing of the Bath locals. We had a good time while we were making the album, and I think Technique is a reflection of that. Not for nothing is it regarded as one of our better albums, and that’s something we celebrated at the time in the best way we knew how.
Real World studios had only just opened when we arrived to put the finishing touches to Technique. Everything was clean, brand new; it even smelt new: all fresh carpet and pine. Peter Gabriel was away when we wrapped, but his studio manager, giddy with demob happiness, said to Rob, ‘Now that the album’s finished, would you like to have a party in the studio?’ What he’d probably had in mind was a couple of crates of beer and a table laid with sandwiches and a few chicken drumsticks, but immediately Rob thought: acid house party. A massive, thumping, hedonistic acid house party. He grinned at the studio manager.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 19