Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me

by Bernard Sumner

  ‘Great idea,’ he said.

  Within twenty-four hours, he’d arranged for the Haçienda DJs to come down, along with a couple of coaches packed with mad Mancunians wearing bucket hats and blowing whistles. In fact, all the baggage you could imagine from the Haçienda was transplanted from Whitworth Street to this idyllic, sleepy, historic Georgian spa town. The DJs set up on the mezzanine floor of the studio and strobe lights went up. People came down from London, the record company showed up – everyone was there. We even invited some locals, and they were the ones who ended up trashing the place: someone, apparently from the rugby club, pulled a toilet cistern off the wall.

  To the studio manager’s horror, despite Rob’s gallant attempts to placate him, the party went on all night. It was fantastic. I’ll admit that I did get a little worried when I saw our publicist dragging our record plugger off somewhere with an axe in his hand and wondered whether things had possibly got a little bit out of hand, but it got to about eight thirty the next morning and everyone started piling back on the coaches to go back to Manchester. The look of relief on the studio manager’s face as he watched all these mad bastards getting back on the coach was really something to see. Except, one of the coaches wouldn’t start. Everyone piled off, trooped back into the studio and restarted the party until the driver could get the coach going again – about three hours later.

  The level of hedonism was tremendous, but at that stage we didn’t know that people could die from taking Ecstasy. We were about to find out. On rare occasions, some people can take Ecstasy once, unaware that it will have a priming effect on their immune system, which means that the second time they take the drug there can be an enormous adverse reaction. This is what led to a terrible occurrence in July 1989, when a young girl called Clare Leighton died after being taken ill inside the Haçienda. She had taken Ecstasy but despite the swift actions of club staff and the emergency services at the time, Clare died later in hospital. It was a huge tragedy, just awful. At the inquest, the coroner said the reaction Clare had experienced was extremely rare and there had only been two previous cases, both in America. From what I’ve learned, she’d only taken it once before, a couple of months earlier, and her immune system had reared up the second time, with desperately tragic consequences.

  Obviously, we weren’t selling Ecstasy at the Haçienda and the security staff at the club did their best to keep it off the premises, but it’s hard to appreciate now how ubiquitous it was in those days, in pubs and clubs, at parties, even on the football terraces. I suppose it was a bit like Prohibition America in the twenties: if people want to do something badly enough, they will always find a way, no matter how hard you try to prevent it.

  The acid house movement of the end of the eighties proved to be the Haçienda’s peak of popularity. The capacity of this enormous venue was around eighteen hundred and, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, it would be packed full of people partying and dancing. We introduced a range of themed nights which seemed to work very well: I remember Nude night on a Friday as a particularly good one, as was Hot, for which, believe it or not, a small swimming pool was constructed inside the club.

  In those days, I’d spend a great deal of time at the Haç. There was an end booth in the corner, beneath the balcony, that became the preserve of Sarah, me and our friends, people like Bez, Shaun Ryder and the other Mondays. We’d all hole up there as part of a weekly routine that began with a quiet night on the Thursday, involved a bit of a blowout on a Friday and climaxed with a massive night on the Saturday, going on somewhere else afterwards till around seven in the morning, when we’d crawl into bed in a, frankly, terrible state. We had a landmark club, free booze, all our friends hung out there: it was inevitable that I’d end up at the Haçienda as often as possible. May I say, incidentally, that a certain ‘Mr Haçienda’ was rarely, if ever, seen there; he was never part of that scene and never demonstrated any interest in dance music whatsoever, but the rest of us would be there all the time, a gang of about fifteen or so, and there’d always be a party afterwards. When the club closed at 2 a.m. I’d generally make my way up to the DJ booth and coerce the DJ into putting more tracks on, even though the licence was clear that we had to stop at two. The crowd would still be dancing away below and, with the night in danger of continuing until sunrise, the manager would have to threaten to shut the power off and pull the plug.

  Then we’d go on to somewhere else. The Kitchen in Hulme was part of a five-storey block of flats on an estate that was gradually being demolished and which some enterprising chaps had taken over and turned into a post-club venue playing primarily black music but with some techno and acid house, Detroit house, Chicago house and some Mancunian music thrown in, things like A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’, and 808 State. It served warm fizzy lager and similar revolting refreshments, but you paid your two quid to get in and you could stay for as long as you wanted. It was highly illegal, but the police would generally leave it alone and, as word spread, the people behind the Kitchen knocked through more and more walls of the flats in order to make the place bigger. They’d have their club nights at weekends and be smashing away with sledgehammers for the rest of the week: eventually, they even knocked through to the floor below.

  I took the Pet Shop Boys there once. Actually, I took the Pet Shop Boys to a couple of places I probably shouldn’t have, and the Kitchen was one of them. When we got there, they said, ‘Wow, this place is great!’ but at about four o’clock in the morning this massive, weird black guy with mad, staring, bloodshot eyes arrived in a full karate outfit with a headband on with a pair of scissors shoved in it and started throwing himself around doing moves like a Vegas-era Elvis. I turned to Neil and Chris and said, ‘I think we’d better go, this guy looks a little bit too crazy.’

  Poor Neil and Chris: I’m wincing now even thinking about another night, when I took them to a really bad place. My best pals at this time were two guys called Mal and Bins. Both had at one stage found themselves temporarily on the wrong side of the law, but when I got to know them they were really nice guys (they still are). One night, Mal, Bins, Neil, Chris, Sarah and I ended up in the then notorious Moss Side district of Manchester at a blues, an illegal house party like a shebeen, run by a mutual friend of ours. Bins had connections there and, after a night at the Haçienda, thought it would be a really good idea to go. It was pretty notorious: some of the lads from the blues would drive around in cars until they could provoke the police into chasing them, then drive back to this no-go area, where they’d do a series of handbrake turns and all sorts, just to wind the police up, knowing that the area was considered so dangerous the police wouldn’t dare follow them in. It was the heaviest vibe of anywhere I’d ever been, and there we were, with the Pet Shop Boys, having a party with these lads.

  When we went inside there were some seriously hard-case black guys leaning against the walls, scowling into the middle distance and not making eye contact with anyone, not even each other. It’s a good job we were under our mutual friend’s wing, or I’m sure we would have been in serious trouble. Neil and Chris were a bit freaked out, and it got quite heavy. Sarah had a drink thrown over her head and our friend made the girl apologize to her, but the place was a tinderbox and it was time to go. You couldn’t even get a taxi round there – no taxi driver would go near the place – and it certainly wasn’t safe to walk to anywhere we might find one, so our friend took us round to his mother’s house to make sure we were safe and called us a taxi from there. This guy really looked after us, and more than once. He’s in prison now, but I still get to see him occasionally.

  It just got heavier and heavier around Moss Side and the illegal party scene until, eventually, the murders started. This was the time when people started referring to Manchester as ‘Gunchester’: some really horrendous things happened and it would take a great deal of pain and suffering for local people before a positive change came to the area.

  After the Kitchen, or wherever it might be that
we’d end the night, there’d usually be a few stragglers who would crash out at my house. The next day we’d try to do what normal people did on a Sunday: read the papers, eat toast and watch Lovejoy and Antiques Roadshow. Then, as tends to happen after Sunday, there was Monday, known as ‘the day after the day after’ because it took so long to recover from a weekend of going at it hell for leather. While Sunday would be quite mellow, on Monday (and, occasionally, Tuesday too), you’d get the feeling you had at school when the teacher would make that horrible screeching sound with the chalk on the board. Only this was non-stop. There wasn’t much you could do to ease it either: a hot bath, a walk, a run – nothing seemed to help. A glass of red wine could calm it down a little, but you couldn’t really look alcohol in the eye at that stage. You’d start feeling normal again by Wednesday and vow to take it easier the coming weekend, but then on Thursday Bez or someone would call, say, ‘You coming out?’ and you’d be powerless to resist and, inevitably, you’d do it all over again.

  Elsewhere at this time, well away from dodgy places like The Kitchen, there were raves springing up in the countryside all around Manchester. These were fantastic events. Someone would set up a PA in the middle of nowhere, put the word out and hundreds of people would troop out into the hills for a massive party. Events like Sweat It Out and Joy were organized by the Donnelly Brothers, Anthony and Chris, out on the Moors in the Ashworth Valley in the summer of 1989. Anthony and Chris were acquaintances of ours – their sister Tracey worked at Factory and the Haçienda – and their raves were among the best. They had these big PA systems powered by generators, and everyone would be there. The Donnellys’ mother would be there flipping burgers: the whole thing was just brilliant, with a tremendous atmosphere. I have particularly fond memories of those nights. Nobody was hurt and there was no question of any trouble, it was just a group of people in the outdoors having a great time and doing no more harm to themselves or the surroundings than any rambler or walker. One thorn in the side of the acid-house movement – which, I must emphasize, was a very different proposition to the scene I’d introduced the Pet Shop Boys to – was James Anderton, the notorious Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police. He was – let’s be kind – a man who polarized opinion. As well as favouring a combative, heavy-handed approach to policing, he was openly political and rabidly anti-left wing, a vocal proponent of the introduction of corporal punishment, and he once described homosexuals and drug addicts who’d contracted AIDS as ‘swirling in a cesspit of their own making’. He was galvanized in all of this by a deep-set religious conviction (he once told a radio interviewer that he thought God may well have been using him as a prophet), which earned him the nickname God’s Cop and inspired the Mondays’ song of the same name. Anderton had decided he was going to shut down anything and everything that he didn’t care for – and he didn’t care for a lot. Once he’d identified the rave scene as something to be obliterated as part of his personal holy mission, things began to change. On New Year’s Eve 1989, for example, there was going to be a party in an old warehouse in Ancoats – only a small event, no more than about a hundred and fifty people – but when we arrived we found a cordon of police surrounding the building, helicopters buzzing overhead, floodlights playing over the warehouse: the lot. It was all a little excessive for a small New Year’s Eve party, but it was an effective illustration of how Anderton seemed hell bent on – among other things – spoiling our fun.

  Despite this, the Haçienda had been doing very well and, though the acid house explosion had played a big part in that success, the new manager we’d installed, Paul Mason, deserved quite a lot of credit. Flushed with success, in early 1989 he issued us with a bit of an ultimatum. He said, ‘Look, I’ve turned this club around, but it’s not enough for me, I want to do more. I think we should open a bar in central Manchester.’ And so the Dry bar was born.

  When we opened Dry I was determined not to make the same mistakes we had with the Haçienda, which had become a success almost despite itself rather than due to any great strategy decisions on the part of the management. I was a huge admirer of Danceteria in New York, one of the clubs to which our friend Ruth Polsky had introduced us (poor Ruth, incidentally, was dead by this time: knocked down and killed by a taxi outside the Limelight in 1986 at the tragically young age of thirty-one). I met Madonna at Danceteria once, very briefly (and a bit of a ‘Who the fuck is this asshole?’ moment for Ms Ciccone); she knew Ruth quite well and I think had even worked at the Danceteria at some point.

  The great thing about Danceteria was that it ranged over several floors, with a lift that took people to a different scene and different music on each level. I thought that was brilliant. During the week, when it wasn’t busy, they’d shut the upper floors so the lower floors would still be crowded, which was also a great idea. The Haçienda was rammed on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights but completely empty the rest of the week because, with the best will in the world, you’re never going to see eighteen hundred people coming through the door six nights a week. In fact, even when it wasn’t empty, with a capacity that large the Haçienda needed to be well populated even to look busy.

  When Dry was mooted, then, I suggested we go for something more like Danceteria. I’d also realized that Manchester was home to the biggest student campus in Britain so suggested placing it in a student area where we’d have a ready-made clientele right on the doorstep. I’m certainly no impresario, but it seemed to make perfect business sense.

  ‘Oh no,’ was Tony’s instant response. ‘We don’t want to do that.’

  He explained that they had already looked at some premises and were keen on one in Oldham Street. It was nowhere near the students, but was supposed to be in an area that was ‘up and coming’.

  Well, an up-and-coming area is all very well as long as there’s some kind of timescale for the upping and the coming. In the case of Dry, this was a small detail conveniently ignored. Oldham Street is certainly up-and-coming now, but when Dry was built it was more the preserve of tramps and winos than the students and young professionals we needed to attract.

  ‘We’ve found this beautiful building,’ he continued. ‘It’s very, very long and we’ve worked out that we can fit the longest bar in Britain in there.’

  I think this aspect in particular is what had appealed to Tony, and it was enough to confirm the decision. They’d taken Ben Kelly, who’d designed the Haçienda, to have a look and he’d found art-deco red curtain plasterwork in the walls, and got very excited about it. The die was cast. Again, just as had happened with the Haçienda, the management had been seduced by the look of the place over all other priorities and considerations. I was trying to learn from the Haçienda experience so we didn’t make the same mistake twice. But guess what – we made the same mistake twice. When Dry opened in July 1989 the Haçienda crowd would meet there before heading over to the club: I think they even ran a bus between the two, which was a good idea. But from Sunday to Wednesday, when nobody went out, it was running at a dead loss: all the money it made at the end of the week was wiped out by the middle of the following week.

  Also in July 1989 New Order were on a gruelling tour of America, and my relentless partying would finally catch up with me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Too much drink, but not enough to lose

  I started throwing up around two o’clock in the morning, and I was still throwing up at four the next afternoon. I was in Chicago, it was early July 1989 and things could have been going better.

  Earlier in the evening I’d been in the back of a limo with Sarah on the way to a night out at our friend Joe Shanahan’s club, Metro, in Chicago, when the coughing started and, after a few minutes, it was clear it wasn’t going to stop. I asked the driver to turn around and take us back to the hotel, and we went up to our room. This relentless dry coughing carried on all night without respite. Then the vomiting started and I knew something was very wrong. I’d not even been drinking, yet there I was kneeling over the toil
et in a Chicago hotel room in the middle of the night throwing up and retching long after there was nothing left to come up. By four o’clock the next day it was decided that I needed some help. I’d been ill on tour before, but never this bad.

  Rob and Tom Atencio came to my room and saw the mess I was in. Tom said straight away that I should get to the hospital over the road. Rob protested that we had a gig in Detroit the following day – which was, I suppose, understandable, because he’d have to deal with the crap my being ill would cause; but in the end Tom insisted.

  I walked shakily to the lift, descended, walked across the street, got into another lift, ascended, and then bang! I was put straight into a hospital bed. The first thing the doctor told me was that I needed to stay there for a couple of days without eating anything, and that they’d need to perform an endoscopy. Rob’s heart sank. As well as the gig, there was a huge party arranged in Detroit with all the local house DJs; it was going to be a massive night. He left the room, cancelled the gig and told the rest of the band and crew. The gig may have been pulled, but the flights were still booked and the party was still on and, given the choice between twiddling their thumbs in Chicago waiting for me and partying in Detroit, surprisingly, they all chose the latter option.

  Rob and Tom stayed behind and came in to see me the next morning. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ they said, ‘but there’s a food festival in the street below.’ Great.

  When I was taken down for the endoscopy I nearly fell off the trolley when I saw the thing they produced to put down my throat. These days, the cameras they use are tiny, but this was 1989 and the contraption they were wheeling towards me was like an elephant’s trunk. When he registered my alarm the doctor smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr Sumner, we’ve put a little dose of Valium in your drip. It’ll be fine, you’ll be very relaxed and won’t feel a thing.’