I think when the three of us voiced our considered opinion that the Haçienda should close and we intended to put no more money in, that got interpreted as us not wanting it any more. But I still owned shares. And Steve, Gillian and I had put a great deal of money into the Haçienda over the years. Hooky even claims that I stopped going to meetings. I did stop going to the ones about whether to sell cheeseburgers as well as normal burgers, but I never stopped going to the important meetings – the ones where im portant strategic decisions, security and police issues were discussed.
A year after the Haçienda had closed, early in the summer of 1998, we all got together after receiving an offer from Vince Power of the Mean Fiddler organization to play the Phoenix Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. By that time, we’d suppressed the bad things that had happened and were focusing on the good things. Vince’s offer felt like the opportunity for a fresh start, and we’d be going back to what we did best: creating music. The band hadn’t split up; if we had, we’d have said so. We’d just stopped working together for a while and concentrated on other projects.
Vince had always been good to us, and we got on very well with him, so we decided to take him up on his offer. We’d had a meeting in Rob’s office, during which we’d talked about what had gone wrong and how we’d reached that point. There was a sense of the air being cleared and a genuine attitude of goodwill. I came out of that meeting feeling very positive, and the band started working together again. I had one commitment outside of New Order that I had to fulfil – the release and promotion of the Electronic album Twisted Tenderness – but after that I was free to concentrate on New Order again. In the event, the Phoenix Festival didn’t happen. Vince proposed moving us on to the Reading Festival bill later in the summer, and we headlined that instead. As our previous gig had also been at Reading, in 1993, this created a nice symmetry, and it was brilliant, we had a fantastic gig.
Things were looking good as 1998 became 1999, but then, in May of that year, Rob died suddenly from a heart attack.
Rob’s health had always been a complicated set of scenarios, particularly after a breakdown he’d had back in 1983. We’d aroused the interest of what was then Inland Revenue after Rough Trade’s American arm went bust owing us a great deal of Joy Division royalties, something in the region of £600,000. On advice we believed that we only had to pay tax on moneys received and, as we’d not received the money from Rough Trade America by the time they went to the wall, we didn’t owe any tax on that figure. The Inland Revenue thought otherwise, however, and we were called in for a series of increasingly daunting meetings.
The tax man knew something we didn’t: how much money was coming into the organization. However much it was, it was significantly more than was reflected by the wages we were receiving. No one in the organization was paid much – I think we were all on about a hundred quid a week at that stage – which was OK for Tony, because he had a job working for Granada. Alan Erasmus, to the outside world, the quiet director of Factory (although he actually came up with a lot of ideas), said to me recently that whenever he asked for a pay rise or dividend from Tony, he would quote Karl Marx: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, darling.’ (I’m not sure the ‘darling’ was in Marx’s version.)
At the meetings, on the Revenue’s side was a good cop/bad cop act comprising a dour Scotsman called Mr Munro (bad cop) and his sidekick, who looked a little like Jeremy Beadle (good cop). I think they believed we’d been stashing thousands of pounds away in Swiss bank accounts or something, but we hadn’t – we weren’t clever enough, for a start. We pointed out that we hadn’t received any money from Rough Trade because they’d folded, so surely didn’t owe any tax. Mr Munro took great delight in informing us this wasn’t the case and we were required to pay tax on moneys earned, not just moneys received. So, even though we were the victims of Rough Trade’s collapse, the Inland Revenue was convinced we still had to pay tax on money we’d never received. It was a very serious situation indeed, and there was a genuine danger of everything collapsing around our ears. We even had to get our chequebook stubs together and list all our furniture and possessions in preparation for the possibility of bailiffs arriving at our doors. In fact, I think they did call at Rob’s once: he really thought he was going to lose everything.
Eventually, we hired a top tax lawyer called Paddy Grafton-Green who came into a meeting with us and informed Mr Munro that there was no tax owing because the disputed figure could be written off as promotional costs pertaining to the Haçienda, closed his briefcase, stood up and led us all out of the room in triumph. We were off the hook, thank goodness, but the whole process really took its toll on Rob. I noticed in the meetings that, when he held a cup of tea, his hands would be shaking quite badly. He was pretty tough about most things and didn’t show much interest in money, but these shakes got worse with each meeting, and he began doing odd things. One day he came into rehearsals with Terry, sat us all down and produced a bunch of newspaper clippings.
He turned to Terry and said, ‘Terry, what is my brain?’
‘A super-computer, Rob,’ said Terry.
‘That’s right, Terry, my brain is a super-computer,’ he said. ‘I’ve been analysing the situation and have researched all these newspaper clippings.’
They were all things like, ‘MAN ELECTROCUTED BY LAWNMOWER’; all sorts of mad stories which he apparently thought had some relevance towards the tax situation. It was crazy.
Eventually Rob had a breakdown and ended up in hospital for quite some time. It was very upsetting to see him like that. At the time of the tax investigation, the Haçienda was already losing money, which gave Rob a double dose of stress, as cash he’d been counting on hadn’t come in while, at the same time, the tax man was hammering on the door and threatening to cast us and our families out on the street.
He’d been under enormous levels of stress and become very ill. As had happened with Ian after his epilepsy diagnosis, Rob was put on some pretty heavy-duty psychoactive drugs and, to me, he was never quite the same again. He lost a certain amount of his endearing ‘Jack the lad’ quality and, while he did make a recovery, I don’t believe it was a complete one. A few years later he had problems with an overactive thyroid gland (the doctors later cut it in half, leaving him with an underactive one) and perhaps, in hindsight, this had made some kind of contribution towards his breakdown. An overactive thyroid produces too much adrenalin, so he may well have been having panic attacks. I remember saying to him just before one gig in America, ‘I’m a bit nervous tonight, Rob, you should feel my heart.’ He said, ‘Never mind feeling your heart, look at mine.’ He opened his jacket and I could actually see it beating beneath his shirt.
On top of that, he never really looked after himself. He drank a lot of beer and didn’t eat healthily, never took exercise and spent quite a lot of time in the pub.
I didn’t know at the time that he had a heart issue, and wonder whether, again, that could have been related to his thyroid problem. Either way, we were all deeply, deeply shocked when he died. He was a father figure to us all – we were really young when he became our manager and benefited from his being a little older than us. He always stopped us from being complete twats.
It had been his decision to go with Factory, where Tony and he were like two wings on the same bird. I think, politically, they thought the same way, in very socialist terms, and they had quite a similar sense of humour. Even though Tony went to Cambridge, he was a Salford lad at heart; Rob came from Wythenshawe and, despite being outwardly very different characters, they shared the same sensibilities.
Rob always gave us moral guidance. Not that we were immoral people, of course, but he supplied us with a crucial roadmap of principles. He also taught us about independence, staying in Manchester and doing things that were good for Manchester. He gave us directional and musical encouragement, and I’ll always be grateful to him for all this.
One thing he didn’t do was rein in the
chaos. He didn’t see money as important and therefore didn’t see losing money as important. When the likes of Mr Munro are looking levelly at you across a table and raising a quizzical eyebrow, however, it obviously becomes very important. There comes a point when you have to leave behind the endearingly naïve, shambolically amateurish approach, because success precludes being as cheerfully anarchistic as we once were. Tony loved the anarchy, but he had his job at Granada to keep him anchored. Rob’s whole world was guided by his instinctive sense of principled anarchy, and, as we grew more successful, perhaps it was not recalibrated as much as it should have been.
Rob had a gift for injecting levity into a difficult situation at just the right moment and was a great laugh. He instilled in us the confidence that we didn’t have to rely on anyone else because we were good enough. The business side could have been taken care of better, but we’d never have become remotely the force we became without Rob’s guiding hand.
He was a big City fan and when he died he was due to be buried at the Southern Cemetery in Manchester. His widow, Lesley, was told by the cemetery manager that he had a great plot for Rob, right next to legendary Manchester United Manager Sir Matt Busby. That didn’t go down too well, so another one had to be quickly found – although if Rob had had his way I imagine Sir Matt would have had to move.
My last memory of Rob is speaking to him at rehearsals shortly before his death. New Order were working together again and he was really up about that, but he said that he had to go to a funeral a couple of days later. He was dreading it, he said, as he always cried at funerals. That was the last thing he ever said to me. Rob’s death was tragic, unexpected and I still miss him to this day. We all cried at his funeral.
Once we’d started to recover from this terrible blow things began to go from strength to strength. We’d started writing again and continued the tradition of keeping things in the family when Rob’s assistants, Rebecca Boulton and Andy Robinson, took over as co-managers of the band. Rob’s were big shoes to fill so Andy and Rebecca filled one each. This ensured a seamless progression and both continue to do an amazing job, for the band and for each of us as individuals.
Even my relationship with Hooky appeared to be back on a friendly footing, but it didn’t last. One day he turned round to me and announced, almost as an aside, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve bought the Haçienda name from the receivers.’
‘Oh, really?’ I said. ‘How much for?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
What he would tell me was that, having bought the name, he’d cut a deal with the construction company who were going to build apartments on the site and he’d sold them the right to use the Haçienda name for the apartment block.
I was stunned. We’d just got back together, and were trying to keep everything positive, and then Hooky had done this extraordinary thing. He’d not discussed it with any of us or suggested we all buy the name together as a band, he’d just gone off and done it himself.
As I saw it, there were two ways forward: either let what he’d done ruin everything again, just when things were on the up, or try to ignore it and carry on. For the greater good, I chose the latter option, but it didn’t sit well with me. I recall Rob coming to see us at Steve’s studio around the time the club went down. Alan Erasmus had noticed that the opportunity had arisen to buy the name of the Haçienda. Rob asked us whether he should buy it on behalf of everyone, and Steve, Gillian and I said yes, with Steve adding that we should always own the name if possible. Rob never mentioned it again, I presumed it was all in hand and we went back to making music. To be honest, I really didn’t want to think about the bloody Haçienda again.
Anyway, I’m conscious that I’ve made a great deal of the club’s extraordinary story sound negative, but please don’t think it was all doom and gloom. Like many people, I have a host of great memories of the Haçienda – for one thing, it’s where I met Sarah, my wife – and there were plenty of positives, which have left me with lots of good memories. I think it was also part of Rob and Tony’s noble plan to make Manchester a better place; to create a vibrant city by having a vibrant music scene. They wanted to improve the scene for DJs, dancers, musicians, promoters – the whole range of people involved – and the knock-on effect would be the improvement of the city for everyone. It was quite an achievement, even if a series of poor decisions ensured the club was never destined to succeed financially. It was a wonderful dream, and one that came true to a great extent, but one in which the heart too often overruled the head.
Chapter Twenty
‘It’s a disturbing story, there’s no way round it’
If the combined story of Joy Division, New Order, Factory and the Hacienda has often seemed stranger than fiction, then it’s probably no surprise there have been two major feature films made about it.
The first was 24 Hour Party People, directed by Michael Winterbottom and released in the spring of 2002. It was an amusing look at what went on behind the scenes at Factory and the Haçienda, focusing on Tony as the central character. Steve Coogan played Tony and did so very, very well indeed. I think they were friends before the film, which must have helped his performance. I already knew Steve could do a very good impression of Tony and thought he captured him in brilliant caricature on screen. In real life, Tony was almost a caricature of himself: flamboyant, charismatic and (often unintentionally) funny, and that really comes across in Steve’s portrayal of him. In some ways, Tony must have been fairly easy to play, yet at the same time he was such a big personality it would have been a major challenge for any actor to pitch him right: Steve had it pretty much spot on and was the perfect choice for the role.
John Simm played me, and people often ask me if I thought he’d captured me accurately. I can’t really answer that, because I can’t see myself from the outside. The only time I see myself is in the mirror, and I don’t tend to say much then. At some point after the filming, I bumped into Steve and John at the Press Club in Manchester and, as I was talking to Steve, I became aware that John was watching me very intently. Even though the film had already been shot, I think he was still studying me to see if he’d got me right. I managed to turn the tables on him in a way, when I pulled him on stage with me to sing ‘Digital’ at a gig we did in Finsbury Park that summer. He was very reluctant at first but was soon joining me at the microphone, eyes closed and belting out, ‘Day in, day out’ as if his life depended on it.
I liked Steve and John, I thought they were great guys and am a big fan of their work. I’m really pleased John played me and equally pleased that Steve played Tony: such great casting helped the filmmakers really capture the essence of the insanity that was Factory. With all the moaning I’ve done in these pages – and I know I’ve done quite a bit, but hey, at least some of it is justifiable! – about the stress, the pain and the financial crises, it’s easy to overlook how much fun we had. If 24 Hour Party People hadn’t captured both that and the prevailing anarchy of the times, it wouldn’t have been half as good a film. The Sex Pistols sang about anarchy in the UK but, for better or worse, we lived it. People who’ve seen 24 Hour Party People often ask me if it was really like that and I always answer no. They look a little disappointed until I add that, in reality, it was much more extreme.
In retrospect, if we’d got our shit together in a more conventional way, we might have become more successful. But maybe if we’d gone about things in a more traditional manner we wouldn’t be going strong and enjoying the kind of success we still are today. And I’m sure we wouldn’t have had half as much fun. And, for us, the scales were always loaded heavily towards the fun end of the spectrum.
The film also gave us a unique and wonderful opportunity to relive a little bit of that fun, because they rebuilt the Haçienda for it. It was a very Factory and New Order situation: the Haçienda building itself was scheduled for demolition just before they began shooting, so the producers had to construct a brand new one entirely from scratch. It was deliciously ironic, because T
ony’s slogan with regard to the club had always been, ‘The Haçienda must be built.’ In everything he said or wrote about it, that’s the phrase he’d always use, borrowed from the radical organization of avant-garde social revolutionaries the Situationist International. Five years after the doors had closed for the last time, the motto came to pass: the Haçienda had to be built. Just as the real Haçienda was being pulled down, another one was going up inside a warehouse at Ancoats.
When filming had finished, they threw a party there for the cast, crew and all the old Haçienda heads: the bands, the DJs, everyone. I walked in and was stunned: it was exactly the same as the interior of the Haçienda, right down to the last detail. It was breathtaking, like stepping back in time. That night was a great one on many levels, but particularly because we’d never marked the passing of the Haçienda when it closed. The end, when it finally came, had been sudden and, with the bad feeling, we hadn’t felt like celebrating its legacy at the time. But this was different: it was much later, a feature film was celebrating that legacy and the party turned out to be a fitting celebration of all that had gone before. I’m really glad the film gave us that: it was important to us. That night was a little like walking through a dream. No amount of receivers or bailiffs can ever repossess the memories of what were very special times. To me, no matter how many Haçienda theme nights might still go on today, that party was the final chapter, the night the sun finally set behind the Haçienda, and it should be left to rest in peace.
Chapter and Verse - New Order, Joy Division and Me Page 25