Independence Days

by Alex; Ogg

  For the rest of the band, it was business as usual, albeit in strained and dramatically altered circumstances. “We all knew quite early that we wanted to carry on,” Peter Hook would later tell Jon Savage. “The first meeting we all had, which was the Sunday night, we all agreed that.” Joy Division transmuted into New Order thereafter, with the addition of drummer Stephen Morris’s girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards. Escaping the shadow of Curtis and Joy Division’s legacy would prove problematic but not insurmountable. Wilson claimed the name came from Rob Gretton, inspired by a TV documentary on the Khmer Rouge and ‘The New Order Of Kampuchean Liberation’. Perhaps a joke at Wilson’s expense, the chances of Gretton and the members of the band not knowing of its less obscure connotation as one of Hitler’s whims on the subject of the expansion of the Motherland are exactly zero.

  Prior to the reluctant investiture of Bernard Sumner as vocalist, there was some discussion with regard to replacing Curtis with someone from the Factory ranks. “Wilson apparently suggested they consider me on vocals,” remembers Kevin Hewick, “but nothing came of it, other than the one recording session that produced ‘Haystack’.” The latter, New Order’s first studio recording following Curtis’s death, was recorded by Hannett in June 1980. “Alan Hempsall of Crispy Ambulance was also apparently mentioned as a possible,” Hewick continues, “having stood in for them when Ian was ill – nothing like the way depicted in Control [the subsequent Ian Curtis biopic by Anton Corbijn]. Nobody ever told me at the time that I was in the frame for vocals with what was to be New Order, I still don’t even know if it’s true or not. I’d imagine it would have been a nightmare if Alan or I had done it. It would have been seen as an affront to the sacred memory of Ian Curtis, [not least to] those of the Dave McCullough mindset. [They] made Ian their substitute indie Christ, and the strange perspective of history, which has turned him into a precious icon rather than the flesh and blood real man with the profoundly original talent that does deserve posterity. Ian’s death did change everything, did touch many lives, from those close to him to those who never knew him but related to this lyrics and loved the band’s music. People felt genuine grief and sorrow over it, but McCullough’s absurd nonsense sowed the seeds of the Curtis cult.”

  In the summer of 1980 Factory launched a joint initiative with Les Disques du Crépuscule. Factory Benelux was headed by Michel Duval, a partner in the Plan K club in Brussels with Annik Honoré, alongside famed illustrator Benoît Hennebert. Another outlet, Factory US, provided distribution for the label’s releases in America. Of more tangible historical consequence was the decision to launch the Haçienda night club in 1981, at Gretton’s suggestion. A former Victorian textile factory was selected on the corner of Whitworth Street West and Albion Street in Manchester’s city centre, which had most recently been used as a motor boat showroom, and Ben Kelly commissioned to provide the interior design on Saville’s recommendation. The idea was sold to Wilson on the basis of ‘giving something back’ to Manchester, which he, rather grandly, would analogise as ‘paying royalties’ to the city that created the music in the first place.

  The decision outraged Hannett, in his own way master of the conceited sweeping gesture. He’s wanted to invest in a state of the art studio facility. He left the label and would sue for unpaid royalties (the case was settled for £35,000 before going to court in 1984). Wilson’s reporting of Hannett’s succinct astonishment at finding out £700,000 had been invested in the club – ‘I’m a genius, you’re all wankers’. Wilson would later elaborate on this in an interview with Craig Johnson. “Were it not for the utter stupidity of Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson, he [Hannett] would have created the next music because he was desperate to get a Fairlight. It was a synthesiser computer keyboard, and basically what Martin, Stephen [Morris] and Bernard [Sumner] were doing with soldering irons in 1980, suddenly by 1983 there was a machine that did it called a Fairlight. We had no idea what one was, what we knew was that it cost thirty fuckin’ grand and we were running the Haçienda and you could fuck off. So we used to row about this all the time. ‘I want a Fairlight.’ ‘You can’t have a Fairlight.’ ‘What’s this piece of shit you’re building? Where’s my Fairlight?’ He never got a Fairlight, Trevor Horn got a Fairlight and the rest is Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the rest is history. I’ve very recently begun to claim that we created Trevor Horn, by stopping Martin getting a fucking Fairlight. And then the big fight and they go and fall out with each other and it’s the lawsuit and stuff.” For his part, Hannett would tell Martin Aston in 1989 that “If you’re a masonry drill, you eventually became slightly blunted. I found it necessary to go away, after my fight with Factory. I went back to my eight-track in my bedroom for a year.”

  Some of the artists were similarly unimpressed. “By late 1982,” Hewick recalls, “there seemed to be no plan or place for me on Factory. Erasmus seemed to be less involved and Wilson was totally immersed in the Haçienda, which I’d been so against because I knew the lesser acts like me would be totally forgotten once this fantastical folly got underway. Un-with it as I was, I then had no grasp of how this was the way history was to be made again. At the time I thought – a night club where there once was Joy Division? I didn’t get it. Disco rhymed with Frisco as far as I was concerned.” Hewick would move on to Cherry Red after Wilson vetoed recordings he’d made with Adrian Borland and The Sound. “Tony’s retort was that Factory would never release anything with ‘a London band’ on it.” With Hannett’s defection and that of Saville, also over money issues (though he would continue to provide artwork for the label), Wilson, Erasmus and Gretton formed Factory Communications Ltd.

  The Haçienda’s name came from a Situationist slogan, specifically Formulary for a New Urbanism by Ivan Chtcheglov, ‘The Haçienda Must Be Built’. The cedilla (not used in Spanish, where a hacienda denotes an estate or ranch) was added to match the catalogue number ascribed to the venue, FAC 51. Situated upstairs was a stage, dance floor, cafeteria and balcony, while the ground floor housed a cocktail bar, The Gay Traitor (named in spy Anthony Blunt’s honour). The other two bars were named after his colleagues – The Kim Philby and (after Guy Burgess’s cryptonym) Hicks. Later, ‘The 5th Man’ was opened as a secondary venue after the lower cellars were converted. A planned games room was fitted out only for them to remember two weeks before opening that they’d need something more prosaic like a cloakroom. Such details were lost in the purchasing orgy that saw designer stools brought in from Finland, granite bar tops and a mahogany balcony. On the opening night Saville handed over the objets d’art that were the tickets on the actual day of the proceedings and Bernard Manning, the surprise compere, was booed off stage after a spirited ‘fuck you’ exchange with the new clientele. A temple of civic pride or the ultimate narcissistic folly? The Haçienda was both.

  “It would have been alright it would have been the little cottage industry thing, if the Haçienda had just been a little dingy club that didn’t cost much,” drummer Stephen Morris would recall to Ian Harrison in the sleevenotes to the reissue of Brotherhood. “It was the scale of it all. Compare it to something like Alan Erasmus’ Factory boat, for example, which was half-submerged – fine! Or the Factory car he drove into the Haçienda. He lost the keys and couldn’t move it so they bricked it up. There was a fucking car in it when they knocked it down. The Factory Zimbabwe label – another great idea!”

  Almost from the outset the Haçienda haemorrhaged money – not helped by the fact that, despite lofty design standards, the policy was to keep both door and bar prices low. Although the tariff would be raised later, it had little consequence when the venue became the pulsing heart of Manchester’s dance music revolution – garnering a clientele who would far rather buy Ecstasy tablets than pints. The money came from Factory, and as joint directors, New Order themselves – reportedly more than £10,000 a month at one time. It didn’t matter too much while New Order were riding high [although Messrs Hook and Sumner might dispute that], which they were
doing via the spectacular success of ‘Blue Monday’. The group’s initial post-Curtis releases were laudable and, arguably, far more artistically engaging than anyone might have anticipated in the circumstances. But by 1983 they had found their own voice; emerging from their former singer’s shadow and seamlessly absorbing New York club rhythms into a warm, beguiling electronica which maintained the bludgeoning melodic undertow of Hook’s bass runs. At that time the best-selling 12-inch release in history, ‘Blue Monday’, in splendidly iconoclastic fashion, reportedly cost Factory money (3 pence) on each copy sold due to Saville’s elaborate cover design. Though the original die-cut sleeve was withdrawn to minimise any financial shortfall, that was less aggressively reported.

  The Factory roster up until 1985 had featured a cluster of acts who were lumped together in the press as generic ‘Factory bands’. Some certainly were derivative of the sound Hannett and Joy Division had established – such as The Stockholm Monsters (though Wilson would opine that they were “The Mondays five years too early”), Section 25 and The Wake. But the other cornerstones of the roster were always more variegated. A Certain Ratio continued to mine a hybrid of post-punk funk that channelled aggressively polemical lyrics. The Durutti Column were never less than fascinating, though Reilly’s inventiveness as a guitarist and musician seemed to exist in inverse proportion to his commercial viability. And Quando Quango, led by Factory A&R man and Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering, began to break down the barriers between rock audiences and dance fans that would build an audience that would eventually embrace Factory’s heirs apparent to New Order, The Happy Mondays.

  Pickering was an old acquaintance of Gretton’s (they’d met while hiding from marauding Nottingham Forest fans) who had been a face on the early Manchester punk scene. “I used to hang around with Joy Division and Rob,” he would tell Robin Murray, “but then I went to live in Holland and people that I squatted with in an old waterworks had an old hall and they said “if you want to use the hall, you can do, I did my first real DJing there, in Rotterdam. I was playing Chic and so on, which was weird in those days. Also, we put loads of bands on. Amongst other things I put on New Order’s second ever gig after Ian died, and when Rob came over he said “we want to open a club in Manchester, you’ve got to come back, you can stay at my house.” So I actually went home almost immediately – I wanted to come back anyway. They had just bought the building that became the Haçienda at that point.”

  And yet the most important band in the independent world of the 80s, The Smiths, never did release a record on Factory. “The Smiths version about not signing to Factory is that Wilson was a cunt,” Wilson told Andy Fyfe. “Blah blah blah. But my version of the story is that Factory was two and a half years old and a dinosaur. I was extremely depressed about Factory at the time. The first New Order album had sold poorly, and I felt that I couldn’t sell the first James single or the first Stockholm Monsters single, and thought my company had lost something. I didn’t know what but I thought it had gone stale and I wasn’t going to saddle Steven [Morrissey] with a shit record company. And Steven was a nightmare to work with.” He would also tag The Smiths, without actually naming them, for being ‘the one Manc band’ who ‘fucked off to London and failed miserably to invest in their own town’ in 24-Hour Party People. In a documentary sequence broadcast in 1985 on Granada Reports, in which Wilson held the NME’s Smiths’ cover aloft, he rides his hobby horses into the ground. First, he quizzes Messrs Rourke and Joyce on that decision to move to London, manages to talk about Mozart with Marr, then crosses swords with a surprisingly inarticulate Morrissey – addressed as Steven, which Wilson knew well he hated. He concludes by asking him why he wants to be a pop star – although surely Morrissey was to the manor born – going back to his theory that he always envisaged the singer as being ‘our James Joyce’.

  Instead, at the height of the Smiths’ popularity in 1985, Wilson released the first record by The Happy Mondays, ring-led by barrelhouse poet Shaun Ryder – a man with a Dr Seuss-like delight in juggling nonsense words and metaphor. Alongside the Stone Roses, and to a lesser extent, Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets, the Mondays would become key contributors to the faintly ridiculous ‘Madchester’ phenomenon (though the term was not coined for another four years). “Someone had to take Black American music,” Wilson would later tell Manchester After Dark, “add irony and English rock. They did it and everyone fucking copied them. Three months later you get ‘Loaded’ by Primal Scream and ‘Fools Gold’ by Stone Roses and everyone is like, ‘Oh my God, the world has changed.’ It was the Mondays that did it.”

  The whole movement could have been autocue’d on Wilson rhetoric – namely an unapologetic assault on any kind of deference to the nation’s capital. “Rock ‘n’ roll is a history of small cities,” Wilson would tell Andrew Smith of the Guardian, retrospectively, and debatably. “Usually, those cities have two and a half years of ascendancy, then they’re gone. But this place had virtually 20 years as the centre of everything – that was the miracle of Manchester.”

  Factory was itself changing. The Festival Of The Tenth Summer, culminating in an all-day show at the G-Mex in July 1986 commemorated a decade passing since the Pistols’ Lesser Free Trade Hall show. Designated with catalogue number FAC151, it also offered a handy moment for reflection. “The fact that the Haçienda started to work and started to make money,” Wilson told Recoil fanzine, “I think was in part due to a surge of energy provided by G-Mex. There was a change, and our ‘perestroike’ began to take effect. But it wasn’t because we saw ourselves being at a low ebb or anything like that. It was occasioned by Gretton saying at the beginning of that year that he wanted to take New Order to CBS. He said New Order would sell more records there. And I knew he was right, because CBS would make the singer sing on the videos, would employ pluggers and strike forces and so on… I thought, well, why are we still staying with the old ways? It was time to change, time to adapt. So in the spring of 1986 we employed a strike force for the first time and got [Cath Carroll’s] Miaow and The Railway Children into the Top 150. For about two years a whole lot of changes began to take place… We had [by 1989] fifteen or sixteen acts on the label, but it became necessary to carry on with just those that had the will and the talent. Those that can sell records and want to sell records all around the world. And of our new acts we had two that could do that; Cath Carroll and Happy Mondays.”

  Later, quizzed by Danny Kelly in the NME in 1992, Wilson reflected on the way the whole concept of independent music had changed in the mid-80s. “This whole thing – ‘what is indie?’ – is tying people in knots, causing them to lose sleep. All it ever meant historically was independent distribution, following the example of the American indies. Yet we’ve spent months now agonising over the question, wrestling with it. What is ‘indie’? What does it mean? I’m sure lots of people will tell me what it means in the next few months but I really have no idea. In the mid-80s and at its worst, ‘indie’ meant a ghetto for bands who weren’t going anywhere. At its best, ‘indie’ is this strange industry that flourished, and is still flourishing, in the aftermath of punk, and has made a half or two-thirds of all the most interesting music in the world… mountains of good music. For four years now, I’ve avoided the word and called them ‘small British labels’ instead. It’s like guys in Blackburn, those tiny techno labels, they’re pure indie.”

  The upturn in the Haçienda’s fortunes grew from its axiomatic role in importing the American house music boom, thanks to the Detroit-Chicago crate-digging of Pickering, whose Friday night ‘Nude’ sessions began to attract capacity crowds from 1986 onwards. The later ‘Hot’ nights, hosted by Pickering alongside John Dasilva, provided hair of the dog refreshment to clubbers desperate to recreate the euphoria of the Ibiza club scene. Otherwise, however, Factory itself didn’t benefit much from the house boom; Wilson admitting that one of his great errors was ‘not to appreciate’ Pickering sufficiently. “You never recognise a prophet in your own country,” he would sta
te of the DJ, who went on to A&R DeConstruction Records. “Rob and me had seen what was happening at the Haçienda,” Pickering would confirm, “and wanted a dance label. But Tony – God rest his soul – said, ‘Darling, dance music will never happen.’ When he was alive he openly admitted that, so I’m not slagging him off or anything. So with my management at the time we set up DeConstruction from a little office in Islington. I’d be getting white labels in a flat box on a Friday night and we had it signed by Monday afternoon. We were selling millions of records, and if Tony had let us do the dance label, it would have saved Factory.”

  The Mondays, meanwhile, whom Pickering had first brought to Wilson’s attention after seeing them play Salford Youth Club, had ‘Wrote For Luck’ remixed by Martin Hannett at the suggestion of Erasmus and manager Nathan McGough – Wilson would only find out second-hand during the filming of the accompanying video. Presumably because, at their second last encounter, Hannett had pointed a gun at his head (at one point Gretton had a restraining order placed on him). But the single only picked up substantial sales following its ‘Think About The Future’ remix by Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osbourne (after an attempt to resuscitate it by Vince Clarke of Erasure had failed). The same duo would helm production of Factory’s last great album, Pills ‘n’ Thrills ‘n’ Bellyaches.

  While the Haçienda had begun to establish itself as the hub of the new dance music paradigm, it also attracted a deal of negative publicity around its drugs culture. In July 1989 Claire Leighton collapsed on the dancefloor and became Britain’s first ecstasy fatality after being rushed to hospital. Though she actually purchased the drugs in Stockport, the long queues routinely snaking round the Haçienda’s entrance were known both as a peripatetic party locus prior to the evening’s main event and a dispensary for ‘E’ users. “We had the usual crisis meeting,” Wilson told The Big Issue. “There was a feeling of, ‘Why us, why our dancefloor?’ First of all there was revulsion and tragedy and sadness. That kind of death is pretty awful. None of us knew about Ecstasy deaths then, the idea that someone’s body boils. And also we didn’t understand the repercussions. Complete underestimation.” That brought unwanted scrutiny from the police, exacerbated when rival gangs began to invest in state of the art automated weapons and moved in on the scene. A closure order was only averted after the hiring, at great expense, of George Carmen QC, and a three-month shutdown to calm the situation.