Special thanks to ThisDayinMusic.com.
It was simultaneously the best idea ever… and the worst. Factory Records was an independent record label founded in 1978 by Granada TV presenter Tony Wilson and actor Alan Erasmus. The Manchester-based label was intended as an ideal of sorts—a place where a handshake meant more than a contract, where graphic design superseded cost, where artists could follow their muse no matter how long or expensive the journey. And somehow, it was all supposed to work out.
The label’s first release, coded FAC 1 (every item of note, from album to record release party to the occasional wager, was numbered), was a poster announcing the opening of a label-owned club called The Factory. The Factory served as the launching ground for such local acts as The Durutti Column and Joy Division, who were also signed (not so coincidentally) to the Factory label. The club lasted for about 18 months, long enough for Factory Records to take on designer Peter Saville, Joy Division manager Rob Gretton and producer Martin Hannett as partners. Further closure of this first era of Factory Records came with the death of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who hanged himself on the eve of the group’s first U.S. tour. He never saw his band hit the Top Twenty with the single, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” or the Top Ten with the album, Closer.
Two months after Curtis’s death, his bandmates played their first gig as a trio. They would soon take the name, New Order, and add drummer Stephen Morris’s girlfriend, Gillian Gilbert, as a second guitarist. Along with bassist Peter Hook and guitarist-singer Bernard Sumner, the group initially continued down the dark, dissonant, guitar-heavy path of Joy Division. But that all changed when New Order visited New York City in 1981 and discovered electronic dance music. The group almost completely reinvented themselves with the pulsing beat of sweaty Manhattan clubs, an evolution that culminated two years later with the monster hit, “Blue Monday.” But the music was only part of the equation.
On this date in 1982, Factory Records and New Order joined forces to open a new club in Manchester. The Hacienda (catalog number: FAC 51) was opened in a warehouse at 11-13 Whitworth Street West, which had previous lives as a yacht builder’s shop and a Bollywood cinema. The club was expensively outfitted, under the direction of Saville, with a decidedly communist feel, featuring bars named after Cold War traitors and spies. Almost immediately, it proved to be a cultural linchpin for the fledgling house and rave scenes in the U.K. Among the performers during those early years were New Order (of course), The Smiths and even Madonna, who played her first-ever U.K. gig there in January 1984.
With top bands, killer DJs, a cool vibe and low prices at the door and bar, The Hacienda was the hottest club in town—in the U.K., for that matter. By the end of the decade, as the rave and house music scenes crested into a beautiful ecstasy-laced thing known as Madchester, the club reached its height in popularity, showcasing such bands as The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and James. But even when it held the title of “the most famous club in the world” (according to Newsweek), it was hemorrhaging money at a staggering rate. It is said that New Order lost thousands of pounds a month on the venture, inspiring Peter Hook to once remark that the group would have come out better if they had just given all the customers ?10 each and never opened the club.
Hook even wrote a book about the experience, fittingly titled The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club. In a later interview, Hook recalled:
“I didn't know where the money was coming from to pay for it. I didn't get involved with the running until the tax problems. All we [New Order] wanted to do was play music, travel the world and have a good time—which we did. When we came back, Rob [Gretton] and Tony [Wilson] told us the Tax Office was investigating. At that time, the band was getting ?100 per week and The Hacienda was costing ?100,000 per month… our earnings! They had kept it from us, but not in a swindling way. I honestly think Tony didn't want to bother us. We were making music, he was putting the records out and the club was using all the money. By the time we got involved, The Hacienda had lost about six million of New Order and Joy Division's money. But we continued to put money in so we didn't lose it. I was the worst because I stuck with it until ’97 with Rob Gretton. I was putting money in until the month it closed.”
Steep losses, tax problems and the influx of thuggish gangsters on the club’s previously joyous drug scene all led to The Hacienda’s closure in 1997. It still managed to outlast Factory Records, which crumbled in 1992 due at least in part to the somewhat naive belief that contracts were unnecessary for bands and their label. Despite all the financial carnage and legal hassles, Hook said he had no regrets:
“I wouldn't change anything… because if I did, I wouldn't be me. It was a gamble. It gave us a place in history and how many people can say that?”
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