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"You have to remember how grim Manchester was.
It really was very dour. There was still a lot of that look that goes with
The Smiths - people with big quiffs and checked shirts - and that was the
girls!"
808 State's Graham Massey.
words STUART AITKEN
It has been argued countless times that the
Hacienda was the birthplace of acid house during 1988's summer of love.
But a new compilation of Hacienda classics tells the often overlooked
story of what happened in the six years prior to the acid explosion.
 Having
visited New York in the early '80s and experienced clubs like the Paradise
Garage and Danceteria, Factory Records' management returned determined to
recreate something similar in Manchester. As Ben Kelly's industrial
designs were unveiled in 1982, it seemed that everything was in place to
make this happen. However, musically there was a mountain to climb. Tunes
like 'Don't Make Me Wait' by the Peech Boys and Cybotron's 'Clear', are
now considered Hacienda classics, but back then were radical records. Not
everyone in early '80s Manchester was geared up to welcome a new club with
its eye on a brave new future.
 "You
have to remember how grim Manchester was," says 808 State's Graham Massey.
"It really was very dour." The Hacienda was attracting new style magazines
such as i-D and The Face, but as Massey says, "there was still a lot of
that look that goes with The Smiths - people with big quiffs and checked
shirts - and that was the girls!" Massey explains that before acid house,
instead of breaking sweat on the dancefloor, punters would rather hang out
in the bar, the club's restaurant or even - bizarrely - the hairdressers
located in the basement.
Contending with a huge, cavernous and often empty dancefloor became a huge
problem for DJs. Converting a sceptical audience to dance music was to
prove equally tricky. First in line was Hewan Clarke, an established name
on the Manchester soul and funk scene. Next came Greg Wilson, a DJ who had
built up a huge following in the north through his jazz funk nights at
Wigan Pier and Manchester's Legend club.
"Mike Pickering and Rob Gretton were big fans of Legend," explains Wilson.
"They saw it as the closest thing to the NewYork club vibe in Manchester."
The Hacienda audience was very much the alternative, student type. To
succeed in their quest to create a New York style club, the management
needed the racial and cultural mix that Wilson attracted to Legend. As a
result the DJ was approached to launch a new concept for the Hacienda - a
specialist dance music night on a Friday.
Initially the change in scene was extreme for Wilson. "Having become
accustomed to working with a capacity crowd every Wednesday at Legend, The
Hacienda seemed like a huge cold empty shell on the Friday," he explains.
"There might have been a few hundred people in there, but they were easily
lost in the vast space".
Wilson's job was made more difficult by the club's awful acoustics and
impractical DJ booth, located in an underground 'bunker' at the side of
the stage. "You were actually looking through a slit at people's legs," he
explains. "As a DJ you need contact with the audience. To get that I had
to run up these stairs, stand on the stage and then run back downstairs
again."
 This
audience contact wasn't always encouraging either. "I remember being
berated on a number of occasions for playing 'dance shit' and being asked
when I was going to play some 'decent music'," says Wilson. "The indie
crowd looked down on dance music at the time, viewing it as inferior to
what they regarded as proper music - a band." While Wilson was trying to
move the Hacienda floor, Morrissey was busy penning `How Soon is Now' with
its refrain: "There's a club if you'd like to go/ You could meet somebody
who really loves you/ So you go, and you stand on your own/ And you leave
on your own/ And you go home, and you cry/ And you want to die". Not
exactly the sort of mood Wilson was aiming for.
One key weapon that Wilson brought to the Hacienda was the Broken Glass
breakdance crew. Club regulars quickly grew to love what the breakdancers
were doing, making them more willing to be exposed to the music that
Wilson had pioneered. Crucially the group also gave the club credibility
for a black audience. Things gradually began to change. "The black crowd
started coming, the indie crowd began to mellow. Bit by bit it was all
conspiring towards the point some years later where it finally exploded."
One of the kids to embrace the electro that Wilson was pushing was Gerald
Simpson - later to become A Guy Called Gerald. In the early days Gerald
viewed the Hacienda primarily as a live venue. "It wasn't until people
like Greg Wilson and Hewan Clarke started to DJ at the Hacienda that I
thought of it as somewhere you could go and dance," says Gerald. "Greg
brought to the Hacienda the crowd that had been following him from club to
club. Jazz fusion dance crews like the Jazz Defektors and others would go
into the Hacienda and put on a crazy show and be even more amazing than
whatever band that was playing. Most of the crowd had never seen this sort
of dancing before or experienced the vibe."
Gerald compares the energy that was created during some of these nights to
the acid rush at its height. "It was great to dance at the Hacienda
especially in the early days when there wasn't people just standing about
waiting for something to happen or for their E to come on", he explains.
Wilson remembers one magical night when
London-based Newtrament played the Hacienda, bringing breakdancers with
them. "They came with an attitude of `We're going to show you something'.
What they didn't realise was that Broken Glass were at the front watching
them." The gig ended up with a breakdancing battle. "I remember looking up
and seeing Rob Gretton and all these guys hung over the balcony just
absorbed and loving it. It was a real feeling of 'This is Manchester -
we're in this together'".
 But
at this point these moments were fleeting. Graham Massey describes the
schizophrenic nature of the club before the acid frenzy took over: "One of
the first times I saw the Hacienda full was for an early Mantronix gig.
That was the first time it had a really good atmosphere. Other nights
you'd go there though, and it'd be really student orientated and all you'd
get would be The Smiths and all that dreadful music by people like The
Wedding Present."
Still, these key moments did much to prepare the ground for what happened
in that summer of 1988. As Mike Pickering took over Friday nights,
Hacienda regulars grew to accept both electronic music and the concept of
the DJ. In mid-1984 the DJ booth was moved to the balcony, symbolically
and literally giving the DJ centre stage. What followed was one of the
most important periods in the late 20th century cultural history of this
country. But focusing solely on the acid house period would be telling
only part of the story. "Too often people think of 1988 as dance music's
year zero. However nothing happens by accident," says Greg Wilson. "Yes,
the Hacienda became the right place at the right time, a phenomenal
cathedral of dance - but it was a very long, hard journey."
Discotheque Volume 1: The Hacienda, out on 22nd May, is the first in
the Discotheque series of compilations from Gut-Active Records.
Hacienda classics
Greg Wilson's Hacienda classics from
1983:
Peech Boys - Don't Make Me Wait (1982, West End Records)
Klien & MBO - Dirty Talk' (1982, Zanza Records)
S.O.S. Band - Just Be Good To Me (1983, Tabu Records)
Grandmaster & Melle Mel - White Lines (Don't Don't Do It) (1983, Sugarhill
Records)
Hashim - AI-Naafiysh (The Soul) (1983, Cutting Records)
Graham Massey's pre-acid Hacienda classics:
George Clinton - Atomic Dog (1982, Capitol Records)
A Certain Ratio - Shack Up (1980, Factory)
52nd Street - Can't Afford To Let You Go (1984, Factory)
Malcom X - No Sell Out (1983, Tommy Boy)
Marcel King - Reach for Love (1984, Factory)
A Guy Called Gerald's pre-acid Hacienda classics:
Benny Golson - The New Killer Joe Rap (1977, CBS)
Harry Thumann - Underwater (Uniwave Records, 1980)
Funk Masters - Love Money (Siamese Records, 1981)
Chick Corea - Slide (From Tap Step, Stretch Records, 1980)
Hashim - AI-Naafiysh (The Soul) (1983, Cutting Records)
Tony Wilson's pre-acid Hacienda classics:
Lulu - Shout - "The New Year's Eve special".
Thunderbirds theme - "When you're collapsed vomiting in the toilets it got
you UP".
Malcolm McLaren - Buffalo Gals - "Essential".
Rockers Revenge - Walking on Sunshine - "Of course".
"There was one song by some hairdresser outfit, a two piece whose name
escapes me...maybe it was Blancmange; hated the act but there was a number
which filled the dancefloor.... yes it was Blancmange but fuck knows the
track..."
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