➤ Clubbing in Manchester: Rockists in raincoats meet dance and stance
First published in The Face, January 1983
Hacienda 1983: love-action between the bollards
“This is a pretty desperate city as far as money goes and silly reports which moan that we get only 200 people in here some nights forget that that’s 200 more than anywhere else.”
Paula Yates would give her right arm to sound as plausible as Howard Jones, manager of Factory Records’ seven-month-old contribution to the new generation of megadiscos, the Hacienda in Manchester. The discomfiting way he anticipated criticisms before they were raised suggested that those seven months have been spent polishing his answers. . .
◼ “The bar is just big enough to hold all the trendy people in Manchester who by hook or by crook or by prostitution found the £2.50 to be here tonight.”
❏ Manchester is ruled by a regime which doesn’t encourage use of its city centre: “If you’re a Christian and out after 10pm, you must be up to something.”
◼ “Hacienda music is too funk based,” says Adrian Luck. Flat-top Johnny Maher believes there’s only one way to listen to black dance music: “I schtup to funk.” [Footnote to history: It’s taken me three decades to realise that Johnny Marr probably did not say what I thought he said at the Hacienda, as reported below in this cutting from The Face. My own limited Yiddish thought he said “schlepp” which never really made sense in context. Only recently did I discover the much more relevant word “schtup” that seems much more likely! Belated apologies to JM.]
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REVIEW IN THE FACE:
Click for larger image © Nick Logan/The Face Archive
❏ Even on this body-slamming Saturday night space becomes the great divider so visibly that you can read each square foot of floor like a living road-map of nightclub types.
◼ “London wears clothes for effect but we wear them for comfort,” says Rosie, nailing the North-South divide.
❏ “There are easier ways of making money than by opening a club in a recession”
PLUS: ONE REVIEW FROM THIS
MONTH’S NIGHTLIFE SELECTION
Cha-Cha, London WC2, Tuesdays £3
Home of holocaust chic and seven types of ambiguity. Last of the great one-nighters newly ditched by marcel-waved hostess Scarlett (above right): “The people are lovely; it’s the Heaven management I’m pissed off with. They never liked me (a) because I’m a woman and (b) because I’m young”. . . “A twilight world, shocking scenes, bizarre acts” (News of the World). . . Spirit of Cha-Cha: Bostich by Yello (DJ Colin Faver).
TAGS – The Face, journalism, nightlife, reviews, funk, dance music, VJ, Hacienda, Manchester, Cha-Cha, Johnny Marr, Scarlett Cannon, Colin Faver, Claud Bessey, Howard Jones, Paul Smith, Factory Records
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