The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club by Peter Hook (Simon & Schuster 2010)

 

I went to the opening with Iris, my girlfriend at the time. We got an invite in the post like everybody else.

As for the night’s entertainment, Hewan Clarke – a lovely bloke who had a trademark lisp – was the DJ. Because of his speech impediment, we teased him by saying, ‘The Hathienda mutht be built.’ He’d stick with us for years. He was a nice, quiet guy. I don’t remember much about his musical tastes, but my memories of him are all good. The cult of the DJ hadn’t yet begun. On the opening night he DJed between acts but nobody paid any attention to what records he was playing.

Bernard Manning was the compère for the evening. Manning was a comedian who owned the World Famous Embassy Club on Rochdale Road in Manchester (which has outlasted even him and us), near where I used to live in Moston. Rob and Tony thought it was ironic, having him do a spot on the opening night. To them he represented the sort of old-school, working-men’s club environment the Haçienda meant to replace. The crowd were bemused, quite rightly. As for Manning, he took one look at the Haçienda and sussed out it was run by idiots. He laughed his balls off as we tried to pay him. He turned to Rob, Tony and me and said, ‘Keep it. You’ve never run a club before, have you?’

We stared at him, puzzled. What did he mean?

‘Fucking stick to your day jobs, lads, ’cause you’re not cut out for clubs. Give up now while you’ve got the chance.’ Then he walked off.

We chuckled, thinking, ‘We’ll show him.'

Substance: Inside New Order by Peter Hook (Simon and Schuster 2016)

 

There was only one thing for it.

One of us lot would have to be the singer. To work it out, Rob thought it would be a good idea to put us in the studio with Martin Hannett, with Hannett in the Simon Cowell role and the three of us auditioning like a kind of post-punk X-Factor. It was a terrible idea, though. Martin had idolised Ian. Of everybody in the Factory family he was hit the hardest, and we entered the studio to find him medicating his depression in the usual way, with dope and coke. It didn’t exactly help matters that he’d always had a fairly low opinion of me, Steve and Barney anyway: ‘One genius and three Manchester United supporters’ was what he’d called Joy Division. Even though that’s not strictly speaking true, because Steve supported Macclesfield Town, but you knew what he meant. Being Martin Hannett, he wasn’t exactly backward when it came to telling us what a poor substitute we made for Ian’s genius.

Rob Gretton Sez

From Peter Bradshaw's gushing review of Anton Corbijn's 'Control' in today's Guardian:

Then of course there is his epilepsy: and Control boldly shows Curtis succumbing to a spectacular epileptic episode at the climax of one gig and having to be dragged off stage by mates and crew, who had no idea what to do. "It could be worse," laughs Gretton cheerfully as Curtis lies semi-conscious in his dressing room, "you could be in the Fall." That was the nearest Ian Curtis ever got to therapy."

A line so fine, that I'm surprised it wasn't Paddy Considine's 'Rob Gretton' quipping those words in '24 Hour Party People'.