New Order lost over £4,000 a week for the first five years of owning Manchester nightclub the Hacienda, according to Peter Hook’s new book ‘The Hacienda- How Not To Run a Nightclub’.
During the same 1984-’89 period, the band were also hit with a tax bill for £800,000 despite being paid just £100 each a week, Hooky revealed, though the club remained their greatest money pit throughout its 15 year life.
“I made so many wrong assumptions. I never associated what I saw at the Hacienda with our money,” he confessed.
“I believed that everyone who worked there had the same objective in mind as me: to make it a success. I assumed everyone knew what they were doing. I was wrong on all counts.”
Detailing staff thefts, insider robberies and secret Teardrop Explodes gigs that were so secret that just 8 people turned up (the band’s fee was £3000) he also recalled how turning the club into a collective proved similarly disastrous.
“Obviously the staff didn’t want the club to be expensive for their mates. They didn’t care whether the Hacienda made a profit or not,” he said. “I think the staff decided, ‘Oh, they’re rock-star millionaires, fuck them, we’ll keep it cheap for our mates.”
He also wrote explicitly about the first time he took ecstasy, in Ibiza in 1988, when New Order were trying (and subsequently failing) to record the album that eventually became Technique.
Recalling rushing around to find a toilet as he first came up on the pill (‘I needed to shit like I’d never felt before’) he described the next sensation as feeling ‘like having a rocket up my arse’ prompting a frenzied night of rushing round Ibiza during which he lost his friends in San Antonio.
“I came to my senses about ten hours later, five miles away in Ibiza Harbour, sat on a bench and watching the sun rise,” Hooky recalled.
“God knows how I got there, but as I stared blankly out to sea, I thought I saw a little black thing come out of the water. Like a periscope. It looked round; it WAS a periscope. A flaming submarine rose up and docked. All the sailors emerged from inside and lined up on the deck; someone whistled, they saluted, then all disembarked, walked past where I sat, then marched into town. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen,” he remembered.
Peter Hook- The Hacienda- How Not To Run A Club, is out on October 5 (and is published by Simon & Schuster).
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