EPISODE 04: THE HACIENDA (UK)

Hey heyyy friends. Welcome to Episode 04 of Nightclubbing with your host, Cherry Pie, broadcasting from Lower Grand Radio in Oakland, CA.

I’m excited to be presenting The Hacienda on this episode of Nightclubbing. This episode was genuinely so fun and fascinating to research and put together. I feel like the Hacienda is incredibly unique as a concept, yet it shares a lot of qualities of any other place discussed on this show. Big themes of escapism, grassroots youth revolution via music and dance, and a truly socialistic ideal of nightlife. What I mean by that was the original concept of the Hacienda was for the love of music, by the people who loved it, as opposed to big record label execs or business men looking to make a huge profit off their artists and fans.

This story of The Hacienda really begins in 1976 with Tony Wilson and Joy Division. Tony Wilson was a radio and television presenter for music, culture and events on a local station in Manchester. He sees the Sex Pistols perform in Manchester in 1976 and even though there’s like 30 people in the audience, he thinks ‘THIS is it, this is the next coolest thing’. Soon thereafter, punk sweeps the nation, headed by the Sex Pistols, and it spreads – like a virus – to the ears of teenagers all over the suburbs, provinces and cities of the United Kingdom and replaces the psychedelic prog rock scene. An inspired Tony Wilson starts booking and promoting a punk night with live bands at a local pub, and eventually this band called Warsaw, from Manchester, gets on his radar and he starts booking them for his nights. They grow in popularity, and eventually start performing under the name Joy Division.

Tony Wilson decides to start a record label and calls it Factory Records. Joy Division is the first band signed to the label, with their 1979 album “Unknown Pleasures” as Factory Record’s first release. Pretty important stuff here! I think I can say that almost anyone who’s over the age of 30 and into alternative music probably loves, or at least knows, this record.

Fast forward to 1980, the lead singer of Joy Division, Ian Curtis, commits suicide. Joy Division had only put out one record by this time, but had recorded a second that hadn’t even come out yet, which would come out a couple months after Curtis’ death. You can see how short lived but impactful Joy Division was, and the nation was rocked by Curtis’ death. Out of the ashes of Joy Division, a new project arises with a different sound. This is possibly the only band to ever reinvent itself after death by suicide of the lead singer. The guitar player takes over lead vocals, and other members start messing around on synthesizers, as punk + post-punk is transitioning into new wave and synth pop. This band is New Order, and they would continue to be on the Factory Records label.

In 1982, New Order’s manager and co-director of Factory Records, Rob Gretton, has this brilliant idea to open a venue of their own to be financed by the label, or really the success of New Order with their 1983 hit “Blue Monday”— which would eventually come to be the best selling 12” single of all time. Yet New Order would not collect a paycheck for the song, with all the earnings going into the club. They would call it The Hacienda, and it would become THE club that would change youth culture indelibly in the UK, and would forever put Manchester and Factory Records on the map.

The Hacienda was slow to warm up. A lot of accounts of its early days say that on any given night there were 30 to 40 of the same people showing up, so it felt like a private club for them, and it was mostly live music played by bands. As music is shifting in popularity and format throughout the 80s, it really wasn’t until the club started booking more DJs who played house music that The Hacienda became a hot spot. Today we’ll hear a few songs from the earlier Hacienda days, but I’m going to be primarily focusing on the late 80s on this episode and acid house.

What is acid house? This definition taken from Wikipedia:

Acid house is a subgenre of house music developed around the mid-1980s by DJs from Chicago. The style is defined primarily by the squelching sounds and basslines of the Roland TB-303 electronic bass synthesizer-sequencer.

Let’s talk about the Roland TB-303, aka the 303 which is a bass synthesizer released by Roland Corporation in 1981. Designed to simulate bass guitars, it was a commercial failure and was discontinued in 1984. However, cheap second-hand units were adopted by electronic musicians, and its "squelching" or "chirping" sound became a foundation of electronic dance music genres such as acid house, Chicago house and techno.

And if you’ve ever heard the phrase “4 on the floor”, that refers to the 4/4 beat of house music. What does that mean? It means 4 beats per measure of music, but we’ll dive deeper into all this later in this season. Just know that Hacienda was hot hot hot, it was THE club to be at and was really the beginning of rave culture as we know it.

One more thing I want to add is that I watched several movies/documentaries and read a lot different books/articles on this topic in preparation for this episode, and one common denominator in almost every account of The Hacienda was the emergence of straight white guys dancing. Before the late 1980s, club culture was very queer, it was very female, you saw straight men hanging around really just in the hopes to meet women, but The Hacienda culture was one that encouraged participation and unity and with the 4/4 beat it was easy to dance.

Eventually, drugs were the downfall of the Hacienda. Liquor was out, and the bar didn’t make enough money to sustain the club, because Ecstasy was the choice stimulant. With the E came the drug dealers, and with the drug dealers came near fatal rivalries and security failures. The Hacienda was spiraling in debt, and would lose its entertainment license in June 1997, closing it’s doors for good. The final live performance was by Spiritualized on June 15th, 1997.

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