2003 02 FAC413, New Order, Jack Magazine

FAC413

New Order take Jack through more of their career memories in Part Two of our exclusive FAC catalogue-numbered story

STORY BY JAMES BROWN PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIM AINSWORTH

THE HACIENDA

Hooky: What happened in the end with the Hacienda was a bloke had a row with the bouncers and came back later with a machine gun.

Stephen: A nine-mil Uzi.

Hooky: And he chased the bouncers all the way through the door and down into the Gay Traitor bar and pulls the trigger, but the gun jams. That was the last straw, we had to dose the club for six months at a cost to us of £150,000. We had George Carmen defend us to keep the licence because if you've been closed for longer than six months they can take your license.

Barney: We were going to America on one of our Hacienda fundraising trips and I remember getting on the plane to New York and seeing the headline: “Eight Bouncers Stabbed At Hacienda.” Some bloke from Salford had been insulted on the door so he called all these teenage lads down and said: “I want all the bouncers stabbing.” 

Hooky: We had eight Dobermans, a metal detector and 40 bouncers, and in the end we just ended up with the Salford lot doing the door. When we were shut, the gangsters used to see you in town and say, “Open up that fucking club will you, we’ve got nowhere to go.” And they were the ones that had caused it to shut down.

Barney: Paul Cons, the manager of the club, said, “Oh I’ve just had the police on the phone looking for four of our bouncers - they're wanted for armed robbery."

Hooky: The bouncers were saying it was getting so heavy they were getting stabbed by girls and I thought, "It can’t be that bad, I’ll do the door for a night.”

I lasted 15 minutes before I was sending back for double vodkas, it was so heavy. What had happened was that the gangsters took over from the gentlemen drug dealers and the thing just escalated. We’d go to a club in Bath and just pay and walk in and go ‘Where are the bouncers?” There was no violence anywhere else, just at our place. It was a very expensive education.

Barney: The final thing was this guy got into an argument with another guy about a bird and one of them turned out to be a gang member. So as the innocent guy is leaving, this other guy coshed him and then actually drove over him in a car. At that very moment a mini-bus full of magistrates from the licensing committee pulled up to check the re-opened Hacienda was being run right. How do you get out of that one? They were splattered in blood!

Hooky: Rob Gretton, bless him, could never see anything wrong with the Hacienda. But running the Hacienda was like backing a racehorse that never finishes. If he hadn't died before it closed you’d have had to drag him out screaming at the end.

THE CLUB DOORMAT

Stephen: I never really saw this.

Hooky: That’s because they never let him in.

Stephen: I had to pay to get in on the opening night. Gillian's sister would go down early and get in with her boyfriend saying they were us.

Hooky: Same with my brother. Look at that, Bernard, the Hacienda doormat. You used to wipe your feet on that when you walked in.

Barney: They should have put Tony (Wilson)'s face on it.

Hooky: I bet they paid £10k for that... 

NEW ORDER ON TOTP LIVE FROM BAYWATCH

Stephen: This was filmed on a beach named after a famous cowboy... 

Barney: Top Of The Pops were getting bands on tour to play live from a location that represented the city they were in and we were in LA. So we decided to play on the set of Baywatch. It was a really great day, Hasselhoff wanted to sing “Regret” with us.

Hooky: He came and had his photograph taken with us and dug a hole in the sand and stood in it so he didn't tower over us. On the set he was wandering around shouting all the time, it was really weird. We had to get there really early because it was too hot to film in the middle of the day and the broadcast was live so that meant about lunchtime in LA. After we'd played he came up to us and said, “Hey, you guys aren't bad. If you have any spare tracks give them to me and I’ll record them for my album, I’m big in Germany.” Another opportunity we missed. Typical.

Stephen: This other picture is of him with his daughter who he bought down for the day.

Hooky: You see that woman there playing volleyball (see above)... she came up to me and said, "Hey, what are you guys doing after?” And I just went, "Oh, going back to the hotel to do some interview.” And she went, "Oh..." and wandered off. (Sighs) The ones that got away. It was actually filmed on a tiny strip of the beach that they own. If you watch Baywatch it looks like they’re on this massive beach but they confine it all to this one area.

Stephen:... It was the Roy Rogers Memorial Beach.

STEPHEN'S TANKS

Hooky: Other people are into fast cars, with Stephen it's tanks.

Stephen: This is a Roco Minitanks Chieftain.

Barney: He started with Minitanks and progressed to an Abbot (105mm self-propelled gun) and a Ferret (armoured reconnaissance car) and two others (an Army engineers' FV434 armoured crane and a Samson CVR recovery vehicle). 

Stephen: I wanted a Bristol 411, it's a 1947 model that looked like a Twenties rocket. But I opened the doors and it smelled like a 75-year-old suitcase, it stunk rotten. Gillian said, “You’re not having that, it would be like sitting in an old handbag.” On the way back we saw this tank outside a car showroom and she said, “You can have a tank but you're not having that Bristol.”

NEW ORDER AWARDS

Hooky: This is the Factory Award (top) that Tony Wilson made up to celebrate the half a million sales of “Blue Monday”.

Because we weren't in the BPI we weren’t going to be honoured for the sates. In fact, this is the award for us losing £50,000 because we were making a loss of 10p on every sale.

Barney: It was all to do with the hole in the artwork, that's what cost all the money. So in fact we were paying for nothing - a hole - brilliant! The more we sold the more we lost. When it got into the charts everyone was saying, “Hey, well done, 'Blue Monday’ is in the charts.” And we were going, “Oh no!”

Barney: The Brit Award (centre) we got at a time when we realty weren't getting on and were off doing our own projects. Being in a band is an unnatural situation, so close to the same people constantly.

Hooky: It’s like being with your family for too long.

Stephen: We were told we had to go to the awards even though we didn’t want to, because it had been voted for by the Radio 1 listeners. I’m sure it was rigged somehow, I don't think Radio 1 listeners were into us.

Barney: We got to the Albert Hall in the car and there were loads of fans and photographers outside and we just said, “Drive on”. We crept in round the back - we didn’t want all that, “Bernard, over here!” bollocks.

Hooky: I was doing Revenge at the time and didn’t want to go. But I couldn’t help when the time came turning the TV on and watching it. And you did that speech, it made me proud.

Barney: Andrew Lloyd Webber had been droning on and on and on and on. So when we got up I said, “I haven’t got a speech and after Andrew Lloyd Webber that’s probably a good thing.” And people were booing me and stuff. It went down like a lead balloon.

Stephen: And funnily enough, we’ve never done a musical since.

Hooky : This is the Mercury Prize (bottom), I didn’t even know we’d got this.

Barney: Is that the thing they stuck down your cock, Hooky, when you were having your tests? 

DISORDER PARTY FLYER

Hooky: This is the invite to the party after the G-Mex gig. 

Barney: I hate all those puns on New Order - “Out Of Order" “Disorder" and all that. This was in the basement of the Hacienda. At the end of the night it was flooded where the canal had leaked through. Why?

Hooky: That wasn’t the canal, it was the toilets, overflowing with piss and covering the floor.

Barney: It was mustard yellow stuff, though.

Hooky: Every time there was a busy night at the Hacienda it flooded with piss. That night I got dragged home by the ear. We’d been on tour in America for six months, and when we got back everyone was off their trolleys. We’d done G-Mex, had a couple of sherbets, done a big line and said, "Let’s go out.” I turned round and my wife was there. I went “Urgh! What’s she doing here?” I thought I was still in America. 

Barney: I’ll tell you about a party we had. The one at Real World Studios after we’d finished recording Technique. We’d been in Ibiza and then went down to Bath to Peter Gabriel’s beautiful new studio which had cost millions. Peter hadn’t even seen it yet because he was in America and we were the first band to use it. The manager of the place said, "Oh, you can have a party when you finish.” So we organised two coaches full of lunatics like the Mondays and their mates to come down from the Hacienda. Turned out the guy meant we could have a dinner party, but we had DJs, smoke machines, turned the whole place into a club. He’d invited a few locals over for cocktails and we had these loonies whistling and carrying on.

Hooky: Dave Harper (early New Order publicist) was in the foyer with an axe in one hand and a girl in the other, grinning like a mad man. The girl’s screaming and I’m going, “Dave, give me the axe.” He'd had eight E's and just lost it. When I got the axe and the girl off him, he just straightened up and said, "Right, shall we have a dance?” And then he walked off.

Barney: I went to my room and heard a toad of slapping against me window. I looked out and there's this arse going against the window where some guy’s shagging a bird.

Hooky: Rob Gretton, in true tradition, had decided to just give all the drugs away because it was too hard to organise selling them.

Barney: There were people who had never had E taking full strength ones and people were shagging everywhere. Do you remember that 65-year-old French woman? One of the blokes went off with her for three weeks. 

Hooky: There was a free bar and you were supposed to queue up like normal, but they all just went “Free bar, free bar!” and stormed it like a riot. We retreated to the producer’s cottage. 

Stephen: There were footsteps up the wall, the toilet was smashed.

Hooky: Zombies walking everywhere.

Barney: The studio guy was saying, “When are they going?” This bloke was having a breakdown, panicking. By 8:30 in the morning one coach had gone and all the nutters climbed onto the other, the driver wakes up and they're all still having it, whistling and dancing. The driver puts the key in and... nothing. Tries it a few times and the battery’s dead, The studio guy is inside going, “Thank God they’ve gone.” But the driver stands up and goes, “Right, everyone off.” And they all pile back into the studio. I ended up taking the Mondays back up in my Mercedes sports car with Bez doing E farts all the way back. We left and all the nutters moved into the bedrooms and were ordering room service.

LYRICS TO 'REGRET'

Barney: This was a horrible time, too many drugs. 

Hooky: And pressure... the drugs and pressure together made everything worse. 

Barney: We were in Peter Gabriel’s studio at a grand a day to record, and we were actually writing the album rather than recording it. 

Barney: Factory had never had two successful groups before, then they had us and the Mondays recording at the same time. They were having to pay out for the albums and then the Factory offices, which was the end of it all. Especially as Hooky and Alan Erasmus (Factory manager) were bidding against each other for it. 

Hooky: Can you believe it? I was in a bidding war against myself. Me and my mate fancied the building for our studio and we offered £74,000 for it. Then the estate agent says someone else has offered £85,000. Our surveyor said there’s no way it’s worth that, but we upped our offer to £80k anyway. The other guy comes in with £95,000. They get it, and it turns out to be Factory using our money! The intention was to build it, mortgage it and give the money to the group. (Tony) Wilson ended up spending £650,000 for it in the end, then the market crashed and no one would give him a mortgage for it. In the end they sold it for £240k. 

Barney: Is it too late to sue them?

New Order's career-spanning four-disc box-set Retro is out now

COMPETITION

Jack has 15 DVD copies of New Order 511, capturing the band live in London in June 2002. For your chance to win, tell us: What was the name of New Order's club in Manchester? Send answer, name, address and phone number on a postcard to: "Jack February - New Order”, FREEPOST, (SWB1446), PATCHWAY, BRISTOL. BS32 OZZ.