Hooky on the Hac: the definitive book on the Haçienda must be built

OPENING SCENE: Location: dingy flat in Salford. Former Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook sits alone in front of the TV watching 24 Hour Party People for the 194th time. As the clubbers in the film reach an ecstatic rave moment, Hook jumps out of his chair and punches the air. There are tears in his eyes ...

Not really, though having just read Hook's The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club (2009), this image - I'm ashamed to say - did somehow come to mind.

How not to take a photograph of The Haçienda: How Not To Run A Club

Hook's book is a strange ride. For much of the time it's a breathless helter-skelter dash through each of the years of the Haçienda's 15-year existence, one year per chapter. Hook's "voice" throughout is very much "Hooky", the Salford lad having it large in the crazy rock and roll industry. In what is almost a stitch-together of bar-room anecdotes, the larger-than-life Hooky is a super-ripe Manc "character", half scally chancer, half rock superstar - knocking back the booze and snorting drugs with his mates at the Swan pub in Salford, ditto with his mates at the Haçienda, ditto with his mates at the Haçienda-owned Dry bar ("I was there seven days a week"), and ditto with his mates at assorted raves and parties all over rain-soaked Manchester. These Manc mates aren't his New Order bandmates or the management lot (Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus), but a slightly ill-defined group of drinking buddies - some the staff from the Haçienda or Dry. For much of the time, Hook's Manchester world seems to be a constant merry-go-round of drinking, drug-taking and fight-avoiding. Yeah, mate - it's all uppers and downers with Hooky. Sorted for Es and whizz, like. DJ Sasha's on tonight, gonna be a top one  ... (Ahem). Though at times it feels like being trapped in a music-based version of a Guy Ritchie film (especially when various Manchester gangs start terrorising the club in the nineties), the book is still ... interesting. Hook's charge through each of the years of the Haçienda’s rocky existence throws up stuff that's definitely worth hearing about - albeit filtered through Hook's slightly irritating I'm-completely-down-to-earth-no-airy-fairy-manners-with-me persona. For example:

*Rob Gretton was, it seems, the driving force behind the club, the one who most doggedly held onto the idea - the ideal? - of a multi-faceted club which was part art installation, part live-music venue, part social club, and part a New York-inspired cathedral to dancing. A sort of multi-purpose happening.

*Gretton, despite his lairy portrayal by Paddy Considine in 24 HPP, was also the person who most tenaciously adhered to a high-minded belief in good design standards (he "genuinely cared about the aesthetics"), even when the Haçienda empire was crumbling under a mountain of debt and gangland violence.

*Despite the immense freeloading that Hook and everyone else was apparently indulging in (free drinks for Haçienda bar staff and their mates, and their mates and so on), Gretton apparently had a strongly-held personal honour code of paying his way - "Rob paid for every drink he ever had".

*And Gretton was deeply into music, especially soul and other dance music.

*Hook was, far and away, the member of New Order most involved with the Haçienda, drinking there for years, taking on odd-jobs like doing door security, participating in some management meetings, and sticking it out to the bitter end. By contrast, Sumner ("Barney") pops up in honourable mentions from time to time, while Morris and Gilbert are barely referred to.

*Hook seems open-minded about music, saying he went to a Jesus And Mary Chain Haçienda gig in 1985 because their infamous "feedback" tour sounded "interesting". He also says Einstürzende Neubauten's stage-wrecking performance with pneumatic drills in the same year was "fantastic", a show which ended when the "singer's throat burst and he started screaming blood all over the mic".

*Local connections played a big part, including Happy Mondays' bassist Paul Ryder putting demo tapes through Hook's letter-box while working as a postman.

And more - much more. Hook is a bit of an anecdote machine. At times it's all rather one-dimensional, especially his car-crashing escapades in Ibiza in 1988, where he and his mates discover Ecstasy (his first use of serious drugs he reckons) and go berserk, including thinking it a good idea to invite the Happy Mondays over for drinking and drug-taking sessions instead of er, working on the songs for Technique in the studio that Factory had hired for New Order. By this stage we're in a Led Zep "excess all areas" knockabout farce. Later on, he sums up the debauchery as "the time of my life: a different girl every night; all the drugs I wanted; my own nightclub, one of the hippest places in the world". Hmm, not quite the austere bleakness of New Dawn Fades ... This is a problem for me. The book is less a cultural history of the Haçienda, more a story of excessive living and excessive spending. Hook tells a good tale about the Haçienda's spiralling debts and its constant management missteps, but his book doesn't - in my view - do justice to the ambition of the Haçienda. Or at least, he doesn't himself quite seem in sympathy with that ambition and vision. Hook most clearly aligns himself with the club when it's packing them in during the Madchester/rave boom (1988-90). Fine, up to a point, but I'm slightly less impressed by this "superclub" success than by the original idea of the Haçienda, with its uncategorisable mix of events, its video projections (derided by Hook), fashion and art shows, and so on. Another frequently used Hook put-down is "hairdresser" to denote indie fashionista types (that would be me, then). But OK, yes, the Haçienda was very obviously mismanaged (including though ruinous deals with the Whitbread brewing/hospitality company), and yes Wilson and his acolytes could apparently get carried away with their own heady rhetoric, but the echo-ey, half-empty early Haçienda still appeals to me - more so than the luv'd-up, jam-packed sweatbox period of Ride On Time and N-Koi's Anthem. Martin Hannett apparently used to call it the "hole in the ground called the Haçienda", meaning it was a giant money pit. Maybe, and I'm sure I'd see it differently if I'd sunk £100,000s of my own money into it. But art surely isn't reducible to finance. At times Hook sounds more like a frustrated investor than a musician, berating the light-fingered staff ("we got shafted") and complaining about every financial set-back. The point is rammed home after every chapter, with excerpts from the yearly accounts reproduced as the incriminating bottom-line evidence. 

It's a tangled tale in the end, and Haçienda: How Not To Run A Club is a tangled set of themes (the ultimate mess of cables for the sound engineer to sort out): a debauched confessional, a comic caper, a mock instruction manual, a slice of musical history, an attempt to "own" the time and place. In an unkind moment I was going to call this blog "How Not Write A Book About The Haçienda", but actually Hook's effort is perfectly OK. It's repetitive (something the editors could have sorted out, along with its steady accumulation of typos - "Micro Disney" anyone?), but it's a shaggy dog story take on the Haçienda by one of the main protagonists, not a heavyweight cultural appraisal. Which is fine. And Hook's book, for all its "Hooky-ness", still possesses the odd touching moment. "I miss him", he says of Tony Wilson (who died in 2007), a simple but moving statement, not least because you sense that Wilson's flowery style ("don't worry darling, we'll find the money") grated with super-grounded Hook, the bass-slinging semi-hardman mate of all the Salford faces. So no, it's not the last word on the Haçienda (and indeed I've got Wilson's 24 Hour Party People book sitting on my shelf, raring to go ...), but it's definitely worth a read. Did I ever go to the Haçienda myself? Well, maybe I did, and maybe I didn't. Either way, I'm saving all that for my own very exclusive memoirs - Niluccio, the life and times of a music bluffer; aka, a one-time Manchester hairdresser, who found fame and fortune after befriending his next-door neighbour, the co-founder of Factory records ...

Anyway, enough of all that. Back to tonight's film.

CLOSING SCENE: Location: dingy flat in Salford. Former Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook sits alone in front of the TV watching 24 Hour Party People for the 628th time. As Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson shout at each other, arguing about the future direction of the Haçienda, Hook jumps out of his chair and punches the air. There are tears in his eyes ...