The Haçienda Read Online Free Page B

album, Unknown Pleasures , with another one, Closer , already recorded.
    All that came to an end when Ian killed himself, right before we were to fly to America. Personally, of course, we were heartbroken. Professionally, we were back to square one. As you can imagine, it was a tough time – but that’s a story for another day.
    Anyway, we picked ourselves up and Barney, Steve and I decided to keep going. We called ourselves New Order. Barney became leadsinger;we toured as a three-piece,with the songs from the album that would become Movement , and after a while Steve’s girlfriend, Gillian Gilbert,became supplementary guitarist and keyboardist.
    If you liked alternative, underground and non-mainstream music in 1980, you read the weekly music papers and listened to John Peel. Indeed it was Peel, a huge Joy Division supporter, who first announced the death of Ian Curtis to a nationwide audience. Weeklies Melody Maker and the NME were on strike (the NME would return from its six-week break on 14 June with an Ian Curtis cover), so it was left to Dave McCullough in Sounds to provide the music papers’ sole contemporaneous obituary, almost a fortnight after his death. In purple prose somewhat derided at the time, he ended by saying, ‘That man cared for you, that man died for you’, reflecting the impact Joy Division had made in a relatively short space of time. Already beloved of the NME and Peel, their appeal was to go mainstream with the release of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ shortly after Curtis’ death. With the singer’s suicide lending an already jawdropping song extra poignancy, it propelled Joy Division up the singles charts and on to daytime radio, pulling Unknown Pleasures back into the mainstream album charts (it was already a permanent fixture on the fledgling independent charts, which had been introduced in January 1980), where it reached a high of number 71 in August that year – sales having been further boosted by the release of Closer , a number-6 album, in July.
    Interest in both albums was of course generated by Curtis’s death but also by a mini-controversy surrounding Peter Saville’s sleeve for Closer , which showed a photograph of the Appiani family tomb and was thought to be a tasteless reference to the suicide. A bemused Saville pointed out that the design had been finalized prior to Curtis’s death.
    As the year closed, the profile of Joy Division was at a high from which the band has never truly descended, and sales were giving Factory the financial health it would need to even consider projects on the scale of the Haçienda.
    It was the year of the Iranian Embassy siege, of the continued reign of the Yorkshire Ripper, the ever-present threat of nuclear war and the assassination of John Lennon. A dark, moribund year.

The Oasis Club
    On Lloyd Street, the Oasis was ‘the north’s largest coffee bar and rhythm club’ and ran during the early 1960s when it hosted all of the era’s big bands, including, of course, the Beatles. Towards the end of the decade it fell out of favour and its audience drifted towards the Twisted Wheel. After that it became Sloopy’s, then Yer Father’s Moustache.
    The Twisted Wheel
    The original Twisted Wheel opened in Brazennose Street in 1963 playing R&B and chart music before moving to Whitworth Street in 1966,where it gained a reputation as one of the country’s best soul clubs, staging all-nighters and hosting soul stars of the day, including Edwin Starr and Ben E. King. It was in a feature about the club that the term ‘Northern Soul’was coined.However,after problems with drugs the club closed in 1971. It reopened on Whitworth Street in 1999.
    Pips
    Based on Fennel Street, Pips had six dance floors during its heyday in the late 1970s, and was a hangout for many of those would go on become the big names in the Manchester music scene. You could expect to see Peter Hook,Barney Sumner,Ian Curtis,Morrissey,Peter Saville and Johnny Marr among the David Bowie