The Haçienda – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Haçienda ephemera

Haçienda Members’ Newsletter IV, 1982. (The head collaged onto the male figure is from RanXerox by Tanino Liberatore.)

Searching through some papers at the weekend turned up something I’d completely forgotten about: a members’ newsletter for Manchester’s Haçienda club. When the place first opened you needed to be a member to get in, unless you already knew a member in which case you could be signed in as a guest. One reason the place was so empty in its first couple of years was the restricted access, a policy they later dropped.

I paid for my membership in September 1982 since I was eager to see William Burroughs appearing in the Final Academy event on October 4th. I think the newsletter must have arrived with the nice Peter Saville-designed card. If there were any other newsletters after this I never received any but then I was never a conscientious club-goer and only went there if there was a decent band playing.

And speaking of decent bands, I also found this flyer, the only one I have from that period. Einstürzende Neubauten played the Haçienda twice, in August 1983 and February 1985, and I saw them on both occasions. The flyer is for the second event and is a lot more typical of Haçienda products than the fanzine-style newsletter. Neubauten’s first appearance there was sparsely attended but remains one of the best events I’ve witnessed. This was at the tail end of their metal-bashing period, and the performance that night involved a lot of hammering, flames, showers of sparks and broken glass flying into the audience. The climax came when one of them picked up the pneumatic road-drill they used for their noise-making and drilled straight into the concrete wall at the side of the stage. The machine was left hanging there to the consternation of the club staff. A few months later they staged their notorious performance at the ICA in London which was cut short when they started dismantling the stage. The second Haçienda gig drew a larger crowd but was a more subdued affair which would have disappointed those who were yelling for destruction between the songs.

The Haçienda is demolished now so that drilling incident may be seen as a precursor of the inevitable. But the history persists in exhibitions like the recent one at the V&A in London which recreated some of the decor. The typewritten and photocopied members’ newsletter shows a more humble origin than the usual “design classic” label that gets endlessly recycled. Further page scans follow, or you can download a PDF I made. The last two scans in this post are a sheet of guest passes for members to fill, and that ultimate low-tech item: a handwritten and photocopied events list for late 1982. I don’t remember Jah Wobble playing the day after the Burroughs event; I would have liked to have seen that one as well.

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Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966

The Cut-Ups (1966).

More of the present preoccupation. Choosing Brion Gysin as a subject seems like a detour but the shots above are from Antony Balch’s 1966 film The Cut-Ups which also features William Burroughs, Ian Sommerville and someone-or-other’s cute boyfriend of the time who’s only ever credited as “Baby Zen”, a person about whom I know nothing at all.

I first saw The Cut-Ups in video form projected on the screens of the Haçienda nightclub in Manchester during their Final Academy evening in 1982, an event at which Burroughs and John Giorno both gave readings. The film on that occasion was mixed with some of the other Antony Balch shorts including Towers Open Fire, and together they made a strong (and bewildering) impression. The Cut-Ups, as noted a few days ago, may have inspired some of the flash edits in Performance, although Nicolas Roeg had been cinematographer on Petulia for Richard Lester the year before, a film which uses similar Resnais-like flashbacks and flash-forwards. In Balch’s film several sequences each a foot in length are cut together at random, a process which was a lot more radical in 1966 than it looks today. The opening sequence shows Brion Gysin walking out of a shop, along a street, down an alley and into the Rue Git le Coeur where the Beat Hotel was located at no. 9, and into whose door he disappears. I visited the street the last time I was in Paris, and took a few snaps whilst there, but it wasn’t until I rewatched The Cut-Ups a couple of years later that I realised I’d made the same walk as Gysin, having inadvertently discovered the narrow passage (the Rue de L’Hirondelle) which connects Git le Coeur with the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

The corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel where Gysin’s walk begins.

The route can be traced (after a fashion) using Google’s Street View where the photos have the usual drawbacks of being positioned high in the air and with a field-of-view which makes narrow spaces look a lot more cramped than they seem when you’re there. For those who can’t visit Paris, however, you at least get a sense of the Latin Quarter, even though the area is a lot more gentrified today than it was in 1966. The Beat Hotel, as I’ve noted before, is now the expensive Hotel du Vieux Paris whose website makes no mention of their establishment having once been cheap lodgings for depraved writers, artists and junkies. As for the Gysin film, I still wonder where he began his walk: was it at the Tabac Saint-Michel or elsewhere? You can judge for yourself at Ubuweb which has a copy of The Cut-Ups in its Burroughs film collection.

Rue de L’Hirondelle from the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

Rue de L’Hirondelle from Rue Git le Coeur.

Rue Git le Coeur looking towards the Seine. The former Beat Hotel is down the street on the right.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

The Final Academy

The event booklet, designed by Neville Brody.

William Burroughs’ reading in the city of Manchester took place on the 4th of October, 1982, at Factory Records’ Haçienda club, as part of the Manchester “edition” of The Final Academy, a Burroughs-themed art event put together by Psychic TV (Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson) and others. A recent posting on the Grey Lodge is a torrent of The Final Academy Documents, the shoddily-produced DVD made from the low-grade video recordings that captured the event (originally an Ikon Video production from Factory). The DVD is so badly presented by Cherry Red that no one should feel guilty about downloading this.

I’ve always been grateful that a record was made of this event, however poor, since I was in the audience that evening, very conscious of the fact that this was my one and only opportunity to see Burroughs in the flesh. His appearance was the magical part of a scaled-down version of the larger two-day Final Academy that had taken place earlier that week in London. The rest of the event was either strange or underwhelming, not helped by the chilly and elitist atmosphere of Manchester’s newest and most famous club. In the days before “Madchester” and the rave scene (the period that gets excised from the city’s cultural history), the Haçienda was a cold, grey concrete barn with terrible acoustics and a members-only policy that required the flourishing of a Peter Saville-designed card at the door. The place was usually half-empty and the clientèle tended to be students living nearby.

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