We were Mandeans. After the Old Prophets but before Yeshua, came Yuhannan.
After the heavy metal idiots, the bacofoiled hod-carriers, the closet queen showtunesmiths manque, after the exciting abortion of punk, but before the perpetual now, we were.
A foretelling.
A bridge.
After the Electric Circus but before the Hacienda came the Factory Nights.
The Factory was not a place like the Hacienda was a place. The Factory was a transformation, an occupying force, a portal.
In the ulcerated colon of Hulme, on a bend in Royce Road slumped a characterless one and a half-story council-built cack-brick sixties building. Lost amongst the limbo of crescents and vandalised rows of maisonettes, amid the confusion of planned tangle and narcotecture, driven past unnoticed by South Manchester’s post-hippy Dimtelligencia on their way to enjoy (read: doze through) a season of Yugoslavian Agitprop Animation at the Aaben Arthouse cinema a few hundred yards nearer to Trafford, and maybe “score” some “Leb Red” at a “shebeen” on their way home.
What?Oh, just a social club. The Russell Club. AKA the PSV, the Public Sevice Vehicle Club, because it was opened as a club for Jamaican Bus Drivers and Conductors
(children, in these olden days a bus conductor conducted the sale of tickets and the behaviour of passengers on buses, and was a Very Good Thing).
I don’t think I ever saw a Driver or Conductor in the Russell, Jamaican or not: Black punks – yes, there were black punks; Alan Erasmus, Tony Wilson’s co-founder of the Factory Nights was black, but he looked very early seventies, not punk at all; Rastamen who sat crowded on the main stairs to the mezzanine, coz after all, we were in their club, not they in ours; dealers; an impressively efficient bouncer. No Jamaican Drivers or Conductors. I think they must have been long bought out.
You entered the Russell by a door down the side of the building that faced back along Royce Road toward South Manchester. Inside the narrow reception a ticket booth to your left, then through the door into the Auditorium. The whole of the club was situated right of that door. There was a long bar immediately right, and facing the bar across the sticky floor of the audience space, a low, not very broad, stage and the DJs station. In between in the early, quiet days were tables where you could drink and talk before the DJ or the Band came on. Our drugs of choice were beer, speed, cigs, and ganja a distant fourth. Above the bar, looming into the auditorium, was a mezzanine café that served fast food, mainly trays of chips in tomato sauce. If you were determined to be sick you could try the curried goat. That low looming mezzanine provided a low ceiling to the downstairs bar which forced the tallest regular[A1], a giant of about 7’6”, into an uncomfortable hunch. To either side of the bar were stairs to the mezzanine, the leftmost narrow and winding, the rightmost broader but crowded by those rastas in their haze of sickly-sweet smoke, some of them very deftly dipping the dozier white boys and girls who climbed past them.
So.
Tony Wilson
Posthumously “Mr Manchester”.
Half Middleclass Wanker Pseud. All genius.
Professional Salfordian. Spent most of his childhood in the poverty-stricken Salford slum district of Marple, where gaunt and hungry accountants are worked all the late afternoons God sends, counting money. It’s south-east of Salford Town Hall, just a twenty mile walk. His granddad sold me Nana spuds, his other granddad pierced me mam’s ears.
In the earliest days of the Factory Tony would be on the door, taking your money.
“Who’s on tonight, Tony?”
“Vini …The Durutti Column”.
Failing all else, Tony would have his mate Vini’s band – a band in the very loosest of terms – on at the Factory. The Durutti Column was – and is – nothing punk or post punk. The Durutti Column was and is Vini Reilly and his melodic minimal ambient guitar.
We had no enthusiasm for the Durutti Column, but the Durutti Column can stand for every reason why the Factory, why the Russelll Club, was important, was great, was vital. As were the awful A Certain Ratio, who deserve a lot of credit for introducing funk to punk although their first musical babies were excruciatingly ugly, the poor little things.
The Factory was vital because the Factory mob learnt the lessons of punk then threw away its inessentials. Like most punk music.
Looking back from three decades later, the whole punkpostpunk thing has become a cartoon, or worse, a Carnaby Street postcard. At least a cartoon has some wit and art about it.
To the then-unborn and the born-stupid, punk is mohawks (aka “mohicans”), fast dumb riffing and spitting. To Johnny-Come-Lately punks it was about food-dyed hair and bum-flapped bondage trousers bought from a classified ad in the back of SOUNDS. Food dye because they could wash it out for work or more likely school the next day. To the marginally brighter it was about dole cue rock and half-arsed leftwing or anarchist politics – these had the worst long-tem effect, and are almost entirely due to the influence of the Clash. The attraction of the Clash baffled me and my friends at the time and still does. The core bands of Punk were the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash, and the Buzzcocks. The Damned were an entertaining and harmless Status Quo comedy band at heart. That leaves the other three, from which you could choose two bands that sounded like they had been beamed straight from the future, or some blokes who used to be in a pub band led by a public school ex-hippy tosser with a phoney Lahndan accent. I’ll leave you to figure out which was the Clash. But from the Clash, who had two or three OK songs, came the half-baked political WankPunks like Crass, the Anti-Nowhere League and all the other crap that led eventually to the Crusties and Travellers, deluded hippy parasites in late Punk kit.
Find yourself some early photos of punks, punks from late 75 to 77. You won’t see a single bumflap or mohawk. The London punks, be they male or female, chose either a puritanical uniform of short brightly dyed hair, be it bleached blond or electric blue or any unnatural-looking colour, deliberately overdone pissholes-in-snow eye-makeup, drainpipe jeans, fluffy mohair[A2] pullovers, and narrow-lapelled box jackets or they dressed like they had lost their way to the Rocky Horror Show, like the much mythologised Bromley Contingent.
The Manchester Scene, the only UK punk scene independent of London, had a similar bifurcation of style, one tine of which was roundheads going out of their way to wear ordinary day clothes that weren’t the flared, wide-lapelled abominations of tamed hippie that had become the default style of the day, and the other tine the cavaliers of the Roxy Room at Pip’s, who were essentially sixth formers and art student posers ripping off the look of Roxy Music and David Bowie. The roundhead tine were generally the ones with some musical ability, and the ones most likely to affect not to have heard of the prog bands and hard rock bands they had idolised only months earlier.
All considered, the main fashion impact of punk was on male wear – it cleared out a decade of truly ugly shite. It allowed women to look more androgynous and wear tight trousers, but women’s styles are rarely utterly contemptible, and there’s a lot to be said even for a mid-70s Laura Ashley frock or a flared trouser suit. No, it was male fashion that punk revolutionised. Or more properly, re-set back to the simplicity and purity of Beau Brummel.
Back to the Factory. The Factory wasn’t a first generation Punk club. The first generation was the Electric Circus, Foo-foo Lamarr’s Ranch and perhaps the Squat, but these were just venues. They were rundown and/or small, and they became punk venues because they would let punk bands play, either because they were failing, or – like the Squat – they had a misplaced egalitarian commitment to allowing any old noise on. There were other venues like Rafters, and the various university auditoria, but these were incidental and could have been any club any time,
The Factory was different. It was intended. It was deliberate. It was designed. It occupied the Russell Club but it wasn’t the Russell Club. The Russell Club, with its brutal, ugly, barely functional post-industrial Manchester architecture suited the Factory, it had the right ambience.
But.
The Factory was separate from the club it inhabited.
The Factory/Factory Records had an ethos you probably know about, or have seen in 24 Hour Party People, an ethos of being Magnetic North rather than Plughole London, of not binding its acts and workers to contracts, of taking a risk.
The Factory had a consistent look provided by Peter Saville, and its records had a recognisable sound provided by Martin “Zero” Hannett, a curious blend of dub reggae mixing and string quartet attitude, where each instrument had the space to be heard on its own. This expansive open sound and the simple but memorable melodic basslines of Peter Hook were the real genius behind Joy Division, not the maudlin self-pity and adolescent poetry of Ian Curtis, a hollow voiced Baron Knights Jim Morrison who couldn’t hold a note, although he did have that vital thing, Stage Presence - and unlike most adolescent self-pitiers, he had good reasons to feel sorry for himself and it showed.
Too many seventies music scenes were almost exclusively male and you saw a girl, she was there because she was a girlfriend. That was a large part of why going to gigs never appealed to me and my friends before Punk. And obsessive pop fans were and are usually female. Indeed. the word “Fan” was originally used to mock female followers of Popular Singers of the Fifties and is a diminutive of “Fanny”: as the dictionary would put it, “taboo slang: the external female genitals”).
The Factory wasn’t a club for boys. The Factory, like the Whole Punk Thing was a 50-50 Male Female scene, and as such, fitted the forgotten rule of thumb that if something is usually of overwhelming interest to one sex only, it will likely be toss, if it appeals to both sexes equally it will likely be boss. Consequently people danced at the Factory Nights, both vertically and horizontally, though the horizontal dancing was perforce usually on the vertical as well, consummated in the biting ammoniacal stench of the club toilets.
Like any true scene, the Movers and Faces of the scene remained in the scene. Upstairs in the Mezzanine Chip Bar of the Russell on Factory Nights, the likes of the Buzzcocks and other bands would sit around comfortably enjoying their chip barms along with the ordinary punters, unhassled and uninterested in grandstanding. (Contrary to the claims of Buzzcocks and punk bores, nobody except Buzzcocks themselves ever called them Buzzcocks. They were always the Buzzcocks back then.
The Factory had punk bands on, but you were as likely to see Sheffield Electroniks like Cabaret Voltaire, and the Human League before they were remodelled into BadABBA and had a couple of tolerable pop hits as a front band for Jo Callis. And many of the faces from the Liverpool Scene came to the Factory. Merging these two streams, people forget that almost-scouse electronikers Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark were originally a Factory band.
The Factory wasn’t a punk club. It was the First Club of the Lessons Learned.
The lessons learned were these:
- Two minutes of inspiration should be packed into two minutes. Or less. Not stretched to half an hour.
- Doing the job earns the time. The point of dance music is to be danced to. There was nothing wrong with disco and funk at the Factory. If something can keep people dancing for ten minutes it deserves to be ten minutes long and it deserves to be played.
- Sing in your own voice, you aren’t a black man from the missisippi delta, and you aren’t Jim Morrison, you’re an Electrician from Wigan and there’s nothing wrong with your own accent.
- Punk is ded. Whatever the propaganda, punk wasn’t going to change the world, start the revolution, politicise the poor misguided proles, or even kill the Dinosaurs of Rawk. It changed the cut of trousers and imposed the discipline of brevity, and that is enough. The Factory was the first public sign that punk was, whatever the T-Shirts said, Ded. This is a lesson that some still haven’t learned three decades later, when many of the original learners of the lesson are grandparents, or on my council estate, great grandparents.
So, with the Factory we had a club committed to chance-taking, a club for punks who had realised that Punk wasn’t the future and wasn’t the end of Rawk, but had taught them useful lessons and a we-can-do-it attitude, a club with a deliberately designed industrial look and a club that knew and didn’t dismiss the pleasure of dance music. It did not wish death to disco.
According to the New Testament, John the Baptist was the cousin and foreteller of Jesus. He was the bridge between Old Testament Judaism and the Christian and Post-Christian World in which we have lived these last two thousand years. He is almost forgotten, except by a small and endlessly persecuted minority in Iraq - every analogy eventually breaks down - who see him as the true Messiah. They are the Mandeans.
The Hacienda was the venue in which punk attitude and Chicago house fused and then inflated into the dance universe that we inhabit in our perpetual now. But the seed of this universe was the Factory.
Hacienda. >From Spanish, from Latin Facienda “Things to be done”. 1) a large ranch or estate. 2) a substantial stock-raising establishment, mining operation, or factory in the country.
[A1]In hindsight I think this was Richard Creme, later to be Manchester’s hippest bespoke tailor, and the younger brother of 10CC’s Lol Creme, but I never spoke to him because he had no business being taller than me, the cunt.
[A2]I think I mean mohair, but it was half a lifetime ago. Although in my head I still feel nineteen.
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