Mancky

From City Fun Fanzine, February 1982:

“Even if it has to close after a year… if we can say that for 12 months we had the best club in Europe, it’ll’ve been worth it.”
Howard Jones, Manager

And all of a sudden it’s May 1968 again. HJ points out that he and his colleagues furthered their education in the years of hope and “Arts Labs”, when the state had the resources to nurture the creativity/enthusiasm of its children.

Once a visionary, always a visionary… deep down… (let’s not be polite! What we really mean is HIPPY!) They want to see Fac 51 become a new focus for the idealism that blossomed all those years ago.

Fac 51 isn’t just about bands.. there’s room for theatre on the dance floor… it can be either official performances or just the audience spontaneously creating… or performing sea-lions. And videos that reach further than the traditional promotional capacity - “Here’s the VJ box.”

“THE HACIENDA MUST BE BUILT..”*
And there they are, building it… right here, man.

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From City Fun Fanzine, August 1982:

The club now has around 3000 members and there has been the occasional complaint that some members could not always get in on a very crowded night, notably for the free-to-members New Order gig.

“Membership does not guarantee admission, it only guarantees priority”…

“The design of the club limits the choice in modifications. As it’s going to be around for a long time, it’s important that we do it right.”

Surprisingly there has been no response from members to the invitation to submit videos… Mike (Pickering) also listens to all of the tapes sent in but as yet none have been of high enough quality to survive passage through the sound system. Tapes of ‘mood music’ for the cocktail bar were also cited as means for members to contribute something. Also if anyone wants to use the space within The Hacienda constructively to stage their own ideas, they should contact the club.

…Dance group, The Jazz Defektors, lost no time in asking to use the club during the daytime for rehearsal space… The club has already employed seven members with a specific skill who were enterprising enough to ask to take part.

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* From Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary For A New Urbanism (Translation) 1953:

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun…
…without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda…
That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past.** Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary…

…Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.

From Bureau Of Public Secrets website, www.bopsecrets.org.

** In 30 years, The Hacienda has come full circle, ironically becoming one of the ‘ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends’ which it was originally intended to challenge.

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‘The venue was knocked down to make way for a block of lookalike flats also called The Hacienda. In 2002, Peter Hook did the honours and started the demolition live on Granada Reports.’

From ‘Tony Wilson You’re Entitled To An Opinion…’ by David Nolan, page 158

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Further reading: ‘Unknown Pleasure: The Hacienda’ Jon Savage, Corridor8 Issue 1 Page 17-18.

Many thanks to Dave Haslam for the scans of the City Fun articles.