In June 1991, a month after the Hacienda in Manchester reopened its doors, six bouncers from a London security firm ended up in hospital with knife wounds. This film asks who attacked them, and why a door team brought in from London to make the most famous club in the north safe lasted such a short time.
From warehouse to money machine
The Hacienda opened in 1982, when the managers behind Joy Division and New Order turned an old red brick warehouse into a nightclub. But what made it a money machine was something else. According to New Order's bassist Peter Hook, the band went to Ibiza in 1986 to record an album and saw the club scene erupting there, along with ecstasy. They brought it back to Manchester.
It began as one Ibiza-style night a week and grew until the Hacienda was the place for students and ravers from across the north. Hook says middle class kids were selling pills at thirty pounds a tab and making a fortune. The film's point is that it did not take long for gangsters to notice.
Guns at the door
Between the first Ibiza night in 1988 and early 1991, the film says, rival gangs fought again and again for a foothold in the club's drug trade. A feared figure named Anthony Johnson, known as White Tony, and a gang from Cheetham Hill threatened the door staff with guns after being refused entry. The management decided enough was enough and closed the club while they rethought their security.
The film describes Johnson as allied to the Cheetham Hill gangs, and says police believed he was involved in a security van robbery at Mumps Bridge in Oldham in November 1990, in which more than £300,000 was taken.
What followed, as the film tells it, was a dispute over money that was alleged in court to have been left with Desmond Noonan, one of the brothers of a powerful Manchester family of Irish roots. Johnson was shot dead outside a pub in Cheetham, and a friend with him was wounded. Several men, among them members of the Noonan family, were charged with his murder. Defended by Michael Mansfield QC, they said they had been Johnson's friends and had no reason to kill him. The jury found them all not guilty.
The London door
When the Hacienda reopened in 1991, Tony Wilson and his partners were full of optimism. They had hired Top Guard, a large London firm that promised the manpower and experience to handle Manchester's gangs. Three head doormen lived in a secure flat in the city, and most of a fifty-strong team was driven up from London every weekend, so that local men could not be leaned on. There were metal detectors, a new membership scheme, Alsatian dogs and bouncers in paramilitary-style uniforms.
It did not hold. One partygoer who was there on the reopening night told the film he watched a large group of smartly dressed lads push past the door, forty-handed. The Daily Mirror reported that a drug gang had gatecrashed the reopening, and that sixty police officers with a riot vehicle were needed to remove what it called the Cheetham Hill mob.
Salford
Cheetham Hill, the film says, had troubles of its own. The gang that moved on the Hacienda came from Salford. Paul Massey, recently out of prison, saw that the Quality Street Gang, which had once run the city's pubs and clubs, had no interest in the rave scene, and that young Salford men from across the estates were taking their place. His crowd had controlled the upstairs at another Manchester club, Konspiracy, before it closed in 1990.
According to the film, Massey took incidents between the London doormen and Salford people as disrespect. He and his friends drove up to the club and told the doormen that they, not the door, ran Manchester, and that anyone from Salford was to be let in free. When a doorman threw out a Salford man's daughter's boyfriend for dealing, the film says, that was the excuse.
The film's account of the night that followed is that a large Salford crowd arrived armed. The doormen had locked the front, but someone inside opened a side door. Doormen were stabbed and glassed; one, the film says, was stabbed four times in the thigh, and another was saved by a rib when a large knife went in. Some bouncers ran. The rest were driven back to the main bar. Police sealed the building and a helicopter circled overhead. Six doormen went to hospital.
A deal
The owners, in the film's words, decided the only way forward was a deal with the devil. They brought in a local Salford security firm, and the head doorman's job went to Damian Noonan, recently cleared of murder and a close friend of Massey. From then until the Hacienda closed in June 1997, the film says, Massey and the Salford men made thousands of pounds from the club and controlled it.
In the two decades after it closed, Paul Massey, Desmond Noonan and Damian Noonan all died, along with many other figures from the Manchester underworld. Tony Wilson died of natural causes. The film gives him the last word. Whoever ran the door, the legacy Wilson left is in the music, and it is etched into its history.