Pat Kane: We need to build new cathedrals where we can dance and be free

But “the Hac" bears instant comparison with the story of Glasgow’s The Arches, brilliantly captured in the recent oral history Brickwork, by Kirsten Innes and David Bratchpiece.

Both venues became the teeming physical locus for their city’s cultural rebirth. Both venues’ closing was triggered by clubbers' deaths from ecstasy, and the authorities' perception of disorder. And they both still have much to teach us about the feeling that New Order bassist Peter Hook claimed for The Haçienda: “No matter what colour you were, what planet you were from, you could meet there and feel free.”

Their origins are fascinating to compare. They span a decade under Thatcherism, both using culture to literally fill in the gaps left by de-industrialisation. The Haçienda, opened in 1982, was a new build driven by the commercial success of Tony Wilson’s Factory Records with Joy Division (and then New Order).

The name was taken from an old French situationist text, and Wilson justified its construction this way: “It’s necessary for any period to build its cathedrals. It’s necessary for any new culture to have a sense of place. It’s necessary for a city like Manchester to have a facility like New York and Paris - not to have it for the young people here would be a disgrace.”

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With its angular interior design, plastered with industrial hazard stripes, The Haçienda become “a very beautiful way of being in a warehouse in Manchester”, says designer Peter Saville. Not so much an escape from the grind, aesthetically, but “a celebration of the post-industrial everyday”.

(Though hardly a viable one. As Hook shows in the documentary, dolefully reading out the venue’s accounts from his basement lock-up, it lost millions - including some of his - throughout its existence).

The Arches had something of the same vision: how do we re-enchant an old industrial city with the arts? But in 1991, the structures were already available - the dank Victorian railway arches under Central Station in Glasgow. Much less flashy than Wilson’s vision, the voices in Brickwork describe a dogged advance—exhibition space by small theatre by indie gig by club night—through the Arches’ catacombs, which became more usable with every performance.

By comparison with The Haçienda’s pristine aesthetic, aficionados of The Arches knew never to put on their best whites. These would be caked with sooty dirt by the end of the night, loosened from the brickwork by the repetitive beats. The Arches’ vibe, defined by founder, dramaturg and punky anarchist Andy Arnold, was much more performance arts than Wilson’s cultural industries. What oddness and quirkiness could be fomented beneath these cavernous structures?

What’s also interesting is how both venues overlap in terms of the rise of dance culture. The Haçienda plays its part in kicking it off (with the era of Acid House), but The Arches really profits and sustains itself with the phenomenon.

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For all its avant-garde labelling, The Haçienda was almost entirely a music venue. The Arches, from very early on, realised that its creative radicalism for other kinds of live performance (from indie-rock to physical theatre) could be cross-subsidised by poundingly successful club nights.

What the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses and Chicago House did for The Haçienda in the 90s, Slam, Colours and Death Disco did for The Arches in the 00s and 10s. The Glasgow operation took some public subsidy, and used it to support what the Brickwork voices call its “ladder” for fringe creatives. This is where Arnold and his team would take bets on chancers and newbies, giving them their chance to experiment (and fail better) in front of a public.

But the swelling revenue coming in from the dancefloors and the bars allowed the Arches to be held up as an exemplar to the rest of the arts in Scotland. Can’t you lot also find a way to make this kind of cash to support what you do, preached the grant-making agencies? Many of Brickwork’s idealists are none too comfortable with this status.

Yet whereas both venues would doubtless have been comfortable with adopting Malcolm McLaren’s old axiom, “cash from chaos”, it is notable the point at which the authorities decide to clamp down on the chaos. The Haçienda documentary clearly shows how the venue became embroiled in the late 80s to mid 90’s moral panic about drugged-up youth dancing frenziedly in murky warehouses.

One of its founding DJs and music promotors Mike Pickering remembers a police raid, where he was dragged out and pushed down a corridor of officers, aggressively bashing their perspex riot shields with big sticks.

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“I resigned the next day”. With “90% of the audience on E’s” (as Ryder recalls) representing millions of pounds worth of trade, criminal gangs gravitated to the club. Stabbings, gun play and other violence happened as a result (indeed the UK’s first ecstasy death, the sixteen-year-old Clare Layton (16) in 1987, had already taken place at The Haçienda).

The last hurrah of Wilson’s club seems to have been its early embrace of LGBTI culture. They instigated the “It’s Queer Up North” lifestyle that has very much transformed Manchester’s image. But the Hac finally closed in 1997—as much from their owners’ exhaustion, it seems, as anything else.

The closure of the Arches seems, by comparison with The Haçienda, to have occurred under more punitive conditions, trigged by the second drugs death at the venue (Regane MacColl, 17, in February 2014). The Brickwork book gathers many voices who are adamant that the caring, collective spirit of the Arches made it one of the safest possible dance environments.

But they also report that they felt a shift in the audience towards the end of the venue’s tenure. They were less stylishly self-conscious, and more about abandoning themselves to a raw, indiscriminate hedonism.

Carefully curated and distinctive evenings (like Death Disco, which I missed at the time and sounds like huge fun) were attended more and more by the same, let’s-get-mashed audiences, who would bring terrace-like chants of “here we fuckin’ go” to bohemian club nights.

When Glasgow City Council revoked the Arches’ alcohol license in 2015, their budgets immediately fell over. There is tangible resentment in the book about the failure of Creative Scotland and others to step in and support their wider performative programme. They were, after all, the public funders' poster child for a more enterprising Scottish arts scene.

Between them, The Arches and The Haçienda raise many fertile questions. What should the relationship be between the high intensities (and intense highs) of commercial dance culture, and other art forms? What’s the best mix between the bottom-up artistic transformation of existing spaces, and new and prestigious pleasure palaces, whether business or municipal?

Here’s perhaps the most urgent question of all. In an age that faces both hard limits (climate crisis and various wars, material and moral) and dizzying illimitability (artificial intelligence and cultural difference), where are the places in which we can joyously dance through these challenges? Rather than grimly, passively and domestically stare at them through our screens?

To borrow Hooky’s words, where can we go to “meet and feel free”? And to finally misquote Tony Wilson’s old French radicals: The Haçienda has to be built and re-built. And The Arches must be filled, again and again.

The Hacienda - the Club That Shook Britain is on BBC2 tonight, at 22.15. Brickwork - A Biography of the Arches, by Kirsten Innes and David Bratchpiece, is available in all good bookshops