The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club

By Peter Hook

The acclaimed and wildly outlandish inside account of England’s most notorious music club, The Hacienda, from Peter Hook, the New York Times bestselling author of Unknown Pleasures and co-founder of Joy Division and New Order—a story of music, gangsters, drugs, and violence, available for the first time in the United States.

During the 1980s, The Hacienda would become one of the most famous venues in the history of clubbing—a celebrated cultural watershed alongside Studio 54, CBGBS, and The Whiskey—until its tragic demise.

Founded by New Order and Factory Records, The Hacienda hosted gigs by such legendary acts as the Stone Roses, the Smiths, Bauhaus, Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Kurtis Blow, and Happy Mondays; gave birth to the “Madchester” scene; became the cathedral for acid house; and laid the tracks for rave culture and today’s electronic dance music. But over the course of its fifteen-year run, “Madchester” descended into “Gunchester” as gangs, drugs, greed, and a hostile police force decimated the dream.

Told in Hook’s uproarious and uncompromising voice, The Hacienda is a funny, horrifying, and outlandish story of success, idealism, naïveté, and greed—of an incredible time and place that would change the face and sound of modern music.

The Hacienda includes 32 photographs in 16-page four-color insert. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780062307965

Peter Hook

Peter Hook was born in 1956 in Salford.  He was a founding member of Joy Division and New Order and DJs internationally as well as touring Joy Division’s music with his new band The Light.  He lives in Cheshire

Reviews for The Hacienda

[linden_dunham-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hook's book worth a look.

[lorraineh_18 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Its not the sort of book i normally pick, but i remembered the club from my student days as a legendary place and wanted to get an insight into it.its an interesting book. wouldnt rave about it but if you like this era or like books about drugs and gangs and their impact on clubs then i would recommend it.

[sanddancer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

 Much of this story has been covered elsewhere, particularly in the film and book 24 Hour Party People and in various documentaries but this book looks at it from the angle of the legendary Hacienda Club, which was paid for from the profits of New Order's records and contributed to the demise of Factory Records. I'd seen Peter Hook moaning about how much money he unknowingly lost in this venture on various documentaries, and this book is an extension of that. He covers the history of the club year by year, with each chapter being full of tales of the highs, lows and shambolic way the club was being run. At the end of each chapter, there is a list of the gigs and club nights for that year, extracts from the accounts and some quotations from key players in the scene. Although some of the stories were already familiar to me, most are entertaining or in the case of the parts about the gangs ruining the scene, shocking. At times the author's moaning about the money does wear a little thin and after the first chapter, I wasn't particularly interested in seeing more of the accounts (yes, I get it - you were spending way more than you were earning with some ridiculously high costs for some odd things). Overall I did enjoy this, but it would probably only be of interest to people with an interest in the British music scene in the 1980s and 1990s, specificially New Order, acid house, Factory Records and the Madchester scene.