Graeme Park didn't set out to be sentimental. But sometimes, all it takes is a red-brick façade to take you down memory lane. The 61-year-old former DJ stands outside The Haçienda Apartments at 11-15 Whitworth Street in Manchester, a grand luxury building that replaced The Haçienda, the legendary club that shaped England from 1982 to 1997. A smile lights up his face. “I feel like the energy has remained in this place,” says Graeme Park, adjusting his thick-rimmed glasses and smiley-face cap..
This former record store owner, who was the best European ambassador of electro music, acid house in particular, in the early 1990s, describes the images that suddenly crackle in his brain. Getting out of the taxi where, barely had he put a sneaker on the asphalt, he saw himself greeted like a star by hundreds of kids: “Hey Parky! We don’t have room for The Haçienda. Get us through the back door. We promise we’ll buy you a pint!”
A human tidal wave that, as soon as the doors opened at exactly 9 p.m., flooded onto the dancefloor. “Most of them had taken their ecstasy pills in the queue.” The spiel to use to avoid getting caught out by dealers and hooligans roaming the neighborhood. And these thousands of bodies in motion, in the smoke mixed with the lights of lasers and strobes.
A living legacy
On the rubble of the Haçienda utopia, a modern building rose from the ground in 2002, just five years after the bankruptcy and destruction of the flagship nightclub in Manchester, the great city in the north of England. Following the exterior facade of the building that overlooks the Rochdale Canal, graffiti-covered plaques rewind the club's fifteen years.
In 2016, Graeme Park and his long-time partner, ex-DJ Mike Pickering, had the crazy idea of having the chamber orchestra Manchester Camerata reinterpret acid house classics. As he glances over at the car park of The Haçienda Apartments, whose columns have been repainted in the club’s colours of yellow with black stripes, Graeme Park smiles. It’s nothing short of a miracle that a nightclub has managed to transform a grey, deindustrialised Manchester into the world’s nightlife capital of Madchester.
“This is Manchester, and here we don't do things like everyone else” : Today, this synthesis of the local spirit can be found on mugs and badges at souvenir shops in the trendy Northern Quarter. Before becoming the city's motto, the slogan was uttered by Anthony H. Wilson, known as Tony Wilson (who died in 2007), creator of the Factory Records label and an expert in eloquence, enthusiasm and improbable experiences. His name is as much a part of Manchester's heritage as the suffragettes, the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels theorising the uprising of the proletariat in the city's pubs, the footballer Eric Cantona and the author ofA Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess.
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Source: Lemonde
