NO to play Gretton Tribute?
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"And you, forgotten... no longer setting out for the haçienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. Now that's finished. You'll never see the haçienda. It doesn't exist. The haçienda must be built."
It is a well-worn but nevertheless crucial fact that The Haçienda nightclub was given its name by Rob Gretton - Wythenshawe's first, but probably not its last, Situationist. Rob (New Order's long-term manager) had chanced on the name in a poetic urban future fantasy (written in 1953 by the 19-year-old pre- Situationist hero Ivan Chtcheglov) in a copy of Christopher Gray's seminal "Leaving the 20th Century", a book of translations given to him by confirmed intellectual Anthony Wilson. A canny and articulate lad from Salford (and later Factory's founder), Wilson was at Cambridge University in 1968, hanging about with students who, inspired by the collaboration of real-life workers and Les Enrages turning cars over on the streets of Paris, passed around such hip texts in the hope of starting a revolution. In Cambridge. Both Rob and Tony agreed that the name was a great one, and fully appreciated the contemporary context for two men about to open a nightclub. If we dust it off one more time, we can see how it still resonates in the light of all their expectations and the significance the Haçienda came to have at the dawn of a new kind of club culture.
