Back to the Factory’s floor

Much excitement in Manchester this weekend as a fabled name returns to the city’s music scene. Factory is a club/venue complex fronted by Peter Hook, New Order’s former bassist and co-funder of another Manc icon, The Hacienda.

Its site is the same premises that became home in 1990 to Factory Records, the label set up by Tony Wilson in the late seventies that signed up, among many others, Hooky’s band, their earlier incarnation Joy Division and Happy Mondays. It was members of New Order, though, that stumped up the cash for the club that provided a home for some of Madchester’s most thrilling sights and sounds.

The Hacienda was eventually dragged down by all manner of drug, gang-related and financial crises, which begs the question why Hooky wants to get involved in another establishment. The music veteran claims he has learnt from his mistakes and is now working with an experienced team that comes with plenty of business acumen. Not, it has to be said, at the expense of a vibrant line-up. For rather than focus on one huge space, as at The Hac, this new Factory spreads its goodies across three rooms.

There are club nights every day of the week, with an emphasis on indie, retro and leftfield dance, rather than the Chicago house anthems that once alienated the Hac’s original, post-punk punters. The live set up is just as important with gigs this month from White Lies alongside local talents Twisted Wheel and The Whip (get there early for LoneLady).

If anything, it is not the Hac reborn, but a return to the original Factory. Before Wilson and his mates had the bright idea of putting out albums by local bands on a label based in their home city, Factory was a band night at the Russell Club in Manchester’s down-at-heel Hulme district. Joy Division and Durutti Column played there alongside Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire and, from Liverpool, Big In Japan.

It was here Wilson first collaborated with designer Peter Saville on the instantly recognisable aesthetic that Oliver Wood, for one, has termed industrial parody. Now Saville’s unique sensibility reappears as an integral part of the designs for Factory II. But as Hooky himself is keen to explain, the venture is about providing a place for young bands to play; and with a new wave of Mancunian acts on the rise, this could be Hooky’s best business decision yet.