I went to the Hacienda exactly once, in the early nineties, a Londoner up for the weekend who queued for an hour, paid over the odds for a warm lager and was condescended to all night by men in bucket hats. Years later, as an investor in an online recruitment marketplace based in Manchester, the walk to board meetings took me past the site of the club, by then reborn as apartments.
The most famous nightclub on earth is now posh flats. On Monday afternoon, watching Andy Burnham outside Number 10 promising to be a circuit breaker for Britain, it was the flats I kept thinking about.
The universe does not often hand you a metaphor that cleanly. The Hacienda was the Manchester nightclub that defined a decade, launched a thousand bands and lost money on very nearly every pint it ever sold. It was run by Factory Records and Tony Wilson, a man so allergic to paperwork that he signed his artists with a contract written in his own blood, promising them everything and the company nothing.
Which brings us, with grim inevitability, to our new Prime Minister.
Burnham arrived in Downing Street this week as the seventh occupant since 2016, a churn rate that would embarrass even a Manchester band. Joy Division lost a frontman and simply rebranded as New Order. Labour has now pulled the same trick twice in two years and is hoping nobody checks the back catalogue. Starmer has gone, and the party is trying very hard not to look back in anger.
Credit where due, though: the man can talk. His first address from the steps of Number 10, promising a new political model, a new economic model and the reindustrialisation of Britain, was the strongest debut single any government has released in years. Definitely Maybe, as manifestos go. Whether the album holds up is another question entirely.
Then came the line-up changes, conducted with all the serenity of a Gallagher soundcheck. Peter Kyle, the one minister actually loading the van on late payments for small firms, sacked. And the nation’s chequebook handed, in a shock first move, to John Healey, a man who walked out of the last band in a row about money and has now been put in charge of all of it. Some might say that takes brass. The gilt market, humming Blue Monday to itself, nudged yields up all the same.
And here is where business readers will recognise the tune, because the Factory problem is the oldest failure mode in commerce. Wilson had the best story in Britain, the best designers, the best talent, and no unit economics whatsoever. Blue Monday became the best-selling 12-inch of all time in a die-cut sleeve so expensive the label lost money on every copy. The Hacienda was rammed seven nights a week and haemorrhaged cash for fifteen years. Narrative is not margin. Vibes are not cash flow. A charismatic founder with a transformational vision and no grip on the till is not a growth story, he is a cautionary one, and most of us have backed at least one to know.
The till, right now, needs minding. Eight in ten SME owners say they are braced for impact, and the CBI has told the new Prime Minister that stripping green levies from business energy bills, currently 45 per cent above the G7 average, must be a day-one priority. His opening gambit, scrapping VAT on electricity, sounds like a banger until you read the small print and discover most firms will not qualify. A radio edit, if you will, with the best verse cut out.
And yet love will not tear us apart just yet, because the counter-example is parked on Burnham’s old doorstep. The Oasis reunion he watched from the mayor’s office helped drive a record £11.2 billion of music tourism spending, including £1.4 billion in the North West alone. The Gallaghers, once the most gloriously chaotic act in the country, came back as the most ruthlessly well-run reunion in live music history. Proof that Manchester swagger and a properly managed balance sheet can share a stage. People change. Even Manchester learned to love a spreadsheet.
That is the whole test of this premiership, and it fits on a set list. If circuit breaker means Factory, all blood contracts and beautiful stories and nobody getting paid, British business will be sitting down, as James instructed, with its head in its hands. If it means Heaton Park, the same swagger with someone competent on the tills, then this, as the Stone Roses nearly put it, really could be the one.
The site of the Hacienda, after all, is worth more as flats than the club ever made as a business. Wilson used to say Factory learned more from failure than from success, which was handy, because failure was all the accounts ever produced.
Step on, Prime Minister, and mind how you go. Will Andy Burnham end up twisting British business melons?
