Step on: in a pair of Haçienda trainers.
The 25th anniversary of the opening of Fac 51 The Haçienda, the legendary nightclub that rocked Manchester for over a decade, has been celebrated with the release of a pair of limited-edition Adidas Trainers.
The shoes were a co-designed by Factory Records graphic designer Peter Saville, former Joy Division and New Order bass player Peter Hook and the designer who built the original club interior, Ben Kelly.
Like the club itself, the trainers are a suitably minimal, with three black stripes interspersed with two yellow ones, which call to mind the stripes of Adidas as well as those that used to furnish the industrial girders that surrounded the Haçienda's dance floor. At first glance, every Haçienda aficionado should want to own a pair, apart for one obvious reason: they cost £345.
To my mind, this goes against almost everything the Haçienda and Factory Records ever stood for. This is Factory Records we are talking about, the maverick, quasi-Marxist institution who drew inspiration from the Situationist International. On a more prosaic level, the Haçienda spurned the elitism of rival clubs, at least during its acid house years and, above all, was one of the cheapest clubs of its kind to visit.
I remember it was that it was an extremely cheap club to get into. At the height of the first summer of Acid House in 1988, I remember the door price being about £1.50 for students and the unemployed (those on full wages had to stump up £2.50), when some equivalent London rave-ups would already have cost you about a tenner. The drinks, moreover, were always at pub prices and the club were forever giving things away. In other words the Haçienda was never about limited-edition elitism. Well, maybe, it became so in its dark final days when it had a metal detector at the door and a no-go area up the back steps behind the DJ booth. But I'd pretty much stopped going by then.
The trainers are already going for over £500 on eBay making them even harder to for the club's legions of fans to acquire. If Factory really wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the legendary club, they should have made the shoes in unlimited edition, they should have cost around £25 a pair and they should only last half as long as you want them to, as they should spectacularly self-destruct while you are still half in love with them.
