‘The Hacienda’, Manchester’s legendary nightclub, no longer exists. So for the film ’24 Hour Party People’, a rollercoaster ride through the music scene of 80’s Manchester, it had to be rebuilt. The triumph of the film is not only to bring this iconic venue back to life but to recreate a time and place so vividly that you feel as if you were there. And what a place to be…at ‘The Sex Pistols’ first gig (with 42 people in the audience), at the birth of Factory Records, the idiosyncratic label that signed Joy Division and then at the opening of ‘The Hacienda’ itself, an urban, industrial looking club in Manchester that has long since passed into legend.
The film steers an erratic course (like the out-of-control Happy Mondays’ tour bus) from the end of the 1970’s and the beginning of punk through the New Wave and Indie scene to the birth of rave culture. It channels the energy of the times – the freewheeling form of the film mirroring the story it has to tell.
The improbable impresario at the centre of this whirlwind is Tony Wilson, brilliantly played by Steve Coogan, the local television presenter who set up Factory Records and founded ‘The Hacienda’. A Cambridge graduate, who once considered becoming a University Don, he comically punctuates the madcap scenes of debauchery with philosophical and literary quotes.
It is a film of contrasts – the truth with the legend, the comedy with tragedy. At one point, poignantly cutting between Tony Wilson’s other life on local television, his laughably trivial local news reports, with the death of Ian Curtis (the lead singer of Joy Division).
The film doesn’t spare Wilson’s mistakes and frailties and yet you are left with the impression that he did a lot right too – not least in harnessing the spirit of the times – which, for all its hedonism, seems somehow more innocent.
“But my epitaph will be that I never literally nor metaphorically sold out” he says. His idealism a rebuke to the blatant commercialism of today’s music industry. It is somehow fitting that, although packed every night, ‘The Hacienda’ never actually made any money.
