Love is in the Air, Rats Are Everywhere** "We're a pop band," says Robert Smith, describing the four men who have emerged from the north London mews known as the Haçienda. "We've just come out of the pop revolution. Nobody's afraid anymore." The group consists of Smith, his brother, Jason (a.k.a. Johnny Cigarettes), Dave (a.k.a. Boy George), and Sean (a.k.a. Mistery), with the former two producing and the latter two performing. The Haçienda was in danger of going under in early 1988—its last few months had seen a steady stream of negative reports, even though its owners claimed the club was pulling in a thousand or so customers each week. "It was turning into a massive drain on time, energy, and money," says Jason. "You'd work on a project for two months and then find there was no future." In retrospect, the Haçienda's downfall probably had as much to do with internal dissension as with the club's changing fortunes. The owners, Andy and Julia, had turned over ownership to Tony Collier at the end of 1986, but the club seemed to founder after that. It may have had more to do with Collier's own indecision about how much control he wanted. "He was a very nice man," Smith says. "I never had a problem with him. But for him it was always a bit of an experiment. The more he got involved, the more it went wrong. He wanted to be a promoter, and that's not really what the Haçienda is." There were too many people who had vested interests in the venue for Collier to handle easily, Smith says, and besides, his inexperience meant that he didn't know when to admit defeat. "It's all a bit tragic, isn't it?" he says. "He was trying to rescue it and it was just falling apart under his hands." It seems as if Smith was trying to do too much for too long. And with a band that boasted three songwriters and could probably have put together an album without him, why put so much pressure on the singer? "It was an experiment," he says. "I did think I had a talent for writing songs. We were a new breed of songwriter." Perhaps his role was really as a tour guide, leading a flock through the jungle of the British music industry in search of something greener? Certainly there is no mistaking the bitterness that Smith still carries over his time with Factory, the label that went on to become part of the Haçienda conglomerate. "In four months we were there we were really getting somewhere. It was like running uphill, chasing a train in the rain. There was more interest in what we were doing." It was all to no avail. "Tony left after a couple of weeks," Smith remembers. "It just felt like the doors were closing on us. It was a sad, sad thing." Smith, who had also sung for the group the Wake, is a good singer, but there's nothing of the star quality of front men like Morrissey, or even Ian Curtis, about him. Rather than trying to look like an alternative to what they saw as the new, self-consciously pretty stars of the day, Smith and his group seem comfortable in their own skin—they're not the kind of band who, Smith claims, "puts out press releases to the press, or wears big haircuts, or anything like that." Their musical attitude is best described as non-fashionable—they're closer to the likes of the Chameleons than to Culture Club, but it is a formula that seems remarkably resistant to change. "Our style is all decided by what we look like," Smith says. "We all dress in a nonchalant way, we're just playing the music." What does he do when he puts on a pair of Converse and plays the guitar? "I just feel a bit stupid," he laughs. Some of Smith's biggest rivals had the same attitude. The Smiths, the singer's primary competition in Manchester and beyond, have always seemed to be playing with an inferiority complex. "They used to write about themselves in an obsessive way," says Andy Gill, now a major label executive and manager of other Manchester bands. "They have the same kind of sense of themselves as kids. They're just playing with an idea of themselves, but they look a bit stupid, and I think that's a kind of post-Pistols, pre-New Romantic thing." Smith himself may look like the archetypal northern misfit—he wears thick-rimmed glasses and an old trench coat—but there is none of the desperate self-consciousness so prevalent in other bands from the North, the sort of bands whose names read like manifestos: Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets. "Our first impressions of the Smiths are that they are posers, not the real thing," says Factory Records' head Tony Wilson. "They all seem to be trying to be this northern geezer thing. You look at the Smiths and they're not northern, they're southern—look at the girlfriends they've got. They're not very sexy." It's hard to think of anyone less suited to take advantage of Factory Records' new incarnation as a New Romantic style factory. But as Smith's own career was heading downward, Boy George was, in a sense, Smith's final destination. "The Haçienda gave me confidence," George says. "It gave me a reason to do what I wanted to do. I went up a notch to what I wanted to do—I wanted to be an entertainer. Now I was doing shows." He wasn't exactly an overnight success: his debut single, "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," appeared in March. But with the exception of the Smiths, who were playing the same venues as the Specials, none of the other Manchester bands had yet crossed over into the United Kingdom mainstream. It didn't take long for George to make a success of himself. When he went on TV, he seemed just as confident and assured as his idols Boy George Oakey and Osmonds. Even the critics agreed that he had something special about him—in his biography of George, Martin Aston wrote of George's "incredible sense of authority...that ability to give so-called experts a slap as he goes his own way." As George's pop career rose, Smith was moving in the opposite direction—he was more of a joke than ever, and his career was still on hold. **When The Factory Turns Left** It was George who set the tone for New Romantic excess. As his career took off, he was constantly writing about his love for the club and the Haçienda. For him, the club was a symbol of the changing times, a place that signified that the end of the eighties was bringing about a new age of optimism and freedom. "I remember a time when the world was black and white," he recalls, "and now we have a whole new spectrum of color. People can do exactly what they want, express themselves. This has been an amazing time. It has recharged the batteries of British pop culture. It has recharged everyone's batteries. We have more color in fashion, and everyone is coming out of their shell, and that's how I see it." The club had been a symbol of that new age for him, and in a symbolic sense, it was what he became famous for. He called it his "Mecca," and in a sense it represented a kind of new youth movement in a city that had been blighted by unemployment, with unemployment falling to its lowest level since the mid-1970s. The Haçienda was symbolic of that newfound optimism, and the people it represented. For all of his New Romantic garb, George—a born performer, with his slicked-back hair and long sideburns—was not so much a New Romantic as a pop star. Of course, there was nothing particularly new about George's music: the combination of big choruses, soulful horns, and some serious, soulful ballads had been done before in one form or another—see most of the music of the Bee Gees, David Bowie, or the soul legends Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, or Isaac Hayes. But George's songs were stripped down, with lots of horn parts and very little in the way of guitar playing, and that is where the real innovation lies. "We had the drums and a horn section with a rhythm box, and he was singing," says Gill. "We had a big, beautiful production sound, with great drum sounds, and we had lots of keyboards and percussion. The whole thing was designed to be a really beautiful sound. I can't think of a better producer." Not that George's singing is bad, necessarily, but the emphasis was clearly not on his voice. It was the sound that the fans loved. (The album _I Often Dream Of Trains_ sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide, and the follow-up, _Kylie Minogue_ , nearly matched that in sales.) "George is just a rock singer who happened to have his most successful songs when he began his acting career," says Gill. "I think what he does comes from watching James Brown and soul singers when he was a kid." George's songs didn't deal with urban alienation