The Hacienda by Peter Hook

This was the January 2026 IndieWeb Book Club pick, chosen by Mark Sutherland. Not a book I'd have found on my own, and that's the whole beauty of reading in community. If you've got a place on the internet, why don't you join us?

Review

Peter Hook, bassist of Joy Division and New Order, co-owned Manchester's legendary Hacienda nightclub. This is his account of how it rose, raged, and collapsed. The subtitle says it all: How Not to Run a Club.

I knew almost nothing about the Hacienda going in. Didn't matter. Hook writes with such blunt, self-deprecating honesty that you don't need the context...you just need a tolerance for chaos. And there's so much chaos. Financial disasters, drug culture, legendary DJ sets, violence, and a band that kept pouring their album royalties into a venue that never turned a profit.

What hooked me (sorry) is that it's really a story about people building something they believed in despite every signal telling them to stop. As someone who makes things on the internet for the love of it, that resonated more than I expected from a book about a Manchester nightclub.

It's messy, funny, occasionally heartbreaking, and structured through financial records that read like a comedy of errors. Not polished. Not trying to be. That's what makes it work.

Read this if you've ever poured yourself into a project that made no financial sense but mattered anyway.

Links Elsewhere

• Reviewed On Goodreads
• Reviewed On LibraryThing
• Reviewed On The Storygraph

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