Banned for Life: The Night Einstürzende Neubauten Took a Drill to the Haçienda

There's a plaque on the back of the Haçienda building in Manchester. Most people walk past it. I didn't. I stood there and photographed it, because it told a story I already half-knew and wanted to know properly.

1985 – Einstürzende Neubauten banned after attacking cast iron columns with a pneumatic drill.

That's the whole plaque. Understated, almost bureaucratic. It gives you nothing of what it actually felt like to be in that room. So here's the rest of it.

Photo of the plaque: my own (Manchester, back of the Haçienda building), May 2017.

The Gig

28 February 1985. The Haçienda, Manchester. Support: NON.

Einstürzende Neubauten weren't a support act, weren't background noise, weren't anything close to a normal booking. This was the height of their "metal-bashing" period. Blixa Bargeld and the band building their entire sound out of scrap steel, power tools, and whatever industrial junk they could drag onstage. No guitars in the conventional sense. No drums, not really. Machinery as instrument.

Standard stuff, on paper. Until the drill came out.

Partway through the set, one of the band picked up a pneumatic road drill, the kind workmen use to break up concrete, and started drilling through the pieces of scrap they'd hauled onstage. That was normal enough, for them. Then it stopped being normal.

They turned the drill on the club itself. Specifically, the central pillar holding up the Haçienda's dancefloor, the one with all the building's electrical wiring running through it.

Paul Mason, the Haçienda's general manager, saw what was happening and ran across the club to Peter Hook, who told the story decades later in NME:

"They were using this road-digger to drill through the centre pillar of the stage that was holding the whole bloody club up! So we all ended up wrestling with Einstürzende Neubauten trying to get their equipment off them, the audience didn't have a clue what was going on, and the gig ground to a halt. [...] What a night! I loved their performance: it felt punk and anarchic."
— Peter Hook, NME, 2 November 2022

Staff physically wrestled the band for the drill. The gig didn't so much end as get forcibly stopped. Einstürzende Neubauten never played the Haçienda again, banned for life, on the spot.

Copies of the show still circulate as bootleg cassette: Einstürzende Neubauten – Manchester Haçienda 28.2.85 with the tagline "The sound of music from Blixa and the boys."

Halber Mensch, the album the band would release later that year, is now widely considered one of the defining records of industrial music. This gig was part of the tour behind it.

There's something worth sitting with in the fact that the Haçienda, a club that would go on to define an entire era of dance music, that would host acid house nights and New Order gigs and become genuine folklore in its own right, has a plaque on its back wall commemorating the night a Berlin band destroyed part of its infrastructure and got kicked out forever.

Einstürzende Neubauten. A band that matters.

Sources:
Photo of the plaque: my own (Manchester, back of the Haçienda building), May 2017
Flyer scan: via fromthearchives.com, original credit to John Coulthart, johncoulthart.com
Setlist: setlist.fm. Band photo credit: unknown
Bootleg cassette: Discogs
Peter Hook photo: snapshot, credit unknown. Quote from NME, November 2022, via fromthearchives.com