On this day in 1999, I was standing in Dry Bar when I took a call telling me my grandfather died. I went to the toilet and cried. And when I came out, everyone else in Dry was either crying or confused and in shock because they just heard that Rob Gretton had died earlier that afternoon.
Planet K was opening in exactly 2 weeks. My grandfather never saw the invitation I had posted to India for the launch party. I realised Rob would never see the club either, when I had really hoped he would.
A few weeks later, I met Pete - heartbroken and raw from losing Rob. Pete was lost for years without Rob.
A few weeks after that I bought the Hacienda soundsystem for Planet K.
So my life began with Pete: in the shadow of the Hacienda, in the glow of the pastel colours that lit the bar of Planet K, the soundrack of our lives playing out on the Hacienda speakers, 25 years old and in my very own club.
Just like the Hacienda, it ended as intensley as it had started. We both, having made huge mistakes amidst the chaos and the love, were utterly burnt out, just like the friendships and relationships that had once been around us. Everything was dust - sacrificed in the funeral pyre of the club's last months. Finally, thankfully on 09/11/01 it was over.
By 2005 we had Manna. He made the most beautiful patisserie I have ever seen anywhere. He was relentless and focused in his enthusiasm for the business, but as the years had gone by I had noticed that his passion and commitment was only towards our business ventures together and not towards me or our relationship. I began to think he was avoiding emotional intimacy, and then a series of sudden revelations which he just couldn't deny, horrified me and confirmed my worst fears. I knew it was over.
I moved out of the house. The pain was unbearable.
In the weeks that followed, as I struggled with my painful and new reality, I would walk in to Manna to find the girls who were the shop's backbone playing the 'Lost Souls' album by Doves.
This was Pete's work with Rob. Their last piece of work together. An LP that Pete had A&Rd for release on Rob's label. An LP that Pete had sold to EMI after Rob's death. An LP that earned Pete his first gold disc. They knew nothing of Pete's involvement with the record.
I would stand there serving customers, looking around my precious, beautiful shop, that somehow my husband and I had created together even through all our distance and hurt. Knowing that it was all over for sure now, either sooner or later.
I would find my eyes welling up as 'Cedar Room' would come on.
Jimmy singing
' I tried to sleep alone, but I couldn't do it...
You could be sitting next to me, and I wouldn't know it...'
my head full of all those moments that were triggered on the 15th May 1999 that led to my marriage to Pete, to somehow me being written in to his story and him in to mine, and both of us written in some way in to the the story of Manchester and its music scene.
I used to stand there looking around me, listening to that album in the background, watching my husband come deliver the most beautiful cakes and then leave, unwilling to talk about any of it, wondering how much longer I could carry on.
*****************************
When I was alone in the flat I had taken, I would meditate, every morning and every night. One evening I realised I wasn't alone. My grandfather's presence was everywhere. I could smell the smell of cigarettes around him, the smell of his suregery in Dharbangha in India - the sterilizing fluid kept in small vials, antiseptic, ammonia, medicines mixed with the smell of the mud in the yard, the long green grass across the yard that kid goats were grazing on, the smell of India, all mixed together. I found myself crying.
I heard his voice 'Sub kuch theek hoga' he said. 'Everything's going to be alright.'
More tears. And more tears. And a knowing that I was being looked after.
My grandfather died on the same day as Rob Gretton. My grandfather had spent years a a young mand studying and working as a junior doctor in Manchester. The last time I saw him was in October 1998, when during his last visit to the UK, I took him to my flat at 88 Palatine Road. He knew it well. Unbeknown to me at the time, many years earlier, Rob had founded Factory records at 86 Palatine Road. I didn't know that until Pete told me in the summer of 1999.
**************************************
As the weeks went on the agony around our separation and my knowing that this would lead me to close this beautiful business intensified. As negotiations with new investors were put on the table, he fought for his shareholding, but not once for our marriage.
I thought my heart would break. I wished it all away. After a meeting with him and another shareholder, I had a dream that I was standing on a beach, and there were two sharks in the water, and one of them bit me, taking with it something of mine.
In between meetings I would cry and pray and wonder why I was doing this. I wondered why I should do this all so equitably when he didn't seem to care about me at all. Why not just go - get away, from him, from these sharehodlers, from Manchester, forever. It would be less painful. It would be easier for me to give in to the anger, the disappointment, feeling of being betrayed and abandoned - it would propel me to take myself AWAY from all of it and make it all OVER forever.
The next time I walked in to the shop, the girls were playing the 'New Order' best of LP. Rob managed New order. Pete's brother now manages New Order. The girls knew nothing of Pete's connections to New Order or Rob Gretton. They knew Pete as the exacting and perfectionist baker and patissierre extraordinaire, who didn't want to be with his wife who was the boss, but who did want to the business to be perfect. Rob managed New order. Pete's brother now manages New Order. Pete had spent all of his working life before Manna, working for and with either Rob or New Order or both.
I felt everything slow down as I wondered WHY, they had developed a fondness for New Order NOW - at this time, when we were going through the end of our relationship, and I had decided to leave. To leave him. To leave Manchester. To leave my life up until now behind.
'WHAT?' I wondered 'WHAT IS GOING ON?'
The shop was silent. The track shifted to 'ATMOSPHERE' and I heard Ian Cutis's haunting beautiful voice say:
'Walk in silence,
Dont walk away, in silence.
See the danger,
Always danger,
Endless talking,
Life rebuilding,
Dont walk away.'
For the first time I heard the lyrics clearly, the tenderness in his voice, the compassion, the wisdom:
'Walk in silence,
Dont turn away, in silence.
Your confusion,
My illusion,
Worn like a mask of self-hate,
Confronts and then dies.
Dont walk away.'
I was shaking, crying and crying and crying.
'People like you find it easy,
Naked to see,
Walking on air.
Hunting by the rivers,
Through the streets,
Every corner abandoned too soon,
Set down with due care.
Dont walk away in silence,
Dont walk away.'
As I listened to his voice, I felt time slow down around me, almost like it froze. All the colurs seemed more vivid, the room more silent and yet filled with presence.
And out of nowhere I knew all of this:
Rob was there. He brought us together. I didn't meet Pete by accident. The Hacienda speakers were not an accident. Our journey together had a purpose. It was divine and supported. Something special had to happen. Something special has to happen. Walking away and turning my back would be the easiest thing to do for ME to get over my pain. But it wouldn't be the healing thing to do, for me or for Pete. It wouldn't be honouring the reason we were put together. There was a way for love to get through the illusion 'worn like a mask of self hate'. If our relationship as it had been was over, our love for one another, and what we can create together, was not. Ian Curtis's voice said 'People like you...abandon too soon...Don't walk away.'
And I knew there a higher purpose had guided us together, and was still present with us in that moment.
When I first met Pete, I struggled to accept his immediate and intense declaration that he loved me. I felt the truth of his words and yet I could see I could see his broader emotional inhibition, the deep wounding within him. I was torn. To trust him, or to keep my distance. I never expressed any of this to him, but one day in the summer of 1999, as I thought about him in the soft sunshine after an afternoon spent together, I received a text message from him: two words to get me to understand how deeply he felt what he felt:
TRUE FAITH
At the end of the 'Atmosphere', I decided that what I actually had to do was find a way to continue our love. My love for him. For Manna. For Manchester. That what we are here for is to love one another, support one another, teach one another, help one another. Above all, LOVE ONE ANOTHER.
I decided then and there that come what may in our sepration or divorce, no matter what surfaced, I would be there for him. I would love him, respect him and trust him. Only love would guide me through all of this, and one day, we would be able to see beyond the pain around us now, and know that together we did something beautiful.
I would fight for his shareholding as I would for mine. I would love him unconditionally. I would never ever walk away.
And so it is.
**************************************
Only now do I understand that they never actually left us. They were all around us, in spirit, in their Love, the whole time. They still are. They're around us the whole time. Guiding us. Moving us. Helping us heal.
I believe it is no coincedence that my grandfather lived in Mancheseter as a young man, and that years later later, I, brought up in Edinburgh and after university at Oxford, chose Manchester, of all the palces, to settle. That it was only during his last visit to the UK that my grandfather told me that he had once lived in Manchester, or that the last time I saw him, I was waving goodbye to him from my flat at 88 Palatine Rd, which he knew well, and which I would find out later, was next door to where Pete had worked for Rob at 86 Palatine Rd.
I believe that it's not by accident that I, of all people, the daughter of first generation Indian immigrants, opened a nightlcub called Planet K in Manchester when I was 25 years old.
I believe that it is no coincedence that Rob and my grandfather died on the same date. That within weeks Pete and I were brought together. That I bought the Hacienda sounsystem. That Pete poured everything in to K and then in to Manna. That the girls were playing Lost Souls. That my grandfather was with me in the flat when I left my marriage. That I heard the words to 'Atmosphere' for the first time, when I did, how I did.
I believe there is a divine plan. I believe the best is yet to come. I believe that if we surrended to Love and let it guide us, then the plan will come in to being.
I believe that Rob is with Pete always.
I believe that my grandfather is with me always.
I believe that we are connected in Love.
I beleive we are connected in Love through time and space.
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