Peter Stringfellow
Son of a Sheffield steelworker who thanks to his exuberance, fast talk and appetite for ‘fun’ became a legendary nightclub impresario
PETER STRINGFELLOW, who has died aged 77, ran the eponymous London nightclub that became a haunt for celebrities (from A-listers all the way down to Z), rubberneckers, excitable businessmen and people on the make.
The son of a Sheffield steelworker, Stringfellow began his career as a rock music impresario in the north of England. In 1980, having deduced that London was where the money was, he opened Stringfellow’s in Covent Garden. The decor was Dynasty-glitz, and Stringfellow presided over proceedings in his distinctive leopard-skin suits, gold medallions and pink shoes, all topped off with a startling bleached blonde mullet. (On holiday, his beachwear included a leopard-skin thong.) The waitresses wore tutus.
He attributed his success to early experience as a door-to-door salesman: his “exuberance and fast talk” were, he said, “perfect for fronting a nightclub”. Stringfellow’s guiding principle was that people should have fun, and he himself did not intend to be left out. He claimed to have had more than 2,000 lovers – many of them during the course of his first two marriages – before settling down with the third Mrs Stringfellow, a ballet dancer 42 years his junior, and fathering two children in his seventies. But if his moral compass had difficulty locating true north, most people warmed to his affability, natural charm and refreshing lack of pretension.
In his autobiography Stringfellow wrote: “I pride myself on being a gentleman; I’m certainly not vulgar or tacky.” He admitted, however, that he had once blagged his way into Annabel’s and tried to bribe the maître d’, Louis Emanuelli, with £100 to make him a member.
Peter James Stringfellow was born in Sheffield on October 17 1940. Brought up in a one-up, one-down, he and his three younger brothers had to sleep in the attic. As a boy he spent much of his time trainspotting, eggcollecting and playing marbles. He failed the 11-plus, and aged 12 went to Burngreave Secondary Modern, then Sheffield Technical School, from which he emerged with a fourth-class diploma.
There followed an array of jobs, including tie salesman at Austin Reed and cinema projectionist. Peter then joined the Merchant Navy, working as a galley boy on an oil tanker that took him to Philadelphia and New York, the Caribbean Islands and Venezuela. Having returned to Sheffield he had spells as a photographer and sewing machine salesman.
By 1961 he was sales manager for a Sheffield firm selling goods door-to-door. Their items included carpets, and Stringfellow began taking stock to sell for himself. He was rumbled, and sentenced to three months in prison.
On his release, determined to go straight, he saw an opportunity in the music scene. In 1962 he hired a church hall in Sheffield, christened it the Black Cat Club, and booked likely acts. Among the most successful was Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, who chopped up a chair and set fire to it on stage. “The audience went wild,” Stringfellow recalled.
In February 1963 the Beatles agreed to play the Black Cat after Stringfellow phoned their manager, Brian Epstein, from a call box on a council estate. The fee was £85, more than he had ever paid for a band, but he sold so many tickets that he had to hire the larger Azena Ballroom on the edge of Sheffield.
Stringfellow was now on the up. His subsequent local ventures were the Blue Moon (another church hall), where he presented the Kinks and the Searchers, and then the Mojo, which opened in 1964 in what had been a derelict house next to a bomb site. Wilson Pickett, Sonny Boy Williamson, Ike and Tina Turner, The Who, the Pretty Things and Manfred Mann were among the bands who appeared at the Mojo. Another big draw was Jimi Hendrix. When he played there, the police received a tip-off that he was carrying drugs, and – in those days lacking a specialised drugs squad – they sent the fire brigade to investigate. Finding nothing suspicious, they left with an apology to the guitarist. Stringfellow recalled: “Hendrix looked up from what appeared to be a six-inch joint and said: ‘Hey, cool, man’.”
The Mojo closed in 1968 owing to problems securing a music and dancing licence, but Stringfellow was by now casting his thoughts beyond his home city. In 1970 he opened Cinderella’s, in Leeds city centre, followed by a “supper club” next door called Rockafella’s. These he soon merged into what he described as a “superscene”, Cinderella’s-rockafella’s, and it was so successful that for the first time in his life he felt financially secure: “I changed my red E-type Jaguar for a black and white Jensen Interceptor Marque III, which quickly became a boudoir on wheels. The E-type had been a little cramped for extramarital sex … If the girl was tall I’d open the windows and put her legs through them.” He later sold his Leeds clubs to Eric Morley, having opened a new establishment in Manchester called The Millionaire club.
It was a characteristic of Stringfellow that there always had to be a venture beyond the one in which he was presently engaged. Now that he had proved himself in the North, he wanted “London and international fame”. Thus, when London Transport decided to lease out an office block in Covent Garden for £40,000 a year, he jumped at the chance, despite the debt that he would incur. To help finance the development of Stringfellow’s, the club that made his name, he sold The Millionaire to Granada in 1981 for £320,000.
His next project was the old cabaret venue The Talk of the Town, which Stringfellow launched in 1983 under its former name, The Hippodrome. Lavishing £3.5million to install state-of-the-art light shows and sound systems, he billed it as “the world’s greatest disco”. The Hippodrome was soon taking up to £130,000 a week, and on Mondays he introduced all-gay nights. For one of these he hired a lion which pounced on to the dance floor. The customers scattered and the trainers managed to recapture it with nets. “Then the booing started,” Stringfellow recalled. “Were they booing because no one had been eaten? No, they were booing because they thought we were being cruel to the lion.”
Stringfellow’s next plan – the conquest of America – was to end badly. His clubs in New York (opened in 1986), Miami (1989) and Beverly Hills (1990) became casualties of the Nineties recession. Meanwhile, his divorce from his second wife, Coral, required him to sell the Hippodrome, to European Leisure, for £7 million. He was left with just his flagship club in London, for which in 1996 he obtained the first “tableside dancing licence” in London.
For 10 years, until he closed it down in 2016, Stringfellow also ran Angels, in Soho, a club at which men paid £400 an hour for a naked girl to sit at their table. “I do not like the term strip club or titty bar,” the old roué declared. “It’s a gentlemen’s club. And my girls are not strippers, escorts, call girls or, even worse, hookers or prostitutes. I tell them all: you are entertainers.”
In his late seventies Stringfellow launched an online lingerie range consisting of four collections: “Signature Lingerie, After Midnight, Pleasure Sets and Luxury Toys, personally curated by Peter”.
He published an autobiography, King of Clubs (co-written with Fiona Lafferty), in 1996.
Peter Stringfellow married first, in 1960, Norma Williams, with whom he had a daughter, Karen. With his second wife, Coral Wright, whom he married in 1967, he had a son, Scott. He also had long relationships with Frizzbee Fox, a former hair colourist, and one-time Page Three pin-up Helen Benoist.
He met his third wife, Bella Wright, when she was a 19-year-old ballerina and came into Stringfellow’s for a drink in 2003 after a performance of The Nutcracker. They married in 2009 and had a son and a daughter.