Nightclub mogul Stringfellow, 77, dies after private cancer battle

PETER STRINGFELLOW, the Sheffield church hall concert promoter who became an international nightclub mogul, has died aged 77 after a private battle with cancer.

A renowned showman and relentless selfpublicist, it was one thing he wanted to keep secret, said his PR man Matt Glass.

Mr Stringfellow, inset, had been previously diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008 when he went for what he thought would be a prostate test with his private GP.

He kept that news to himself as well, saying later that he “just wanted to avoid all the sympathy”.

His death brought tributes from Lord Sugar, the novelist Tony Parsons and DJ Tony Blackburn, among many others. Comedian David Baddiel said: “He had a sense of humour beyond the haircut. I asked him what he’d be doing if he hadn’t ended up running strip clubs. He said: ‘Two words: benefit fraud’.” Mr Stringfellow’s career began in the early 1960s, renting St Aidan’s Church Hall in Sheffield every Friday and calling it the Black Cat Club. The acts he booked there and later at Cinderella’s club in Leeds and in Manchester included The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. In 1980, he opened Stringfellows Club in Covent Garden in London’s West End and went on to create venues in Paris, New York, Miami, and Beverly Hills.

With topless girls and exuberant after-hours entertainment, the Stringfellow brand became a byword for debauchery that had echoes of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire. Mr Stringfellow’s guests included singers Rod Stewart and Sir Tom Jones and Professor Stephen Hawking.

Born in Sheffield in 1940, he was the eldest of four boys who were brought up by the women in his family after the men went to war. He said sex was never a topic of conversation in the family home, and that his father declined an invitation to visit one of his establishments in his later years.

He served a brief prison sentence at Armley Jail in Leeds in 1962 for selling stolen carpets, a sharp lesson which he said put him on the straight and narrow. Married three times, his youngest children are four and two. He was also a grandfather four times over.