Warring factions in our own ‘Las Vegas’
ENTERTAINMENT: Yorkshire’s Las Vegas had been initiated in late 1966, when the first sod was cut on a Batley site. Four months later, its Variety Club was open.
But it was in August 1970, with the opening of the Fiesta in Sheffield, that battle was joined. The bidding frenzy for stars waged by their owners led to them going out of business.
IT WAS a showbusiness war that was never going to end well, and exactly 50 years after the first shots were fired, the battle strategies are debated still.
From their improbable oases of glitter and excess at opposite ends of the old West Riding, rival impresarios fought tooth and nail to attract the biggest audience and the brightest stars. Their weapons were cheap beer, chicken-in-a-basket suppers and glamour served up on a scale not seen before or since.
Yorkshire’s Las Vegas had been initiated in late 1966, when the first sod was cut on the site of a former sewage treatment works in Batley. Less than four months later, the vast Variety Club was open for business.
But it was in August 1970, with the opening of the yet more spectacular Fiesta in Sheffield, that battle was joined. From that moment, the bidding frenzy waged by their warring owners forced up the prices of visiting “turns” to such an extent that they eventually drove themselves out of business.
Neil Anderson, a Sheffield writer whose new book, Dirty Stop-out’s Guide to 1970s Sheffield – the Fiesta Edition, celebrates the anniversary, said it was a campaign neither side could win.
“The Fiesta was the biggest nightclub in Europe when it opened, and it competed with Batley for the biggest stars from both sides of the Atlantic,” he said. “The Fiesta even held a date open for Elvis Presley after he claimed there wasn’t a venue in Britain palatial enough for his entourage.”
The Fiesta had planned to pay its acts with the proceeds of its own casino, Mr Anderson, inset, said. But a change to the gambling laws prevented that part of the operation from opening. Its owners, brothers Jim and Keith Lipthorpe, had spent £500,000 building the Fiesta from the ground up. Formerly semi-professional musicians, they had seen a gap in the market for entertainment of a “more sophisticated” nature than had been the norm in the working men’s clubs of the time, and designed the Fiesta to accommodate 1,300 people at each show, all at supper tables.
The brothers had operated another Fiesta club, in Stockton-on-Tees, from 1965 and had entertained and advised Batley’s owner, the former fairground operator James Corrigan, in their early days. “They didn’t realise then that he would be a rival,” Mr Anderson said. “They went head to head when Shirley Bassey signed an exclusive deal with Corrigan. There was little love lost between them after that.” Miss Bassey was not the only problematic top of the bill. Mr Anderson quotes a former staff member as recalling that Tommy Cooper “could be a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde character depending on whether he’d had a drink or not – and he really liked a drink”.
The Fiesta’s fortunes were no less volatile, and during its lifetime it closed and reopened at least three times. It was also beset by strikes, and finally shut its doors in 1980 – two years after Batley – blaming the rising cost of stars and the changing face of showbusiness.
Punk rock, Mr Anderson points out, was what the new audiences were after, and the Sex Pistols did not belong in a club with fitted carpets.
The Fiesta even held a date open for Elvis Presley. Neil Anderson, who has written a book celebrating the Fiesta’s heyday.