Help! I’m trapped in a naked dancer’s booth with Stringy
He’s a dad again at 75 – and bringing his unmistakable brand to a town near you. So what else but to go behind the velvet curtain for a hilarious pas-de-deux with the louche Lothario Lord of the Lapdancers?
THREE minutes. Or 180 seconds. I can do this. It will be all over in a flash. Unfortunately, flash is exactly what I’m experiencing: a fullfrontal, back-al, inside-out and almost upside-down twerking of a completely naked woman inches from my face.
I’m in Stringfellow’s nightclub in Covent Garden, Central London, encased in a velvet, curtained booth, and this is my very first lap dance. I don’t know where to look. I consider checking my phone, but opt instead for smiling weakly, and making a Sainsbury’s list in my head.
I keep wanting to ask the dancer, who is Romanian and in her early 20s, if she’s warm enough. This must rank as the least erotic experience of my life. Men pay £20 to get into the club, £20 for three minutes of nakedness, £200 for half an hour? They are even madder, sadder, than I ever imagined.
I’m here as the guest of the man himself: Peter Stringfellow, who has run this club, in this location, for 35 years. And despite turning 75 yesterday, he is about to open a chain of cafe bars and restaurants in his name across the country. A joint venture with investors, each bar will have his unique branding – leopardprint, velvet – but, as with Playboy magazine’s decision to clean up last week, ‘no nude girls’.
Really, I say, trying to gather my composure after my private view. ‘The staff will all have to be attractive,’ he says, ‘but there isn’t the money outside London for live nude dances. There will be screens showing girls performing a modern striptease, very beautiful, very artistic.’ Will it be like Hooters? ‘Their girls are in provocative outfits, but it’s a family environment, so no.’
But why on earth take on such a project at his age? ‘I semi-retired a few years ago, I was a bit laid-back, but now I have two young children – Rosabella, two, and Angelo, born on September 23 – I have to work! I want to make sure that when I leave them they are secure for life.’
We’re talking, late on Thursday night, at a table while a succession of topless girls in thongs gyrate on a platform nearby. The girls hold on to poles, but there are no acrobatics, no spinning.
‘Men don’t want to see spinning, women upside-down,’ Peter says. ‘The poses are just to show off how beautiful they are.’ I think he’s trying to tell me that men really aren’t that hard to please.
I tell Peter, who is as deaf as I am (‘My ear was up against the lead guitarist of the Pretty Things for 45 minutes’), that the dancers seem quite chunky to me, used as I am to seeing only fashion models sans clothes. ‘Men don’t want to see ribs, they don’t find that attractive.’ How have the women changed in 35 years? ‘They used to have real breasts, now some don’t. They used to have a landing strip, you know, now you never see a pubic hair.’
Does he know all their names? ‘No, I don’t. And I never go in a booth for a private dance any more, not since Bella, my wife, and I became an item. If I reached out I could get attention from the girls, but I’m too smart to think about something so unnecessary.’ Are they more perfect these days? ‘Some have cellulite, but they’ve all got to have good bodies. Men don’t want perfect. They want personality.’
By that I take it he means a woman who is smiley, demure, unthreatening, complicit. ‘Men are afraid of complimenting a woman at work, or chatting someone up in a bar: they might get rejected, or sued. Here, no man is ever rejected, he doesn’t have to chat her up. A beautiful girl is paying him attention: that’s a powerful thing for a man. He’s never going to be told, “Well, you don’t look like David Beckham,” he’s going to hear, “My God, you’re like Brad Pitt!”’ I tell him I imagine any famous man his age, post-Jimmy Savile, must be quaking in his winklepickers. ‘There is a fear. Savile was a difficult man to like. Cliff Richard? I cannot believe that for one second. I’ve never met a nicer man.’
He believes, too, in women taking control of their own sexual safety, that a young girl ‘wearing a blatantly sexual outfit on the street is putting herself in real trouble. How stupid is that? When the Tube opens all night, the dancers will use it to save money to get home, and it won’t be safe’. So, the nude girls in his club are a safety valve on male desire? ‘In a way, yes.’
But far from the club being packed with lecherous creeps, I see perfectly good looking thirty- and fortysomething men leave tables, led by the hand by nubile women, like so many toddlers being taken to the bathroom. Why do men feel the need for this? ‘It’s a fantasy. They are not cheating on their wives, there is no touching, no one leaves with the girls.’
He says they used to have a male nude dancer but ‘the women didn’t follow the rules, they kept grabbing him!’ Do the dancers feel exploited? ‘I have a weekly meeting where everyone says what they think, and mostly the girls complain about each other: she stole my client, or whatever. The dancers are all selfemployed: they might earn nothing for two nights, then thousands the next night. It’s like being an actress: you might get a film, then nothing!’
Are the girls now all Eastern European? ‘There are a lot – Romanians, Poles. I have to say those girls have a much stronger work ethic than the British girls.’ So, we need to stay in the EU to ensure a good flow of hotties? ‘I’ve never seen a Romanian who is not beautiful,’ Peter says, with no hint of irony. ‘Immigration makes us a better country. When I lived in Sheffield, the only people who weren’t from Sheffield were the stars I brought there! It was introverted, don’t tell me there is anything wonderful about that.’
Born into a family of steelworkers, he left school at 15 and began his career by running a club in a church hall every Friday night. He started out booking live acts, including The Beatles, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, but on moving to London came up with the idea of a classier take on the strip joint. ‘It was the 1960s, I went to a strip club in Wardour Street, and I’d never seen a woman take her clothes off so close before. But it was dark, dingy, seedy.’
He has been married three times, and has two grown-up children: Karen, 51, a restaurateur, and Scott, 49, who works in the club, and who it turns out is also deaf: perhaps the Pretty Things were only partly to blame. He met his third wife, Bella, who is 40 years his junior, in the club. She was a ballet dancer, but gave it up ‘ because of the pressure to keep slim. It was verbal abuse every day. She didn’t want that any more. Her father was utterly destroyed when she gave it up’.
Did her parents approve of him? ‘I fell down drunk at my villa, and it was on Sky News – it looked much worse than it was – and Bella was watching it with her father, who’s English, and she started crying. He said, “Oh no, don’t tell me that’s your
Immigration’s great. I’ve not seen an ugly Romanian...
boyfriend.” It took a year, but now we get on really well. Her mother’s fine about me, she’s Italian.’
Did Bella fancy him when they first met? ‘She said she’d never have fancied me if I looked like I did 35 years ago. I tell her about the Small Faces, Rod Stewart. We went to a modern ballet once, and I fell asleep. She will not let me forget that, but it was very warm.’
The couple, who live on the Albert Embankment, also have a home in Marbella but ‘Bella won’t travel. She was a normal girl, liked a drink and a cigarette and a laugh, but the minute we decided to have a baby all that stopped’.
But why a baby, at his age? ‘Did I want a baby? Not necessarily. I wanted to fool around with Bella, having the greatest time. But if you get married to a young woman you’ve got to go baby again.’
Is he worried about telling his small daughter what he does for a living? ‘Of course not. I have a granddaughter, she’s 11, and a grandson, 15, they’ve been here, seen the poles. My granddaughter said, “Poppa has a strip club. I can do that Mummy!” But no, I don’t want them to do this. I want Rosabella to grow up to be a scientist.’
It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Just a few months before he married Bella on Valentine’s Day 2009, Peter went for a routine scan, which found a small patch of malignant cells on his lung though, he says, ‘I’ve never smoked. It was secondary smoking: I’ve been in clubs since 1962. I no longer drink, other than wine with dinner’.
Bella nursed him through his illness. ‘I was walking around the hospital with pipes sticking out of me, dragging a trolley, and I said to her “I don’t want people going, Oh, poor Peter Stringfellow”, and she said, “Well, it would help if you didn’t wear the leopardprint dressing gown.”’
Is she a feminist? ‘I would call her a strong woman. She is as sexual with me as I would want anyone to be. She won’t be dictated to by anyone, least of all a man. I’m in love now, it came along with time.’ But does he have the energy for two young children? Being deaf, does he even hear them cry in the night? ‘I’ve only got up twice, I admit that. She sleeps in the baby room, but that’s OK, that’s part of life.’
Does he have to resort to Viagra? ‘I’ve tried it a couple of times, made me nauseous! I’m not the Hugh Hefner of Europe. I don’t identify with him for one minute.’
Two different girls are now at the pole, but I’ve grown used to all the nipples: the women are now like wallpaper, even when one comes over to give me a shoulder massage. Peter tells me of the famous people who have been in: Jack Nicholson, Madonna, Rihanna, Kanye West. What about someone a bit more wholesome, like David Beckham?
‘I met David and Victoria in a restaurant once, and I said to David “You must come to the club”, and before he could answer Victoria said, “Oh, you don’t like that sort of thing do you, David?”’ He laughs uproariously.
As we leave to visit his younger satellite club in Soho, Angels – Peter is out until 2am, 3am, three nights a week, and has to tiptoe into his home to avoid waking his family, and still be up at 9am to take his daughter to nursery – a group of boisterous twentysomething men make Peter pose with them for a selfie.
Why would they come here, when they can sit at home watching far more graphic porn? Isn’t his business, which made its third annual pre-tax loss in a row (he takes a salary of over £300,000 a year), too quaint to survive much longer? ‘It’s a gentlemen’s club, it’s not laddish: I would never walk through a door before a woman, or not open a door for her. The internet is full of everything, but my clients don’t want to watch a stud having sex with three women at the same time, they don’t want to meet someone on Tinder.
‘My clients are older, though no one comes in who’s older than me, they’ve lost interest in their 70s. But for the men who come here it’s an ego boost: that a beautiful 19-yearold is your girlfriend for one night. It’s safe. It’s not cheating. We are a little old-fashioned. I’m quite a prude if you really get to know me.’
At the end of my private dance, I have no idea of the etiquette. There is nowhere to poke a £10 note, so I just say: ‘Thank you. That was really nice.’
And I wonder if the reason this lovely, mute Romanian is spending six months a year grinding her genitalia near the faces of strangers is because of women like me: strident, unforgiving, super busy, super bossy. Perhaps men simply come here for a bit of peace and quiet.
I’m quite a prude if you really get to know me