The thong-wearing mullet-haired “King of Clubs”
Peter Stringfellow, the selfstyled King of Clubs, also known as Stringy, was Britain’s “lap-dancing supremo”, said Jane Fryer in the Daily Mail. An enthusiast for gold lamé, Krug champagne, leopard print shirts and tiny thongs, he partied with everyone from Jack Nicholson and Princess Diana to Stephen Hawking, rarely went to bed before 5:30am, claimed to have slept with 2,000 women and “possessed one of the worst mullets in the history of hair”. He made a fortune by commercialising sex and objectifying women in his “gentlemen’s clubs”, and incurred the ire of moral campaigners and feminists alike. But in person, Stringy, who has died aged 77, could be charming and funny, with a good line in self-deprecation. The journalist Jan Moir once spotted him at Gatwick turning up to catch an Easyjet flight to Majorca. “Where’s the queue for C-list celebrities?” he cried as he approached the check-in desk.
Peter Stringfellow was born in a suburb of Sheffield in 1940. His father was a steelworker and money was tight. They had no bathroom (in later life, he made sure his bathrooms had whirlpools, TVS and buckets of champagne on ice), and his bedroom was an attic that he shared with his three brothers. Having failed his eleven-plus, he left school at 15. After a stint in the merchant navy, he fell into sales jobs (“I was flash,” he said), only to end up in jail, having been caught stealing his employer’s stock and selling it on. By then, he was married to his first wife, Norma (with whom he later had a daughter), and cheating on her with her cousin. He hated prison, and described his eight-week term as the shock that spurred his success. On his release, he struggled to find a job, so decided to go into business himself as an impresario: in 1962, he hired a church hall on Friday nights, booked some local acts and turned it into the Black Cat club. Early in 1963, he booked The Beatles, then known only in Liverpool. By the time the concert came around, they were in the charts – so he hired a bigger hall and sold tickets to twice as many people as the venue was licensed to hold. He made £300, said The Times; the Beatles went home with about £10 each.
He hosted an array of bands that went on to be famous, including The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. His clubs in Sheffield, and later Leeds and Manchester, made him a millionaire in the 1970s. But it was the opening of Stringfellows in London’s Covent Garden in 1980 that made him famous. In that “loadsamoney” decade, rock stars, film stars and bankers flocked to his doors. Even Margaret Thatcher popped in, for a Tory fundraiser (Stringy – a Tory donor – made sure his dancers were off-duty that night). In 1983, he took over The Hippodrome (then The Talk of the Town) in Leicester Square, where he launched its first gay night, before expanding to the US. At one point, his US operation was valued at $25m, but it was badly hit by the recession, and in 1991 it went under. Stringfellow was distraught, but by then, a friend had taken him to a lap-dancing club in Miami. This, he perceived, was “the future”. Returning to London, he put in action a plan to turn his Covent Garden venue into the country’s first topless table-dancing club. Later he obtained a licence to have nude acts – a first for Westminster.
In 1967, two years after leaving Norma, he married Coral Wright, with whom he had a son. Although he cheated on her constantly, she stuck with him for 17 years. Then in 2001, he fell in love with Bella Wright, a Royal Ballet ballerina 42 years his junior, and the playboy declared that his womanising days were over – they married in 2009 and had two children. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, but kept his treatment for the disease private.