Peter Stringfellow has got the go-ahead to open a club in Dublin, but what exactly can Irish men expect? Paul Cullenviews what's on offer at the London club
It may be stating the obvious, but the first thing that strikes you on entering Stringfellows nightclub in London is the girls. They're everywhere, scores of them, long-limbed and indisputably lovely on their six-inch heels, milling about the bar trying to make eye contact with the punters, or gyrating around elevated poles in various states of undress. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, but mostly blondes. Europeans, Africans, Latinas and Asians, but mostly white girls with eastern European accents. Their skin, all of it, is shaven and their dresses, when they're on, virtually non-existent.
There are six in our party, including two women and a gay male; none of us has been to a lapdancing club before. The Stranglers' Golden Brown is playing as we take our faux leopardskin seats in a corner dressed with red drapes and lit by a plastic chandelier.
We order a bottle of Veuve Cliquot (a snip at £65) as the pole-dancer on the stage in front of us removes her thong, bends over and runs her finger along her backside. It's hard not to stare but the effect is hardly erotic. To our left, a thirtysomething male, who we imagine works in the City, sits back as a dancer wiggles her bum in his face. His face bears a look of studied concentration, as if he was listening to Bach.
Girls come over to our table in a succession and offer to dance. Sonia, a Brazilian/Malaysian beauty in a minimalist turquoise number, is one of the 100-plus girls working tonight. It's £20 for a dance, which lasts for three minutes, and you can also pay £200 to just talk to her for an hour. She drifts off when we show no interest.
There seem to be girls to suit every male taste here, from waif-like "schoolgirls" to bustier dominatrices. Most of the breasts on view seem to be surgically enhanced, and many of the mouths too. In the dim light of a nightclub they all look fine to me.
"It's Disneyland for men," my friend's wife remarks, and it's true. The last time I saw so much human flesh was in a German sauna but, let's face it, there the comparison ends.
While some girls appear bored with their work, no one is sullen, presumably because sullen is bad for business. Our City neighbour sends over his favourite, Anna, to dance for my friend's wife, which she does with enthusiasm and a girlish sense of fun. "Quite limited" is the female verdict on the range of the performance, though another friend - male, of course - proclaims it "absolutely riveting".
Apart from our table, the clientele is exclusively male, ranging in age from 30 upwards. The older men smile like small boys as they're led away to a quiet corner for a dance. The atmosphere is subdued, mannerly, even languorous; it's hard to believe that one of the club bouncers was convicted this week of killing a customer who allegedly touched one of the girls.
DOWNSTAIRS, THERE ARE two more bars, and three poles constantly in use. In one corner, a dancer is simulating sex in front of a customer, who lies sprawled on his seat. "I'm gay," one of our friends tells a girl who accosts him on the way to the toilet. "Already?" she replies.
By now, we're on our second bottle of champagne, and getting used to this erotic dancing thing. Most of our group find the club fairly harmless, even soporific. It's like a nightclub for the over-40s; you can find seats and hear yourself over the music, which is pedestrian (M People, U2, even Billy Ocean).
I order a lapdance - or should I say table dance - purely in the interests of journalistic research, of course. Maria, a tall, dark-haired Croatian who came to London as an au pair in 1991 and became a refugee after the Balkan war broke out, leads me away to a quiet corner. Once she gets a British passport, she plans to give dancing up and become an air hostess, she tells me.
Maria gets me to sit back, pushes my legs apart and starts to dance in front of me. Items of clothing become detached and some end up, like discarded party streamers, around my neck. Various body parts loom into view before my eyes, but it's all over in the space of a song. I complete the transaction by giving her a £20 note, which she places in a garter, and return to my group, wondering what all the fuss is about.
Peter Stringfellow himself, in black suit and white shirt, with two medallions draped across his chest, is in the club tonight, picking at a large tray of fruit at a nearby table. I introduce myself and "the granddaddy of English stripping" comes over to our table for a chat.
He comes across as the cat who got the cream. You think of the joke about George Best and the blondes and the champagne and the quip about "where did it all go wrong, George?" and then you remember that joke's not funny any more.
Stringfellow, in contrast, shows few signs of wear and tear after the decades of partying and womanising. His mullet is receding and years of nightclubbing have ruined his hearing, but otherwise he looks well for his 65 years. His enthusiasm, the glee of a boy who can't believe his good fortune, quickly wins us over.
We talk about his appearance in court in Dublin earlier in the week, when he successfully obtained a licence to open an Irish Stringfellows. "It was one of the funniest times in my life. Some of the characters in court were straight out of Father Ted; one of them must have been 110," he chortles.
"Everyone thought it would be like Sodom and Gomorrah, with girls straddling the tables. But it's not like that. This is the pinnacle of the business; the girls do nothing crude."
He explains in great detail his rules: no physical contact with the customers; clothes taken off during dances only, which are performed at the tables. The London rules, on this evening at least, appear to conform to what Stringfellow told the Dublin court would apply at the new operation on Parnell Street. Then there are the odder rules, such as a ban on gum-chewing, smoking away from the tables and even holding cigarettes in the mouth.
WE'RE CONVINCED THERE'S more going on in the club than meets our eyes, but Stringfellow is trenchant in his denial: "If a girl takes up with a client and we find out, she's finished. It breaks the fantasy."
He sees himself as part of the entertainment business, not the sex industry. "If a girl wants to be a prostitute, she isn't going to waste all night in this club. What you see, it ends here."
George Best's son Callum Best ("a great lad") wanders by, followed by Bella, Stringfellow's latest fiancee, who's about 30 and a former ballerina.
The dancers in the club are effectively self-employed; they pay a nightly "house fee" and expenses to Stringfellow, who also takes a 15 per cent cut from their earnings. "It can only work this way. There's so many of them, and they come and they go."
One girl tells me she earns more than £500 a night. Next door to us, Anna is having a busy night; we gave up counting how many dances the City type had ordered after it hit 20.
At the start, most of the girls were British, Stringfellow says, but nowadays the accents are all foreign. All his staff are from the EU or have valid work permits, he assures us.
Without irony, Stringfellow promises "no half measures" in his Irish venture. While the club will be run by an Irish associate, he says he will be intimately involved. "It's my name, my quality control, my rules and my girls. If anything goes against that, I'm out of it."
Addressing the objections that have been raised against his Irish venture, he says: "I can't help with the moral values of the neighbours if they are offended by women taking their clothes off. But if their concerns are about noise and trouble, I can tell them they won't have any problems."
And why Dublin? "I like the address, the capital city image. Dublin's a good name." And the money, of course: "I've a 50-foot boat, but I'm quite happy to swap it for a 52-foot boat," he laughs.
But why doesn't he just retire? "To what?" he replies. "I like gardening, but not that much."