Interview: Peter Stringfellow
13-minute read • 2,116 words
Originally published in the February 2015 issue of Westside Magazine.
I see the mullet before I see anything else.
I am in Soho to interview Peter Stringfellow. It is 2.52pm and the doors of his Angels nightclub are barred shut – it will be six hours before they open to punters eager to see female flesh and drink expensive drinks. But I knock and explain who I am, and the receptionist lets me in. She tells me to take a seat, motioning to a table to the left of the entrance. Around it is a red velvet throne and two chairs upholstered in leopard-print. Obviously!
After a short wait I’m ushered through the club (more red velvet; even more leopard-print) to the office at the back. It is relatively cramped, but sleek; like the headquarters of a trendy advertising firm.
In the middle is a separate office, partitioned off from the rest with glass panels. There is a frosting effect across the centre of the glass, meaning I can’t see the face of who’s inside. But lo, what’s that poking over the top? Why, it’s that unmistakable silver mane!
We all think we know Peter Stringfellow: the hair, the leopard print, the scores of nubile girls in his clubs and on his arm. But he is 74 now – what is he really like these days? How much of his lothario persona is actually true to life?
“Absolutely none,” he laughs. “I have no leopard-skin G-strings. Damn!”
He is, he claims, a reformed character: he doesn’t drink (apart from the occasional glass of pinot grigio with food), and is happily married with a baby daughter (more about that later). His only interests nowadays are his family and his business.
Indeed, it’s easy to forget that Peter Stringfellow is, above and beyond everything else, a hugely successful businessman (he prefers ‘entrepreneur’). He has made millions from his nightclubs – first the music venues in his native Sheffield which played host to the likes of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, now his Soho nightspots where ‘adult entertainment’ is the order of the day.
His has been a long and lucrative career, and it shows no sign of stopping any time soon. In fact in his seventies Peter is striking out anew once more, with a plan to expand the Stringfellows brand across Europe.
“I’m in a recognised, understandable licensing deal, which is the future for me,” he says. The first of these new branded clubs opened in Paris in late 2014. “These countries have become more capitalistic and more westernised than they’ve ever been. So the [Stringfellows] name, in my opinion, fits in all the capital cities: Prague, for instance, Budapest…”
It’s a bold move, but then Peter Stringfellow is no shrinking violet. He may have put the boozing and womanising behind him, but the energy, the megawatt charisma for which he’s famous, remains firmly in place.
During our chat, he punctuates most sentences with a hearty, capital-letter laugh (“HA HA HA!”), and regularly breaks into song, and impressions of the many celebrities he knows (his Janet Street-Porter is hilarious).
Celebrities loom large in Peter’s world. The wall of his little office is filled with pictures of him hangin’ out with the stars, at his clubs and elsewhere. He continually drifts off from conversation to point them out and tell me the story behind them. Princess Diana, Charlie Sheen (“we forged a very good friendship, but we only knew each other when we were drunk!”), Ginger Rogers, Simon Cowell (“good old Simon, comes to the club a lot, fabulous guy”)… the famous names come thick and fast – so many, clanging around me like anvils, that I worry the floor will fall through.
Peter James Stringfellow was born in Sheffield in 1940, growing up in the suburb of Pitsmoor (“When people say ‘what was Pitsmoor like?’… the name described it quite adequately. HA HA HA HA!”). The family were poor, he says: their house was cold and cramped; the only toilet was outdoors. His memories of Sheffield are fond, though: he still has family in the city, and visits when he gets the chance.
The young Peter struggled at school, due to what was later diagnosed as mild dyslexia. As a result, the first signs of his extrovert persona emerged.
He says: “I found myself trying to be a joker in the class to lift myself up from being the dumbest kid in the class to a little bit more than that.”
He left school at 15 and took on a series of odd jobs, including cinema projectionist and apprentice mechanic, before his father persuaded him to sign up for the merchant navy. Peter sailed the world, his eyes opened wide by the gleaming skyscrapers and well-to-do citizens of New York.
Peter’s nascent Jack-the-lad attitude was soon to land him in trouble, changing his life’s direction in the process. Now back in Sheffield and working for an upholstery firm, he began stealing carpets from the company’s warehouse to sell on the side for extra profit. He was promptly discovered and arrested, and served six weeks at Her Majesty’s pleasure as a result.
After being released from prison Peter struggled to find work, but an outing to Chesterfield with younger brother Geoffrey provided the inspiration for a new career path. Attending a performance by Johnny Tempest and the Cadillacs, the elder Stringfellow felt he could make a success of putting on gigs of his own. Shortly after, he began laying the foundations of his nightclub empire, and set about building for himself the life he’d first glimpsed during that merchant navy trip to New York.
“I’m called ‘King of Clubs’,” says Peter. “I’m still the only guy that’s had a club in Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, London, Miami, New York and Beverly Hills, and owned all of them. Nobody else has done that.”
Peter’s early clubs have become the stuff of legend, in Sheffield and beyond. First was the Black Cat, in St Aidan’s church hall on City Road. Then came the Blue Moon, and in the mid-Sixties the King Mojo, which was later given a very groovy psychedelic paint job.
As a promoter and booker, he brought so many iconic acts to the city that it’d be quicker to name the ones that didn’t play for him. The Kinks, The Who (personal favourites of his), Tina Turner and Elton John are just a few of the ones who did.
The Seventies saw an expansion into other cities – first Leeds, then Manchester – and then in 1980 a move to London, with the opening of Stringfellows in Covent Garden. Stringfellows quickly became the place to see and be seen, thanks largely to Peter’s reputation from his Sheffield days. The stars who had played for him years before – Marvin Gaye, Elton – stopped by the new club whenever they were in town. Stringfellows was instantly transformed into the latest hip celebrity hangout, and Peter’s fame was assured.
Given Peter’s love of the US, sealed in his merchant navy days, it was inevitable he would open clubs across the pond. Soon enough he did, and the Stringfellows clubs in New York, Miami and Beverly Hills were great successes, frequented by Hollywood stars and music legends alike.
But the good times in America weren’t to last. An economic crash there at the end of the Eighties forced Peter to close his stateside clubs – and allegedly led to an unsavoury run-in with the Mafia. He retreated to England with the tail of his mullet between his legs.
Peter bounced back, of course. And it was another eye-opening experience in the States which helped him turn his fortunes back around: a visit to a gentlemen’s club.
“A girl had come up to me at the side of the stage and said ‘Can I dance for you?’ I said ‘Sure!’” he says. “She said ‘It’s ten dollars a dance.’ ‘Fine, I’ll have one.’ Three hundred and fifty dollars later, I was still giving her ten dollar bills. HA HA HA HA HA!”
Ever the entrepreneur, Peter felt that ‘adult entertainment’ was another venture he could make work for him, and he soon introduced it to Stringfellows in London. It was an instant success, and before long he became the first club owner to secure a fully nude licence from Westminster Council.
Gentlemen’s clubs will always be a controversial topic, with many (including this writer) feeling they are exploitative and promote sexual objectification. For his part, Peter insists his clubs are thoroughly classy, aimed at high-flyers rather than horny teenagers. He also says the girls who perform in his venues are not ‘strippers’ or ‘lap-dancers,’ but rather ‘entertainers.’
Of course, the move into adult entertainment did nothing to alter the public perception of Peter – based on years of appearances in the tabloid columns – as a sleazy, silk-shirted womaniser. Neither did his propensity for dating dancers from his clubs, most of them half his age.
But he’s different now, he says. It’s true that today, dressed in casual trousers and a polo shirt, he doesn’t look much like the lothario one imagines (although I must report that all the buttons on the shirt are undone to reveal a thatch of chest hair). And while cynics rolled their eyes in 2009 when he married Bella Wright – a ballet dancer some 42 years his junior – Peter insists it isn’t history repeating itself.
“I have been ecstatically happy many, many times in my life, but I can’t honestly say I’ve been any happier than I am now,” he says. “I have a 16 month old daughter who is everything, and my gorgeous wife who I love – she loves me too, for some unknown reason! We’re a great little team.”
His decision to become a father again at 72 (he has a daughter, Karen, and a son, Scott, from previous marriages) attracted further snorts of derision. Again, Peter has a rebuttal to the critics.
“I’ve enjoyed my family life so much in the past I wanna do it again,” he shrugs. “People who have something against that probably say ‘Well, it’s not very fair because you’re going to die and leave your little girl with no father.’ But she’ll have her mother, and she’ll have a memory of a doting father.” He puts great emphasis on the word ‘doting’.
Peter Stringfellow can be a difficult man to read. For one thing, there are those meandering anecdotes. And while his answers certainly aren’t rehearsed, his 50 years in showbiz mean he knows how to talk to journalists like me and give the answers he thinks I want (he makes sure to frequently address me by name, and will often preface the anecdotes with “Here’s a story for you,” as if to make sure I get it down).
But when talking of his love for his new family, he seems completely sincere. He tells me we have to wrap the interview up because he’s cooking a dinner for his wife and some friends later. These days, it seems, Peter Stringfellow is more domestic god than love god.
Many of the questions I’d wanted to ask – has he really, as he’s claimed in the past, slept with 2,000 women? Why oh why the obsession with leopard-skin? – are sadly left unanswered. But there’s time for just one more: would he ever retire?
“The answer to that one, Adam, is retire from what? To what?” he says. “In a way I am retired.”
He explains how he used to spend every night in one of his clubs: Friday in London, to New York by Concorde, then the next week Miami, the next day Beverly Hills. His life now is comparatively sedate: he splits his time between London and his property in Mallorca.
“I would be a lot richer today had I not enjoyed my business so much,” he says. “Richard Branson jumps out of an aeroplane every now and again, but basically he’s a businessman. Me? No. I wanna be onstage with these stars, I wanna meet up with them, I wanna be Peter Stringfellow.”
And having spent an afternoon in his company, I think I wanna be Peter Stringfellow too. I may disapprove of his line of work, but the man himself is friendly, hungry for success even at 74, and a total hoot to talk to. And when I think about his life nowadays, with his wife and child and his millions in the bank, it’s all rather appealing.
So as I walk back out into Soho, I run my fingers through my imaginary mullet, and unbutton my shirt just a little bit further than I had before.
