PETER STRINGFELLOW, the night club entrepreneur who rose from humble beginnings to host the A-list, millionaires, and royalty at his London establishments, has died of cancer, aged 77, it was announced Thursday.
Stringfellow, who was brought up in a hardscrabble steel town in northern England, began his life as an impressario after he was briefly imprisoned for a scam involving fake carpets.
He founded the Black Cat club – held on Friday nights in a church hall in his local town of Sheffield, which he rented for about £30 a time.
He famously booked the Beatles for £85, as well as the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. By his mid-twenties he had made it to London and founded the King Mojo club, where talents including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, and Elton John all played.
He moved on to Leeds where he opened Cinderella’s nightclub, followed shortly by Rockefeller’s next door, and cemented his reputation as a northern club mogul with the opening of the Millionaire’s Club in Manchester.
Inevitably he soon made the move to the capital, coming to nationwide prominence with the opening of Stringfellows in London’s Covent Garden in 1980. In those halcyon days Stringfellows was not a gentlemen’s club but rather a favorite haunt of showbiz types and many a starlet and football player were snapped falling out of its famous doors. Three years later he took over the defunct cabaret venue The Talk of the Town and turned it into The Hippodrome – which he dubbed as “The World’s Greatest Disco”. Stringfellow – now nicknamed “The King of Clubs”, – went on to open clubs in Paris, New York, Miami and Beverly Hills – the last being a huge disappointment. It opened in 1990, lasted less than a year and cost Stringellow at least £4m in losses.
But as the nightclub business began to fade in the 1990s he Stringfellow pivoted to turn his clubs into high class strip joints, and his London location later became notorious for its “Cabaret of Angels” with lap dancing table-side, which operated three days a week.
The venue’s website describes itself as “the most famous gentleman’s club in the world” and “not a private club but a club for private people.”
Stringfellow leaves behind his 27-year-old wife Bella Wright, and his four children Rosabella, Angelo, Scott and Karen.
He was also a grandfather to Taylor, Jamie, Thomas and Isabelle.
RIP Peter!
