What happens when William and Harry hit the town? One man spent a month trawling the nightclub world of the Turbo-Sloanes to find out
Please don’t call it a scene. Norman Mailer and Mikhail Baryshnikov ordering drinks while Jerry Hall and Debbie Harry hit the dance floor at Studio 54 – that’s a scene. Francis Bacon holding court over 100 sq ft of talent at the Colony Room – that’s a scene. Prince Harry lurching, glass-eyed, out of Boujis on a Wednesday morning? Prince William at Mahiki, jiving like an uncle at a wedding? Not so much.
A scene requires a motivation beyond the twin engines driving any night out – whether it’s at the Blue Orchid nightclub in Croydon or Annabel’s in Mayfair – of getting wasted and getting laid. It requires the possibility of genuine novelty. It requires the interesting people to turn up. It may be uncharitable to say so, but if a scene’s two torchbearers are Harry, who left one of Britain’s best schools with a B and a D at A-level, and William, whose most memorable sound bite is “C’mon, chaps, let’s drink the menu,” it is unlikely to be a scene worth recording for posterity.
They are not, it should be said, London’s biggest party animals. While some weeks it seems they are out every night, there are some months where they may only splurge once or twice (and, for the next three months, as he learns to fly with the RAF, William is on an alcohol ban). But, through the society pages of our evening newspapers and monthly magazines, the princes have, nevertheless, become a catalyst for London’s re-emergence as a posh boy’s playground.
Young women and men, who, like William and Harry, come from the right schools – the people we used to call Sloanes, who never liked to venture beyond the Barbour’s den of Chelsea – now find themselves on nights out in the West End. And the tabloid fodder, informed by their publicists that something might be going on down in southwest London, find themselves dancing with Old Etonians in darkly lit rooms.
This is all most irregular. But it can make for the most joyous night out. Imagine, please, the postmodern glory of sitting in the corner of Kitts nightclub in Sloane Square – a firm favourite with Kate Middleton – engaged with a bottle of vodka and good company, while, under the burnt-orange lights of the dance floor, the nu-rave band the Klaxons share the same drinking space as boys in loafers and the chap who used to play Spencer Moon in EastEnders.
What we are witnessing might not be the high point of Western culture, but it is a nightly statement of what London has become. The celebrities – for that is how William and Harry are now depicted – bring the press coverage, which brings the punters, who are spending more than ever. The capital remains awash with money and, after hours, it shows. How else to explain the six people who, this Christmas, bought Movida nightclub’s £35,000 “Flawless” cocktail – a diamond-laced drink that cost more than the average British salary?
Money, though, only tells half the story.
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Blame the princes. Their love affair with nightclubs began in earnest in September 2003, when they held a private party at Purple in Chelsea: a joint celebration before Harry started his gap year in Australia and a birthday party for the princes’ friend Natalie Pinkham. S J Dent – who was then a promoter, but now owns a sports-memorabilia business – organised the evening. It was the start of a close relationship.
“It was a slick operation back then,” says Dent. “I met their security guys for coffee before the event, and we talked about how to get the boys in and out without fuss. Their security would call ahead so we could be ready, then the Range Rovers turned up. I grabbed Harry and William and took them in the back door.
“We got them a table in the corner, where they were out of the way. By the end of the night, the boys had had a few beers – they were pissed – but nobody papped them coming out. After that party, I ended up taking them out quite a lot. We’d go to Boujis and Mamalanji’s, places like that, and I would never tell anyone we were coming down. So we had these great parties, and hardly anyone knew we were there.
“I’ve got no contact with them now, but I don’t know what’s happened over the past year and a half. Their private lives are all over the papers. They’re seen drunk in public. I imagine that a lot of that’s to do with them making more decisions for themselves. When I knew them, they still seemed very young. Now, they’ve grown up.”
Grown-up William and Harry certainly seem to have acquired a taste for the high life, although why they wish to sate themselves at nightclubs is puzzling. Royals have always known how to have a good time. It is said that the Queen used to have memorable parties at Sandringham. But the princes do not choose to enjoy themselves behind closed doors. Why? One member of their social group suggests that, despite both being in relationships, the boys continue to “love the attention” they receive from women in the right sort of nightclub. Another says they “just want to be like everyone else”.
Either way, for the party to continue, the princes need to be able to trust those around them. For that reason, they have maintained a trustworthy inner circle – including Holly and Sam Branson, Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe and the so-called “court jester”, Guy Pelly – whose discretion they know they can rely on. And they visit the same clubs again and again.
Boujis, as anyone who has read a tabloid in the past 18 months will know, is one. Mahiki is the most famous, but over the past few months the princes have also been spotted at establishment favourites like Tramp and Annabel’s; the two Swallow Street bolt holes Volstead and Cuckoo; and, oddest of all, the footballers’ favourite, Embassy. But, for William and Harry, Boujis remains the mothership. When things go well in their lives, they come to this aesthetically unremarkable hole in the ground outside South Kensington Tube station and celebrate. When things go badly, likewise. Tuesday nights at Boujis are a favourite – not just with the royals, but with the society crowd who party with them.
To enter on a Tuesday night, one must know someone or be pretty. On one icy Tuesday evening in December, a string of boys – dressed in the Euro-Sloane uniform of washed-out jeans, loafers, Gucci belts and double-cuffed shirts – and girls, uniforms hidden beneath coats, wait to be admitted. I know someone who has the twin benefits of knowing someone and being pretty, so we don’t bother with the queue.
You can’t sit down. At 11.30pm, half the seats in the club are empty. But to sit down, you’d need to have already arranged a table and agreed to a minimum spend of around £500 per table -depending on where you are in the club. For that kind of money, I’m prepared to be footsore.
By midnight, the place is full. There has been a minor kerfuffle upstairs as the president of the Turks and Caicos Islands brings his own security people inside. Brendan Cole, the oleaginous hoofer from Strictly Come Dancing, has also arrived, blonde in tow. Other than that, it’s a regulation Boujis Tuesday: public school meets minor European aristocracy meets polyglot City boy. There is an above-average incidence of willowy blondes in minidresses.
At half-past midnight, I meet a trader. He appears to have come on his own. He’s in his early thirties. By the size of his watch and the opacity of his American Express credit card, I imagine he made more money this year than most British people will earn in a decade. What would possess someone to come here on their own? “Well, I treat this place more like a bar than a nightclub,” he says. “I don’t dance.” He was meant to be meeting someone who hasn’t turned up. Nevertheless, I see this same lost soul cruising the dance floor 45 minutes later, alone.
The loos get busy. Boujis operates a zero-tolerance policy on drugs, but, as at most London clubs, cocaine finds its way through the door. Indeed, late last year, the Daily Mail went to the trouble of swabbing the bathrooms at all the clubs favoured by the young royals, including Boujis and Mahiki, and found what everyone already knew: that young people on a night out take drugs.Such is the brazenness of cocaine use in clubs across London that, on another early morning at Kitts, I was approached by a member of the defeated X Factor girl band Hope – a garden-variety Z-lister if ever there was one – asking if I had “any coke”, only minutes after I told her I was a journalist for The Sunday Times.
At the tables in Boujis, meanwhile, groups converge round their communal bottles of vodka like families round a television while, in front of them, the minidresses dance with the Gucci belts. There is some kissing. Later on, there will be some your-place-or-mine negotiating. But mostly there is, despite (and because of) the expense, extravagant consumption of vodka and champagne. Most of those knocking back spirits will be at work at 9am the following morning.
Luke Blackhall, the journalist who, through his gossip column in thelondonpaper, has done as much as any other to highlight the royals’ nocturnal predilections, explains why Tuesday has come to be the most popular night. “It’s the old thing of growing your fingernails to show you don’t do manual labour,” he says. “There is a kind of showing-off involved in going out really hard on a Tuesday night.”
Matt Hermer, who runs the Ignite Group, which owns Boujis, has a different theory. “I like to think we’re a home from home,” he says. “We haven’t become popular on the back of royal patronage – we were enormously successful before that, and continue to be with our regular members. Of course, the PR doesn’t hurt.”
Hermer seems sincere when he says he does his utmost to protect the young royals from the paparazzi. But when things are out of his control – “The paparazzi know where the front and back entrances are, and there’s only so much you can do” – he can’t get too dispirited.
Hermer’s problem is that his most famous clients are worth too much to the picture agencies. Darryn Lyons, the founder of Big Pictures who styles himself “Mr Paparazzi”, says that William and Harry’s frequent benders have made a typical nightclub exit shot fairly low value – a few hundred quid, depending upon what kind of news day it is. But an exclusive picture of them, or their girlfriends, doing something interesting – brawling, or leaving with a new partner, or showing off an engagement ring – can shift their value into five figures. Kate Middleton is apparently the most prized target, although, says Lyons, “they’re all definitely A-list”.
No wonder the paparazzi crowd outside Mahiki, on Mayfair’s Dover Street – a club that attracts a similar crowd to Boujis but a different attitude. An underground boîte with a South Sea Island theme owned by Piers Adam (who had the good sense to invite Guy Pelly to be his “marketing manager”, ensuring the patronage of the princes), Mahiki is studiedly uncool. The music is retro. The boys dress in Abercrombie & Fitch. And, apart from the odd celebrity chavette – Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding has been known to test her liver here – the girls don’t try too hard, either. The Wags and the orange lollipops in Dolce & Gabbana prefer Chinawhite’s.
One can see why the princes like Mahiki. They can dance to songs they know, surrounded by people who don’t bother them, in clothes in which they feel comfortable. Prince William once paid an £11,000 bar bill here, although God knows how he managed it. Presumably he and his pals ordered rubies as bar snacks.
The club doesn’t feel like an £11,000 night out. It feels like an upmarket student union, and is similarly bacchanalian. The princes, though, don’t always go wild. The last time William was in the club, just before Christmas, he spent the evening requesting songs from the DJ, chatting to all-comers on the dance floor, while his security detail tried to look unassuming in casual shirts.
On Thursday nights, the “big Sloane night” according to Adam, the man to know is Henry Conway, 25, a flamboyant Old Harrovian promoter and fashion journalist with a seemingly indefatigable wardrobe. Conway organises the guest list. He never has any problem filling the joint. And he argues that, while the princes are a good marketing tool for Mahiki, they’re not the key to the club’s success.
“Mahiki aims to be egalitarian,” says Conway. “If you can get on with anyone, no matter what walk of life you come from, you’re welcome.” Well, yes, to a point. But Mahiki excludes on the grounds of money. The drinks bills can be ruinous. The princes’ favourite tipple, the Treasure Chest – half a bottle of vodka, a bottle of champagne, fruit, ice, and eight straws – comes in at £112.50 including service. “It’s true, money is the big equalising factor. It’s not about where you went to school,” says Conway. “And that’s happening everywhere. As a society, we’re becoming more meritocratic. Just look at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, which is definitely not as harsh as it used to be on the rules of who can come. Money speaks.”
By money, Conway generally means male money. Girls rarely pay, although one does now see groups of girls splitting bills. But there are still strings of good-looking, well-connected twentysomething women with successful careers who check their egalitarian principles with their coats at the door. I met one such woman in Mahiki: a 25-year-old blonde with yards of leg on show. In the day she worked in operations at a City bank. I asked whether she paid when she went out. “Obviously not,” she replied.
By money, he also means Mayfair money. It is one of the unspoken truths about Mahiki that while the Sloanes may have found their feet again, they are not the ones signing the largest bills at the end of the night. That honour often goes to the boys who make their way down from the hedge funds and private banks who have moved west, to Mayfair, from the City. The same might be said for Boujis, whose situation in the residential heart of the European banking enclave has buoyed Ignite’s coffers to the extent that last year it planned to turn over £25m.
“Every club wants the cool, interesting people in there,” says Luke Blackhall. “But what they need is someone to pay the enormous leases one has to clear in London. The people that fund the whole thing are the people who spend five or ten grand in a night. For that you need the bankers, you need the Arabs, you need the Russians.”
As Peter York, whose book Cooler, Faster, More Expensive: The Return of the Sloane Ranger charts the odd resurgence of the monied west Londoner, explains, it was ever thus: “At Annabel’s in its prime, royal people left by the same door as the Middle Easterners. That was because Mark [Birley] had to get the Middle Easterners in there to pay the rent. I don’t imagine the economics of it have changed very much.”
For the non-royals, non-hedgefunders, non-Arabs, non-Russians, and non-footballers – ie, for the averagely wealthy – the economics of a night out are only as limiting as one lets them be. A 26-year-old head-hunter explains: “I’ve got a good job, but I’m not loaded. I’m single, and I do like going out, and I want to go out where there are good-looking girls… I used to go out Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, but now it’s mostly just the weekends.
“A couple of us will get a table and split the cost. If you’re going to a club, it’s going to cost you £10 for a vodka and tonic anyway, so you might as well accept that you’re going to spend £200 on a night, and deal with it. If you’ve got a table, you can have a great night – you can drink, you can dance, pass out in the corner, whatever.
“I’m not interested in getting a table at somewhere like Chinawhite’s. That’s just a place where people spend huge amounts of money so that girls will sit on their lap. I’m also not in the Jacobi [Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe] clan. I don’t have that kind of money to throw around. Some of those boys spend thousands on a night out. That’s a different league.
“When it comes to girls, yes, we want to be out where there are good-looking people. But there’s nothing more annoying than a girl who doesn’t pay. It happens the whole time. When I’m out with my close girlfriends, they pay. It pisses me off when I know that a girl isn’t paying but she can afford it – when I know she’s a trustafarian or has a good job. If that happens, I’ll get on the phone to them the next day and say, ‘All right, next time, don’t come out with me.’ ”
Duncan Stirling and Charlie Gilkes, the amiable double act who, at 26 and 23, own and run Kitts in Sloane Square, need to have a keen handle on the economics. As Christmas approached they knew that for every headline-grabbing celebrity party they threw, they needed to throw a corporate bash for JP Morgan and their ilk. Because, gnawing at the back of their minds was the £100,000 yearly rental they need to pay on the premises.
Stirling recognises the princes as “a walking billboard for nightclubs”, but is not sure Kitts needs them. “Of course, they’re more than welcome to come down, but we’re doing really well,” says Stirling. “Kate [Middleton] comes down, largely unnoticed, and blends in, as do many other people. We had a great night recently where we had Freddie Ljungberg and Orlando Bloom sandwiched between a minor royal and some City people, and I thought, ‘We’ve got a pretty cool club here.’ Do we really need a couple of boys who dress like young farmers?”
Gilkes and Stirling and Conway are what York terms Turbo-Sloanes: young, entrepreneurial men from establishment backgrounds. Conway makes his money by striking a deal with the nightclub – a promoter’s fee will often be most of the door money plus a percentage of the bar take, although Conway will not disclose his exact arrangement – while the nightclub owners bypass the promoters by doing the job themselves.
While promoting, or indeed running, a nightclub seems to have become a perfectly acceptable mode of employment for the new breed of old-money entrepreneurs, the unavoidable whiff of the underworld remains. Dent, the promoter-turned-memorabilia expert, remembers that, in his role as a promoter, he frequently came across “creatures of the night”.
“The thing was, the money involved was so massive,” he says. “A good promoter will always try to get 100% of the door money. But if you’re talking about 200 or 300 people coming into a West End club at £20 a time, the club realises that there is a huge sum of cash they would like to get their hands on. The deals start to change. To incentivise promoters, maybe they’d offer us 50% of the door and a percentage of the bar.
“The trouble is, the bar take is worked out by something called the Z reading [from the till], and there are any number of ways that can be fiddled. Some of the nightclub owners I dealt with were not the most honest of people. What ended up happening was the promoter would not only have someone on the door to guard the door money, there would also be someone by the till to check everything was okay.”
The presence of well-spoken young men at the door of nightclubs provides, among other things, reassurance for the well-bred punter that the place is safe – that while underworld elements may have seeped into other establishments, this one might as well be the enclosure at Henley. “We are our target customer. We know what they want. They like seeing us in the club,” Gilkes says.
Another Old Etonian Turbo, Ben Elliot, the 31-year-old who founded the concierge service Quintessentially, knows there is a fortune to be made servicing London’s new money. Mark Wakefield, whose job is to gain Quintessentially members access to desirable nightclubs, and who spends six nights a week out on the town, says the demand is more intense than ever.
“It’s very tricky,” he says. “If you’re a guy who’s just randomly looking for a night out, and you’ve heard of this Boujis place, and you want to go, you’d never get in. My job is basically to make sure I know all the doormen, and keep up good relations with them, so that one of our members can get in, hassle-free, when they want to.”
If Wakefield’s job doesn’t sound like a real job to you, you’re in the majority. The London club environment is so far removed from most people’s lives that explaining it is almost insulting. On what planet does paying someone to give you access to a bar where you will spend hundreds of pounds on a Tuesday evening make sense? But to certain strata of people in London, this life, and this nightlife, is the norm.
“I remember thinking one day that it was all bullshit,” recalls Dent. “When you’re out five nights a week you live in a parallel universe. You lose touch with your old friends, your real friends. You find yourself walking through nightclubs high-fiving people who haven’t known your surname for years. And you realise you don’t know theirs either.”
He is not the only dissident. By far the most memorable conversation I had in my month of frequenting London’s new establishment nightclubs was with two men from the Niger Delta, employed as “cloakroom assistants”. After we had discussed how they would redistribute Nigeria’s oil wealth, and whether the kidnapping of Western oil workers was a legitimate way to bring change, I asked them what they thought of the men whose hands they washed. They smiled and made a very West African sound – somewhere between a sucking of teeth and a cluck – to signal, if playfully, their displeasure.
This is not a scene, then, but a symptom.
But of what? Our residual post-Diana affection for the young princes, and our continued interest in their rather humdrum personal lives, for one. Perhaps, also, the nightclub landscape is a symptom of a meritocratic shift – proof that we have become, if not classless, then less class-bound. It is certainly proof that “money speaks”. But, largely, it’s a symptom of our continued ability to create labyrinthine mating rituals for ourselves. Because, as Stirling says, the selling point of nightclubs is not celebrity or friendship or exclusivity, but, “when it comes down to it – it’s sex”.