by Rick Stein
PART THREE
Early Days
I
Back in London I set to work to make my fortune running a mobile disco. I advertised The Purple Tiger in the pages of a new magazine just arrived on the streets called Time Out. I was copying other, more successful, mobile discos which had better equipment and better transport. The Twilight of the Gods was one, The Mushroom another (well, you couldn’t call it The Magic Mushroom). I got my driving licence back (it had been taken away – quite rightly – after the accident in which I had nearly killed Jill), so I sold the old Commer and bought a blue Volkswagen van. I asked a friend to paint some purple tigers on it. Cecil was a young man of peaceful demeanour. He had long curly hair, was a bit plump and wore his bell-bottom jeans and a tank top with sartorial elegance. His jacket, too, was of a tight cut and shape which said art school. We used to meet at the King’s Head in Crouch End to discuss tigers. Cecil was very keen on real ale and introduced me to the world of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. The King’s Head had Courage Best Bitter and Directors’ Ale. I was rather hoping for fierce William Blake sort of tigers, in purple hues to give the impression of some acid vision of terrible creatures with ‘burning bright’ scary eyes. Cecil painted just one tiger, in his own image.
The tiger on the van was purple, yes, and standing among green jungle leaves, but he looked rather little and had the severity of a dog waiting to go on a walk. Cecil also did a purple tiger for the disco console and the speakers. I still have the speaker covers: two tigers, one with distinctly chubby cheeks and an expression of attempted severity, the other looking slightly frightened.
‘Well, it’s supposed to be sort of a bit druggy.’
‘I don’t like drugs.’
‘Nor do I actually.’
‘I thought they should be nice tigers, maybe the sort who’d like a pint or two of Courage Best.’
‘Yeah, OK.’
The Purple Tiger roared in many a venue in London: the staff restaurant of John Lewis, a pub in Hampstead, a police section house off Baker Street. I built the whole disco in Janey and Shaun’s cellar – the light boxes, the speakers, the disco console. I made a bubble machine from an old turntable motor and a hairdryer. I bought photo-slide changers and had a box of 35mm transparencies of shots of Trevone Beach at sunset, the old graves in Padstow cemetery surrounded by greenery, some nudes from a copy of Playboy, pieces of green, yellow, red and blue gel made to look like a Patrick Heron abstract. I’d project these on to the walls. Jill painted a double sheet with a girl kneeling in front of a forest, all in fluorescent paint which would shine under ultraviolet. I had two strobes which I would go mad with at the end of long pieces like the Allman Brothers’ ‘Jessica’. At the time, quadraphonic recordings were the latest technology; a four-channel hi-fi system. There weren’t many quadraphonic records around but I had two: Santana’s Caravanserai and Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. I bought a special quadraphonic converter and sat in the cellar with a four-way amplifier and couldn’t actually tell the difference. The music I played was eclectic to say the least. As DJ I didn’t say much, just kept it rolling along. I thought I absolutely knew what would get people going. I cringe now to remember some of the Top 20 hits I put on – ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by Middle of the Road, any of the Gary Glitter hits, ‘In the Summertime’ by Mungo Jerry, ‘Band of Gold’ by Freda Payne (the gays were very keen on that).
But I had standards, though they seem a bit meaningless now. I wouldn’t play any of The Osmonds and I couldn’t stand Chuck Berry’s ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ though I would play anything else by him. The trick was to build a dancing audience by playing a sequence of songs which would get them up and dancing – more and more of them – then climax with a couple of really-throwing-it-around tracks, then kill it with a couple of quiet ones, then go at it again. Towards the end, given that by then a lot of people were really pissed, I could slip in the stuff I really wanted to play – the sort of thing that I felt would single me out from all the other discos, tracks like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘L. A. Woman’.
Here’s the sort of sequence I would play. Actually, it’s the real thing from a disco in a bakery in South Parade in Oxford which I recorded on a cassette tape.
‘Jig-A-Jig’
‘Sex Machine’
‘Brown Sugar’
‘Ride A White Swan’
‘I Hear You Knocking’
‘When I’m Dead And Gone’
‘Jessica’
‘Just My Imagination’
‘Nothing Rhymed’
‘Spirit in the Sky’
‘Strange Kind of Woman’
‘Satisfaction’
‘L.A. Woman’
I booked some Cornish village halls for the summer – St Merryn, Port Isaac, Crackington Haven, Padstow, Crantock. I hired rooms in pubs: the room above The Swan in Wadebridge, a similar one in the King’s Arms in Lostwithiel. I built a second disco and bought a second van and took on an American student, Chris Darkins, to run it. I kept up the advertising in London.
Jill and I would start at seven, playing stuff for teenagers like ‘School’s Out’ by Alice Cooper and ‘Hot Love’ by T. Rex. Towards pub closing time at 11 the hall would fill up as the Farmers Arms emptied and by midnight it would be heaving, with condensation running down the windows. We’d take about £250 a night. We sold soft drinks and crisps bought from the cash and carry in St Austell. The hall cost £10 to hire, so we were doing well. None of the other venues were anything like as good earners as St Merryn. I always did the nights there and, if there was nothing else on, Jill would take the money at the door, but if we had a double booking she would go off with Chris to other venues. They complained about the quality of the second unit equipment because I was too mean to buy some proper stuff. Well, maybe not mean. I had a clear idea of profit and loss and always kept little notes of what things cost, but I also suffered from a failure to see the difference between cost and value.
And so I came to buy a nightclub in Padstow.
II
The summer of 1973 had come to an end, the holiday visitors had left and the revenue from the discos had plummeted. Chris had gone back to college in Portland. When I heard that the White House Club in Padstow was up for sale I thought: here’s a home, a den almost, for The Purple Tiger.
The owner, Terry Johnson, had appeared in Padstow a year or two earlier. He had made a lot of money buying and selling meat in London’s Smithfield market and had decided to put some of it into doing up a rather sleepy little supper club called The Puffin Club. The property was owned by Brad Trethewy who had previously used it as a furniture store. It had been constructed as a granary by a friend of the man who built the Metropole Hotel on the hill above. Known then as the Great Southern Hotel, this had been designed as a railway hotel for the Southern Railway from Waterloo to Plymouth. The part of the track which runs from Padstow through Wadebridge and on to Bodmin is now called the Camel trail. The Puffin Club attracted the sort of people that I found hard to take in those days, the sort of people who like to dance to ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’. But Brad, who with his mutton-chop sideburns looked like a slightly dodgy sea captain and was locally known as Lord Puffin, was a shrewd operator. He knew his audience and he spent very little money on his club.
Terry converted the Puffin Club into what he billed as the most luxurious club outside London’s West End and renamed it The White House Club. It had swirly purple carpets and purple faux leather high banquette seating. There was a white baby grand piano and a small dance floor with aluminium chains hanging down from the roof. The bar was deep blue and long and backed with mirrors. It was the sort of place you wouldn’t dream of entering without a tight, double-breasted suit with flares and a shirt so stretched across your chest that your nipples stuck out. The White House Club was singularly out of place in the then prosaic fishing port of Padstow, a world of rusty chains and lobster pots and the salt smell of fish bait. I’m fond of saying it was
a bit like finding an opera house in the Peruvian rain forest city of Iquitos. It was Terry Johnson’s dream, like the dream of Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog’s film. On the top floor, Terry had built a steak bar with an open kitchen and a view over the Camel Estuary. He booked acts from London. On a radio programme recently I met Dave Stewart who reminded me of how he had been booked to appear with Annie Lennox in the White House Club in the early seventies. They’d played for a couple of hours with no one interested and finally had been told to pack up. He said Annie had cried all the way back to London. He assumed that I owned it then, but it was TJ. Terry was an amateur heavyweight boxer, very handsome, dark and Italian-looking. He was tall and broad and very fit. He was charming and funny but there was also a slight air of danger about him, like a sort of Medici prince; everyone was a little scared of him, not least me and my friend Johnny Walter. Johnny and I had decided to buy the club jointly. Our negotiations with Terry for the purchase price were pathetic. We tried to get it a bit cheaper than the £65,000 we eventually paid for it, but we were never in with a chance.
Johnny and I started negotiations in early January and by May we had the keys. Johnny put up two-thirds of the money, £38,000. I put in £19,000, and the final £8,000 we borrowed from Terry Johnson. Much of my share came from a sum I had inherited from great-uncle Otto, who had lived in Dusseldorf. I never met great-uncle Otto and didn’t know of his existence until he died and left me about £12,000. I feel forever grateful to him because a bit of capital in life is a great thing. The rest of my share came from Jill’s compensation for our accident, henceforth called her head money. The balance was put up by my mother.
I never for one minute tried to consider the reality of what it would be like running a club. All I wanted to do was get it open. I pressurised everyone to make it happen quickly – my solicitors, Johnny’s solicitors – and I gave in all too readily to Terry. The fact is I couldn’t wait to take it over. The country was going through a low time. The Conservative government under Edward Heath had introduced a three-day working week to conserve dwindling coal stocks during the miners’ strike of 1973. In my little world that meant the editor of the Western Morning News, who had held out the promise that he would give me work as a sub-editor, wrote and told me the job was no more. It was then a simple decision for me: I wouldn’t become a journalist after all. I’d become a nightclub owner.
I still have nightmares about opening the club. The almost crippling sense of claustrophobia when you realise that you’re stuck. No more trips to Greece, no more ‘What shall I do with my life’, no more ‘Let’s drive off somewhere nice’. You’re stuck. You haven’t got anything like the staff you need, and the ones you’ve got are terrible because you’ve no idea what to look for. You become overtired and as you do you get more demoralised. All these strange people, most of whom you’ve never met before, checking you out, especially the ones from the old Puffin Club, the members of the chamber of commerce, the Freemasons, the happily-married couples who like to go out on a Saturday night and dance cheek-to-cheek and drink Double Diamond and Babycham, who wear Burton suits with striped polyester shirts and Dorothy Perkins dresses. Even the customers you know have become strangers to you because you’re so convinced it’s all terrible. And all the time you’re asking the question: Why? Why didn’t you see this coming? How could you have been so stupid? Why ever did you think it was so like a New York club, though you’d never been to one, and why did you not see the long, green abstract fibreglass fish hung on the wall above the longest run of purple banquettes was not fabulous modern art but just a piece of fibreglass?
When The Purple Tiger was at its height, I’d had the idea of running another type of event which I was going to call The Peace Machine. I would hire a hall or pitch a tent and invite people to enjoy a serene experience. I would play soothing music while projecting calming scenes all around and the sound – naturally – would be quadraphonic. I had thought of the club as being the sort of place where I could do this. It would become a very special venue in the south west, do some great food, put on some great lunches.
The gap between my vision of the way it was going to be and the reality was frightening. Padstow was then a gritty fishing port and, like it or not, many of those fishermen were going to become my customers. They were a long way from the bright young things I wanted. They’d normally arrive when the pubs closed. They were already tanked up and often aggressive. We needed all the business we could take, as we were undercapitalised. Doubtless we were warned about this at the time but we didn’t understand why you needed money in the bank just to open. In fact we had no working capital at all and we soon realised that we’d have to let anybody and everybody into the club.
The rules for operating a licensed club are simple. You are required to admit only members – and their guests. The members have to go through a process of application, followed by acceptance or rejection, and this should not happen instantaneously at the club door. We regarded strict membership as not important. At either end of our bar we had poker machines which had a jackpot of a sufficiently large pay-out to make them legally for the use of bona fide club members only. We also skimped on the food. The rules stipulated that we had to supply our members with what was classed as ‘a substantial meal’ and that any drinking had to be ‘ancillary’ to the food. Our substantial meal was Batchelors ready meals. These were freeze-dried chicken curry or beef stroganoff mix, sold in the shops as Vesta. Every night one of us would go up to the kitchen on the middle floor and prepare a 24-pint pan of mix by adding water and heating, then a bigger pan of boiled rice, then send both down on a rope-driven dumb waiter to be picked up near the bar. Small portions were then slapped on paper plates and handed out with plastic knives. Most people declined. Some actually ate the stuff, sitting on the steps of the bar.
Plenty of other clubs were very lax about observing the rules. What we didn’t take account of was the pubs in Padstow. In those days pubs officially stopped serving at 11 p.m. Most would then close their doors and draw the curtains over their small windows, and invite their favoured customers in for a cosy late evening’s drinking. This was called a ‘lock-in’, an illegal but not usually penalised activity which went on everywhere. Thus, the publicans did not relish a club on their doorstep, let alone a club open till 1 a.m. with music and dancing and pretty girls. Many a lock-in customer came to take a look at us, and business in the London Inn, the Harbour, the Golden Lion and Shipwrights took a downturn.
None of us had any idea that we were causing this sort of trouble. We had plenty of our own to deal with anyway – our policy of letting anyone in was already causing problems. We got over the opening. The Puffin Club lot left, never to return. We started to attract some young people, and renamed the club The Great Western. We had yellow headed paper with a brown, puffing, steam train at the top. I had seen a few hamburger restaurants – Browns in Brighton for example – decorated in brown and cream with potted palms everywhere, so we copied the colour since it approximated the original livery of the Great Western Railway which ran from Paddington to Penzance. We failed to notice that the original railway company that came to Padstow was, in fact, the Great Southern Railway, probably because their livery colours – green and cream – wouldn’t have looked so classy.
It wasn’t too long before The Great Western Club had been renamed locally The Wild Western Club. The slogan was that you didn’t sign in at The Great Western, you weighed in.
The fighting was mostly on a Saturday night. On the door we had a local called Richard Bate who was big and broad. Jill and I usually left him to sort out the fights but occasionally we wondered if he wasn’t actually causing more brawls than he was preventing.
There were two bars, and the smaller one was run by two very pretty girls from Manchester. Jill and Terri thought they were a couple of scrubbers who were robbing us blind. Johnny and I would not hear of such a thing. Johnny had married Jill’s best friend Terri in 1970.
Our main barman,
Tiggy Old, was as fast behind the bar as anyone I’d ever seen. You didn’t bother to enter every drink on the till, you added everything in your head. Or you did until you knew everyone was too pissed to remember, then you’d just think of a number and add a bit more on to cover yourself. The speed with which you delivered a round of drinks was staggering by today’s standards, but under-ringing was rife. No one drank much more than beer, cider, whisky and dry ginger, gin and tonic, vodka and orange, Bacardi and coke, or Babycham, so rounds were easily assembled. Almost all the men drank Double Diamond, a beer so sweet it would make Coca-Cola taste dry, or Whitbread Tankard, a so-called beer which these days would probably fail to satisfy the Trade Descriptions Act. Johnny and I were very keen on real ale and usually had a barrel of Bass or Devenish Wessex in the cellar behind the bar. We took the business of cellaring the real ale seriously, but it was not chilled and when the club was heaving it became hot and the beers became volatile, so much so that the walls and ceiling were splattered with the hops which would blow through the spill hole on the top of the barrels. Once a senior member of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, came down to check us out. He was an older man with handlebar moustaches who looked like an ex-RAF officer, rather red-faced. He started shouting at me about how we shouldn’t be in their guide running such a rough place and selling good beer in a nightclub. I told him to fuck off but it didn’t make me feel any better about the club.