The Hollywood Arms, an airy pseudo-pub, located just off the Fulham Road and ornamented with crushed velvet cushions and job-lot chandeliers, seems a humdrum location to meet a nightlife impresario whose world collided with some of Britains most notorious figures. But the Chelsea that Howard Spooner knew was a very different place.
‘I’ve got very mixed memories,’ he says warily, sipping on an ice-cold sparkling water at £5.60 a bottle. ‘It was here I went from being a complete and utter nobody to a somebody in a very short period of time. I had about ten clubs, 20,000 people a week coming through the doors, lots of money rolling in, a lot of doormen working for me, a lot of muscle around me… mainly just to keep me alive.’
Howard, now a trim, handsome 50-something in a mauve corduroy jacket and long cashmere scarf, was the king of west London party life at the turn of the millennium: a Sloane Square Steve Rubell, a Peter Gatien with a standing order at Gieves & Hawkes.
His venues – among them Embargo, Public, the Leopard Lounge, Crazy Larry’s, the Hammersmith Palais and the Clapham Grand (which he still owns outright) – were part of a hyper-luxe, pre-credit crunch club landscape that brought disparate and dangerous characters together to pop bottles and toast themselves silly.
Although Howard has a digital footprint that reveals a chaotic life – lawsuits, public spats, quotes in a Bristol Cable investigation into organised crime, a Companies House page that warrants a Goodreads listing – only now is he telling his story properly. Recently, Howard offered his services as a source in Patrick Radden Keefe’s mega-selling London Falling, having worked for two years with a ghostwriting team on a memoir.
What makes Howard so fascinating, so appealing to writers, is that he was the lynchpin for a particular kind of milieu: ‘London noir’, a shadowy interzone where wastrels, knaves, wideboys, aristocrats and thugs brush shoulders under mirrorballs and on carpeted dancefloors. Even for Howard, the results of this world could sometimes be surreal.
‘I’ll always remember the VIP balcony at the Leopard Lounge,’ he recalls. ‘You’d see debutantes mixing with very nasty gangsters, sweet posh girls who were obsessed with my bouncers. You’d see washed-up pop stars doing drugs on the table – footballers, actors. It was a great leveller.’
Things really took off for Howard in the mid-90s, when he took over Embargo, a King’s Road nightspot. Howard was given a lesson in the dark arts of nightclub finance.
