If you found yourself in the Phoenix bar, Soho, and were to decline paying the £300 cover charge, Lesley*, the manager, would spring into action: ‘Sorry, sir, but where do you think you are? What… what do you think this is? This is Soho. You’ve spent time with my girls. Now pay your fucking bill’.
£300 sounds a fair whack now, and it was even more in the 90s, when Soho was much seedier and still awash with characters you might today more regularly see on film screens. ‘It was the Wild West,’ Lesley tells me over pints on Dean Street. ‘We got away with, well, not murder or anything like that, but what we were doing might not have been totally legal, I suppose.’
Lesley ran the Phoenix with a ‘showman’, a second person who coordinated the more intimate goings-on with ‘the girls’, women who wore only bikinis and mountainous high heels. They were ‘all stunning, absolutely beautiful’. Naturally, Lesley married one of them – one who may or may not have arrived here illegally – to help her stay in the UK. ‘She went off to university in the end and now has a family. At the time she needed my help and I thought, “Sod it, why not?” I’m pleased I did it.’
The Phoenix wasn’t a strip club or a brothel: there was no groping and only a little gawping. Lesley and his ‘hostesses’ were there only to take money from desperate, fawning, foolish men.
Whomever stumbled into the Phoenix happened to find themselves in what was a relatively common Soho clip joint. Were tourists, businessmen or anyone caught unawares (usually drunk) to cross the threshold, they were there to be ‘clipped’. They were there, Lesley says, ‘to get taken for a fucking ride’.
‘Anybody would come in’, he says. ‘Lawyers. Priests. Communists. Footballers and film stars, even. We got a lot of Japanese tourists – they were a top target.
‘One afternoon an actor from that film Platoon came in. A fight broke out, some really hard men, and afterwards we found him sobbing in the corner. He’d run into a store cupboard and couldn’t get out.
‘The South African rugby team came in once, although they got away with paying £20 each. We didn’t fancy arguing. Other groups, like soldiers, often left without paying anything. Generally, we avoided getting stabbed as best we could.’
