Strippers and stand-up comics in the early days of British alternative comedy

Anna Smith in her Vancouver hospital after the operation

Stripping and stand-up comedy have often gone hand-in-hand in London.

The Windmill Theatre was a famed training ground for post-War British comics and, in the 1980s, the original Comedy Store was above a strip club and was co-founded by strip club owner Don Ward.

The So It Goes blog’s occasional Canadian comedy correspondent Anna Smith is, I’m glad to say, recovering well from her St Valentine’s Day operation in Vancouver to get a Dacron patch sewn onto her aorta. She tells me:

“My scar is looking less like one made by an attack with a ravioli cutting wheel and more like I’ve been flayed between the breasts by an accurate whip enthusiast.”

Anna was around in the early days of British Alternative Comedy in the early 1980s. She knew both the strip club and comedy club worlds. She tells me:

“Me trying to be funny in the UK  started in about 1981 and ended in about 1986… interspersed with exotic comedy/dance stints in Belgium, France, Finland and Australia.

“By the time I arrived in London, I had already worked as a striptease artist in Canada for about five years at places ranging from the infamous Penthouse Club in Vancouver to Newfoundland. I was the first person to perform in Newfoundland following a period of ‘prohibition of erotic dance’ that had lasted twenty years. Needless to say I was very popular in St. John’s for so doing – I was costumed somewhat like Scarlet O’Hara from Gone With The Wind and received a standing ovation from nine pregnant women at the bar.

“I was often called an exotic dancer; sometimes I felt more like an exhausted dancer. When I was working in London, I was running up and down stairs in Wardour Street and Old Compton Street and even strayed as far as Mayfair to dance at a ‘hostess club’ where, as far as I could tell from what was going on in the toilet, the poor beautiful young hostesses were making a lot of money vomiting for a living.

Poster for the Gargoyle and Nell Gwynne club

“The Nell Gwynne/Gargoyle was the best though, because  most of the other clubs only offered one ‘spot’ per night.  At the Gargoyle, the pay per show was less, but we did three shows and could leave our costumes there in the freezing gloomy dressing room. There was also theatre style seating and a real stage and a choice of backdrops (crescent moon and stars, English garden, Arabesque) and an appreciative audience of the trench coat type.”

Anna also frequented the original Comedy Store, which started life above the Gargoyle/Nell Gwynne club.

“I remember Joe, the elevator operator, and Peter Rosengard, the Guinness record holder for insurance sales (who started the Comedy Store with Don Ward), gliding about behind the scenes. Don and Peter had figured out there was a need for comedy entertainment but they really didn’t have a clue how or why it was happening… It was like a couple of kids playing with a chemistry set and all of a sudden the whole thing went BOOOF! But, even then, they still didn’t understand it and were still keeping a lot of bad acts and sacking talented people like myself (and Vivienne Soan).

“It could become confusing with half the people changing stage names on a regular basis. Sometimes we did that to find a name which would look more memorable on the playbill; at other times, we just did it to harass one another. I used to love irritating Sir Gideon Vein (aka Tony Green) by referring to Bob Boyton as ‘Bob Boynton’.

“Sir Gideon would rage: It’s Boyton! – Boyton, I tell you! but I would then call him Bob Boinkton.

“Tony Allen was frequently the compere for the Comedy Store Gong Show. He was a great compere. Some of the others would say something demeaning as an introduction – not very encouraging at all – but Tony Allen gave us a fair intro, reducing the chance that the drunken audience would hurl their shoes at us.

In the 1980s, Anna remembers Tony Green as Sir Gideon Vein

“He also encouraged me personally and gave me practical suggestions about how to improve my act. When I recently ordered his book Attitude – The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy because I wanted to read about Sir Gideon Vein , Ian Hinchliffe and others, I was shocked to find that he had written a sentence about me in it. I’m in the index as Annie Smith, somewhere after Richard Pryor. What an honour that he remembered me – although it was in the context of comics removing their clothing.

“But so what…as you mentioned in a recent blog this WAS during the time of The Romans In Britain.

“One act I particularly remember was a great voluptuous Canadian dancer from Winnipeg, named Karen. Her shows were completely unique. She danced solely to classical music and wore long pastel gowns and hats which had her resembling a Georgian shepherdess – a stark contrast to the rest of the acts who were sheathed in skin-tight leather, ripped stockings, and other rough punky styles popular in the 1980s.

“Karen was a lovely person to work with. She told us she’d had to flee Canada because she had been a young school teacher in Winnipeg and some incriminating letters between herself and an amorous seventeen-year-old boy were discovered. In those days, seventeen-year-old boys were not permitted to have such thoughts about their busty young teachers. So Karen fled to London where she found immediate employment at the Nell Gwynn Club… and many new admirers.

“One was an older, moustached employee of British Telecom who was so besotted with Karen that he followed her to our weekly Sunday afternoon sherry parties on Royal College Street. The telecom man seemed out of place because everyone else there was a performer: Randolph the Remarkable, Sir Gideon Vein, John Hegley. Ben Elton and Peter Elliot (ape expert to the film industry).

“We would sit in a large circle on the floor of a friend’s bedroom drinking sherry and pass round an enormous spliff….and then decide what children’s games to play, Sardines was a favourite, as it was a four storey townhouse with plenty of hiding spots.

“I think  the man from British Telecom was having a rough time in his marriage and was soothed by sleeping with the insatiable Karen and playing rowdy children’s games with a horde of comedians sloshing around scantily-dressed young strippers… It was a delight beyond his previous imaginings.

“I don’t have any photographs of Karen or even know her real surname – Oh, the tragedy of using fake names! – but I would really like to locate her.

“It’s an irony I have no photos of her, because Karen was a highly skilled photographer who took excellent portraits of the dancers sitting in the dressing room of the Nell Gwynne/Gargoyle Club. This was a cavernous windowless room with four lengths of plumbing pipe rattling with empty coat hangers, from the days when there really were floor shows and spectacular shows. Tattered bits of old costumes used to flutter from the plumbing pipes and, on the floor of the closet in the corner of the room, lay a crumpled iridescent mermaid tail, dusty and abandoned….as if the mermaid had eloped decades ago and moved permanently to St Johns Wood.

“The odd thing is that this vast, chilly dressing room was for the exclusive use of four or five exotic dancers. We even had a ‘secret staircase’ to ascend and then, through a doorway, we could watch the acts performing at The Comedy Store. The comics had no dressing room. They just wandered back and forth in a narrow hallway beside the kitchen clutching scraps of paper, nervously talking to themselves and sometimes juggling things or trying on noses or wigs….

“The mysterious Karen was last seen in London, but has probably travelled widely since then. I know she took some great photos of me and the other dancers in that dressing room. I would love to see them, because they were works of art… and to add to my portfolio which is surprisingly sparse, considering I spent more than fifteen years on stage.

“I suppose I ought to contact Randolph the Remarkable as he was friends with her and I see he is still active, tango dancing and posing in photographs as The Little Mermaid.

“Sometimes I fear I will have to spend the second half of my life researching just exactly what I was doing for the first half.

Paul Raymond’s Revuebar: striptease, false teeth & Peter Stringfellow’s peas

(This was also published by Indian news site WSN)

Johnny DeLuxe reminiscing off Leicester Square last week

Different people’s lives, eh?

And the random, rambling, briefly intersecting nature of people’s lives.

Someone at Westminster Reference Library, just off Leicester Square in London, has a taste for the bizarre. They have occasional fascinating evening events on the strangest of subjects – Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley are coming up and, last week, they had a very strange, rambling event called Confessions of a Stage Manager with Johnny DeLuxe, organiser of an exhibition called 100 Punks, sometime member of various punk bands including Fist Fuck Deluxe and, more relevant to the Westminster Library gig, sometime stage manager at the Raymond Revuebar in Soho… although he only started in 1993, a little after its peak.

Paul Raymond started the Raymond Revuebar in 1958 in what was formerly the Doric Ballroom. It offered burlesque-style entertainment, including striptease. Eventually, by turning itself into a members only club it was able to evade the Lord Chamberlain’s Office‘s rules which barred naked female performers from visibly moving while on stage.

In 1980 Peter Richardson rented the Boulevard Theatre – part of the Revuebar property – for his Comic Strip club, putting on alternative comedy shows featuring Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Nigel Planer and Alexei Sayle. It ran until 1981 and later, in 1989, Eddie Izzard ran his stand-up venue, Raging Bull there. I never went to the Revuebar, but I have vague memories of being shown upstairs to the Raging Bull by a rather distracted and vague Eddie Izzard.

As for Johnny Deluxe, he arrived in 1993 and someone (I think maybe he himself) said that “Johnny DeLuxe has removed more sequined bras and knickers from hot lighting rigs than he has had dinners”. His memories of working at the Raymond Revuebar last week (when he got round to them after espousing the philosophy and art of punk) were interestingly non-linear:

“Can everybody remember Captain Scarlet?” he said at one point. “Do you remember how Captain Scarlet used to drive his SPV backwards? Well, the control board at the Raymond Revuebar was backwards to the stage. So you were looking at a very small black & white screen showing where the dancer was. You saw the cues visually, you listened to the cues and one day I was almost comatose watching a dance number for the thousandth time when I suddenly heard someone scream Fuck!

“If you hear someone shout Fuck! it usually means you have to do something very quickly and what had happened was… the front of the stage was about two feet from the front row of the audience and this man in the front row had coughed his guts up and both sets of his false teeth had ended up on stage between a girl’s feet. The poor girl was in mid-dance, heard a cough, looked down and saw a set of false teeth on the stage. What do you do?

“On another occasion, a stage hand blew his false teeth out and hit a girl on the side of her head. She was in the middle of an incredibly complex dance number.”

Soho’s Raymond Revuebar at its height

That type of exotic dance show – one of the Raymond Revuebar shows was alleged to have cost £300,000 – has ceased, to be mostly replaced by cheap table dancers and pole dancers pioneered in London, perhaps, by Stringfellow’s club.

Stringfellow’s opened in 1986 as a disco/nightclub but, in 1996, Peter Stringfellow introduced table dancing.

“Peter Stringfellow used to come into the Raymond Revuebar a lot and watch the shows,” said Johnny DeLuxe last week, “and we used to pea-shoot him. I used to love pea-shooting people. There was a raised stage at the Revuebar. On one side of it (to create effects) there was a CO2 pit and, on the other, a dry ice pit which had a curtain which you could peek through to monitor the audience. It also meant you could pea-shoot people in the audience if they were getting out of hand. Which used to be fun. I was a very good shot.

“Peter Stringfellow used to come in a lot and there was an awful lot of paranoia at that time. At first, Peter Stringfellow owned the Hippodrome and we didn’t see him as anything other than another Wow! There’s another part of beautiful Soho! like the Batcave, Vortex, the Roxy Club and all these bizarre clubs that we used to go to… All these punky, rocky, glamorous places that were available to us after hours, because we got off at 11.30 or 12.00 at night. A lot of us had a lot of fun at the Hippodrome where a lot of us had found a bizarre home at all those nights when they would give you free passes if you were a freaky kid.

“When Peter Stringfellow started coming in to the Raymond Revuebar, he had already been to America. We knew this idea of table dancing was coming in and so, when he came in, we used to pea-shoot him. It wasn’t Peter Stringfellow’s fault that the Revuebar closed, though.”

Paul Raymond was psychologically badly affected when his daughter Debbie died in 1992 from a heroin overdose.

The Revuebar name, leasehold and control of the theatre (but crucially, not the actual property itself) was bought by Gérard Simi in 1997. Paul Raymond, according to Johnny DeLuxe, immediately doubled the rent.  Gérard Simi turned the show into a more conventional striptease revue.

The Revuebar closed in 2004 and became a gay cabaret venue Too2Much. In 2006, it changed its name to the Soho Revue Bar for club nights and special events. That closed in 2009, but it re-opened in 2011 as The Box Soho, billed as ‘a theatre of varieties’,

In its obituary, the Guardian described Paul Raymond as “a self-confessed spiv who once sold nylons and hairnets from a stall and was part of a mind-reading act… He boasted that throughout his life he had never read an entire book… He remained shy and stammered in company… He had no interests apart from his cabin cruiser, his gold-plated Rolls Royce and drink… He was invited to Downing Street by Margaret Thatcher as an exemplary entrepreneur, but his social life tended to be confined to escorting strippers from other girlie clubs.”

In 1992, he became Britain’s richest man, with an estimated fortune of more than £1.5 billion. He owned around 400 properties in Soho including, it was said, the whole of Brewer Street. This was the same year his daughter Debbie died.

In 2004, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated his fortune at £600 million.

Paul Raymond spent his last years as a recluse, living in a penthouse next to the Ritz Hotel. He died in 2008 of respiratory failure at the age of 82.

So it goes.