- The Observer, Sunday 11 February 2001
Debbie is a rare breed of employee. She pays her boss £50 every time she goes to work, and considers it money well spent. As a table-dancer in one of London's biggest clubs, the 23-year-old can expect to pull in £300 a night. 'Maybe £500 if it's Christmas or it's bonus season in the City,' the part-time student says.
Her best pay came courtesy of the millennium bug. Legions of IT professionals, their wallets stuffed with huge bonuses from working overtime preparing for Y2K, partied like it was, well, 1999. Over the New Year period Debbie's club boasted more than 100 dancers each night, compared with 15 on a normal Tuesday or Wednesday.
But if the likes of Debbie are enjoying the good times - table dancing is currently in vogue, with even blue-blooded Tatler magazine holding its annual Christmas bash at Stringfellows last year - the industry itself is in turmoil. A raft of US table dancing firms are now coming to Britain, sparking an unseemly and damaging turf war in a business desperate to gain some credibility after a series of high-profile flops frightened off potential investors
The stakes are high. Five years ago there were only a handful of table-dancing clubs in the UK. Now there are around 300. Most of the big players believe there will be more than 1,000 clubs in five years. And no wonder. A big club, such as the For Your Eyes Only Club (FYEO) in London's Park Royal, makes an annual profit of £1 million on a turnover of around £3m.
Table dancing is already a £1 billion UK industry. But it could be much bigger. As local authorities become more relaxed about granting operators table dancing licences - under a catchily titled 'waiver of striptease rule'- the opportunities for clubs that can keep police forces on side and soothe the fears of nearby residents increase exponentially. The numbers being talked about are massive. As ever, the US provides the paradigm for the UK.
'The industry will grow as it takes in more of the general public,' said Glenn Nicie, director of operations at FYEO. 'In the US, a little town will have five or six clubs. In Manhattan alone there are 700 table dancing clubs.'
So bright does FYEO consider the future that it recently spent £2m on building another club in Mayfair, due to open next month. The company is also looking to open venues in Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle.
So if it's such a growth area, why did SFI group, the leisure company that owns bar brands such as the Slug & Lettuce, the Litten Tree and Bar Med, announce last month that it wanted to offload the FYEO chain, which has clubs in Bournemouth and Southampton as well as in London?
It seems to make no sense. After all, an ordinary pub would make around £250,000 a year - a fraction of the profit at a table dancing venue. And it's not hard to work out why. A punter in a boozer may spend £30 on drinks in an evening, compared with £150 in a dancing club.
The decision to spin off the clubs is all to do with focus, apparently. 'We talked with the SFI board long and hard, and decided we needed a separate management structure to look after the table-dancing side,' Nicie says, adding, without irony that you've 'got to stay close to it'.
Indeed. There have been several spectacular failures in recent years which have put potential investors off the industry at a time when it is desperate for cash to expand.
First, there was the collapse of the Ofex-listed Berkeley Playhouse, which sucked in nearly £3m from investors, thanks largely to enthusiastic support from City types who liked to unwind there after a hard day crunching numbers. It opened with the backing of former 'page three stunna' Jilly Johnson in October 1997. By the following March it had debts believed to be as much as £2m.
This was hardly surprising. The club was practically stillborn. The Playhouse hadn't reckoned with the might of Westminster council and opened before it had a licence. The result? Its girls were dancing with their clothes on half the time.
When the management persuaded the dancers to wear see-through underwear they were pounced on by undercover Westminster inspectors. Admittedly this was after the diligent inspectors had witnessed no less than eight different performances, obviously in an attempt to gauge accurately the true scale of the Playhouse's perversity.
But the contempt in which the Playhouse held its shareholders was nothing compared with how Cherokee Leisure treated its investors. The company, like Berkeley an Ofex-listed venue, went belly-up in October 1999 with debts of more than £1.5m. Several of the firm's clubs repeatedly fell foul of the licensing laws. One magistrate said it had a 'cavalier disregard for basic standards that would disgrace a corner shop takeaway, let alone a public limited company'.
Cherokee denied this, arguing that it had always acted in the interests of its shareholders. It's hard to see how. First, Cherokee had the insane idea of launching a 'babes on the green' caddy service, whereby nubile women would accompany golfers around the fairway, offering them advice on what to do with their mashie niblicks.
Then there was the inspired idea of riding the dotcom boom by investing what was purported to be £800,000 in a failed internet venture so that the clubs' delights could be viewed online.
Not content with all this, the company decided it would be a brilliant idea to buy a chain of fitness clubs. It approached Fitstop, launched by former Olympic athlete Sally Gunnell. Cherokee managing director David Peters argued that the deal made strategic sense. 'People who work out also go table dancing,' Peters told an incredulous City.
To top it all, his firm failed to understand the most important rules of the table-dancing industry: don't make your clubs exclusive and do pick the right locations. But Cherokee's were for members only. It opened clubs in such salubrious places as Watford. And even those in more prestigious locations such as London's Tower Bridge area had to close at 11pm, completely missing the after-pub trade.
Given the industry's seedy reputation and its apparent lack of fiduciary responsibility, big operators such as FYEO and Stringfellows are now grappling with a conundrum. By their estimates the industry is ripe for growth. They want to go to the City to raise the funds to expand. 'The way forward is the plc route,' says Peter Stringfellow, who wants to launch clubs in Birmingham, Manchester and Paris. 'The City has to take notice of this business. Soon there will be a number of plcs in this industry.'
But although Square Mile types may like the clubs for corporate hospitality, they no longer want to invest in them, having had their fingers burnt already. 'Wherever there are high profits there are risks,' Nicie concedes.
Which is why the remaining UK operators fear the US invasion. The big US and Canadian operators, some of whom have more than 20 years' experience at running table dancing clubs, are now looking to muscle in on this side of the Atlantic, where they foresee huge opportunities.
Already the bafflingly named Spearmint Rhino, which with 31 US clubs, 3,500 employees and a turnover of $60m, is one of the industry's biggest groups, has launched its first club in central London. The founder, former policeman John Gray, who started the business when he was 18, wants to open another 20 UK lap dancing venues.
Gray has been withering about his UK rivals. He claims to have girls working in several London clubs 'gathering information' and boasts that soon all the best dancers will be working for him. He argues that the UK industry lacks sophistication and that his clubs, which are heavy on the gold leaf and the velvet wallpaper, will add a 'more theatrical' element. Other US clubs will arrive soon, according to Stringfellow.
This invasion could hurt UK operators looking for cash to expand, and some in the British industry argue that it will hurt the image they have established. The US operators offer full nudity and are much more explicit than their UK counterparts. At the back of Spearmint Rhino's club in London, there are booths where clients pay for private 'full contact' lap dancing sessions.
An indignant Stringfellow says: 'This industry is in its infancy. It's got to be kept respectable. I'm concerned about the influx of new operators coming in ignoring all sorts of rules.'
Whatever happens, the explosion of clubs means there are likely to be thousands more Debbies in the future. When the For Your Eyes Only chain advertised for dancers for its new Mayfair club a few month ago, it received 180 replies. Nicie says: 'More than 120 of them had never danced before. I thought "Jesus, I'm going to have to set up a training school".'
Your private dancer
Table dancing, or to give it its proper title, 'table-side' dancing, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the UK, arriving in 1995. The world's first such club opened in Fort Lauderdale in the US in 1972.
Although table dancing has become fashionable in recent months, with top clubs reporting a huge rise in the number of women punters, the industry's core clientele remains the business community during the week and stag parties at weekends. One night last Christmas, a London club, Venus, cashed in £18,000 worth of dance vouchers handed out by grateful companies to their employees.
Although all major cities now boast venues the UK industry is still in its infancy and is highly fragmented. No company owns more than five clubs, although there are more than 300.
Most UK operators have learnt their trade in the US. Peter Stringfellow ran a club in New York for three years before launching in the UK. Other chains have invested huge amounts of time checking out venues in the leading US fleshpots of Atlanta, Florida, New York and Las Vegas. The vogue now is for more theatrical routines, based on those performed at the industry's most famous club, Paradise, in Las Vegas, which boasts a choreographed floor show.
'The main thing we've learnt from the US is not to mix the message. You don't do table dancing Monday to Wednesday, then lap-dancing Thursday to Friday and have a gay night on Saturday. You've got to focus,' one UK operator said.
Dancers will pay between £50 and £90 a night for the chance to perform, although the US operators now setting up here charge around £110.
In a bid to win over deeply sceptical local authorities and police forces, the clubs have imposed what they say are strict rules and regulations. Most ban any form of contact other than when a punter hands over a tip. Many are topless-only joints. There is also talk of establishing a certificate for clubs that meet local authorities' regulations. This, the clubs argue, would help speed up their expansion plans.
Nevertheless many people find the clubs unsavoury and see the industry as 'stuck in the Soho gutter'.
Fleshpots of Britain
Professional table dancing clubs in major UK cities
London 20
Birmingham 4
Edinburgh 4
Glasgow 3
Manchester 2
Cardiff 2
Bristol 1
