Certainly, by many lights, it would be easy to look at the constituent parts of the generic London hipster and think that the composition of socioeconomic cults has now become somewhat prescriptive. What with his beard (tick), his Day-Glo tweed (tick), his tattoos (tick), backpack (tick) and his dog (tick), not only has the hipster become a cliché, but he’s also appropriated the idea of the boulevardier so much that he has almost completely denigrated the idea of the man about town. These days, the man about town is thought to be someone who simply dresses up in order to cause a stir, a popinjay driven by a need to clog up people’s Instagram feeds. He could be a barista, could be a designer of some sort, but whatever he is, his career will almost certainly be playing second fiddle to his social media profile.
Once, however, a man about town meant something more. Once upon a time the man about town was a man to be reckoned with. The prosaic definition was always someone who liked to go out and spend money, someone sophisticated with a busy social life. He was probably dapper, connected, able to move through social classes with the ease of an elevator and who swanned around town with purpose. Someone who could speak Portuguese or French when he needed to or bash a few heads together if the going got rough. He could procure entertainment at will and jump on a horse. He could convincingly place a bet and knew how to rebuff an unwanted advance without causing offence or embarrassment. In short (not that he was ever short), he was like an entry-level James Bond, whether he spoke like a colonel or a private. He developed into someone who knew what was going on – although in an age when social media has obviated the need for that, the modern-day man about town is a 21st-century has-been, downgraded to someone who wears fancy clothes for the sake of it and who wanders around outside fashion shows hoping to be photographed.
Chris Sullivan has never been one of those. A veteran DJ, club-runner, journalist, sometime painter and general city slicker, for more than 40 years Sullivan has been an integral part of London after dark, since the heady days of the Blitz nightclub. In the Seventies he was big on the soul scene, was a contemporary of Boy George, Steve Strange and Spandau Ballet, almost became a pop star with Latin throwbacks Blue Rondo À La Turk and for nearly two decades ran the legendary Wag Club. Back in the day, Sullivan was a nightclub vampire, out every night, looking like a cross between Bill Murray and the Penguin in the original Batman TV series.
Today, touching 60, sitting in the confines of The Colony Grill Room in The Beaumont hotel in Mayfair, consuming expensive comfort food with obvious glee, he exudes the air of a man who has experienced more than his fair share of life. Apropos of nothing, although maybe just in celebration of his steak, he interrupts himself to say that he owes everything to his mother. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I’m proud to say that I never had a proper job, still have no boss and do exactly as I please in both work and play.”
With Sullivan you always get the sense that there are so many things to do. There is the endless DJing, the teaching (he takes classes at Central Saint Martins), the books – having created one of the best coffee table books on punk (Punk, co-written with Stephen Colegrave and Simon Morgan) and contributing the text to Graham Smith’s pictorial history of the new romantics (We Can Be Heroes) – and this month he published a collection of his profiles, Rebel Rebel: How Mavericks Made The Modern World, including the likes of Egon Schiele, Fela Kuti, Jackson Pollock, Orson Welles, Louise Brooks and Liam Gallagher. He’ll also probably be working on some television idea and planning his next pair of bespoke trousers. In some respects, Sullivan is acting as though he’s still in his twenties, which I imagine is just how he likes it.
Sullivan is from a part of Merthyr Tydfil where you could get thumped simply for having the wrong parting in your hair; consequently, he has been known to settle the occasional argument the old-fashioned way. His childhood was normal enough for South Wales in the Sixties, in as much as he used to think anyone who had a car, a phone or central heating and hot running water was like King Farouk. His mother was a cleaner and his father sprayed washing machines in a Hoover factory – draining shift work that saw him work from 8am till 5pm for a week, then afternoons for a week and then the 10pm till 7am night shift for a week. “They were mentally and physically draining, so I didn’t see him much, like ships that pass in the night. It didn’t seem to matter that much, as I knew no different.” Sullivan describes his childhood as “rambunctious, with lots and lots of fighting, underage drinking and teenage sex in public places, as everyone lived with their folks and shared bedrooms with siblings. I shared with my sister who was four years younger than me.” He painted from a young age, finding a creative streak that he pursued as ardently as he did the local girls. The Sullivan household wasn’t full of many toys and so he drew. And drew and drew and drew and drew. Which obviously paid off, because in 1978 he was accepted on the foundation course at Camberwell College Of Arts. (His expertise meant that he didn’t need to commission anyone else when it came to designing record sleeves, or flyers for his clubs, or the suits he designed for friends. He still paints today, resolutely uninterested in the fashionable ideologies of the art world or its obsession with technological development and identity politics. He just paints.)
It was in the spring of 1976 when Sullivan really started to live, immersing himself in punk and starting to get used to the idea that people at home were now calling him a “weirdie”. For him, it was always about the clothes. “It was that year that a schism opened up and I first saw this when I went to see David Bowie at the [Wembley] Empire Pool in May 1976,” he says. “There was one gang that was all pink peg trousers and plastic sandals and Hawaiian shirts. Then the other gang, the Bromley lot, were wearing leather trousers and had dyed hair, with lots of earrings. Then I thought: something’s going on.
“Like anybody else, I was into one-upmanship, which is what the whole new romantic thing was all about. You know, the banter: ‘You actually came out like that? And you haven’t been beaten up? You didn’t take the Tube in that, did you?’ So, anyway, I got right into punk, but it soon became a cliché, exacerbated by the tabloids. I didn’t even like The Clash at the time, as they felt like outsiders and very generic. A lot of people behaved as they thought they ought to behave. Because, as I always tell people, punk was a fashion. It wasn’t anything to do with politics and really angry kids. This was a fashion that emanated from New York and it was a fashion movement in Malcolm McLaren’s shop, at Saint Martins, with a gay, mixed clientele. The punk cliché just got grafted on afterwards. All that spitting was disgusting. I think a lot of people who were involved with it in the beginning were absolutely appalled.
“Probably one of the finest examples would be Steve Strange. He loved dressing up. He had all the bondage stuff. He would go absolutely mental if you spat at him. And he’d been a roadie and worked for some of the bands as well. So he saw it first-hand. So, from where it actually began, which is quite a peacock thing – showing off, red trousers, plastic pockets – to end up with a minging old T-shirt and spitting at each other with their funny hair, it’s quite a journey. In the pre-punk times you had people wearing Acme Attractions and if you went to Crackers on Saturday you’d see a couple of people looking like Robert Mitchum and girls in Courrèges and see-through macs. At the time, during the day I’d be wearing a mac and a trilby and a Forties suit. Me and my friend Mark Taylor, we went to this pervy shop in Cardiff and bought all this leather stuff. To get into my bedroom, I had to walk through my mother and father’s bedroom. My mother said to me, ‘Was I dreaming, because last night I could have sworn I saw you walking through my bedroom dressed in rubber?’”
Sullivan had three jobs at the time: he was loading lemonade lorries, doing a paper round and delivering the pools (an old-fashioned form of betting on the outcome of football matches). He was also an avid shoplifter. All so he could make regular trips to London.
“I used to get the 7:20 bus from Merthyr Tydfil on a Saturday and would arrive at midday at Victoria station. Then we’d get the No11 bus and then walk right down to the end of the Kings Road. By the time we got to Sex, we’d have bumped into everybody we knew and we’d find out where the party was, what was going on. It was almost like the equivalent of Facebook in those days. So by the end we’d hear about the next Sex Pistols concert or house parties or which clubs to go to.”
Moving to London was a Damascene moment for Sullivan, as it was for many of his generation. In 1978 he moved into the Ralph West Hall Of Residence in Battersea and in the time it took to buy a second-hand demob suit, reinvented himself as a nightfly, a mouchenocturne. The Ralph West Hall Of Residence was on the west side of Albert Bridge Road and serviced the art schools in Central London, including Camberwell, Central, Chelsea, the London College Of Printing and Saint Martins. If you were from the provinces and you were in your first year studying at one of those colleges and you could afford it or had a grant, this is where you stayed (this is where Joe Strummer stayed in the early Seventies when he was at the Central School Of Art And Design, as did Glen Matlock). A nine-storey Inner London Education Authority tower block overlooking a council estate on one side and Battersea Park on the other, to those that stayed there this felt like the centre of the known world. Just a five-minute walk from the Kings Road, Ralph West was like New York’s Chelsea Hotel, reimagined as a youth hostel. It was here where Sullivan became fast friends with a group of ex-punks, ex-soulboys and -girls and half a dozen wayward souls intent on making an impression on the city. A few months later, another friend from Wales, Steve Strange, along with a DJ called Rusty Egan, started hosting Bowie nights at a Soho nightclub called Billy’s, before moving to a dusty Covent Garden wine bar called Blitz. This soon became London’s answer to New York’s Studio 54, the hottest club in town, as well as a something of a cultural incubator. Behind its hallowed doors you would soon find the people who would morph into pop stars, such as Boy George, Spandau Ballet, Sade and Depeche Mode, dancer Michael Clark, milliner Stephen Jones, conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans, journalist and broadcaster Robert Elms and more fashion designers than you could shake a pin cushion at.
Then there was Sullivan, a boy from the Valleys who wouldn’t stop talking. He hasn’t changed.
“When I was on the foundation course, I needed to apply to a degree course, so I chose Saint Martins. I wrote down five courses at five different art schools and then my friend Graham Smith pulled one out. ‘Oh, fashion at Saint Martins. You’ll never get there. There are 5,000 applicants per place!’ I said, ‘I will. You watch!’ Of course, I did. I regretted it almost immediately, as I’m not exactly fashion designer material. You have to be quite exact to make clothes. I’m rather approximate. A few weeks later I bumped into Steve [Strange] one night in Oxford Circus and he had the long leather coat on and a little hat to one side and he said, ‘Come along to this new night I’m doing at Billy’s.’ And that was it, the first night. The reason we started all these one-nighters is because none of the West End clubs would let us in. I got refused service in a few pubs in those days, so I thought I would just create a place, a safe haven where, you know, we could all go, where there wouldn’t be any fights and the DJ would play whatever he wants. So that’s when I started doing the warehouse parties and all these one-nighters at places like Le Kilt, St Moritz, Hell... Young people were no longer prepared to be sold clothes they didn’t like or go to clubs playing records they didn’t want to hear, being run by grunters three times their age and having to pay for the privilege. When the Blitz opened, for a start it was cheap, but it was also extraordinary to have someone aged 19 vetting the door.”
Now that the world – or at least this world – is full of private members’ clubs, the concept of having institutionalised door policies is an old one. And yet 40 years ago, when the only private members‘ clubs in London were aimed at barristers, judges and captains of industry, it was actually rather novel. And Sullivan, who during the late Seventies became something of an institution himself, was one of its most vocal champions. “The reason we had door policies was because your normal person couldn’t cope with people walking around in a wedding dress and a policeman’s helmet or [Boy] George as a geisha with a green face. We realised the importance of creating safe havens for us, because, if we hadn’t done it, we would never have been able to have a good night out.”
The Blitz lasted until October 1980, by which time other clubs had started to crop up, not just in London, but all over the UK. Chris Sullivan, Robert Elms and Graham Smith, who was developing into the scene’s in-house photographer, had already had some success with a number of warehouse parties at Toyah Willcox’s Mayhem studios in Battersea and so, in January 1980, they partnered with an old friend of Sullivan’s from Merthyr Tydfil, Steve Mahoney, and opened a Monday club night at St Moritz, a cellar on Wardour Street.
“The reason I started branching out was because there were so many copycat people coming down the Blitz. When that space-age look was going down, I went to the Blitz dressed as Clark Kent. I even had a Kent cigarette packet in my top pocket and notebook in my hat. The next week people were turning up in suits and hats. I couldn’t believe it. I only did it for a joke.”
St Moritz lasted until March 1980 and two months later Sullivan joined forces with Strange and Egan in a new venture, Hell, on Henrietta Street, again in Covent Garden. This closed at the same time as the Blitz, weeks before Sullivan, Elms and Smith started another one-nighter at Le Kilt, where the tropes were tartan and funk (two things that were previously thought to be mutually exclusive). This iteration of the Blitz scene lasted until spring 1981, by which time Le Beat Route had opened (running from November 1980 to June 1983), which was one of the most exciting clubs of the entire period, bang in the middle of Greek Street, just behind St Martin’s. (George Michael loved the place so much he wrote a song about it, “Club Tropicana” – “All that’s missing is the sea...”)
Perhaps Sullivan’s greatest success was the Wag Club, the Wardour Street club he and fellow scenester Ollie O’Donnell started in 1982 and which ran until 2001. They started by packing out the Whisky A Go Go every Saturday night with their own crowd, until the club’s new leaseholders asked them to run it with them full-time. So they rebranded it, lowered the drinks and the door price, pulled in specialist DJs and the place took off, becoming a Soho institution almost immediately. They had only been open a few weeks before they hosted the first-ever hip hop club event in the UK, The Roxy Road Show, featuring 25 artists who flew in from New York, including Afrika Bambaataa, Grand Wizard Theodore (widely credited with inventing scratching), Jazzy Jay, Fab 5 Freddy, rope-skipping stars the Double Dutch Girls and legendary breakdancers the Rock Steady Crew. They soon developed a name for themselves by booking the likes of De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Eric B & Rakim, Kool Moe Dee, Grandmaster Flash and Doug E Fresh. It’s no overstatement to say they were complicit in breaking hip hop in the UK. The Wag Club became a drop-in too and a strict door policy meant that boldface names largely felt safe mixing with Sullivan’s carefully curated crowd – a crowd containing many boldface names of the future. Thus on any given night you could be guaranteed to bump into – literally – anyone from John Galliano and Jonathan Ross to Tracey Emin or David Bowie, or perhaps a combination of Leigh Bowery, Grayson Perry, Boy George, Joe Strummer, Neneh Cherry, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Prince, George Clinton, Stevie Wonder, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier. Unsurprisingly, Sullivan had time and a word for all of them. “One night George Michael had a fight with our DJ, Fat Tony,” he says, “and Grace Jones had to be physically restrained after laying out an irritating bloke with a single punch.” Sometimes it felt like the VIP room of a benign approximation of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars.
It wasn’t all beer and skittles, though, and Sullivan admits to a period of serious overindulgence, if somewhat obliquely. “I will admit that during the late Eighties my overenthusiasm for nefarious stimuli didn’t do me any favours whatsoever and took me to places I’d rather not have visited – like the backstreets of King’s Cross at 5am on a Wednesday. But I was one of many unsuspecting club types who were caught with our pants down. One has to remember, though, that we were like guinea pigs. Much of what was on offer hadn’t been available before and as it was so cheap we filled our boots. Of course, the most harm I did was to myself – as well as those that had to put up with my antics, of course. But perhaps the worst thing was the damage done by rumour, overexaggeration and fabrication. That’s the thing about being in the public eye: however small one’s notoriety, one sneeze becomes pneumonia and a cup becomes a gallon. Looking back, it was just a phase I went through as a crazy kid.”
Sullivan’s career path has certainly not been orthodox and there are some who might think that his failure to capitalise on almost 20 years running one of the most important nightclubs in the world is something of a damning testament, although his mind doesn’t really work like that. Since he was in his teens he has been driven by the thought of experience rather than the allure of security and this is what continues to propel him today. A more traditional line of work would also have curtailed Sullivan’s ability to spin a yarn, as there is nothing that he likes to do more than tell stories, often with the kind of circuitous embellishments that, when they’re told in real time, which they often are, make the stories a lot longer than the actuality. Sullivan seems committed to a life as an outsider, which is why the title of his new book suits him well. He remains a rebel, even if the classifications for being a rebel are so much more prescriptive than they once were.
In his time, he has met just about everyone, or at least everyone who may have frequented a London nightclub in the last 40 years, including David Bowie.
“You’d occasionally see Bowie at The Sombrero in High Street Kensington at the end of the Seventies,” says Sullivan, “but I didn’t actually meet him until he came down with Bianca Jagger to Hell one night, which was a one-nighter I was running in Soho in 1980. He had this soulboy haircut, peg trousers and a big brown tweed overcoat. It was early, empty, maybe only about six people there. My friend Christos [Tolera, the painter] went up to him and said, ‘Hello, mate, how are you doing?’ Christos is asking him how he is and David Bowie doesn’t really know what’s going on, his eyes looking around the room. I think he may have been chemically enhanced at the time. Christos that is, not David Bowie. I think he went off that night with Helmut Newton. After he left, Christos came up to me and told me all about this guy he used to know at the Lacey Lady – which was an old soul club in Essex – and he was mortified when I told him he’d actually been talking to David Bowie for half an hour. I think Bowie was too polite to say anything. Christos said, ‘I thought there was something funny about him, because of his eyes. It must have been the drugs.’ I said, ‘The drugs he took or the drugs you took?’”
Bowie also turned up when Iggy Pop was staying at Sullivan’s house in Kentish Town, as the singer was seeing a girl Sullivan knew who was staying with him and his wife. “He’d just done this concert in Marseilles and had had the shit kicked out of him, so he was holed up in Kentish Town with us, trying to keep a low profile and staying away from the press. All his gear was there, all his clothes, his bags, his toothbrush, his work, everything. The next morning a cab pulls up and it’s David Bowie with [assistant] Coco Schwab with Iggy’s passport, off to take him away. He was like a mini-cab driver. A very polite mini-cab driver.”
When Sullivan launched the Wag Club, Bowie started popping in a lot, often with the director Julien Temple (with whom he’d later make Absolute Beginners). “He seemed to like Soho, loved seeing what was going on, soaking everything up,” says Sullivan. “I was called one day at home and asked if I wanted to be an extra in Jazzin’ For Blue Jean and when I turned up at six o’clock on the day of shooting they handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘These are your lines.’ They weren’t the kind of lines I needed at six in the morning, let me tell you. For a person who runs a nightclub, 6am is like eight o’clock in the evening. Anyway, I had to do my thing as David Bowie is up a ladder and I had to actually do some acting. I did it about six times and every time was worse than the last. He was very nice about it and said it was the same for him on The Man Who Fell To Earth, which, unsurprisingly, didn’t make me feel any better. In the end, I ended up getting extras for him, found him his backing band and became a lot more involved in the film. But he would still come down the club, sometimes with Mick Jagger, or [the hairdresser-turned-artist] James Lebon, sometimes on his own. You wouldn’t have noticed him at all. He was very casual and just a really nice bloke. He’d talk about art, music, Miles Davis, sit down and have a pint of bitter. Loved bitter. He wasn’t just interesting, he was interested and always wanted to know what you had been up to, what was going on, who you had seen. If someone is interested in you then you sort of forget who they are, don’t you? He even asked my opinion on clothes, which I could never really get over, to be honest with you. He was David Bowie! The first suit I ever got made was a copy of the one he wore on the cover of David Live, so, I have to admit, it was a bit disarming. But the eyes never let you forget that you were talking to David Bowie.”
His relationship with Bowie was very real, although Sullivan’s own forays into the world of pop were slightly less successful than his friend’s. In 1980, the new romantics’ in-house band, Spandau Ballet, had been launched with great fanfare and had immediately become successful, matched only by the success of their great rivals, Duran Duran. The success of Spandau generated a kind of A&R feeding frenzy, as record company scouts started scouring London nightclubs in search of “rumour bands”.
Everyone was looking for the Next Big Thing, and if you were approximately good-looking, had appeared in the pages of i-D, Blitz or The Face at least once and you claimed to be in a band, then you were automatically a record company target. This was originally how Chris Sullivan’s Blue Rondo À La Turk attracted so much heat, making their success something of a foregone conclusion.
The annals of London’s rock history are filled with impassioned stories about the best surprise gigs of all time, whether it’s Sex Pistols playing on the Thames in the summer of 1977, Dr Feelgood stepping up unannounced at the 100 Club, The Libertines playing The Albion Rooms or Paul McCartney busking in Covent Garden. In 1981, Blue Rondo played a gig on the eve of the royal wedding in a warehouse in Clerkenwell. This was the first time the band had performed as a ten-piece and put on such a sensational display that they were immediately signed by Virgin Records for £500,000. Those who were there say it was one of the best gigs the country had seen since Pere Ubu and The Red Crayola played the Chislehurst Caves three years previously – although this might have been due to the fact that a substantial percentage of the crowd had taken large quantities of MDMA that had that week been imported from America. However, while they were certainly an intoxicating live attraction, the Latin movement, such as it was, was successfully hijacked by singalong popsters Modern Romance. They had little of the credibility, but all of the hits. Blue Rondo, meanwhile, were a busted flush.
These days, Sullivan puts it all down to experience and can’t quite believe it lasted as long as it did. “We were a terrific live band, but the records just didn’t work. But it was the best fun. What marked the era was that many of us, having seen our friends create successful bands when they could just about play an instrument, seeing other friends promote these bands armed only with an address book and seen young designers making a name for themselves creating clothes in their mum’s kitchen, we were unafraid to go out on a rather shaky limb and try to do the unexpected. We were not hindered by fear of failure or the need to make fortunes, as we existed in a bubble where everyone was having a go at ‘something’. And some succeeded more than others but none were criticised for trying, only applauded. It was a time of liberation, when all of us felt that nothing was beyond us, that we could be anything we wanted to be and when many started getting big record deals – Spandau, Blue Rondo, George Michael, George O’Dowd, Haysi Fantayzee, Sade – and some hit the top of the charts worldwide; that empowered us even further. We knew that we had something special – our youth – and that that was a marketable commodity. And we all helped each other. Young people who promoted one-nights got their friends to DJ, design flyers, make backdrops, put on fashion shows, read poetry, perform and allowed many of our pals in for free, while young bands, such as Spandau, got their friends to manage them, cut their hair, design their clothes and album covers, promote their gigs, photograph them, direct their promos. It was a time when if we needed something done we found a friend to do it.”
Even though the Wag Club is long gone, Sullivan manages to treat London clubland as some sort of continuum and on the last occasion I went to an event where he was DJing, the crowd was peppered with friends and acquaintances who have been going to nightclubs for more than 40 years. Ask him about this and he’ll shrug his shoulders and recall some tall tale that, while having been lovingly burnished through constant retelling (Sullivan’s stories are hardy perennials), will contain more than a few words of wisdom.
The past 12 months have been anything but uneventful. Sullivan split up with his wife, broke his leg and lost a close relative. But then he peels off these misfortunes with the air of someone who can’t locate a favourite pair of cufflinks; he doesn’t diminish them, but he doesn’t want to burden anyone with his problems. His most pressing project at the moment is his book, which he sees as something of a natural extension of all the things he’s been involved with since he took London nightlife by storm back in the Seventies. The last time we met – for lunch, in a basement warren in Mayfair – he’d just come from a teaching assignment at Central Saint Martins and gave the impression he’d walked all the way from King’s Cross. I’m sure he hadn’t, but Sullivan has always struck me as a man who spends his life walking, as though it would somehow be foolish to travel any other way.
The man, reassuringly, is still about town, still pounding the streets of Soho in search of something to amuse him. Armed with his satchel, a beret of some sort and a look of almost wilful expectation, Sullivan appears to glide through life, giving the impression that whatever he finds himself doing tomorrow might conceivably be the thing he spends the rest of his life doing. Or not, as it happens.
Given Chris Sullivan’s peripatetic life – and his portfolio career – there’s no knowing what he might end up doing. You can bet he doesn’t know himself – a situation I suspect he rather enjoys.
Rebel Rebel: How Mavericks Made The Modern World (Unbound, £12) by Chris Sullivan is out now.
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