Peter Stringfellow is about to open a club in Ireland. Róisín Ingle meets one of his dancers, an Irishwoman who wants to go into the music business
It's the kind of dinner party you are unlikely to forget in a hurry. Across the circular table, perched on his trademark throne, is the king of the British nightclub scene, Peter Stringfellow. Beside him, sipping a glass of water, sits his girlfriend Bella, who - and this is also something of a trademark - is 42 years younger than her 65-year-old boyfriend. Next to her, Callum Best, sometime model, sometime reality-television star and son of footballing legend George, is nibbling his dinner and checking out the dozens of women who are gyrating near the laps of London businessmen or around shiny poles, all of them wearing a colourful selection of Ann Summers's finest. The room is an orgy of red velvet, golden plaster statues and leopard-skin upholstery, not forgetting the naked and nearly naked women. You don't know where to look.
But even all this isn't as intriguing as the person sitting next to me, eating smoked salmon and good-naturedly slagging Best for being such a regular visitor to Stringfellow's London nightclub. Her name is Shannon, and she is a lap dancer from Co Fermanagh. The brown-haired 27-year-old is friendly, down to earth and sweet. So sweet that you can't resist asking what a nice girl like her is doing in a place like this.
We shall have to wait until the next day to find out, because right now she has work to do. Having finished her dinner, Shannon - real name Jillian Johnson - flashes her smile, adjusts her see-through black baby-doll nightdress and disappears into the crowd. Back at the table, Stringfellow, who tells me to speak louder as he is hard of hearing, holds court. Occasionally, he mispronounces the names of his Irish guests. He will need to practise, as in a month or so he is opening a Stringfellows in Dublin. He is already looking for a chef - the food here is surprisingly good - and auditioning dancers.
Shannon, who is one of the club's highest-earning dancers, will be coming over to help get the Irish outpost started. We meet in a coffee shop near Stringfellows, in Covent Garden, at noon the next day. She is hung-over and, fresh faced without her heavy lap dancer's make-up, looks about 18. She is wearing a white vest, red cardigan and denim miniskirt. She narrows her almond-shaped brown eyes to look at the menu, orders a pot of English tea and discusses last night. "I made a grand after I left you," she says delightedly, clapping her hands together. "And I only did two dances. There was this man who was just throwing money around, and he only wanted to sit and talk to me."
Shannon quickly explains that, ultimately, she wants to manage rock bands and that the lucrative lap-dancing job that she has had for almost two years is helping her do that. "I want to invest in Irish bands. I have contacts with a couple of world-class producers, and I have already paid for a couple of acts to get studio time. One of them is close to being signed," she says, smiling. "I'm very focused now. I know what I want. I feel like I have to get it all done."
She grew up in Enniskillen in a "typical Irish family"; she says her parents were strict with her and her two younger sisters. "But I was always a wild child, going out, doing my own thing," she says. She was modelling and doing television work from the age of 17, then spent a year in the US as a nanny. Afterwards she spent a couple of years studying theatre at Huddersfield University, in England. "It was more about scriptwriting and directing, and I was more into performing arts, so I didn't finish the full three years."
Some of her fellow students were paying off their student loans by lap dancing. "I remember thinking, oh, I don't know if you should be doing that," she says. "But then they'd tell me about all the money they were making, just for being naked. You could be naked on the beach, naked anywhere. Why not make money from it?" Nudity was nothing to her, anyway, she says. "Being a model, you get used to having to make quick changes in front of art directors, so I have never been bothered by being naked. I'm a bit of a naturist, actually."
Then she visited a lap-dancing club with some rugby players and was fascinated. "It's a place that is mostly unknown to women. It's a man's place - you don't get invited there. I think I was intrigued because it's such an unknown world."
After splitting up with her boyfriend in England she returned to Northern Ireland, where she looked on the internet for work in a Dublin lap-dancing club. Her first dance was nerve racking. How did she know what to do? "Let's face it, it's not rocket science," she say, laughing. "I just quickly went into stripper mode. My mind was in another place. I had this constant roll of thoughts through my head. Is this right? Is this wrong? What will my parents do when they find out?"
That question was answered sooner than expected when, two weeks later, some Enniskillen neighbours came into the club and recognised her. "They squealed on me, and I got this call from my sister, saying: 'Oh, Jillian, what are you doing now?' " she says. "I had to sit down with my family and explain it all. I didn't visit my grandparents for a year and a half, because of the lecture I knew I was going to get from my grandfather. But my parents are OK about it as long as I am happy and safe, which I am."
After leaving Dublin, she auditioned for Stringfellows, attracted by the potential for high earnings, the celebrity clientele and a strict code that she says makes the club one of the safest to work in. To her surprise she was accepted. "I didn't think I was good enough to get in, because everyone knows it's the top club. Girls all over England would love to do my job. The ones who don't get through the audition are crushed."
It's not just about having a perfect body and being able to dance, she says, although both are essential. "You have to be extremely socially intelligent," she says. "The girls who make the most money in Stringfellows are the ones with the best personalities. That's the way it is. I mostly get paid because I am able to talk to people, I can have a laugh and am reasonably intelligent. I earned three and a half grand one night for just two three-minute dances, when a good-looking Swedish banker came in." (The standard fee for a table dance is £20, or €29.)
Whatever about the money - "the best thing about the job is definitely the money," she says - I have to ask if she understands why some people think what she does for a living is wrong. Why some people, when Stringfellows opens in Dublin, will say that young women like her are being exploited for their sexuality. Shannon will have none of it. "Women are exploited and exploit their sexuality every day. They just don't always get paid for it. The woman in the job who wears a low-cut top so she can get ahead. The woman who is sleeping with the boss to get a promotion," she says. What she does for a living is to "tease men. I provide a fantasy. Men go there for a laugh, to spend their money and corporate money looking at nice fit women. Every guy loves that."
Shannon says she has earned about £500,000 (€725,000) since she started at Stringfellows. She expects to invest about £100,000 (€145,000) of it in her bands. "I will do the dancing until I get what I want . . . At the end of the day I am not working in some company for four quid an hour, being told what to do by a team leader. To me that is more soul-destroying than stripping for a living."
Stringfellows is due to open on Parnell Street, Dublin, next month