Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. And, perhaps, if you’re a member of London’s £1,250-a-year Groucho Club, go into a flat spin about where on Earth you’ll be able to let your hair down until 4am in the run-up to Christmas.
After nearly 40 years of outrageous hedonism, mad behaviour and wall-to-wall celebrities in various states of ‘relaxation’, Soho’s last bastion of proper, unfettered fun – or, as non-members see it, a haven of pretentious, show-off nonsense – has been shut down.
It all happened late on Tuesday morning. As the Mail reported, Westminster Council suspended the club’s licence at the request of the Metropolitan Police who are investigating a ‘recent serious criminal offence’ on the premises.
This is not the first crackdown by the council. Last month it shut the famous gay nightclub Heaven when a security guard was charged with raping a woman in the vicinity of the club and management were reportedly slow to act.
But, in the meantime, the 5,000 members – who all received an email from new Groucho chief executive, Elli Jafari, informing them of the closure – are agog.
Comedienne Helen Lederer was mid coffee in the main bar when, at about 11.30am on Tuesday, a member of staff told her ‘very discreetly, but very firmly’, that she should leave immediately.
Supermodel Kate Moss with photographer Mert Alas at the Groucho Club during its heyday
‘We couldn’t imagine what it was – a bomb scare, an escaped rat, maybe. It has never closed before, other than Covid, and I bloody hope it’s open by Christmas. What on earth could it be?’ she says.
Staff have been threatened with instant dismissal if they speak to anyone about either the closure or any allegations.
Meanwhile the owners – Manuela and Iwan Wirth, a Swiss billionaire couple who own The Groucho through their company Artfarm, have employed Princess Eugenie for nearly a decade at their Hauser & Wirth art gallery and own a slew of restaurants loved by the King and Queen – are keeping a dignified silence.
Which all means that the rumour mill has gone into overdrive, with unsubstantiated tales of shenanigans involving Albanian drug lords, to outlandish claims of child sex rings.
But the most repeated rumour (again, not supported with any evidence) is that of the rape of an 18-year-old girl on the premises in recent weeks, either in the bathrooms, or a private room, which – mirroring the allegations made at Heaven – was not acted on quickly by management.
Last night, The Groucho released a statement to concerned members. It read: ‘Reports that a serious crime may have taken place at The Groucho have been widely circulated.
‘At this stage we would like to take the opportunity to both assure you and confirm that the club (or indeed its staff or members) are not considered a suspect in any allegation of serious crime.
‘The club took the decision to voluntarily close its doors for practical reasons for a short period of time, following agreement with the council that there should be a temporary suspension of our licence.
‘Inevitably, there has been some misinformation circulating.’
Whatever the truth, something very serious is clearly afoot – so serious that many members and commentators think this might finally be the end for a club where, over the years, some members have always pushed the limits.
But never to the extent that it’s been threatened with closure. Not even when Kate Moss, Liza Minnelli, Ronnie Wood, Damien Hirst and Blur’s Alex James were regulars. Or when the club was reportedly so awash with cocaine that the upstairs snooker room became known as the ‘Peruvian Procurement Department’.
Even Freddie Mercury and Liza Minelli were regulars at the exclusive establishment
Or when two members smuggled in a chimpanzee to try to tempt Michael Jackson out of his nearby hotel room. Or when comic actor Rowland Rivron drunkenly cycled down the main staircase, catapulted over the banister on to a row of bar stools and ended up with third-degree carpet burns.
But according to some, things have been steadily sliding downhill for nearly a decade now – particularly over the past two years under Artfarm’s management.
As one long-term member, who prefers not to be named, puts it: ‘It’s more anonymous and much louder. Quite business-like and sedate during the day, and hell on Earth at night.
‘Thunderous, thumping music, outrageous behaviour. It’s like being in a Wetherspoons.
‘No one knows each other in there any more. People used to be courteous and respectful. Now, it feels populated by a lot of thugs.’
Thugs, she says, who still do an awful lot of drugs.
‘The club has a zero tolerance policy, but there is so much drug-taking in there, it’s unbelievable. You could lie on the carpet and get high – without even breathing in.’
For some, the beginning of the end came in August 2017 when, after 28 glorious years, Bernie Katz, the club’s brilliantly charismatic maitre d’ and everybody’s friend (until 4am when he showed them the door) was ‘retired’, aged 49, by the club’s former owners.
British actor Jude Law was known to frequent the Groucho Club in his younger years
Soon after, he was found hanged in his north London flat.
As the story goes, Bernie – who was just five feet tall and eternally dressed in a leopard-print jacket – had become increasingly entangled with Albanian drug lords.
During recent years, they have blitzed London with so much cut-price cocaine that the city is now reportedly the coke capital of Europe, consuming eight tonnes of the drug a year – more than Barcelona, Amsterdam and Berlin combined.
And rumours still swirl that, rather than suicide, Bernie Katz’s death was murder.
‘The joie de vivre of the club drained out of it at that point,’ says one member. ‘It lost its brilliant madness,’ says another. When Artfarm snapped up
The Groucho for £40 million in 2022, the company already owned Mount St. Restaurant & Rooms in Mayfair (plus the Audley pub situated on the ground floor) and it owned The Fife Arms in Braemar, Scotland
Both are favourite haunts of the King and Queen and both turned around by Ewan Venters, Artfarm’s superstar Scottish CEO, who began his career as an orange buyer for Sainsbury’s.
Everywhere Venters has been, he has sprinkled gold and courted royals. At Fortnum & Mason, where he was CEO for eight years, he transformed the brand and seemed to be hosting a party for his dear friend Tom Parker Bowles, the Queen’s son, every other week.
So Artfarm had high hopes for The Groucho – to rejuvenate it into a slightly different club.
Still bohemian and edgy, but younger, funkier, slicker, more international.
Actress Sienna Miller and designer Matthew Williamson arrive at the members’ club
To the members’ horror, like Soho House, the worldwide members’ club chain that started life as a single site in Soho, they announced plans for international expansion – the anti-Christ for many Groucho members.
Eventually they announced just one outpost near Wakefield, in Yorkshire. Which feels unlikely to open now.
Some insist it was just a matter of time before it all blew up in Artfarm’s faces.
‘They were outrageously incompetent and did a terrible job of losing the staff who understood the alchemy of the club and how to keep control,’ says one.
‘They bought something they didn’t really understand. How unique it was.’
Certainly, when it first opened in 1985, The Groucho wasn’t like anywhere else.
Founded by a group of publishers and agents – including Carmen Callil, Ed Victor, Liz Calder and Michael Sissons – who wanted a ‘congenial refuge’, somewhere fun and unstuffy for both men and women, it was new and exciting.
The name came from the old Groucho Marx quip: ‘I wouldn’t want to join any club that would accept me as a member.’
The original prospectus was illustrated with brilliant, bouncy pictures by Roald Dahl’s collaborator, Quentin Blake.
Applicants needed to have written recommendations from two existing members, so it was tricky to get in and those who did (sort of) knew everyone.
The rules were set by Stephen Fry and have included a ban on mobile phones in the bar, the wearing of string vests – which he declared ‘fully unacceptable’ because ‘there is enough distress in the world already’ – and drugs. Though obviously the latter was roundly ignored.
For a long time, the club’s ever-burning flame was fanned by swathes of writers, musicians and artists, many of whom – Tracey Emin, Francis Bacon, Gavin Turk, Gordon Cheung – donated amazing works of art that Bernie would hang on the walls, often in return for membership.
Hip hop group Run-DMC members, Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and Jason Mizell, enjoyed the high-end night out
Regulars included everyone from distinguished journalist Jeffrey Bernard to Rod Stewart, George Michael, Freddie Mercury, Liam Gallagher, Kate Moss. The list goes on and on.
And stories passed into legend, such as when dancer Wayne Sleep brought Princess Di for lunch, then promptly handed her the bill at the end of the meal.
During a power cut causing an impromptu lock-in, Tom Jones duetted with Bono, accompanied by Jools Holland on the piano, with presenter Chris Evans singing along.
And almost every member has since claimed to be there when Bono sang ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’ to Bill Clinton on a piano painted by Peter Blake. Another rule was that no one ever pointed or stared.
‘We’d go there every evening after work – and sometimes fall asleep there, and go straight back to work the next morning,’ says one member.
‘There were no bedrooms in the early days, you just slept in a chair. Everyone knew each other. There was wonderful camaraderie and what happened in there, stayed in there.’
But occasional stories of hedonism did slip out.
Damien Hirst celebrating his 1995 Turner Prize by putting his £20,000 winnings behind the bar – plus another £20,000 the next morning when they were still hard at it. Journalist Toby Young emerging from the loo after a quick romantic tryst with a Princess Di impersonator in the 1990s. PR guru Mark Borkowski ending up in hospital after Hirst set fire to his chest hair. Alex James and actor Keith Allen sleeping under the snooker table after absinthe benders.
‘There were about five years when it was just a drunken blur after 9pm,’ says one member, a regular since 1985.
And brilliant Bernie could sort and smooth out pretty much anything, but that was then – in a very different world.
A good number of the original club members are either in AA, dead, or living quietly in the countryside.
In the past 18 years, the club has changed hands three times. Each time losing a bit more of its vim.
Membership costs have been hiked, driving out a great swathe of the more ‘colourful’ members. It became more corporate. There were external events. Non-members could stay in the bedrooms. The bar became a sea of laptops.
‘Gen Z don’t lunch. They don’t know how to have fun,’ says one member. And an anonymous online blog about how it had been corporatised got everyone riled up.
Then in September, Venters suddenly left Artfarm.
‘Everything’s changed. Back then there was nowhere else to go. Today the only regular is Bros singer Matt Goss,’ says one less famous member. ‘Not quite the same, though he is very nice.’
Helen Lederer is pragmatic about the changes. ‘Nothing stays the same. Things evolve. You can’t keep a place in a time capsule just as it was in the 1980s,’ she says.
‘It’s different, but it doesn’t have to be bad. I still love it and, while I can still get a vodka and can still get up from those low velvet sofas, I still will!’
The entrance to the famous club this month
The notice on the door about the establishment’s current closure
Sadly, the one thing that doesn’t seem to have changed is the drug-taking – though the Soho cocaine market (and pretty much every major supply chain in the country) is now run exclusively by the Albanian narco gangs.
Though perhaps now, with Bernie and all the long-term retainers gone, it’s harder to police.
‘I’ve heard there has been some pretty outrageous behaviour that wasn’t fit for the age, even before this ‘serious crime’,’ says one member darkly.
Certainly it will be harder for the new rotating band of staff to know the trouble makers, or master the delicate balancing act of allowing ‘exuberant’ members to let their hair down, have fun and make the place feel ‘cool’, while retaining control and keeping everyone safe.
Meanwhile, the Christmas decorations are half up but the doors remain closed. With everyone’s lips clamped tightly shut, we’re unlikely to be any wiser, any time soon.
Some members are hoping that Labour-run Westminster Council – never a fan of establishments like The Groucho, or their clientele – is overreacting and will relent at the hearing next month.
Others have faith that the scandal will force Artfarm to sell it on – maybe to a buyer who really understands the club.
But more worry that, after 39 years, this could be the end for The Groucho.
As one chap who has been a member since 1985, the year it opened, says: ‘It is a very black day – and a very sad day.’