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Far from hawking its wares in
the seafront's sleazier realms, the city's only lap-dancing
joint is in downtown Hove, actually. Pussycats opened its
discreet door to Caitlyn McCarthy
 Walking down suburban Church
Street, past the Estate Agents, just before Hove library you
might notice a discreet red door. Though it's a club, there
are no flashing lights, no banging music and not a bouncer in
sight.
I furtively ring the doorbell
and wait to be let in. Only as I peruse the rules and
regulations on the foyer walls: no photographs, no under 21's,
do I have a hint of what awaits me behind the mirrored
doorway. A friendly bloke lets me in. He searches my bag for
photographic equipment, then reads out the club's four basic
rules: "Touching is never permitted, A Dance costs 1
Kittenkash voucher, £10, Do not proposition dancers, Remain
seated at your table." I gulp in anticipation.
He leads me down the stairs
into the club. It's 9.30pm on Tuesday night and the club is
quiet. Four pretty girls dressed in clingy, revealing dresses,
sit chatting round a table. Beside them, a middle aged bloke,
tie askew, looks like he's just finished a hard days work at
the office. Another slightly younger businessman, suit jacket
on, sits on the other side of the room, trying to look like
he's not watching the girl who is dancing seductively on
stage, but failing miserably.
The club is small and intimate
and un threatening. Red walls are decorated with seductive
black and white photos of all the girls who have worked here,
mostly taken by the enthusiastic owner Ken McGrath. They are
more Athena poster than Page Three; none of the girls are
topless and they all look thoroughly pleased to be snapped.
The place is packed with round tables and comfortable chairs
and there is a small dance floor in the corner of the room,
backdropped by floor to ceiling mirrors for optimum viewing.
It's finished off with a dancing pole around which the girls
gyrate and swirl to show what's on offer.
Pussycats has been up and
running for nearly four years. Ken McGrath came up with the
idea when he read an article on a chap called Peter
Stringfellow who was planning to open up the first UK
lap-dancing club in London. McGrath thought it sounded like a
moneyspinner and decided to investigate the possibility. A
year later, having acquired the basement of an old bank to
start up his business, he came across a few hurdles. "The
place stood empty for six months while we wrangled with the
local authority about our licensing laws. The Church got
together a petition of 500 signatures to stop the club opening
and the police thought we would create trouble. We had a
million objections," McGrath explains. The community has
obviously been won over. The other day the local PC popped in
after work to have his pipe and chat to the girls.
Ken McGrath is not what you
would expect. The softly spoken Scotsman, an accountant and
property developer by day, is more M&S cardie man than
gold medallion man. Every evening before he comes to the club,
he goes home to tuck his seven-year-old up and read him a
bedtime story. He's passionate about his club girls' safety
and would hate to see the lapdancing industry get out of hand
in Hove. "If you go to clubs in Soho they're much more
explicit but I wouldn't want that for Hove as it's my
neighbourhood too."
The guidelines for the girls
are very specific. They must keep at arms' length from the
punters, they must never take numbers from clients, they must
get in a car to travel home to limit the risk of stalkers.
They have installed CCTV around the club and on the door to
identify any troublemakers and the girls have the direct line
to a police officer who is sensitive to their risks. At the
end of their contracts it is pointed out that a lapdancer's
career is short-lived, much like a professional footballer's,
and suggests that the girls' consider taking out a pension.
McGrath has every angle covered.
The club now has 10,460 names
on the members list and an estimated 1,000 active regulars.
McGrath explains, "In the week we get local regulars and
at weekends it's packed with stag parties and tourists. Our
ideal customer profile is AB, mid 40's, white collar
professionals with big spending power on credit cards."
And boy, do they.
Every time a girl strips down
to her g-string and writhes around provocatively in front of
the customer, she has a 'kittenkash' voucher worth £10
stuffed in her garter. The dance lasts three minutes 35
seconds and on a busy night the girls can squeeze a fair
number into their eight hour shift. The club is open from
5pm-1.30am, Mon-Sat. The girls are reluctant to tell me how
much they earn but they don't look shocked when I suggest they
might take home up to £700 on a good night. A percentage of
this goes to the club.
Most of the girls are in it for
the money. Frankie, 27, a well-spoken brunette, has been
working in the club for nine months. She decided to give
lapdancing a whirl after she graduated from the University of
Brighton with a degree in Visual and Performing Arts and
needed money to buy camera equipment. "This job gives me
the time and money to pursue my career as a documentary maker
and script writer. I don't want to do lapdancing forever, but
it's a fun job."
Like most of the girls who work
here, Frankie hasn't told her parents about her job. "I'm
proud of what I do but my Mum's from a different generation,
she wouldn't understand." Frankie's one of the more
experienced dancers and often acts as a mentor for the new
girls. "It can be nerve-wracking when you're new, we look
after new girls."
The club has a strict policy on
age. If the girl doesn't produce ID to prove she is over 18
years old then she doesn't get paid. Courtney, a street-wise
18-year-old, brought her mum down to show her the club to put
her mind at rest. On her first night she was more nervous that
the other girls would think she was flat-chested than what the
blokes would think of her dancing. In the first week a bloke
grabbed her boobs as she danced for him but it didn't put her
off, "Usually you can tell when they're going to do it
and you can pull back in time. This time I wasn't quick
enough. I wasn't scared because I knew the bouncers would kick
him out. I was more annoyed that he felt he had the right to
touch me."
The girls are propostioned on a
regular basis and have a competition running to see who has
been offered the most money. "One bloke offered a girl
£1,500 to spend the night with him," boasts McGrath. But
I talk to the real winner. Charlie, a 27-year-old beautician
who got into lapdancing when she needed extra cash to bring up
her young son, was offered £10,000 to spend a week with a
client. Like all of the Pussycats girls, she wasn't tempted.
"No way. He'd hardly be happy with a few lapdances at
that price, would he?" she points out. McGrath has had so
many requests from the clients to acquire the girls' knickers,
he's thinking of adding this to his merchandise.
The girls might take their tops
off and titillate blokes for a living but they all have their
limits. They like Pussycats because they don't do full nudity
and they don't have to compete with the silicone glamour of
the London clubs. "It's a whole different ball game in
London," Frankie winks. Allegedly, London punters can pay
for 'private lapdancing' sessions which often lead to
masturbation or full sex in a back room.
The girls get up to perform a
group dance for one of a bunch of well-dressed, rugby-types
who have just come in. To watch them dangle their boobs in
front of the bloke's face and stimulate sex with one another,
you wouldn't imagine they were thinking about doing their
washing or what they were going to do with their kid the next
day. The bouncer discreetly reminds the bloke of the rules, as
he tries to touch the girls' leg. This is Hove, after all.
Lapping it up
The world's first 'table-side'
dancing club opened in Fort Lauderdale in the US in 1972.
There are now over 700 clubs in New York and a staggering
3,000 clubs across America.
The first UK lapdancing
club, Cabaret of Angels at Stringfellows, was opened in London
by Peter Stringfellow in 1995.
Pussycats was the sixth
lapdancing venue to open in the UK.
The UK table dancing
industry is under threat by US big player Spearmint Rhino.
Earlier this year they opened two clubs in the UK, one in
London's Tottenham Court Road and one near Heathrow airport.
They have plans to open a further 20 clubs in the UK in the
next few years.
The industry estimates that
there will be over 1,000 clubs in the UK in five years' time.
Stringfellow has plans to
create a chain of his Cabaret of Angels clubs by opening clubs
in Paris, Birmingham and Manchester. "The way forward is
the plc route," says Stringfellow.
There are plans to open a male
gay lap dancing club in Brighton in the near future
copyright New Insight 2000
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