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The Groucho Club, which has been forced to close after its licence was suspended due to an alleged ‘association with serious crime‘, was famed for its hedonism in the Noughties.

Its name became a byword for debauchery, with tales of drug taking, sex romps in toilets and misbehaving celebrities being thrown out. Sprinkled in between the madness was the odd royalty like Princess Diana, who was said to have regularly visited the establishment.

Over the years, the club welcomed a host of celebrities including George Michael, Cara Delevingne, Noel and Liam Gallagher, Lily Allen, Robbie Williams, Freddie Mercury and even Princess Eugenie.

The club, which opened its unassuming doors in 1985, was the idea of publishers Carmen Callil, Ed Victor, Liz Calder, and literary agent Michael Sisson, who sought the opposite to the stuffy gentlemen’s clubs of the day. It was named after American comic Groucho Marx, who once joked: ‘I don’t want to belong to any club which will accept me as a member.’

Actor Stephen Fry reportedly even drew up four rules for The Groucho: ‘No phones, no drugs, no string vests and please leave quietly’. Looking back at the club’s history, we reckon all the rules were bent.

“There was so much cocaine flying around in the club in the mid-Nineties that if a terrorist posted some anthrax through the letterbox in a white envelope it would be up someone’s nose within 30 seconds.”

The club always had a no-drugs policy, which was frequently rumoured to be breached, especially in an upstairs room dubbed the Peruvian Procurement Department owing to the supposed availability of you-know-what.

Although its image has become more restrained in recent years, the exclusive venue in London’s Soho has remained recognised as a location for the affluent and famous to let their hair down.

The club was fairly cheap and welcoming to women, soon establishing itself as an arty hangout for media and literary types, but it truly took off in the 1990s, fuelled by Britpop and the Young British Artist hedonism.

Rival rock bands Blur and Oasis were frequently observed stumbling from the club, and Bono allegedly even sang ‘happy Christmas’ to former US President Bill Clinton there in 2001.

At one point The Groucho became so popular that it even refused entry to Al Pacino, and asked Madonna to leave the joint one night. One can only imagine what would led to her being kicked out.

Predictably, the mad tea party couldn’t last forever, and as the previous decade began to wrestle with its conscience, the club’s owners started to receive complaints about ‘people snorting cocaine in toilets’. The hedonism of the nineties was replaced with the righteousness of the 2000s, and when the beloved manager of The Groucho, Bernie Katz A.K.A. the Prince of Soho, died under suspicious circumstances in 2017, the party was all but over.

Rumours swirled that the diminutive Bernie had a serious drug addiction and was being chased by an Albanian gang after running up debts of £30,000. He was found hanged in an apparent suicide at his rented London flat shortly after leaving the club.

Soon more rumours were going about, including several controversies around some of the club’s male members, including comedian Russell Brand and actor Kevin Spacey. Ironically, Spacey went to The Groucho last year to celebrate being cleared of sexual assault.

Two years ago, The Groucho was purchased for an eye-watering £40 million (R942 million) by Iwan and Manuela Wirth, whose business Artfarm operates the Hauser & Wirth art gallery. Gen Z’s time at the club had arrived and top chef Mark Hix was appointed to attract a ‘younger clientele’. Boring…

 

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Soon the older members complained about millennials and the Generation Z crowd using the club as a workspace rather than a place to relax, summed up nicely in an anonymous letter that complained about a ‘corporate atmosphere’ in the place where George Michael and Freddie Mercury once partied to sunrise.

More recently the club has been closed while police investigate an alleged “serious crime” that took place at the venue.

“This decision follows reports that a serious crime may have taken place at the premises.”

By the sound of it, a lot of serious crime took place at The Groucho – The fuzz, like most people visiting today, seem to have just missed it.

[source:dailymail]