69 Dean Street is an address implanted somewhere in the folk memory of every
FACE reader. During the four years when the launchpad for musical experiment
shifted from traditional rock gigs to the dancefloor, 69 Dean Street became
a factory farm that has fattened each passing cult en route for today's
richly flavoured mainstream.

This is an upstairs-downstairs tale of two separate nightspots which share
the same building and the same pioneering policy of fostering a different
theme each night of the week. At Christmas the upstairs club, the Gargoyle,
passed into history with the expiry of its lease, though the one-nighters it
hosted are all now resurfacing elsewhere. Downstairs a lavish sign in the
street proclaims the proud history of the second club: "Gossips, formerly
Billy's".

Here is the home of the one-nighter through which the TransEurope Express
once roared towards the Blitz and beyond. It was here that ritualised the
weekly party. It is here that the nightclub has identified yet another role
for itself in 1983 . . .

The stripper retrieves her scattered tassels to a smattering of applause
from the idlers in Burton suits. Pinki Pirelli scurries naked from the
fifth-floor bar that was Soho's idea of plush when it opened in the Fifties,
into the ladies to dress for her next appointment. She leaves by the lift
and in the street pushes past a youthful queue waiting to take the same lift
skyward for a night billed as "thoroughly nasty". Participants include the
ubiquitous Siouxsie, music bizzybodies, a BBC producer who says he doesn't
mind being two years late on the scene ("that's television") and a dazzling
kaleidoscope of current cults you could describe extremely inadequately as
Dracula meets the Muppets.

It is llpm and since this is Wednesday the rooftop Gargoyle club is
undergoing its weekly transformation into the Batcave, the most unsubtle of
London's one?night stands, fronted by a Jaggeresque youth in mascara and
black lace and without doubt the runaway success of the year.

The rest of the week The Gargoyle becomes in turn a moviemakers' showcase, a
Sixties soul night, a gay club which welcomes straights, and the Comedy
Store which back in 1979 threw up the Alexei Sayle school of "alternative"
comics who seem now to have colonised half our TV.

A few paces along the pavement a second door leads down to the cellars of
the same building and the sinewy and refreshingly unfamiliar rhythms of
Afrobeat. A white youth in a Sabbath hat is greeting the kind of mix-it
membership that's becoming a regular feature of nightlife: a gracious black
beauty just in from Nigeria, a Camden Town trindy, Sixties art dealer Kasmin
("Is that his first name or his last?" asks a junior clubber called Lloyd)
and in separate company, Kasmin's son Paul.
Since this is Wednesday this is the Gold Coast club but other nights in the
Gossips week are devoted to straight jazz, rapping, rocking blues, jazz-funk
and roots rockers with Capital Radio DJ David Rodigan. By the time you read
this any of these could have dropped out: in the world of one-nighters, two
weeks means make or break.

Since 1978 when Rusty Egan's Bowie Night at Billy's ritualised the private
party which enjoyed full disco facilities, Gossips astutely wised to filling
the slack nights in its week. In came Pink Monday, Pistols, The Clinic, Jive
Dive, Vidzine and five different Tuesday tenants in the past year alone. The
nature of the one-nighter is its transience. That now legendary Bowie Night
ran only three months. Certainly fast bucks have encouraged exploitation of
passing fads but club-owners have had to depend entirely on streetwise young
frontmen to bring them each craze. Central to the Billy's-into-Blitz axis of
Egan as DJ, Strange as greeter, was the innovation that youth assumed the
initiative. "These were the first clubs run for kids by kids without feeling
we were being ripped off," it was said at the time.

Perry Haines with his I-D night was next off the grid with his "100mph dance
music". He succeeded at Gossips. Stevo and Jock McDonald tried and flopped.
Gaz Mayall's Rockin Blues is now in its third year and one reason why he's
enjoying London's longest run is inevitably the universal appeal of the
blues he plays. Another is Gaz's membership list. It reads like a hip Who's
Who without regard for age.

"A promoter's social register must be strong and if it's not he won't keep a
following, " says Reid Anderson, co-licensee of the Gargoyle upstairs. With
a former pageboy to the Queen, the 24-year-old heir to a 13th Earl hosting
Tuesdays (called Soul Furnace, he says, because "it's hot"), this not
surprisingly is the strongest night of their week.

Steve Strange and Perry Haines carefully constructed their own social
registers but most aspiring promoters who walk in mean a gamble for the
club. "Gossips has always had the bottle to take chances," says Mick
Collins, manager downstairs. "You need courage to let anyone who impresses
you have a go. And you need courage to cut it if it fails on its first
night. I've lost fortunes in the past advertising people's second nights."
What happens of course is that some kid on an ego trip fails to realise that
it's his own job to promote the event.

With dwindling cash closing clubs two or three nights a week, last winter
saw the West End stiff with handbills for mod revivals, paisleyed
psychedelia and mime-faced futurism. Some club-owners got stung. The
Gargoyle scored a first for rapping but when the air got a little too heavy
the Language Lab had to go. Gossips, in line with a solid black music
reputation, gave reggae a home last winter, but now has to display signs
requesting "Gentlemen: No Hats on Fridays and Saturdays" which is a
euphemism to blacks like "No Jeans" is to whites.

"That's our only restriction," says Collins, "and because of it the club
feels safe. People can get away with a lot here and that matters. Some kids
can only afford one night out and they'll spend all that week's dole here.
There's no longer the money to go out every night so we've learned to vary
our clientele through the week."

Upstairs, owner Don Ward had also made a stripclub which had outlived its
purpose viable. "As long as people leave here with money in their pocket,
they'll come back next week. Yes I'm taking a little now off a lot of
people. Each night's promoter works hard too. And the profits go to him."

69 Dean Street can trace its ancestry back to the dawn of clubmanship. It
stands on the corner of a filmset Soho's oldest intact terrace, and though a
spraycan has dubbed this Rapping Yard, a tablet on the same wall dates it:
"Meard Street 1732."The original Jethro Tull, wouldn't you like to know, was
writing his revolutionary theories about English farming then and in the
building boom which followed the Great Fire, speculators spread mansions
over Soho Fields. Artists quickly adopted the new suburb as London's
fashionable quarter.

As recently as its 1930s incarnation, the Gargoyle boasted a
theatrical-artistic membership which included Noel Coward and Tallulah
Bankhead for whom it daringly relaxed the evening dress requirement. Up to
the Fifties, as the haunt of Francis Bacon's Soho group, the club had
Matisse's Red Studio hanging on its wall, arguably his most important
painting, declined by the Tate and lost to America amid scandal when the
Tennant family sold up.

Vestiges of lost splendour still shine, like an Art Deco staircase in steel
and brass that links the Gargoyle dancefloor with the rooftop theatre and
bar. As the Nell Gwynne revue staging three lavish stripshows a night, this
was where businessmen came to clinch their deals over dinner and a hostess and
whatever until the last Labour government said, sorry but hostesses are no
longer tax deductible. The Astor closed, the Churchill closed, but in May
1979 the Gargoyle did some speculating of its own.

Don Ward, himself a onetime comic, imported the American Comedy Store
format: an evening of stand-up comics plus an achingly trendy audience who
gonged off the most hopeless performers. "I feel as welcome here as Hitler
at a Barmitzvah," said one joker last month to a Saturday crowd that's still
in its twenties but after three years rates only a Springsteen in
trendiness.

The Comedy Store did prove to be a crucial staging post in weaning young
comics off leftwing benefits and onto the music circuits. Then last year
along came the eminence grise who'd been trying to make Pythons out of the
breakaway Comic Strip team, Simon Oakes, who in the words of a friend "knows
absolutely everybody" and in those of a rival "has more fingers than there
are pies to put them in."

What he injected with the Language Lab and Lord Ogilvy's Soul Furnace by
putting music first was a social mix you seldom find elsewhere. So though
you really can hear some Henry say "They let you in for half price after lam
like a halfday ski pass," once inside you nevertheless find underage Wembley
mods Doing The Dog beside young Lady Cosima Fry. "This club has been a great
leveller," says Oakes, "because it's based on people not style."

Likewise at The Lift on Thursdays. "Straights have such misconceptions about
gays: people still ask me if I play the male or female role," says co?host
Steve Swindells who encourages gays to bring straight friends of all sexes.
The bait is the hardest music in town, not the usual wimpy American gay
disco, but rebel funk, BLT, Man Parrish. The DJ has scrawled across the wall
"Boogie leads to integration."

If the Gargoyle has cast itself as an equal opportunities crusader, Gossips
pads the musical waterfront with as much zeal. Vince, who has owned Gossips
since the days when gay clubs like Billy's led musical taste, is a Soho
legend himself, straight out of Shaft, huge hats, fistfuls of rings. His
jeweller along Meard Street once showed me a mock-up for a mountainous ring
he was making: "18-carat gold, 16 diamonds, it shone like a torch. I showed
it to Vince and he said, I want more diamonds on it."

One DJ said "When Vince calls by even the manager stands to attention so it
makes sense that I should too." Gossips is the kind of place where nobody
admits a surname until they know you. Yet everyone working there, staff and
one-nighters, uses the same fond word about the few square feet of stonechip
floor and mirror: atmosphere. Collins says: "It's not posh here. What we
have though is heritage."

It's no accident that the nights which have survived the carnival of cults
here say much about the dominant musical forces at work in 1983. Amazingly
for a jazz-funk night Steve Welsh on Fridays pulls an almost exclusively
black crowd: "Very upfront, advanced in their tastes. It doesn't appeal to
the white party crowd." Equally unusually for an essentially reggae night,
Rodigan and his ace toaster Papa Face pull a healthy black-white mix. "It is
rare," he admits. "We emphasise the rootsy, sweeter end of reggae, Rudi
Thomas, Carroll Thompson, and that attracts a lot of women." With the lights
out, the dancefloor throbs like a Ladbroke Grove blues. "Everyone dances to
reggae: you have to get closer," says Dave Gordon, aged 18.

Gossips stands alone in championing reggae in the West End and it is perhaps
significant that it occupies the week's prime spot, Saturday.

Both of Gossips' other hit nights fall happily into playschool roles.
Ghanaian Jo Hagan likes educating people and says the highlife he plays at
the Gold Coast is a lot less aggressive than people expect, "but it can be
intimidating not to hear an English word sung all night." His partner
Christian Cotterill who owns half the records says: "The press made African
music flavour of the month but in fact it's all so danceable. When Gaspar
Lawal played here Gossips had its most profitable night for a year."

If you want to see a genuine Stetson, check Thursdays and you'll find 24
year old Gaz beneath one. When he began playing blues masters B. B. King and
John Lee Hooker back in 1980, Gaz said "People didn't know how to dance to
this stuff but they've been practising." For nearly three years Gaz, himself
a vinyl junkie, has devotedly been handing down history by numbers.

The impact of nightlife on the style of the past five years is not to be
underestimated. However much Futurist-Romantic labels make the skin crawl,
their legacy is evident in the vitality of today's streets and charts,
obvious though the ingredients may have been in Britain's post-punk vacuum:
SF movies, a Dada retrospective, headline-making performance art, a revival
of intimate cabaret.

Yet the positive accelerators of change were a handful of nightclubs.
Photographer Derek Ridgers recalls that Tuesdays at Billy's were "like
walking into a Hieronymous Bosch painting: furtive but lively and with a
dedication that's never been equalled since."

Those formative Bowie Nights and Electro Diskows were parties with a
vengeance, glorifying the individual, wresting power and profits from the
elders. In particular the imaginative deejay became lionised for engineering
new sounds, resplicing Kraftwerk, say, and eliminating the mid-range in
playback.

As those events of '78 were a reaction to the music of Fever and Boney M, to
dancehalls turning into discos, so the circle has turned again. What Moroder
said then is as true today of the Palaces and Haciendas: "Most disco-goers
are not dancers." Nor are they convincing posers. Conceits which were once
daring, the megadisco has now sanctioned. The mainstream giants have
sanitised the cults, standardised the music and dwarfed the individual with
pyrotechnics.

But what Billy's developed, the factory farm at 69 Dean Street went on
refining. The smallscale nightclub has emerged as the customised club night.
It reasserts the supremacy of bedrock music and consequently attracts a
strong social mix. And because allegiance owes less to age-group or to
dress, it activates more socially rewarding reflexes.

What the one night clubgoer has discarded is the disposable identity in
favour of a confident expression of taste. The Pose Age appears to be
buried. Here at last is the party which requires you to come as yourself.

The Gargoyle's lamented closure has not prevented its successes from
striding on into 1983. At time of writing the Comedy Store was reopening mid
January in Lansdowne How, Mayfair. The Lift has already resurfaced on
Thursdays at 28 Leicester Square and the Batcave follows on Wednesdays in
February.