Bonfire Of The Vanities

When trouble-prone soccer star Stan Collymore reluctantly played the odd-shaped ball in a drunken street scrum with some Bath rugby players a couple of weeks ago, it put the name of Lillie’s Bordello – the club they had all just vacated – on the front pages for the second time in a month. The infamous Dublin celebrity night spot had earlier hit the headlines when, despite much media speculation, it failed to attract a single bid when it went up for auction on October 13th.

Of course, barely a day passes without Lillie’s being namechecked in the press anyway but it’s more usually mentioned in the gossip columns. The Central Bank of Celebrity, Lillie’s is a home away from home for many visiting A-listers, and a second one for numerous local luminaries.
Bono, Eamon Dunphy, Eddie Ervine and Ron Wood are all regulars, while the likes of Mel Gibson, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Mick Jagger would normally drop in if they were in town (the Rolling Stones held their last end of tour party there). In any case, on any given night, the ‘name’ to ‘non-name’ ratio is generally pretty good for such a small country. Twenty minutes before he was scrapping rugby players on Grafton Street, Stan Collymore had apparently been singing karaoke with Pierce Brosnan in Jersey Lil’s, the exclusive upstairs members bar.
Unfortunately, 007 was nowhere to be seen when Collymore was getting his head kicked in.

When Lillie’s Bordello first put up its velvet rope in 1990, the Dublin club scene was completely different. In fact, Dublin was completely different. It wasn’t so much that there were no celebrity nightclubs – more that there were no celebrities. Pre-Celtic Tiger, there weren’t that many of the rich and famous around, but those that did come to town tended to park their egos at the Pink Elephant on South Frederick Street (now the downstairs bar of Renards).
Opened in the early 80’s, the ‘Pink’ was the first Dublin nightclub to challenge the dubious supremacy of the Leeson Street strip of clubs and wine bars. It quickly became a haunt for the likes of Def Leppard, U2, Gavin Friday and other local celebrities, and media and music industry types.
Now a club DJ, singer Barry Warner was a reasonably successful Irish pop star in the mid-1980’s. He filmed the video for his first single ‘Real Man’ in the Pink, and was a “five nights a week” regular in the club during its heyday.
“I’m originally from Limerick,” he explains, “and basically, when I came up to Dublin first, I wanted to bring records out but I didn’t really know anybody much, so it seemed to me that the best place to hang out was the place where all the people in the business hung out. So the Pink became my haunt very quickly. For quite a long time, it literally was the only place to be if you were in the music business or the media.”
The Pink was owned by the Belton family, and the head barman was an ambitious young Dubliner named Robbie Fox (who today owns Renards and a number of successful restaurants). When Leitrim businessman Gerry O’Reilly decided to open a proper celebrity nightclub, he brought Fox in as his partner.
It was a shrewd move. From his Pink years, the wily Fox had the experience, contacts and ideas to really get a new club going. Having already opened a bar and restaurant, Judge Roy Beans, on the ground floor, they decided that they were going to transform the upstairs venue into a truly exclusive club. In other words, they weren’t going to fill it with “nobodys” on the quiet nights. For the first six months or so, they let less people in than they were turning away. As a result it soon became the place that everyone wanted to go to.
The building in Adam Court, off Grafton Street, actually already had a history of attracting notables. In the 1940’s, it was where Jammet’s restaurant - a favoured haunt of writers, politicians, diplomats, actors, journalists and the Free-French - was situated. Subsequently, over the years, it had gone through a number of less credible metamorphoses (including a few years as a Bernie Inn burger joint). Before O’Reilly and Fox took over in 1990, it had been a lacklustre nightclub called The Last Watering Hole. However, with extensive redecoration and the addition of many drapes, paintings, red carpets, chandeliers and velvet ropes, its new incarnation as Lillie’s Bordello - named after the beautiful turn of the century socialite Lillie Langtry - proved to be its most successful.
In addition to the dancefloor and two bars, O’Reilly and Fox installed a room known as the Library (which was expensively furnished with old fittings and drapes from Jammet’s restaurant). The Library was actually quite small - comfortably holding only about twenty people - but it quickly developed a reputation as the most exclusive room in Dublin.
Warner was one of the many local celebrities who soon became regular there. Like this writer, he has very fond memories of the Library scene. “The Pink had lost a lot of its shine at that stage,” he recalls. “And the Library was just a really great scene. You never knew who you’d meet. What I’ve noticed today with the smoking ban is that a lot of people standing outside bars all wind up talking to each other because they’ve all got something in common, and they’re all thrown into this area together. And it used to be like that with Lillie’s Library.
“It was a similar vibe because it was very small and very intimate - anyone who was in there was kinda in there. People would just chat to each other. All that A-list, B-list stuff hadn’t really kicked in. It was just that we were all there for the same reason - generally to get wasted. Ha, ha! It didn’t really matter if you’d one record out that had sold two thousand copies, you’d still wind up talking to someone who’d sold ten million. People who’d written bestselling books would be talking to people who had a bit of local profile but were still signing on the next day.
“Most people who came in there wanted to talk to people. They didn’t want to be aloof in the corner. A good few years ago, I was there one night with my wife and we didn’t realise until afterwards that we’d been sitting with Julia Roberts all night. I hadn’t even noticed. But I don’t know now if that would even be possible because the Irish have gone from being very casual about saying, ‘Oh, there’s Mel Gibson’ to making a big fuss. It was something that was liked about us and a reason people came to Dublin. But nowadays it seems to me that Irish people are getting as hysterical about people who’ve been on TV, or written books, or been in the movies as the English or Americans.”
Although O’Reilly and Fox dissolved their partnership in 1994 (Fox left to open his first restaurant), the club’s reputation continued to grow steadily under its new manager, former singer and model Valerie Roe. With increased economic prosperity and a huge upsurge in investment in the Irish music and movie industries, there was suddenly a massive increase in celebrity traffic. With the glamorous Valerie Roe playing traffic warden, most of it bottlenecked in Lillie’s. And the bottles being necked were mostly Moet.
Writer and social diarist Dermott Hayes was another Lillie’s regular. “In the mid-90’s I’d go around about five clubs a night because there was always something happening in every club,” he says. “But the one place that you always knew you were gonna run into celebrities was Lillie’s. And it never had that big kind of dance club vibe at all. It was the only place that managed to straddle both worlds fairly successfully.”
Indeed, the club’s DJ (Tommy) hasn’t changed in years. The musical policy in Lillie’s has always been contemporary and chart orientated. In other words, non-intrusive. Lillie’s has never been about the music. People don’t go there to dance - they go there to see and to be seen. And maybe to be spotted. Louis Walsh first laid eyes on Samantha Mumba there.
Having said that, the club has had the occasional impromptu live gig. “There used to be a band there on a Sunday night,” Hayes recalls. “And around 1995, Public Enemy had been doing a Dublin gig and they went into the club afterwards. They wanted pizza so someone went out to get them pizzas. While they were waiting they went out onto the stage and started rapping, so anybody who was there got a free gig. They played for around thirty minutes.”
Although rumours abounded of prodigious coke-snorting going on behind the Library doors, the club has always operated a strict no-drugs policy. As one nameless former librarian - a now 33-year-old music journalist - recalls, “Sure, sometimes there were people taking drugs but it was never an open thing. Like, contrary to rumours, nobody was chopping out lines on the tables. Same as any other club really. If the bouncers caught you, you were out. Unless you were really famous, in which case you’d probably be politely but firmly asked to stop. But really what mostly happened in the Library was drinking, flirting and chatting.”
In 1996, the club changed hands when the Egan family (owners of Bruxelles) bought it from Gerry O’Reilly, who was now concentrating on buying property. Recognising that times had changed and that, with a media explosion, there had been a concurrent celebrity explosion, the very first thing the Egans did was build an extension onto the library. Their intention was to maximise the public space in the club, while maintaining the air of exclusivity that Fox had established, and Roe was now adeptly continuing. All they had to do was to expand the other half of it and then they had a good combo going. They quickly made it very profitable. Like a transatlantic jet, the champagne guzzling First Class passengers covered the costs, while the celebrity spotters and lesser luminaries generated the profit. Or vice versa. Depended on the night.
Eventually, as the volume of celebrities increased to a ridiculous level (hello, the entire cast of Fair City), they ripped the Library out altogether and moved it to a different part of the club. The VIP lounge, Jersey Lil’s, is now situated on the third floor (there’s another one for lesser lights downstairs) and, with a separate entrance and beefed-up security, is practically a separate club in itself. To gain membership, you must be over 32 and either nominated by two other members or invited to join by the management. “Lillie’s is a private club and people can join if we feel that they will fit in,” Valerie Roe (who didn’t return hotpress’s calls for comment in this article) explained a few years back.
Although Lillie’s is more normally mentioned in the gossip pages and social columns, there have been some less welcome headlines about the place in recent times. In 2002, a couple who claimed to have been the victims of a “commando-like assault” by the Lillie’s bouncers were awarded 27 thousand by the Dublin Circuit Court. Late one night in March, 2003, the cops raided and found comedian Patrick Kielty and 100 others still drinking. In a much-publicised case, the judge commented: “If you have got famous people you must put them out like everybody else, and if not, then frog-march them off and call the Garda.” On October 28th of this year, the club again escaped an endorsement on its license for after-hours drinking, but was fined two grand.
But these are just regular hazards of the trade, and the club continues to do good business, attracting A-listers, B-listers, C-listers, wannabes and celebrity-spotters on a nightly basis. Writing about Lillie’s in the Sunday Independent recently, Michael Flatley described it as “one of the greatest nightclubs in the world.” The Lord of the Dance went on to ask: “What other place in the world could you go to bump into the Corrs, Julia Roberts, U2, Tom Jones, Van Morrison and Liam Neeson?”
Flatley was actually in attendance at last month’s auction but didn’t make a bid, despite the fact that he had previously attempted to buy a 50% stake in the club from the Egan family a few years ago. It was in Lillie’s that he met his former fiance Lisa Murphy - spotting the gorgeous blonde on the dance floor and, with a click of his Cuban heels, whisking her off to the privacy of the Library and a much publicised courtship. Now that the couple have split up, maybe it had lost its sentimental value for him. Or maybe with serious investments in Los Vegas, he just doesn’t need the headaches.
The club has 65 years left on a 99-year lease, with rent currently at 272,994 euros per annum. The starting price was a cool four million, though many expected it to sell for at least seven. However, former Lillie’s manager Robbie Fox (who also attended the auction) says he isn’t particularly surprised that it didn’t attract any bids.
“A lot of people thought that I’d be jumping with joy that it didn’t sell but, in actual fact, I think it’s a bad sign for not just the nightclub business but for the pub business in general,” he told hotpress. “People are a bit wary of the pub business because of all the shouting out of the Minister for Justice about how he’s going to change the licensing laws. So people are just waiting to see what he’s gonna do, and I think that’s why it didn’t sell.
“There’s an uncertainty within the licensing trade at the moment because of the smoking ban and the change in people’s habits when it comes to drinking. But I think also that there’s a bit of scare-mongering by the media. I don’t think that business is as bad as people are saying it is. I mean, certainly not in my business. I mean, I’m no worse than last year.
“But I think sometimes the media and even people in the business themselves tend to talk doom. It’s a bit like people talking themselves into a recession. I don’t think it’s as bad, although I do understand why people would be standing back and waiting to see what the minister is going to do. Hopefully if he does the right thing - we’ve been asking him for a few years now to issue a nightclub license - the confidence will come back into the business, and especially the nightclub business. If that happens, Lillie’s will go in a shot.”
Apparently there were other offers made after the auction (one rumoured to have come from former footballer Lee Chapman), but the Egan family turned them all down.
As one industry insider (who asked not to be named) explained to hotpress: “I think the sale was really just the Egans dipping a toe in the water. You know, the club’s making good money and there’s no urgent need to sell it. But they’re doing a lot of stuff in the US at the moment and I think that Lillie’s is very time consuming. It’s a big headache having such a big staff. But they’re genuinely very nice people, and they’re a very family orientated business as well, and I think that, with so much staff, they sort of felt it would be unfair on them to sell up so close to Christmas. So they’ve just left it as is for the moment.”
Whatever happens, it seems likely that the club will be alive, kicking and packing the stars in for some time to come. After all, of all the listed buildings in Dublin, Lillie’s Bordello is the only one filed under ‘A’.