Eileen's Story
33/37 Wardour Street - The Wag Club
It’s an Irish Pub now, but it used to be so much more. The Wag Club ran from 1982 until 2001, evolving from the Whisky A Go Go which operated on the first floor of 33/37 Wardour Street. Co-founded by Central St Martins student and musician Chris Sullivan the club brought the spirit of warehouse parties to Soho. Specialising in having different genres each night, it played a key role in breaking hip-hop in the UK, featuring the first UK gigs by Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. The Wag also kicked off the acid house scene with Frankie Knuckles, Todd Terry, Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall among those hosted by the club. Sade and Fine Young Cannibals were signed by record companies after performing there.
Club regulars included Tracey Emin, Boy George, Neneh Cherry and Joe Strummer - but the club was priced to be inclusive, attracting students and a whole range of clubbers. We spoke to Eileen, a regular at the club from the late 1980s. This is her story.
I grew up in a very remote village in Northern Ireland and knew as soon as I was old enough, I would be out of there. Every week I would buy the one teenage magazine that was in our newsagent, and every week I’d watch Top of the Pops - the only music I had access to. It was 1987, I’d turned 17 and I just decided that summer that I was going to get a job in London.
I looked up all the fancy hotels there and applied for jobs as a chambermaid because you could live in the hotel. My parents were quite conservative - so I'm astounded that they didn't say ‘you're not going’! A top hotel in Mayfair offered me a job with accommodation in a staff hostel around the back. It was a five minute walk from Oxford Street and I just thought I’d be able to experience London.
I quickly realised that just about all the other women in the hostel were very much older than me, apart from a German woman called Ulrike who was into the club scene. We went dancing on various nights of the week to different clubs. There seemed to be quite a scene around young people that worked in hotels that would all go out together.
I really enjoyed the experience of being in London. I'd go to the Notting Hill Carnival, all these things that I just didn't get when I was growing up in Northern Ireland. And I really liked the fact that although I was living in this hostel, I was right in the centre of everything.
I got to know a guy called Denis who worked in the hotel laundry - a Londoner and a regular at the Wag Club. That’s was how I ended up going there - probably a couple of times a week. I didn’t go for specific music nights - I just went along when Denis was going - and that got me into different types of music. I suppose the kind of music I listen to now is the stuff I got into during that time in London - jazz funk, acid jazz, disco music and soul. Although I grew up not knowing much about music, during that time in London I got know a lot of fairly obscure jazz and funk. I would never have known about all that music if I'd stayed in Northern Ireland.
Because I was living in a hostel at the back of the hotel, there wasn’t a huge amount of preparation involved before a night at the Wag Club. I wasn’t particularly into the dressing up - but I did have very bad permed hair. But to fit in I'd wear my Levi's. I’d generally go with Denis and Ulrike and we might have gone somewhere for a drink before arriving at the club around 10.
The thing about the Wag Club, was that it felt a bit secretive. Not exclusive, but it didn’t show itself off - the doorway on Wardour Street didn't look that exciting. From the outside it didn’t suggest you were going into somewhere, that there was a club going on up the stairs. But you could hear music. It was a narrow staircase and actually I remember the club as being not particularly glamorous. You would arrive into a dark room full of lots of people dancing and having a good time.
We’d have a drink and sit down. There were some seats around the edges. I've got a memory of one night feeling really tired, but feeling I wanted to stay there, just to be there, just sitting on this chair at the edge of the room. A bit like a school disco where you would just have very basic seats around the edge.
There were a lot of people there and - I wasn't as cool as I might have liked to be - I was probably just wanting to fit in. I remember one night Boy George was there and I was absolutely star struck. Another night I was dancing and Chrissie Hynde was there just dancing beside me. But of course nobody was taking any notice of her. So there was clearly a lot of very cool people there, but at the time I don't think I fully realised. But it didn’t feel exclusive at all. I was a young 18 year old from Northern Ireland - but there was never any issue about whether I would get in or not. I just went there. I was accepted as part of it.
I can remember sometimes staying there all night, then going back to the hotel, sometimes in the summer sitting outside early in the morning having a coffee, then I'd get on my very prim chambermaid’s uniform, which made me look a little like a Florence Nightingale nurse. I can remember times when I would lie down on the beds in the rooms of the hotel and have a little nap!
I felt like I'd escaped from a mundane existence and it was really exciting to be at a London club that I'd heard of. It was the complete opposite of anything I'd experienced before - discovering new types of music that I really liked, making new and more diverse friends who I would have never come across in rural Northern Ireland. It was liberating for me. I felt part of something.