Club class


'Everyone loves you and everything's free/We're always the face everyone wants to see/Life goes by in a velvet rope blur/In through the back by the fire escape stairs/Everyone loves us and everything's free/Always in the place everyone wants to be'
from Peakin' by Bleachin'

Jeremy Healy is a DJ. Ranked by fame, fortune or ability to attract paying customers through the door of a club, he's probably in the top 10 worldwide. He's a star, whose earnings for a good weekend run well into five figures. Under the name Bleachin', he has just released an album with his friend Amos Pizzey - one of those people everyone in London knows, even if few of them could say exactly what it is that Pizzey does. Bleachin' is an Afro-Caribbean term for serious partying, for going without sleep so long that your face turns white. It's also the name of the album's first track, the story of a nonstop three-night bender in Paris and London which the duo enjoyed two years ago. The first few copies of the album, Everyone Loves You, Everything's Free , come in a limited- edition, mirrored CD case complete with rolled-up note. As you may have guessed, it's about a certain lifestyle: about celebrity parties, guest lists and free champagne, about bright cocaine nights and the dark, empty comedowns that inevitably follow. For Pizzey especially, it's an intensely personal record. You could say he'd been researching it most of his life.

Tuesday, 8.30am, Eurostar terminal at Waterloo. Pizzey is in his element. He has friends to entertain, strangers to charm, a party to organise. He's telling stories and jokes, cheerfully moving passengers around our first-class carriage so that we can all sit together, trying to persuade everyone to stay the night in Paris and go out. Meanwhile, he's on the mobile with his record label, trying to persuade them to hold the launch party for his album on a yacht in Ibiza.

Annie Leibovitz is undertaking a marathon shoot for the September issue of US Vogue: 12 fashion designers with the friends who inspire them, shot in several countries over a period of 16 days. Pizzey, Trish Simenon and Annabelle Neilson are going to Paris to be photographed with John Galliano; Pizzey's girlfriend, the radio and TV presenter Lisa I'Anson, has come along to shop; I'm just there for the ride.

From the Gare du Nord, a limo whisks us to the opulent restaurant where the shoot is to take place. An army of Vogue stylists and a rack of gorgeous Dior dresses is waiting. Galliano himself arrives straight from the airport at 5pm; Healy, who has provided the soundtrack to every catwalk show the designer has produced since his graduation, has flown in sleepless from Mallorca, where he has been playing all night at the vast BCM club; celebrity party organiser Fran Cutler and her sister Charlotte have come in from Ibiza, where they've been visiting Fran's business partner, Meg Mathews, at her home on the island.

As they finally settle down for the shoot, they are asked to act like there's a party going on. It's no great stretch. Most of this group have known each other for years, and were there for Galliano when times were tough and his talent wasn't so richly rewarded. There's a lot of banter, a lot of loud laughter. Leibovitz takes just 30 minutes to capture an illusion of late-night glamour, and then the real night begins. Taxis arrive to transport everyone to rooms at the swish Hotel Costes, then there's an hour by the pool and dinner at a hip new Moroccan restaurant. Late that night, I get a taxi home. Reaching for the fare, I realise it's the first time I've paid for anything all day.

Jeremy Healy was born in Peckham, south-east London 'a restless spirit, full of vague, unspoken ambitions'. On the bus to school, he'd met George O'Dowd, from the nearby suburb of Eltham. They began going out together, dressing up, becoming faces in the emerging club scene, living in squats and getting their photos in the new style magazines. Inevitably, they both joined bands. Healy's band, Haysi Fantayzee, got a record deal by making a cheap video and sending out a sheaf of promotional photographs, making them one of the first acts to realise the power that image was to play in the MTV decade. They hit the charts in July 1982 with the gloriously titled 'John Wayne Is Big Leggy'. O'Dowd's band, Culture Club, got its first hit single two months later, but proved to have rather more longevity. Healy, meanwhile, moved from making records to playing them, becoming a star DJ in the small, enclosed world that was 80s clubland. The elite got into clubs for free, drank cocktails in VIP rooms, enjoyed trips to New York, Japan, Ibiza. At the time, this seemed the height of sophistication but, like so much about the 80s, it proved to be just an over-dressed rehearsal for the decade to come. When the acid-house boom took club culture mainstream, going out dancing became something all kids did, not just the strangely dressed ones. Suddenly there were cool dance clubs in every town and city in Britain, and then across the globe.

When the scene exploded, Healy employed his friend Fran Cutler, to organise his bookings for him. She went on to start one of the first DJ agencies and is one of the people credited by disgruntled promoters for raising DJ fees up into the stratosphere. Some time around 1993, Healy challenged Cutler to book him somewhere absurd, somewhere new, and she sent him to a club in Norway just by the Arctic Circle. It was then, he said, that he began to understand that he could take his records and get paid to go anywhere in the world.

Friday, 9pm, Seven - the restaurant above Home nightclub in Leicester Square. Pizzey is holding court, as he does every Friday, before hosting the night at Home's members' bar on the floor above. He is entertaining the close friends on his table with the story of his doomed attempt to enjoy a quiet New Year's break in Thailand with I'Anson. (It involves various celebrities, plus a man with a gun, a helicopter, and things the libel laws wouldn't allow me to even hint at here.) The club pays Pizzey to host the night, to invite his friends along, have a few drinks and a few laughs. He's too diplomatic to mention it, but before he got involved, the place was dead. To kick it off, Pizzey set up a few parties for famous friends, peaking with an event for John Galliano that saw 1,400 people pass through the bar - including the reigning queen of the London party A-list, Madonna. 'After that,' he says casually, 'it was pretty much up and running.'

Amos Pizzey was born in west London. His father, an ex-naval officer, worked in television. His mother, Erin, a diplomat's daughter, founded the first refuge for battered women in Chiswick, bringing the issue of domestic violence out into the open. After they divorced, his dad lived in a flat in the basement of their home with various girlfriends, while Erin unofficially fostered a group of young men Pizzey grew up regarding as his half-brothers. All of them were black, all older than him: 'They were my role models, which is where my cultural confusion stemmed from. I didn't know it, but I had real problems being white at that time.'

His liberal parents told him he didn't have to go to school if he didn't want to. So he took his education instead in illegal shebeens, following reggae sound systems. By the time he was 13, he was performing himself, a white boy improvising on the mic in fluent patois. 'I was pretty wild,' he recalls. 'I couldn't write, but I couldn't half rock the mic!'

His sister's boyfriend, Mickey Craig, had also moved into their household, and invited Pizzey to join his group, Culture Club. Pizzey worked with them under the alias Captain Crucial. He was 14 and the band was just on the verge of pop success when his mother dropped her bombshell: they were moving to New Mexico. 'The next thing I knew, I was in the desert in Santa Fe. A white kid with dreadlocks, surrounded by cowboys. Not a good move.' For years, Erin Pizzey's life had been a battle. Against the local authority about overcrowding at the refuge. Against feminists, who first celebrated her, then objected to her analysis of the causes of domestic violence. And finally against the legal system, when she refused to reveal the whereabouts of a woman and child she'd smuggled to safety in France.

Pizzey remembers being in court with people like Spike Milligan who had taken up his mother's cause, watching her get sent to prison. She was eventually released, but decided to leave Britain. 'It was a bad period,' says Pizzey. 'I'm very proud of my mother. But it wasn't great, a lot of it. She was under a lot of pressure.'

In the next few years, they moved across New Mexico, to the Caribbean and then to Italy. By the time he was 16 he was back in London alone, with a fierce self-belief that he says was his mother's gift to him. With his half-brother Cass (now in Skunk Anansie), he formed an abysmal band called Dark Star. They recorded one demo, a calypso version of 'My Girl', and signed a massive record deal. 'I loved the 80s,' laughs Pizzey. 'They gave us a quarter of a million quid. I was 17, Richard Branson took me out to lunch and said, "You're it, you're going to be the thing."'

Pizzey didn't have a driving licence, but he had a Jag. And suits with shoulder pads so wide he had to go through doors sideways. They spent two years in the studio, but the resulting album was predictably dire, and the group was dropped. 'If we'd been successful, I would have been such a wanker,' says Pizzey philosophically. 'I mean, I'm a wanker now, but I've got a sense of humour. Taking yourself seriously and being a wanker is a different thing: that's Mick Hucknall.'

Undeterred, he formed a rock band with Ringo Starr's son Zak Starkey, and they were big in Japan for a while. By the time he returned to London, Ecstasy and house music had arrived, and Pizzey enthusiastically embraced the new scene. He'd known of Healy for years - Boy George had engineered a stand-off between the two over who had the most authentic dreadlocks - but finally they became friends, recording for O'Dowd's dance label More Protein.

When Healy played in clubs, Pizzey would often come along to improvise on the mic over the records. It was on a club trip to Singapore and Bali with Healy at the start of the 90s that Pizzey met Melissa Ong, the woman he was to spend the next seven years of his life with. He took her to his swish hotel in Singapore to impress her; she laughed and told him that her father owned it. In fact, her family owns quite a few hotels, across the world. Along with a substantial oil business and a retail empire built around designer fashion.

Although the 80s are often seen as the designer decade, the obsession with labels only became big business in the 90s, when entrepreneurs like the Ongs took an interest. At its peak, the company run by Melissa's mother Christina had the franchises to some 60 designer names including Armani, Prada, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein. She opened flagship stores for these labels across Asia, Australia - and, of course, in London, where she also opened the Metropolitan on Park Lane in 1997. A designer hotel very much in the mould set by Ian Schrager in New York, it had a small bar that the Ongs hoped would draw in hip Londoners as well as hotel guests. Since they wanted the bar to be exclusive, Pizzey advised them not to sell memberships. Instead, they gave them away. A thousand cards went out to carefully selected people, and the deluge began.

'People are always going to fight if they can't get into something,' he shrugs. 'That's so London. It's just a small, red room, but the scenes that went on in there during the peak two years were just ridiculous.'

For a while, it seemed that everyone who was anyone passed through the Met Bar. Fran Cutler and Meg Mathews hosted a night there. Models, actors, pop stars and their entourages partied there. 'It wasn't the celebrities, it was the people around them who started to fascinate me,' says Pizzey, explaining his inspiration for the Bleachin' album. 'They were all supposedly producers, directors, models, actors, but all they really did was bugle [cocaine] in the bar. But then you started to notice fall-out. Certain people would get rougher and rougher, their designer facade would slip and they'd end up hassling you for drugs. I found the whole period fascinating. It was the end of the century, there was an element of fiddling while Rome burns.'

Monday, 7pm, yet another new cocktail bar, Zeta's, not far from the Met Bar. Pizzey is here with I'Anson, Healy with his Brazilian girlfriend Luciana Silva. We're meeting before the London Club and Bar Awards at the Hilton - a lavish, self-congratulatory affair that offers yet another illustration of how fast this industry has grown. It's being televised, so there's a short film clip before each award. Pizzey guides us on a tour of some of London's new bars before I'Anson comes on stage to present the Best Bar award to Piccadilly's 10 Rooms. Former EastEnders actor Sid Owen presents the Best Club award, reading out the list of nominees and announcing, 'I've been mashed in all of these places.' It goes to Fabric, and the lady who runs their VIP toilets steps up to collect it, joking that she's seen many of the audience lingering in her cubicles.

Meanwhile, from the numbers shuttling to the toilets in groups, the hotel's staff could be forgiven for believing they were at a support night for the chronically weak- bladdered.

There's another story to the Bleachin' album, one that is told in the final four tracks, where the titles are less celebratory: 'Comedown', 'Fragile', 'Ambulance' and 'Learn to Cry'. It's the story of the lows that always accompany chemical highs, of the many who lost their souls for a line of white powder. But more specifically, it's the story of Pizzey's nephew Keita. Pizzey's sister Cleo was 15 when Keita was born; the father, Mickey Craig, was two years older. Pizzey talks about Keita as a brother, or a son. 'We slept in the same bed because he got scared at night. I changed his nappies, and he always looked up to me 'way too much, I can see now.'

Keita came to clubs when Pizzey performed, and had some talent as a rapper himself 'at one point, there was talk of him signing to Boy George's label. Like many clubbers, he got into Ecstasy. Unlike most, he started hearing voices. Gradually, the Pizzeys began to realise he was seriously ill, and discovered that paranoid schizophrenia ran in his father's side of the family. Pizzey spent a lot of time just talking to him, 'really out-there conversations when he'd hear voices talking to him in records and say me and him were here to fight aliens'. Pizzey got him into The Priory for a while, and Keita went through various NHS schemes without ever getting consistent help. Mostly the family was left trying to deal with his illness alone, his mother and grandmother taking turns to care for him.

When he asked for money, Pizzey said he'd buy him food, clothes, anything he needed, but he wouldn't give him cash to buy drugs. One day Keita mugged an old lady. When he was chased, he ran to his own home and sat inside the front door, crying, until the police came. At the station, Keita said he was a danger to himself. The police followed procedure, putting him in a shared cell, checking on him every 15 minutes. But then he was transferred to Wandsworth Prison for the night and, by morning, he was dead - hanged in his cell with his laces.

Pizzey blames himself for Keita's death. He didn't take drugs with his nephew, but he has never hidden the fact that he does take them. He thinks he's got away with a lot in his life, by being physically fit, by having good friends, by having places he could go to escape and clean out if it all got too much. He wonders if everyone will be as lucky. 'I think the drugs fallout will be massive over the next few generations, because we're doing shit that we've got no idea about.'

Saturday, noon, The Dior couture show at L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. On a balcony high in the roof, Healy is pacing about nervously. His music is playing: a simple four-note sequence repeated again and again, punctuated by the crack of a whip and a woman moaning in sexual ecstasy. Below, Steven Spielberg is sitting with his wife Kate Capshaw on one side, Elle Macpherson on the other, brilliantly managing to affect natural-looking conversations with both despite the photographers who surround them in an arc, flashbulbs popping. There's a hush as the show starts with a man in an ornate, feminine bishop's costume, followed by characters from a lavish, yet slightly sinister wedding. As each model moves along the catwalk, the music changes to match the mood. Healy has spent four days in Paris talking through the ideas with Galliano, making the music fit his themes of dysfunctional families and sexual transgression. The final mix includes dance beats, film soundtracks, a stream of obscenities by American performance artist Karen Finlay, and Beethoven's ninth symphony. As always, it's the most exciting music Healy makes.

There was a point when he became a symbol of DJ excess. A couple of years ago, he began to slow down. He'd been depressed, he realised, and needed to start enjoying music again, enjoying his life. 'Money isn't everything. Unconsciously, I'd focused so much on my career - and I never thought I would even utter that word - that I was travelling all the time. If you're not around when people phone, after six months no one's going to call you. Success made me quite a lonely person.' Healy's daughter, Marley, was born in 1991. It wasn't something he'd planned, and it didn't make much difference to his life at first: 'I was never with the mother, never said I would be.' But then Marley's mum died. Suddenly, unexpectedly. (In the context of this feature, it seems relevant to say there were no drugs involved.) So Marley came to live with Healy for two days a week, and in their first year together, he finally became a father. 'To see the wonder in her eyes when I show her things is brilliant. It's lovely.'

He recently moved into a new apartment in central London after spending months having it fitted to his specifications, yet he talks wistfully of a house he'd seen out in the suburbs, a big house with room for a swimming pool that he says would be lonely without a family to fill it. For now, though, Marley lives in Ibiza with her mother's best friend, who is bringing her up with her own children. Healy doesn't see her as much as he'd like, and he still seems surprised at how painful that is. 'I hope to take on more, to get closer and closer to her. It's difficult, because apart from the summer, I can go two or three months without seeing her, and that tends to hurt. You have to get to know them again, and it takes time to get to that place with them again. That idea of a family may be corny, but to not have that is a lot harder to deal with than to have it. And not to have your daughter with you when you want her to be_ That's one thing I haven't got, and it's about the only thing in my life that could have been worked better.' He pauses then laughs, almost embarrassed. 'But everything else has worked out quite good.'

Saturday, 8pm. There's a car waiting at Waterloo. I drive with Healy to his new home. In two hours, he'll leave again to play at a club in Watford. Then it's back to London, where he'll DJ at another club until 5.30am. The next day, he'll fly to Mallorca for another all-nighter, followed by his weekly residency in Ibiza. There are far worse ways to make a living, of course, and Healy certainly isn't complaining. Nonetheless, it's a relentless schedule. Everybody loves you, nothing comes free.

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