I used to love NY

Who or what killed New York’s night world? A number of perps come instantly to mind.

‘The camera phone basically killed off the VIP room as an arena where anything interesting might happen,’ I once told the writer Christopher Tennant, who referred to me as the ‘three-time winner of Spy magazine’s infamous Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon’. I went on to say, ‘There’s not nearly as much drunkenness as there was back then, and certainly not as much fun. I can hardly remember the last time I saw a queue of giggling girls waiting to use a restroom.’

I moved to New York in the late 1970s, from a still somewhat swinging London. I had long been happily living in a studio in the Pheasantry on the King’s