High Society

Travel

William Cash, in Ibiza, joins the A-list jet-set whirl of The Society, Dudley Spencer’s club with an international calendar of social events

DUDLEY SPENCER LOOKS more like a pro-body builder or surfer than the man behind some of the international society crowd’s glitziest dinners and parties — most recently a bash he threw in mid-August for Raffles nightclub in Ibiza at the impossibly trendy (at least while half of London’s jet-set aristo crowd was there) Ushuaia beach restaurant.

But it’s not surprising that he managed to host his party at the chicest beach restaurant in Ibiza as the beach is the one place he feels very much at home. Before working for many years as a financial futures trader for Bankers Trust bank in Australia and London, Spencer spent most of his time surfing the coast around Sydney after his parents moved there from Cornwall when he was a young boy. His father was a top marketing director for Hertz.

‘I was obsessed with surfing and rugby,’ says Spencer. ‘But my parents never made me forget I was English. My dad was brilliant at marketing and always made me understand that nine times out of ten, businesses are about making people happy. And that is what we try to do with The Society club.’

Guests for the exclusive Raffles dinner — the sort that would usually get your A-list society photographers flying out, even if they had to take easyJet — included bohemian music types like James Blunt, who lives part of the year in Ibiza, and Simon Le Bon and his gorgeous and amusing wife Yasmin (their teenage children sat at a kids table); film luvvies like actress Rosamund Pike; and well connected aristo types like Lord Ali Spencer-Churchill, Lady Emily Compton (former social editor of Tatler), and property moguls like Anton Bilton (along with wife Lisa B) and John Hitchcox.

Who wouldn’t want to fly out to Ibiza to party with this crowd? Even if it means flying back to London the next day on the 1.25am easyJet flight to Gatwick — as I did — sitting next to a badly-spangled lager-lad from Blackpool who still thought he was at Pasha and was nearly sick on me.

But mixing things up — with your Eton-educated Mayfair hedgie finding himself at the bar of KM5 at 4am talking with the tattooed ‘uncle’ of Kate Middleton, owner of the wonderfully named villa Maison de Bang Bang — that’s the whole point of the Ibiza scene, and indeed partly why Spencer, along with his business partner and girlfriend Cordelia Nevill — of the blue-blooded Nevill family — decided to set up The Society, his exclusive jet-set private members ‘club’.

After quitting futures trading, Spencer made a name for himself as a consultant for such clubs as Boujis, helping to organise their VIP nights and raising their profile through a PR and consulting firm he owns called The London League. ‘Our new venture, The Society, came out of that because we were finding that we were always inviting the same people to all our events — so we created a little private club around it with about 90 honorary members and the opportunity for new members to apply’.

IF ANY PARTY-INCLINED high-net-worths fancy the idea of hanging out with London’s peripatetic socialite crowd — quite a few of whom, it has to be admitted, are social minnows — they can apply for membership of this troubador version of Annabel’s, very much founded in the same spirit, so long as you pay your £5,000 a year membership fee. When Mark Birley founded Annabel’s in 1963, he invited around 500 of London’s best-connected, most socially desirable toffs, socialites and friends to join his new club, asking them to pay just five guineas to become founder members.

Spencer’s idea is not dissimilar: he realises whenever he has organised events in the past, it is always the same names on the invitation list. So why not create an international table-hopping social club around the compulsive need for those in the ‘in crowd’ to party together (invariably on somebody else’s tab)? And then charge would-be society types, who don’t normally get invited to London’s A-list parties but are wealthy enough and suitable enough to hang out with the cool social, music, and film crowd?

‘Our annual membership fee is no more than the cost of a good dinner for ten friends at Harry’s Bar,’ says Spencer. ‘We have at least one event a month and we plan our dinners and parties to follow the international social season — so we were in Ibiza in August hosting for Raffles, who are our ideal partner, exclusive, discrete and high-end, and we are hosting a fashion party for a major designer at London Fashion Week in September.’

The annual schedule means that members can start planning their roving socialite calendar well in advance without having to wait for a last minute call up. They know, for example, that if they decide to blow their air miles flying business class to LA for the Oscars or the Cannes film festival — using what excuse for actually being there, God only knows — they will at least have a decent dinner or party to go to and won’t feel like a complete loser when they find themselves curiously ignored by the likes of Graydon Carter or the Warner Bros PR office.

What’s more, the people they will meet will help fuel their socialite career, hopefully will lead to a few more invites while they are there, and they might even end up being photographed for the social pages of ES Magazine — or Spear’s. In a way, being a paid-up member of The Society is paying for an annual socialite insurance policy to ensure that whatever happens in your personal life, business life or career, you will always at least have a decent flow of invites to keep you on the social radar.

AS WELL AS VIP dinner events at London’s Fashion Week (for a designer) and London’s Film Festival, the party schedule is packed. In November, a dinner and party in an newly-converted 18-bedroom mansion designed by Paul Davies, and a spa and golf weekend at the King of Morroco’s new resort, The Royal Mansour. In February there’s a
party in L.A. for an Oscar-nominated film. In April, there’s a garden party at the Nevill family estate, Eridge Park, hosted by Cordelia’s cousin Lady Sophie Nevill. And then in May, there is the yearly Cannes film Festival party at 3.14 La Plage.

Having been out to Ibiza, and experienced The Society in action, I can see why this newest form of roving private members club should take off. Spencer is the hands-on type that makes sure the sort of parties he puts on are exactly the sort that he would like to attend himself: full of socialites, celebs, filthy rich property and finance types — and a whole coach load of beautiful, single and sexy socialites. And they all come — whether it is Cannes or Ibiza — because they know they will be guaranteed ‘fun’ and lashings of late-night social froth that gives them a high from the (invariably delusional) belief they are hanging with the cool crowd.

‘It was very clear to us that the majority of events this crowd were always being invited to were not actually run for people who were invited to the event,’ says Spencer. ‘They were run by corporate event companies that didn’t have a clue. Classic mistakes would be they would make their “patron policy” completely wrong.’

What’s a patron policy, I asked.

‘I actually invented that term — it’s now widely used in the events world. It means the mix of people that come from different social spheres. And when it comes to mixing things up, we like to think we are the very best.’