Kate Moss's 30th birthday is famed as London's most decadent party - I know it's true because
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Kate Moss's 30th birthday is
Kate Moss's 30th birthday is famed as London's most decadent party - I know it's true because
Kate Moss's 30th birthday is famed as London's most decadent party - I know it's true because I was there...and saw the cocaine and all those naked bodies writhing on the bed
The halls and bars of Claridge's hotel, London, are all but deserted. Night cleaners move discreetly around a solitary guest who nurses an unfinished drink.
In an instant, the calm is shattered, as Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood bursts into the lobby. His voice bouncing off each marble surface, he announces to everybody and nobody, 'We're in f***ing Claridge's.'
It's Saturday January 17, 2004, and it's 2.30am. Kate Moss's 30th birthday party is in full swing.
What a difference two decades make.
Earlier this week the supermodel turned 'spiritual warrior', a newly minted lifestyle guru, alcohol-free and glowing today despite her infamous hard living of yesteryear, marked her half century with a series of celebrations.
A girls' trip to the Caribbean was followed, last Tuesday, by an evening of dinner and dancing at Laurent restaurant in Paris.
Celebrity guests were seen leaving the opulent venue — which had transformed into a nightclub with makeshift catwalk for the occasion — then climbing into taxis at 2am.
According to reports, Kate wanted her 50th birthday to be a 'night to remember' — or perhaps, more accurately, a night she and her guests could remember.
Because when it comes to unforgettable, well, you can forget your seaside rituals in Mustique and elegant soirees in Paris.
The one for the cultural history books, the party that is still spoken of as one of the most decadent London has ever seen, is the one that took place 20 years ago: Kate's 30th.
And I should know: I was there.
As a night porter showed Ronnie Wood, along with his then-wife Jo and daughter Leah, to the lift that morning, I started the climb up the stairs to the seventh floor and the penthouse suite where Kate and her closest friends would party until long after dawn.
The theme was The Beautiful And Damned and Kate styled herself after Gloria Gilbert, the spoilt, beautiful creature who marries Anthony Patch in F Scott Fitzgerald's book of that title.
Described as a girl who 'goes, goes, goes', who smokes, flirts and sunbathes, who dances all afternoon and night, is exquisitely beautiful, unaffected and spontaneous, it's not much of a reach to see why the Kate of those days might relate to Gloria.
That night she was the ultimate party girl, playing the ultimate party girl.
By the time I made it up the back stairs and into the seventh floor corridor, there was a logjam of extravagantly dressed guests waiting to pass the final hurdle of a clipboard-wielding official who guarded the base of the narrow little staircase that ran up to Kate's penthouse suite.
The late Radio DJ Annie Nightingale leaned on a radiator. 'What did you do for Christmas?' someone asked her. 'Mushrooms. And you?' she replied as she waited her turn along with Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull.
Thankfully, not everyone was so patient and I found myself carried along with a surge of frustrated guests, past the name-check and up into the inner sanctum.
At the top of the stairs guests dumped their coats and bags with little ceremony in a cubby-hole that had been turned into a cloakroom-cum-bar.
This week it was Nicholas von Bismarck on Kate's arm — at 37 he's not much older today than Jefferson Hack was back then when, as Kate's partner and father of her daughter, Lila, now 21, the magazine publisher welcomed guests at the top of the stairs.
Dressed in a fiercely tailored cream suit, he handed me a vodka-soda which I sipped as I took in the room.
There can't have been more than 40 people there at the time, though it got more crowded later. Two bedrooms flanked the suite's main room, along which ran a large balcony overlooking London.
To the far side of the room the door to one of the bedrooms stood open, revealing a four-poster bed.
At one point broadcaster Janet Street-Porter, dressed in a psychedelic mini-dress with lurid purple tights, launched herself on to the bed only to promptly roll off.
As she floundered, giggling helplessly on the floor, legs kicking, Kate screeched: 'Janet Street-Porter's on the f***ing floor! Janet's my intellectual friend! You're such a f***ing intellectual!'
Earlier in the night Kate's friends, Agent Provocateur co-founder Serena Rees and artist Sam Taylor-Wood, then married to gallerist Jay Joplin, had thrown two adjoining parties at their homes.
One was themed 'The Beautiful', the other, 'The Damned'. A heavily pregnant Gwyneth Paltrow was there with her then-husband Chris Martin of Coldplay.
Jools Holland played piano while Kate sang her way through a husky rendition of Summertime and later, when Marianne Faithfull sang I Get A Kick Out Of You, substituting 'Kate' for the word 'You'.
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