IT IS A moment straight out of bouncer hell. Sara Brumpton, 'membership liaison manager' of Club 97 is at her usual post; a compact blonde sphinx guarding the chic caverns from the tidal surges of Lan Kwai Fong's Friday night flotsam, divining the right stuff from the riff raff, and warding off the latter with terse pronouncements that fall on beery ears like unfathomable riddles.
Some time after 3am, a pale and rather weedy figure subsumed by an enormous fur-fringed coat sidles up to the red velvet rope and waits expectantly. Sara hasn't noticed him yet: she's gazing down the hill at the ebb and flow of the Fong, her face set in that trademark doorperson's non-expression, equal parts alpine impassivity and glacial cool. I'm looking at pale and weedy and thinking there is something weirdly familiar about his kinked and wet-gelled hair, his slightly pock-marked skin, his snake-hipped, sinewy stance. Then time expands and contracts and my stomach does a faint flip as I mutter under my breath 'Oh my god, it's Michael Hutchence'.
Michael Hutchence. Seducer of supermodels. Cuckolder of saints. Father of Heavenly Hirani. Erstwhile penman of pap pop. Rehabilitator of Kylie Minogue from naff soap queen to iconic rock slut. And, since he traded in Helena Christensen for Bob Geldof's missus, the stuff of serious tabloid fodder. A guaranteed tweak of any Hong Kong club's hip-o-meter. Seconds creep by, as Hutchence looks down with bemusement at the fat cord barring his path. The twists of velvet seem to morph into a ruddy Rubicon, and the air swells with the volatile vapours of celebrity spurned. Sara turns and registers who is patiently waiting in front of her red rope.
For a nanosecond or two, the glacier is plunged, hissing and fizzing, into a hot sea of shame. Then she's whisking the rope aside and the King George V old boy saunters in with a sheepish grin, flanked by two attractive women - neither of whom appear to be Paula Yates. Sara rolls her eyes and flashes a faintly embarrassed smile.
It is an uncharacteristic lapse for Brumpton, who, in her five years patrolling the portals of Club 97, has rubbed shoulders with all manner of movers, shakers and megastars. It is also a valuable lesson in how bouncers - door managers, client liaison specialists, call them what you will - cannot afford to let their concentration flicker for even a second. Interminable hours may drag by on a quiet night, but the instant your back is turned and your guard is down might be the one a fist or glass comes whizzing for your skull or a celebrity's engorged ego comes a-calling, expecting the red carpet to be rolled out.
In the transient world of pubs and clubs, Brumpton's long service with the hipper-than-thou 97 Group has her approaching veteran status. But she is firmly at the vanguard of a trend which has seen the traditional nightclub neanderthal replaced by a kinder, gentler type. In phrenological terms, the bouncer of yesteryear had a cranium which fitted in somewhere between that of Cro-magnon and Piltdown man; a brow so beetling you wanted to smash it with a slipper and biceps that would take a week to circumnavigate. The type who preferred to split heads, decorate eyes and remodel septums first, and ask questions later.
