For someone who has spent much of his life in the public eye, Peter Stringfellow is surprisingly reluctant to have his picture taken. "I only have one picture face," he protests, as our photographer chases him around the rather surreal surroundings of Angels, the second of his two London clubs, where he still spends four days and three evenings a week, even at the ripe old age of 74.

Any concerns about prima donnas, though, are shortlived. When we sit down for our interview, among the pillars of plastic nude women holding up the ceiling, he is friendly, charming and entertaining; displaying both the traditional Yorkshire warmth - even if the accent has morphed into something rather unique - and the people skills to which he attributes much of his success.

That we meet at all appears slightly surprising, at least to him, given he sees himself as neither an entrepreneur nor businessman. "You want to call me a businessman; I'm not," he says. "If I was a businessman I'd be a lot richer than I am now. I'm a very good nightclub owner, probably the best in the world. That's what I'm good at, not business." He is, of course, doing himself down, having built up a hugely successful business empire in his chosen industry, albeit with a few gambles too many along the way.

His early career was uneventful and appeared to be heading nowhere fast, after leaving school at the age of 15 with no qualifications. "My first job was in the local clothes shop, but being a young boy I got young boy jobs," he says. "The most I was allowed to do was to sell the occasional tie, so if I did sell one it was a big deal to me. Once I managed to sell a shirt but the guy who actually did sell the shirts didn't like that so we fell out, and that would be a pattern for the future. I would always seem to upset the next guy in front of me, because I wanted to do other things."

Other jobs followed, including a six-week spell working down the steel mine in Sheffield with his father, a stint in the merchant navy as a galley boy on a tanker and a job in a carpet shop called Dobson's Furnishings Company, which ended up in a prison sentence in Ford Open Prison. "I was a little bit above myself, a bit Jack-the-lad," he admits. "I'd been defrauding the company I worked for of carpets, selling them on the side for cash. I made about £65 but it was enough to get me sent to prison for eight weeks. Today you might have to paint somebody's gate for a day, but in those days it was heavy stuff."

Club career

This, though, marked a turning point, albeit not of his own making. "Having been to prison I couldn't get a job but I heard about my friend who was taking this local group to their bookings in his van," he recalls. The group in question was Johnny Tempest and the Cadillacs; one of a number of emerging bands in the 1960s which would coincide with Stringfellow's fledgling nightclub empire.

"I went to see them at Chesterfield Town Hall but they weren't there, but another great band called Dave Berry and the Cruisers were," he says. "I'd never seen a group until then, and it blew me away. I wanted some of that, so I spoke to the local vicar and rented St Aiden's Church Hall in Sheffield, for Friday night. I had some flyers made and stood outside the local cinema giving them away. I couldn't get Johnny Tempest and the Cadillacs and I couldn't get Dave Berry, so I booked a local band."

The first event lost money, but Stringfellow was hooked on the atmosphere. He put on another night, which also lost money. "The third week was a watershed," he says. "A watershed is a word I use for something that changes your life; not your night, your life. And the decision was I would do one more Friday. My wife was pregnant at the time so I wasn't popular and I actually borrowed some money off my mother-in-law to get the third week, and I said if it didn't work that would be it.

"But I had a feeling it would work, and I had Dave Berry and the Cruisers booked and everyone thought they were fabulous. I'd taken out the white lights and put bare red bulbs in, and covered up the church windows with hardboard to make it a bit darker. We packed the place, and I never worked for anyone else again."

After that the groups kept coming, including Johnny Tempest and the Cadillacs and another new band called The Beatles. "In those days you only put records on to fill in between the acts, and nobody really listened to them because the sound was horrendous," he recalls. "But someone asked for a record that had just come out called Love Me Do so I went out and bought it and put it on the next week, and these girls started screaming. I hadn't seen that before. I'd heard about screaming but not in my little church hall."

This was to be another break; he got in touch with their manager Brian Epstein, and booked them in at the church hall, which he'd now branded The Black Cat Club, although he was eventually forced to hire the Azena Ballroom due to demand for tickets. "I'd booked them in late October and I couldn't get a date for them until February," says Stringfellow. "When they did play for me they had released a record in the January called Please Please Me, and that was their first number one. So when they played for me their record was number one, and the magic of the Beatles had taken off. I made a right amount of money out of them and that set me going."

King of clubs

After that, Stringfellow was up and running, booking bands from all over the north-west and even London outfits the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. By this point he had another church hall in Sheffield, and before long was operating a dance hall which he converted into a Blues club, called the King Mojo Club. "That only lasted three and a half years but that time I was booking The Who, The Yardbirds with Eric Clapton, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Ike & Tina Turner, Little Stevie Wonder, and then the pop boys were coming through; the Who, the Small Faces, Procol Harum who sang Whiter Shade of Pale, Pink Floyd, Jimmy Hendrix, and on it went," he says.

In time, he opened another nightclub in Sheffield, called the Penthouse, but his time in his home city was drawing to a close. "The Penthouse had the first alcohol licence I'd ever had; all the other clubs were just teen and 20 clubs," he explains. "When I sold it I decided I was going to move away from Sheffield because the police and I were falling out big-time. I'd get more people in than they wanted to see because I didn't understand licensing laws, and in the end they were ready to take my licence off me."

His next stop was Leeds, where he opened up a club called Cinderella's, after borrowing the money - something that would also be a recurring theme in his career - and later opened another one next door called Rockafella's. By now his clubs were mixing live acts with recorded music, and when he sold his Leeds clubs to Mecca and headed to Manchester to open The Millionaire Club the focus shifted entirely to recorded songs.

But Stringfellow was frustrated, despite building up a comfortable life for himself and enjoying a growing reputation as a disk jockey in the north-west. "I was probably one of the first ever mobile DJs but I wasn't happy in Manchester," he recalls. "I had this fantastic house, fantastic cars, wife, kids, all the stuff that goes with it; great time. But I wanted out." What he really wanted was fame. "I was known in Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester, but not London."

The result was Stringfellows, which opened as a conventional club but with his name above the door, built almost entirely on debt. "I was bringing into London what they didn't have, and that was a club where you didn't have to be a member but you wanted to go in," he says. "It was the first non-members' members club. Immediately it was a great success, and the stars I'd been playing started to come in and play in my club. It took me two years to pay off £1 million."

It was a busy time for Stringfellow; as well as opening another club in the form of the Hippodrome, he also launched a brief career as a record label. "I had two big stars, one was Edwin Starr and then I brought back Dusty Springfield," he says. "But we had no chemistry. She was one of the few people in my life that I couldn't get on with, sadly. She did one record for me called Sometimes Like Butterflies, which I think is still a beautiful song, but she wouldn't promote it, and it didn't make the charts."

But back to the clubs. Despite the success of Stringfellows and the Hippodrome, he wasn't satisfied, and the next target was the US, financed by the sale of the latter. "It was the beginning of fame," he says. "I was getting my face in the paper, I was being written about, I was with the stars and I was accepted, but it wasn't enough for me. I wanted America." This is where the tale goes sour, for a time at least. Stringfellow piled millions of dollars into clubs in New York, Miami and Beverly Hills, but he was hit by a double whammy of the faltering exchange rate for the pound and the start of the recession in the late 1980s.

"I closed down New York because we were losing money hand over fist, Miami was just ticking over but I thought Beverley Hills was going to save me," he says. "It was full of film stars. But they don't spend money. One of the biggest stars to walk in that club was Clint Eastwood; two lagers. Sylvester Stallone and his entourage; lovely men, but no one was spending any money. In the end I lost a great deal of money."

Eyeing up the girls

Yet this was the catalyst for another "watershed". "I was in Miami and the club was about to close and my friend said "let me take you to another club"," he adds. "He got me in his limo and took me to North Miami. As we got nearer I said "you don't mean a strip club do you?" I was not going in a strip club. I had my own list of girlfriends at that time, I didn't need a strip club. But he talked me into going in, and it was brilliant. I'd never been in a place like it. There were glamourous, beautiful girls on stage, about 300 males, and no one was fighting. In my life if you had 300 men in a nightclub without women you're going to have blood. Not in this club."

Again, Stringfellow was hooked. He took the concept to New York, opening up Stringfellows Presents Pure Platinum in a deal with a business partner. The club was a success, but for him the US dream was over. "I realised by then that I'd lost so much money in America that it was time to leave," he says. "So I sold what interest I could in the American club and came back to Stringfellows."

This time, though, it would be different, with the focus on creating a lap-dancing club. "It took me three years to get the licence to bring the girls in, and when I did it was the first time that Westminster had given what we now call a tableside dancing licence, where girls could take their clothes off."

His golden touch had come back, and the new-look club took off. But his US adventures had curbed Stringfellow's insatiable desire for bigger and better things, and it took until 2006 until he felt able to open another club; in the shape of Angels in Soho, where we met. "I was slowing down," he says. "I wanted to have a good time, which I did. I went to Mallorca, bought myself a villa and had a fantastic time, just in my clubs and in Mallorca.

"And then I bumped into my present wife and my life changed again. We still live in my villa in Mallorca, and we're expecting our second child. I have one little girl and we have another one coming in September. People look at me and think "How can you do that to yourself, you must be crazy", but over the last 50 years I've done it all. I've had as much fun and excitement and heartache as any man is likely to want."

Identity crisis

In hindsight, Stringfellow admits it was a "silly risk" to open Angels so close to his original club, which he initially called Stringfellows Soho. "That was a major mistake," he says. "There was only one Stringfellows, in Covent Garden. It's too strong to have a second. The confusion was immense and I had to change the name, which I did. My thought was that I would create a younger crowd, which I did, but they had no money. Also I'd designed it wrong, it was too bland."

Today, his focus remains his two clubs - he's now happy with how he has Angels - as well as his young family, but there's still something of an itch he needs to scratch around expansion, this time into Europe. "There's one club in Paris at the present," he says. "I had a club in Paris for seven years but the lease ran out. In Paris it's a different game, you don't get leases for 30 years as you do over here, and when it runs out that's it. So I went back in again but franchised the name, which we've started and we'll see how it goes. But the hard thing is to franchise the girls; we're not talking hamburgers or pasta here, these women are not packageable."

There is, surely, also a question over just how long Stringfellow - now well into his eighth decade - can keep going, but retirement is something he's not willing to countenance and, less than convincingly, claims he cannot afford. "I'm in both my clubs without any slip at all three times a week, sometimes four, and I'm in my office certainly Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday," he says. "I might miss out Friday. But I can't see me scaling back more than that."

His son, Scott, is now actively involved in the running of the business, while his daughter lives in the US. "Depending on what state I'm in when I go, if I still have two clubs they could run them but they can't expect it to be a guaranteed success, because nightclubs aren't," Stringfellow says. "I constantly have to reinvent my clubs. A nightclub is not an animal you can leave on its own. So I would say to my kids that if they're not ready to live the nightclub life then this is not the life for them."

Learning from experience

Stringfellow himself is happy to admit to the mistakes he's made along the way, and to offer advice to others, despite being reluctant to accept the label of "entrepreneur" himself. "I was so naïve but it was a naïve time," he says. "You wouldn't get away with my naivety today with starting a business. But in my naivety I was courageous, fearless. Debt meant nothing to me, it didn't frighten me at all. That was a good attitude for an entrepreneur. A lot of entrepreneurs ask me how to start, and I say put your house up. If you won't do that then don't do it at all, because an entrepreneur is someone who takes risks."

Knowing what skills you have and where to bring in help is another tip, although not one he has practised himself. "If I do anything it's because I have a passion for it," he says. "So instead of standing back like Richard Branson did and letting somebody who knew what they were talking about produce the records, I used to go into the studio and try and make records with them. He was smart enough to let someone else make the decisions. He gets the best guys in the business to do it. Not me, I wanted to be the star of my own record label. I put some incredible records together, but none of them were hits."

Towards the end of the piece, I challenge his claim that he cannot afford to retire, revealing perhaps the same sense of insecurity that lies behind his reluctance to call himself a businessman. "I don't have to work, but I would be fearful not to," he says. "What being an entrepreneur has left me with is a fear of failure. I've failed a few times in my life and I want people to know that, because only a fool is going to go 50-odd years in business and not screw up. I'm frightened of failure, even to this day. When you've had no money - and I mean no money - it doesn't leave you. And when you've had money and lost it, that doesn't leave you either. I still wake up in sweats."