Kate Moss’s thirtieth birthday is famed as London’s most decedent occasion

The halls and bars of Claridge’s lodge, London, are all however abandoned. Night cleaners transfer discreetly round a solitary visitor who nurses an unfinished drink.

In an instantaneous, the calm is shattered, as Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood bursts into the foyer. His voice bouncing off every marble floor, he publicizes to everyone and no one, ‘We’re in f***ing Claridge’s.’

It’s Saturday January 17, 2004, and it is 2.30am. Kate Moss’s thirtieth celebration is in full swing.

What a distinction 20 years make.

Earlier this week the supermodel turned ‘non secular warrior’, a newly minted life-style guru, alcohol-free and glowing right this moment regardless of her notorious onerous residing of yesteryear, marked her half century with a sequence of celebrations.

A ladies’ journey to the Caribbean was adopted, final Tuesday, by a night of dinner and dancing at Laurent restaurant in Paris.

Celebrity friends had been seen leaving the opulent venue — which had reworked right into a nightclub with makeshift catwalk for the event — then climbing into taxis at 2am.

According to reviews, Kate wished her fiftieth birthday to be a ‘evening to recollect’ — or maybe, extra precisely, an evening she and her friends might bear in mind.

Because on the subject of unforgettable, properly, you’ll be able to neglect your seaside rituals in Mustique and stylish soirees in Paris. 

The one for the cultural historical past books, the occasion that’s nonetheless spoken of as some of the decadent London has ever seen, is the one which came about 20 years in the past: Kate’s thirtieth.

And I ought to know: I used to be there.

As an evening porter confirmed Ronnie Wood, alongside along with his then-wife Jo and daughter Leah, to the carry that morning, I began the climb up the steps to the seventh ground and the penthouse suite the place Kate and her closest mates would occasion till lengthy after daybreak.

The theme was The Beautiful And Damned and Kate styled herself after Gloria Gilbert, the spoilt, lovely creature who marries Anthony Patch in F Scott Fitzgerald’s ebook of that title.

Described as a woman who ‘goes, goes, goes’, who smokes, flirts and sunbathes, who dances all afternoon and evening, is exquisitely lovely, unaffected and spontaneous, it is not a lot of a attain to see why the Kate of these days would possibly relate to Gloria. 

That evening she was the final word occasion woman, enjoying the final word occasion woman.

By the time I made it up the again stairs and into the seventh ground hall, there was a logjam of extravagantly dressed friends ready to go the ultimate hurdle of a clipboard-wielding official who guarded the bottom of the slender little staircase that ran as much as Kate’s penthouse suite.

The late Radio DJ Annie Nightingale leaned on a radiator. ‘What did you do for Christmas?’ somebody requested her. ‘Mushrooms. And you?’ she replied as she waited her flip together with Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull.

Thankfully, not everybody was so affected person and I discovered myself carried together with a surge of annoyed friends, previous the name-check and up into the internal sanctum.

At the highest of the steps friends dumped their coats and baggage with little ceremony in a cubby-hole that had been changed into a cloakroom-cum-bar.

This week it was Nicholas von Bismarck on Kate’s arm — at 37 he isn’t a lot older right this moment than Jefferson Hack was again then when, as Kate’s companion and father of her daughter, Lila, now 21, the journal writer welcomed friends on the prime of the steps.

Dressed in a fiercely tailor-made cream swimsuit, he handed me a vodka-soda which I sipped as I took within the room.

There cannot have been greater than 40 individuals there on the time, although it bought extra crowded later. Two bedrooms flanked the suite’s foremost room, alongside which ran a big balcony overlooking London.

To the far facet of the room the door to one of many bedrooms stood open, revealing a four-poster mattress.

At one level broadcaster Janet Street-Porter, wearing a psychedelic mini-dress with lurid purple tights, launched herself on to the mattress solely to promptly roll off.

As she floundered, guffawing helplessly on the ground, legs kicking, Kate screeched: ‘Janet Street-Porter’s on the f***ing ground! Janet’s my mental good friend! You’re such a f***ing mental!’

Earlier within the evening Kate’s mates, Agent Provocateur co-founder Serena Rees and artist Sam Taylor-Wood, then married to gallerist Jay Joplin, had thrown two adjoining events at their properties.

One was themed ‘The Beautiful’, the opposite, ‘The Damned’. A closely pregnant Gwyneth Paltrow was there along with her then-husband Chris Martin of Coldplay.

Jools Holland performed piano whereas Kate sang her manner by a husky rendition of Summertime and later, when Marianne Faithfull sang I Get A Kick Out Of You, substituting ‘Kate’ for the phrase ‘You’.

There had been scantily-clad waiters, a blacked-out room with a DJ within the nook the place, at one level, dressmaker Bella Freud may very well be discovered dancing alone.

And there was cake — a towering pyramid of profiteroles dipped in, and glistening with, honey, toasted almonds, cream and rose petals. Kate blew out the candles to cheers and applause.

Kate’s hair was styled in a riot of curls that night. Her eyelids loaded with heavy navy and graphite shadow in a kind of darkly glamorous look that reeked of smudged dishevelment from the get-go.

She accomplished the aesthetic look with an extended, diesel blue, sequined costume out of which she stripped virtually as quickly as her tanned toes touched the shagpile of her Claridge’s suite later that evening.

Now, as daybreak inched nearer, she rocketed across the room, twirling and guffawing, braless and sporting a tiny cornflower blue flutter of a costume that confirmed off her again and limbs, tanned from a current journey to Jamaica.

Earlier within the night Marianne Faithfull had squeezed into the busy downstairs bar crammed with the afterwork crowd of drinkers. She laid declare to a bar stool and rasped her order — a gin and tonic.

Confusion unfold over her and the barman as she fumbled in her purse solely to tip out a jangle of Jamaican foreign money, then try to pay with it. ‘God, I’m jet lagged,’ she wailed, pointing on the cash, ‘I’m simply again from there, you see.’

Moments later she was rescued by an emissary from the seventh ground the place Kate and her mates had been all preparing collectively for the evening of partying forward. ‘There you’re,’ he exclaimed. ‘They’re all ready upstairs.’

Several hours later and queues to the seventh ground suite’s two loos — one only a small cloakroom — had been lengthy as they had been getting used extra as an extension of the occasion than as locations to reply the decision of nature.

Certain friends held again their hair as they bent to snort traces of coke off the lavatory’s pristine surfaces. 

They drank and smoked and chatted and the one particular person for whom they moved was Kate who, at one level, unceremoniously chucked everybody out, even throwing out the one male visitor truly utilizing the bathroom for its meant function mid-flow.

Clutching a magnum of champagne by the neck and a beautiful fellow occasion visitor by the wrist, she commandeered the lavatory and closed the door.

Ronnie Wood sat on an opulent couch, pushed again in opposition to a wall. He drank what seemed to be vodka, neat from the bottle whereas spouse Jo and daughter Leah sat at his facet.

No doubt the Rolling Stone had seen all of it earlier than, after which some — a lot of it with youthful variations of the identical forged of characters.

To his proper, a heavy drape partially hid the door to the suite’s second, smaller bed room. For essentially the most half that door remained shut. That, one visitor advised me with a leer, was the place the actual occasion was occurring.

At one level, a dark-haired girl flung open the door — behind her a flare of bare limbs and folks entwined on the mattress was seen, their faces obscured by her physique.

She swung across the room yelling: ‘Does anybody have a condom?’ I do not recall if anybody got here to her support earlier than she disappeared again inside.

The visitor who had advised me that this room was the place the actual occasion was occurring was by my facet when this occurred. Leaning near me he nuzzled my shoulder and requested if I wished to go in.

I declined however I’d be mendacity if I did not typically marvel simply what may need occurred had I mentioned sure.

It at all times struck me as odd that Kate’s mom Linda was there within the midst of all of it, alongside along with her brother Nick and his mates. Linda chatted and smiled and seemed on fully unfazed.

The room past that bed room door was getting increasingly more chaotic. Shoes had been discarded, glamorous outfits slipped off shoulders earlier than being torn away.

Guests smoked. I do not bear in mind if that was nonetheless allowed indoors again then however, as vices go, it ranks fairly low on that evening’s spectrum.

Besides, again then Kate Moss might do just about no matter, with whomever she happy and so, it appeared, might her friends.

A younger member of Claridge’s employees, rumbled for having given up serving champagne in favour of consuming it and mingling with friends, was rumored to have been thrown out at round 4am.

Sisters Stella and Mary McCartney squabbled within the lavatory. Naomi Campbell, her hair slicked into pin curls and adorned with an ostrich feather headband, sporting a tiny peach flapper costume, towered over others within the room.

She seemed virtually too lovely to be actual till she introduced in her Streatham-LA drawl that she was going to mattress earlier than she ‘f***ing died of starvation’.

As daybreak broke over London, Jay Joplin tried to corral the shambolic scene into some kind of order by encouraging individuals to step out onto the balcony and watch the solar rise.

I joined them, respiratory within the morning air — a stark distinction to the fug inside. But whereas the remaining seemed for the solar I turned and seemed again inside and tried to imprint the scene of the crumpled, messy suite on my reminiscence.

Kate was nowhere to be seen.

It was virtually 8am and it was time to go.

Three years later, Harper’s Bazaar journal would charge Kate’s ‘The Beautiful And The Damned’ birthday bash quantity three in a prime ten of scandalous events that included all of Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah and the final days of Rome.

I could not say. I wasn’t on the others. But I’m damned if Kate’s thirtieth wasn’t one hell of a celebration.