Growing up in the 70s and 80s my parents would take me on days out to Chinatown in London that have stayed in my memory. Unknown to me at the time, Soho was an area that was heavily influenced by Paul Raymond. The neon lights of his empire made Soho a vibrant and exciting place.
I actually know very little about Paul Raymond. The only thing I really know is that he took over publication of Mayfair magazine in 1991.
Finding this Thames Television interview from 1975 is a fascinating insight into the man. He comes across as a charming, thoughtful showman. Putting his case that what he does is no different from mainstream entertainment. And his ethical stance on obscenity.
Not having a time machine to be able to go back to see what one of Paul Raymond’s shows forces me to be a bit creative in my research.
There aren’t any online reviews of the 1974 stage show “Royalty Follies” that was a commercial failure for Raymond. From what I can gather, it appears that no expense was spared but only ran for a few weeks. I don’t know what went wrong but renaming it The Great International Nude Show I’m sure did not help to draw in a mainstream audience.
For context in September 1968 the musical Hair, for the first time on the London stage, featured a scene that contained nudity. I am pretty certain that Paul Raymond took advantage of this change in the West End.
Fast forward to 1980 and he launched a new magazine called “Paul Raymond’s Model Directory”. And on page one of the very first edition, Paul Raymond says “each photograph has been personally selected by me in a tribute to the world’s women.”
My opinion of the images he chose are very reminiscent of the style you might find in the Pirelli calendars of that era except a bit more explicit. You could argue that Pirelli were selling tyres and Paul Raymond was selling his own brand in this magazine. Maybe Paul Raymond was in his time what we now call a content creator influencer.
In 2013, Steve Coogan took on the role of Paul Raymond in the biopic “The Look of Love”. Like all these types of films, I have no idea how accurate to life it is. The storyline is more about the death of Paul Raymond’s daughter in November 1992 than his cultural influence.
From the selection of Model Directory magazines I purchased second-hand, they do credit Debbie Raymond as one of the producers. Sadly, following her death, the 1993 and onward editions of the magazine appear to be a complete change of style. Prior to this date, the magazine had no to very little text but was just a curation of pictures. Some might say a lovingly curated collection. These later editions were just reprints of the full pictorial sets of a model that had already appeared in the various Paul Raymond stable of magazines. The soul did seem to disappear from the magazine after this date. At the very end of the Thames Television interview, it was quite telling that he said if anything happened to his daughter it would hurt him very deeply.
Not having seen the full collection of this series of magazines I can’t say when they stopped being able to sell advertising space to mainstream brands. The early editions have tobacco advertising on the back cover. It was replaced by adverts for the Revuebar but these turned into a space reserved for adult premium phone lines at some stage.
The styling and effort in creating the images from the early editions of the magazine must have cost a fortune. The exotic locations, elaborate sets and film costs must not have been cheap. With a majority of the images having a warm sunny afternoon lighting set up. It almost feels like they want to take you back to a memorable summer holiday on a distant shore.
Again with the inability to see every volume of this magazine, it is hard to tell exactly when the budgets for the expensive shoots dried up. In later editions there are more images taken in studios with very basic set dressing rather than the sandy beaches or luxurious holiday homes. In my opinion, these studio sets are unconvincing of the opulent lifestyle they are trying to make you believe.
To me, the success of Paul Raymond was also his downfall. What Paul Raymond was offering over fifty years ago was a rare product. As time passed and technology developed, the need to join a members only club to be entertained with the same content became extinct. In one of the late editions of Model Directory magazine there was a full page infomercial for their online offering. A sign of things to come.
Paul Raymond died in 2008 and a couple of years later in 2010 the publications side of his business was sold. London’s Soho area of today is very different to what it was like in the second half of the 20th Century. I do wonder if London’s theatre land has fully recovered from the lockdowns.
