“People came to the disco for three reasons: to drink, to dance and to cop off.”
That’s what Paul Chase tells me when we meet to discuss the Chelsea Reach, a legendary Wirral nightclub disco which reigned over New Brighton pier between 1971 and 2001. The iconic venue introduced thousands of innocent revellers on both sides of the water to a new culture which would soon come to define their generation.
The 76-year-old initially worked on the door at the Chelsea, and by 1979 he was manager and licensee of the immensely popular club. During its gloriously chaotic 30-year run, he waved in famous faces like Paul McCartney, while dealing with the day-to-day eccentric characters and “lovable rogues” of Wallasey.
In his new book Chelsea Nights, Paul - who went on to become a lawyer and a licensing practitioner - attempts to trap the lightning of that era in a bottle.
But it’s also a story of society at large. The Chelsea came at a time when the “teenager” was still a reasonably fresh idea, with plenty of newfound spending power and cultural capital. They were days when you could pack out a suburban nightclub seven nights a week, something which Paul rightly acknowledges would be “unheard of” today.
It’s also an autobiography, charting Paul’s own quixotic journey from amateur wrestler to economics graduate to club manager.
As we sit down in an Oxton café to go through the Chelsea’s highlights (and lowlights), I’m not sure who exactly to expect. He used to be a hardman, and maybe he still is, but it’s hard to picture him cracking skulls as we sit sipping ice lattes on a crisp spring afternoon.
And while he certainly has the broad shoulders and canny eye of a former doorman and wrestler, Paul’s muted accent (he moved to Norris Green as a child) and eloquence betray his status as something of an outsider, an intruder in the rough-and-tumble underbelly of nightlife.
“What drew me into hospitality, as a middle-class lad, university educated, was the adrenaline,” he explains. “The immediacy of it. Having to solve problems and make decisions now.”
'Mate, this is the best night of my life!'
At the beginning, the Chelsea Reach was ahead of the curve. It began as a partnership between Paul’s dad George and older brother John (before you ask, there’s no one called Ringo involved) and well-known club owner Roy Adams, who was known as “the King of Clubs”, along with his wife Ellen.
The idea for the venue was inspired by a visit to a Swinging Sixties club down in Chelsea called the Ring ‘O Bells. “It was a pub disco – a very novel concept at the time,” Paul says.
“The format of most nightclubs, certainly on the Wirral, was a dance floor, a jukebox and a band that would play two or three sets. Nobody was doing disco; nobody had a DJ.”
Once they had a concept, they needed a name – and “Chelsea Reach” has a surprisingly literary origin. A non-fiction book of that name had been written by Tom Pocock about a destructive friendship between two famous painters, and on the cover was a picture of a bend in the River Thames which is known as the Chelsea Reach.
So the name stuck - a nod to the new venue’s riverside New Brighton location, and the visit to Chelsea which had inspired the whole enterprise.
The building (which is now an apartment block called Pier House) was once a “big, empty pub” named the Royal Ferry Hotel. Built around 1930 and owned by Threlfalls brewery, Paul says old drinkers would tell tales about when the ferry would dock at the pier and the landlord would have 100 pints of bitter lined up on the bar, waiting for thirsty boys from over the water.
By the time the Chases and Adamses came to take it over, the building “smelt of neglect”. But the new owners saw the marble dancefloor, the “marvellous” wooden panelling, a private function suite and several floors of prime real estate. In other words, potential.
So they bought the pub, plus a terrace of six houses on Tollemache Street, for £21,000. And the Chelsea Reach was born.
The club was busy seven nights a week. On Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights, it was open on two floors. “We’d have 700 people in on a Monday night,” Paul recalls. “First day back at work was always a big night, we’d fill out two floors. They’d come from all over Merseyside."
Within 12 months, every late night premises on the Wirral was copying them – they got rid of the bands, got rid of the jukebox and replaced it with a DJ. The Chelsea Reach was the first pub disco outside of London. Paul says proudly: “We pioneered disco in the north.”
Disco became a global phenomenon in 1977 with the release of Saturday Night Fever, and remained popular throughout the 1980s even as the “umbrella” evolved and mixed with other genres.
Famous DJs Greg Wilson and Derek Kaye began their careers at the Chelsea. As a pair of precocious teens, they had commandeered a couple of old decks, put them in a chest of drawers, wired them up to an amplifier, added some flashing lights and started doing wedding discos.
After playing a wedding at the Chelsea and later covering a shift on the main dancefloor for an absent DJ, Greg and Derek became a regular weekend staple at the club.
“But one day,” says Paul, “Derek was walking through Liscard and bumped into the wife of the manager at the time, Bill Trainor. Derek had a school blazer on, his tie and his prefect’s badge. He’d been rumbled.
“Until that day, Bill had no idea his crowds were being entertained on the three busiest nights of the week by two fifteen-year-old schoolboys!”
One of the first big moments in the Chelsea was when Paul McCartney & Wings used the club to film a segment for an ITV special titled James Paul McCartney. The film featured the band's family members and included a pub singalong. “They presented it as Paul McCartney’s local,” Paul says. “But he’d never been there before and he never went back again. It’s bollocks.”
But the writer says it was a brilliant night and helped put the Chelsea on the map. He recalls rescuing Macca from fans who had cajoled him onto the grand piano in the hallway and demanded he turn into a live Beatles jukebox. “Scousers being Scousers, they were going eeyar Paul, can you sing this!”
Not everyone was welcome in the Chelsea. Paul fondly remembers some run-ins with a local drug addict called Arthur Fear, a roguish Artful Dodger type.
“If you’re from the north end of Birkenhead and you’ve got a name like Arthur Fear, you’d better be able to fight,” Paul says. “But Arthur couldn’t punch his way through a wet Echo.”
Arthur would sneak into the pub and mine-sweep other people’s unfinished drinks, after which Paul would duly boot him out. One night, he tried a more creative way of sneaking past security.
Paul was told a wired window in one of the hallways, which opened onto a flat roof, had been smashed, with the wiring bent inwards. Someone had broken in while the club was very much open. It could only be one person.
“Stood at the bar, blood dripping down his face and on his hands, holding a pint - which he’s actually bought – is Arthur.
“I said Arthur, you’ve broken in through that window, haven’t you?”
Arthur replied: “Well I wouldn’t have got in through the door!”
Not having the heart to kick him out, Paul let Arthur stay a quarter of an hour to finish his pint. When he came back, a group of girls were fussing round Arthur with tea towels from the bar, mopping his face and buying him drinks.
“Arthur said to me – mate, this is the best night I’ve ever had in my entire life!”
Suffice to say, Arthur stayed the rest of the night.
'Drop a tablet, do some lemo, get off your box'
The Chelsea Reach tapped into the rebellious urges of the emerging “teenage” class with a Holy Trinity of delights – music, drink and necking.
But that premise would also become its downfall. Unbeknownst to anyone, this ever-changing world in which we’re living had even more bewitching temptations on the horizon. Drugs. Rave culture. All night partying. Is that what killed the Chelsea?
“It was quite an abrupt change,” Paul admits. “All of a sudden, people weren’t coming to drink, dance or cop off. They were coming to get off their heads. That spelled the end of regional nightclubs.”
By 1996, Paul had moved onto other things – but a huge police raid at the Chelsea Reach pulled him back into its orbit.
“The place got busted: drugs, underage drinking. I was asked to come back to clean things up and get the license back, which I did.”
Paul ran the club for a couple more years until 1999, but there was a “totally different atmosphere.” It was starting to feel like fighting a losing battle, against forces far bigger than one club.
“What happened was a fundamental cultural change,” Paul says. “Beforehand, people were mainly using alcohol to get intoxicated. You’d occasionally find someone smoking a spliff, but that was the extent of the drugs problem.
“What people were seeking with rave music and dance music was what is euphemistically called an immersive experience.
“Drop a tablet, do some lemo, get off your box. Dance music, which started off at illegal raves in warehouses, was brought into mainstream clubbing where it could be policed. But drugs took volatility in clubs to a new level.”
The change of customer habits caused logistical problems too. “When you have a music scene that’s heavily drug biased, you’re going to get one or two nights a week – you’re not going to get seven. So you need a big place. The Chelsea suffered commercially because it just wasn’t big enough for that.”
As Paul puts it in the book, “Decline never announces itself. It slips in while you’re busy dealing with tonight.”
He describes the social contract of nightclubs breaking down as people began to see clubs as disposable venues for drug-taking, rather than somewhere they had any personal stake in. Loyalty and respect vanished and violence became more casual.
Paul doesn’t recall a dramatic “showdown” that made him step away. He just became “de-sensitised”, permanently braced for confrontation. “I didn’t like who I was becoming,” he recalls. “And looking back, I don’t miss its. But I’m glad I was there.”
For thirty electrifying years, the Chelsea Reach was a bastion of Wirral nightlife. But it could only have existed at that time, Paul says. It couldn’t have happened before, and it couldn’t happen now.
There is a blissful ignorance and naivety to some of the photos in Paul’s book. Men and women paired up, swaying to slow ballads, squeezing each other’s bums. How many excited young people must have passed through those doors, eager to start living. How many would go on to share their best memories or meet the loves of their lives.
You can’t see the moment things changed. Like Paul says, there wasn’t a single moment, only a gradual shift. One day, you looked around and realised no-one was doing “slowies” anymore, or wearing smart shirts or drinking bitter. They were dancing alone, slipping off to cubicles or trying to score pills.
The future, for better or worse, had arrived - and the Chelsea Reach wasn’t in it. But thanks to Paul, its place is now firmly secured somewhere better: history.
Chelsea Nights: A Memoir of Mayhem, Music and Moments is available for £10 via https://chelseanightsbook.co.uk/
The book will also feature at Liverpool Book Festival on August 2, 2026.
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