Well, the Beautiful & Damned club night was a roaring success last night. People came from all over the capital (much thanks to Time Out, Evening Standard, Guardian Guide etc) and really made the effort to dress up in their own takes on stylish period looks. Some fantastically good-looking patrons. People do look their best this way, no doubt about it. Dressing up is attractive. Men do look better in silks, ties, braces and so forth. Of course, the important thing is to stress is it isn’t ‘fancy dress’.

I played a couple of extracts from the Topsy-Turvy soundtrack, which went down well. You can’t dance to Gilbert & Sullivan, but it sounds terrific in a bar. The Topsy-Turvy cast sing in a non-operatic style, so Mr Gilbert’s lyrics are particularly discernible.

I also started the evening with all of the ‘Elizabeth Taylor In London: with John Barry’ CD, (on El Records, naturally). Arguably the most stylish album ever made. Against a stirring, swooping orchestration by Mr Barry, Ms Taylor recites various texts related to the capital: Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge”, Queen Victoria’s diary entry following her husband’s death, Queen Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech (“I may have the body of weak and feeble woman…”) and Churchill’s post-Blitz statement comparing the city to a defiant rhinoceros.

The biggest floor-fillers seemed to be not so much the vintage 20s and 30s stuff, but the musical tunes inspired by that era, from Cabaret, Chicago, Bugsy Malone, A Chorus Line and so on: “All That Jazz”, “One”, “Fat Sam’s Grand Slam””, “You Give A Little Love”, “Life Is A Cabaret”.

I was a bit worried about mixing in a few pop tunes like Mr Prince’s Raspberry Beret and Talking Heads’ “This Must Be The Place”, but I think it worked okay. Essentially, it’s a time-travelling disco, where (like present-day Earth in Doctor Who), some destinations are more favoured than others. Actually, David Tennant’s demob-suited Doctor wouldn’t look out of place at The Beautiful & Damned.