GOSH, can it really be 50 years? Half a century since brothers Keith and Jim Lipthorpe opened the Fiesta in Stockton – April 8, 1965 – and created a nightclub to remember?

A pint was 35p, scampi in a basket ten bob, the cover charge usually 75p – or 15 shillings as doubtless they said at the time – the environment truly luxurious and the door code strict.

A supply of ties was provided by the club itself; the barber who set up stall outside may have been a little more opportunistic.

Once admitted, patrons were waited upon by the Fiesta Fawns, not overtly overdressed young ladies with winning smiles. “Of course you knew the reason you’d been hired,” one of them once recalled. “When I went for my interview, they asked me to lift up my skirt and show them my legs.”

It’s for its coruscating cabaret, however, that the Fiesta is chiefly remembered. Shirley Bassey is said to have charged £28,000 for a week, Sinatra to have demanded £75,000 for two nights. Though even the Lipthorpes drew a line at that one, it was the turns who called the tune. The stars didn’t just fall on Stockton, they fair cascaded upon the place.

Ella Fitzgerald charged £12,000, Glen Campbell £8,000, the Four Tops £9,700. Still, recalls Keith Lipthorpe, some of the big names would pinch the soap from the dressing room.

Forsyth played the Fiesta, Stevie Wonder got £2,800 for one night, Basie blew the place away and is said by the younger Lipthorpe to have been the nicest man they met.

Still swinging, the 60s became the 70s and it wasn’t just in twice nightly cabaret spots that the worldwide cast was sometimes playing away.

Keith Lipthorpe had a rule: “I resolved not to have sex with any of my secretaries or top-of-the-bill artistes or females in high management positions,” he writes in a new autobiography. “As for supporting artistes and general staff, I felt that this rule could be relaxed.”

The top of the bill celebrities may still be best remembered, but the Fiesta was a class act, too.

NOW 82, he was born and raised in Billingham, a bright kid who was reading Milton when he was seven. His great uncle was Jem Mace, once the All England boxing champion, his mother so strict a Methodist that she wouldn’t even allow playing cards in the house.

An able trumpet player with the Jimmy Lipthorpe Swingtet – once resident band at Fishburn club – he worked in a Darlington bank, did National Service with the RAF, qualified as an accountant.

His autobiography recalls that, unable to decide whether to go into business as a second-hand car dealer or nightclub owner, he tossed a half crown coin. The Fiesta – in Norton-on-Tees, but always supposed Stockton – had been the Moderne Cinema.

Back in 1965, the North-East’s burgeoning night club scene was chiefly in the control of the Bailey Organisation, run by Stan Henry – “a small man in every respect,” says Lipthorpe, a man of forceful opinions. Their Stockton club was called Tito’s.

The brothers – Mr Keith and Mr Jim – were the Fiesta front men. Their business partners were Spennymoor furniture maker Frank Kenmir and Tom Adams, Kenmir’s accountant.

If Mr Keith entertained a pretty cautious opinion of all of them – “the cleaners knew more about the Fiesta’s finances than Jim did” – he’s even more dismissive of his sister-in-law.

“Club Fiesta: the Real Story” was launched at the Guisborough Book Shop – from where Guisborough Town FC chairman Don Cowan kindly picked up a copy for the column. Don’s a Scot, a relatively recent arrival on Teesside. He wouldn’t have heard of Club Fiesta, then?

“Oh aye,” says Don, “I remember coming down from Motherwell, just to hear Roy Orbison. They came from all over Britain to the Fiesta.”

Despite it all, says Keith, there were only 24 nights in ten years when the place was officially full.

ORBISON he thinks, was the best stage show he ever saw – so frequent and so popular a visitor that his agent was baptised at the age of 30 in order to be godfather to Lipthorpe’s son.

He supposes Dusty Springfield to have been the best female singer – “Bassey’s not bad for a folk singer” – Ted Ray the best comedian, Bob Monkhouse the most intelligent, Eartha Kitt the sexiest, the Hollies the best pop group.

Probably even the Fiesta couldn’t afford The Beatles. Nor did he book Ken Dodd because, then as now, Doddy went on so long he’d have kept punters out of the casino. None of it would have been possible without the income from the casino. His Methodist mum’s view is unrecorded.

Gene Pitney seemed to exist on pork scratchings and dry ginger, Joe Brown was one of the few who didn’t (as Mr Keith puts it) play around, Morecambe and Wise got £7,500 (way back then) and “weren’t brilliant".

Then there was Tommy Cooper – funny feller, good magician, but able, it’s recalled, to make an awful lot of alcohol disappear as well.

In the board room, Lipthorpe recalls, he’d often consume a whole bottle of gin. “When Tommy arrived, he’d try to negotiate with regard to his drinks bill. Even with 25 per cent discount, it once came to more than £700 for the week. He’d pay in cash because he didn’t want his agent to find out how much he’d been drinking.

“On another occasion, when he wasn’t happy with the discounts I was offering, he brought his own booze in two very large, and full, cricket bags.”

It vanished; just like that.

MR Keith the driving force, the Lipthorpes opened a second Fiesta club, in a former theatre in Sheffield. Though the stars shone just as brightly, the outlook soon dimmed.

The Sheffield club closed in 1974, its debts put at £300,000. Norton Entertainments went into receivership soon afterwards, Keith Lipthorpe playing the clubs’ demise on the ever-increasing demands of top artists and their agents.

“Everyone thinks the Lipthorpes are loaded, but I’m absolutely skint,” said his brother after the news broke.

In 1982 Keith and his wife opened Scruples – promoted as “Too good to be true” – in Regent House, Stockton. In little more than a year it went into receivership, owing £156,000 to creditors. Keith, said the registrar, had been guilty of “absolute negligence”.

He later managed the Vaux-owned Crosby’s pub in Stockton, but left after 15 months, returning to accountancy. “It was our view that he would be better suited to a lounge/bar style of pub rather than with young, trendy people,” said a company spokesman at the time.

The once-celestial Club Fiesta is now a Pentecostal church. The privately published book, like Norton Entertainments, has just fallen to bits.