He’s always been, ever since I’ve known him, perfectly turned out. He invariably looks like he’s just come back from the dry cleaners. Not Sketchley’s, but one of those really posh cleaners in Chelsea, all padded hangers and little labels saying “We have replaced any missing buttons”.

Today is no exception. The tailored suit, designer tie and Cheaney brogues reinforce what most of us already know - that Mike Payne has done very well out of this industry.

As, equally, this industry has done very well out of Mike Payne.

For almost three decades, he has been at the sharp end of the late-night entertainment business. You can count on the fingers of one cash-stained hand the people who have not been touched by his wisdom and counsel at some time during their careers.

Wrinkle-free at 62 years old, with fine grey hair immaculately lacquered, Mike Payne ushers me into his office for about the millionth time in the donkey’s years we have worked together at First Leisure’s London headquarters. The building, a once-proud statement of success, corridors bustling and ‘phones humming, its modish Soho location cocking a gentle snook at the competition in their cladded UPVC sheds in the wilds of Surrey or the north-west, is now a depressing, faded reminder of what used to be.

But Payne’s office, like the man himself, seems to have retained that polished quality that bypasses the shop-worn look of the rest of the place. It was designed by his devoted wife of 33 years, Violet, of whom he says “She has supported me all the way. If I have been at all successful, she is one of the reasons for my success.”

The room is, as always, hot. The desk is covered in papers, as weekly figures jostle for position with details of the next Curry Club meeting, cigar butts and sheafs of printed e-mails - the latter, at a stroke, cleverly defeating the entire purpose of electronic communication.

“This won’t take long, will it?” Payne asks, with the kind of gruffness that he knows I can see through. “It shouldn’t. You know me well enough.” I wonder, silently, just how well anyone really knows this industry icon, who began his career, as a rookie copper, in the gentile 1950s and has seen at first hand just about all there is to see of the sterile seaminess of the nightclub business.

Michael Kenneth Payne was a quantity surveyor when, in 1957, he was called up for National Service. A Drill Sergeant in the Royal Engineers, on demob he joined the Metropolitan Police and, two years later, was assigned to the Clubs Office, becoming one of 15 officers responsible for monitoring licensed operations such as pubs, clubs and casinos, as well as what became known as “The Vice”. Ironically, the sex-shops, strip-clubs and drinking-clubs of Payne’s old stamping-ground, Soho, have, in the main, been replaced by the bars, restaurants and late-night hybrid operations which now typify our industry.

“I was good at the undercover stuff, plus I had a lot of top informants” Payne recalls, “so I became a permanent member of the squad, even though most people were only in it for two years. I loved what I was doing and turned down a load of promotion opportunities so I could carry on.”

By this time, the young Mike Payne had met his future wife, who lived with her family in the north-east. On his visits to the area, he became a regular at local cabaret clubs such as Tito’s in Stockton-on-Tees where he was to meet John Smith and Stan Henry of the Bailey’s chain of cabaret/gaming venues. They were in the midst of a plan to make the clubs more discothèque-y.

“They said to me ‘you’re the kind of guy we want, we’ll make you an executive, but you’ve got to learn the business from the other side’” he recalls. Payne went on the road with a live show called ‘Crazy Nights’ before being made General Manager of Bailey’s Leicester, a 2,000-capacity former Rank Suite, in 1971. The following year he was promoted to Area Controller and opened several new units before being made Regional Manager just prior to the acquisition of 11 Bailey’s clubs by EMI in the mid ‘70s.

“I was given the option of staying in the north-east with Bailey’s or going to EMI. I liked what Peter Smith [then head of EMI Dancing] was doing, so I went. Within 18 months, I was made Operations Director.”

Asked for some names of his fellow executives in those heady EMI days, Payne pauses long and thinks hard. “There’s no one people would know now…” His voice tails off and he gazes pensively at the ceiling, as if he has just realised that he is the last remaining.

He ran EMI Dancing alone, reporting to leisure division Chairman Bob Upsdell. When John Conlan (now Chief Executive of Chorion plc) was brought in from Rank as Managing Director, he and Payne hit it off immediately and both became close to EMI Group Chairman Bernard Delfont.

EMI began to copy the successful twin-scene discothèque format pioneered by Peter Smith in his Mecca days, pitching their Romeo’s and Juliet’s in direct competition with Mecca’s Cinderella Rockerfella’s. Under John Conlan, all but two of the former Bailey’s clubs were converted to discothèques and several new units were opened.

In 1979, Delfont, well past EMI’s retirement age, hauled the leisure division off to Trust House Forte and merged the leisure interests of Charles Forte’s monolith with EMI’s mish-mash of units, which by then included the Empire Leicester Square, Blackpool Tower, the West End theatres, restaurants, showbars, ballrooms, squash clubs and a yacht marina. Forte paid EMI a hefty £14m and Delfont became head of the newly-formed THF Leisure.

Payne’s responsibilities were now expanded to include Forte’s theatre-restaurants, including the Night Out (now Dome II) in Birmingham and the Golden Garter, a highly successful aircraft-hanger-with-lights in the middle of a Manchester council estate. Both venues were at the cutting edge of the cabaret boom – customers paid a few measly quid to dance to a big band, eat chicken-in-a-basket and watch a top act such as The Temptations, Roy Orbison, The Four Tops or Bruce Forsyth in aspirational surroundings that fooled them into believing they were residents of Posh City.

By now, a certain Tony Spragg had become a Regional Manager and Payne had recruited Nick Tamblyn from the Rank Suite in Reading to run the flagship Empire. By 1985, the Garter had been sold and the Night Out and Bailey’s Watford (then Paradise Lost, now Destiny) were converted into the first of the large-capacity discothèques that were to characterise First Leisure’s nightclub operations during the next decade.

“The cabaret artistes priced themselves out of the market” Payne says, “and there were no new acts coming up to replace them.” A calculation made at the time proved that, one particular week when an especially expensive act was performing at Watford, it would have been cheaper to give every customer who turned up for the show a pound and send them home, rather than actually open the venue!

“It was Bernie’s idea to close those clubs and turn them into discos” says Payne; “I thought it was a very brave decision, but that was the kind of man Lord Delfont was - visionary.” Referring to the 1998 disposal of First Leisure’s resorts operations, he goes on “Lady Delfont has been critical of us for getting out of Blackpool, but if Bernie had been here, I’m sure he would have made that decision himself, probably even before we did.”

In 1982, the well-documented management buy-out from THF took place and First Leisure was born, with Delfont as Chairman and CEO. Payne became Managing Director of Dancing, reporting to Divisional Managing Director John Conlan. Further consolidation later took place, to the extent that Payne was, operationally, running half the company and Clive Preston (now Managing Director of Northern Leisure, then Resorts MD), the other half.

March 1989 saw Payne, now Director of Operations, appointed to the main board. Payne points out that “John Conlan played the City and corporate role and I got on with running the operations, just as we did in the old EMI days; it always worked very well.”

Payne recalls Conlan’s departure from the company in an uncharacteristically measured manner. “I had worked with John a long time. But the non-executive directors felt that it was time for a change. Michael Grade was a charismatic man with a big name and, at that time, I thought it was probably the right decision.” He pauses, significantly. “When John went, there was sadness” he says, using a word that was to recur time and again in our conversation. Immediately, he uses it again. “Yes, sadness. But life goes on.”

Payne and Conlan had negotiated a deal that would enable Payne to retire at 60, but continue for another 3 years as a consultant. “But” he says, “when Michael came aboard, he asked me to stay for those 3 years.” Grade, ably abetted by the company’s self-possessed and dispassionate Finance Director Graham Coles, made light work of pooh-poohing City criticism of the five-figure “golden handcuff” payment made to Payne to engineer this arrangement.

“Money has never motivated me” Payne claims. “At my age, I needed a challenge if I was to stay. Michael had this vision of us doubling in size, becoming a billion-pound company, getting into the FTSE 100, with the main thrust coming from nightclubs and bars, bowling and health.”

Following the subsequent departure of Nick Tamblyn (then Commercial Director, now Managing Director at Chorion), Payne knuckled down to the not inconsiderable task of running First Leisure’s operations in toto, which by now included bingo and the embryo fitness division. “It was all stations go!” he recalls, mixing clichés as disarmingly as ever.

“We were unlucky” he continues. “Business was sensational, we laid down the plans, decentralised, invested in people and new divisional headquarters. But, after 6 months, we went into a trading lull.”

I ask Payne how responsible he personally felt for the trading slump – after all, he was the man in control of all the company’s operations. “We had got so big that I didn’t have my hands on every one of the businesses” he concedes. “I had five divisions, five Managing Directors, and my job was to manage them. I tried to keep my hand in, but I had to go through so many layers.”

Almost a year ago, in a meeting to discuss poor trading, Payne slipped me a note under the table which read “Do you think I should resign?” I slipped him one back which read “You’re not getting out of it that easily!” – by which I really meant “Don’t be ridiculous”. I recall we grinned warmly and knowingly at each other following this covert exchange, while all around us was cold and soulless.

Tony Spragg’s early retirement from his role as Managing Director of Nightclubs brought to an end a 20-plus years relationship. “I felt sadness” Payne says, using the word again, “but Tony got tired and felt that the challenge wasn’t there any more. He wanted to do his own thing - it was all very amicable, he wasn’t pushed.”

I sense his discomfort and move quickly on – how does he feel the business has changed over the years? “I don’t think it has” he says. “Nightclubs are still all about music and the door. The only difference now is the marketing – it’s much more centralised. There used to be more emphasis on the manager doing his own promotions. I think we’ve gone too far that way and we really need to bring in more entrepreneurial general managers.”

Payne warms to one of his favourite topics. “The two main elements of ‘boy meets girl’ and the desire to dance will always be there, plus many people like to go to discothèques just to listen to music, not to dance. The need to drink has been totally exaggerated – most people just want to be entertained and meet their friends.”

So what of the dreaded late-night bars and their perceived effect on the nightclub business? Payne launches straight in: “I’m not frightened at all of the licensing changes…”

Ah-ha! Gotcha! I jump on the last phrase and suggest that it would imply that he intends to stay in the business once the MBO completes. “Very shrewd, Mr. Freeman” Payne chuckles. “What I meant was that it is my advice to everyone not to be frightened of changes in the law. It’s the City that has hyped up this fear – if you talk to people in the business they agree with me, they’re all happy about the future. Bars and nightclubs will merge as businesses and eventually, all nightclubs will have a bar as a part of the complex.”

I am anxious to find out – as are many others – why Payne, with his years of experience, financial security and a full contact book, never struck out on his own. “I’ve never, ever seriously considered it ” he says, “perhaps because I’m not brave enough. I had many offers to do my own thing, but I’m an operator – as long as I had a satisfying job and enough to do, I was happy.”

So would he consider it now? “When an MBO was discussed, everybody thought I would do it, but I’m in my 63^rd year and it wasn’t for me. I’ve earned some rest – I’ve worked long hours for 30 years, been totally committed – and the people that are there now, they understand and think like I do.”

I get only part-way through my next question before Payne bridles and interrupts: “Do you feel any animosity towards Michael Gr…?” “No, no, no. None at all!” he affirms, almost too emphatically. “Michael and I are very close. I like his style.

Grade’s policy of collaboration and empowerment at all levels, would appear, in Payne’s view, to have been something of a enigma to the front-line troops. “If we made a mistake – and I say ‘we’ because Michael, Graham and I were a team – it was taking cultural change too far. I don’t think it was really understood. We probably didn’t communicate it well enough or train people in how to use empowerment. They’d been so protected by decision-makers like me that, when they had to make a decision for themselves, they fell apart!”

Payne thinks, he says, that what is happening now – the disposal of nightclubs and bars, to enable the company to re-trench as a pure health and fitness business, Esporta plc – is the right thing but, he says once again “I feel sad - sad that First Leisure as it was is no longer. But it’s great that the MBO team are keeping the name First Leisure. It’s good to see them take it private and drive it forward as we did 20 years ago – as we did 10 years ago!”

I ask how he would respond to those who claim that the board’s action is the solution of the spineless and quote him one executive’s remark that “we’ve traded through worse situations than this – what they’ve done is the coward’s way out.” There is a long pause, a couple of coughs and an embarrassed snicker or two. “In trading terms, we were only talking about a few percentage points below the previous year – we were still the most profitable chain and still had the best businesses, but what persuaded me that we were doing the right thing was that borrowing had become costly and capital investment would be tight. I also wanted to protect the people that had supported me over the years, so I got behind the management buy-out. I’m very happy that Paul Kinsey has done the MBO; he’s one of my people.”

Payne’s most respected industry figures are a predictable trio – firstly, Steve Thomas, to whom he claims to have been a father-figure, surreally bizarre though that concept may be. “Steve’s moulded himself on me and, operationally, his knowledge is as good as mine, although he was more enthusiastic in taking the road into the city.”

Next, John Conlan. “A very clever man, very shrewd, look what he’s done since he left First Leisure – he’s building another First Leisure!”

And finally? “The ultimate has to be Bernie. He lived for the business, breathed it.

“By God, the times he backed me were unbelievable” he recalls, wistful-eyed. “Once, when my wife was ill, he said to me ‘Take her on holiday’, put his hand in his pocket, and paid for it. Although he’s been gone five years, people still talk about him. It’s great that Paul Kinsey will continue with the Delfont Awards to the management each year and that Bernie’s portrait will hang in the MBO’s boardroom.”

To close, I drag Payne, kicking and screaming, back to his remark that he is not frightened of the future. So, come on – what’s the wily old fox up to? “My job now is to police the management buy-out up until completion. At the end of January, my time is up and I will retire. I have had three offers already of consultancies and non-executive directorships, but I haven’t decided whether to carry on in the business or run away and sun myself to death!”

A recent top-secret trip to Spain to look at properties may or may not offer some clue here - even consultants and non-execs are permitted holiday homes – and, as Payne volunteers, “my wife and son [31 year-old motor trade sales director Darren] dread the idea of my retiring! I think there will be very strong motivations that will push me in a certain direction. And that’s all I’m saying, except that, when I do make a decision, you’ll be first to know!”

As I leave, we hold – not shake – hands, unembarrassed, as he expresses a wish that we should continue as friends and work together again. I swallow, and agree.

“Do you know who I am?”, the damning epithet Mike Payne would bellow at doubting doormen or sluggish staff has, from today, taken on a very different meaning. At last, I think I really do.