For half a century rock’n’roll and hotels have been uneasy bedfellows. Stars have thrown televisions from windows or ridden motorbikes up the corridors. The hard-pressed staff have been left to clean up and stick it on the bill.

Not any more. The management of one of the hardest rocking groups has decided to go into the hotel business and open Britain’s first luxury inn dedicated to musicians.

The desk clerk will be dressed in black, the mini-bars will be hidden inside giant loud-speaker stacks and the cinema in the basement will screen films such as Notorious, about the life and death of Biggie Smalls, the American rapper.

The bar will serve cocktails 24 hours a day and the open-air hot tub on the rooftop terrace should give London’s skyline some of its biggest thrills since the Beatles played Get Back live above their Apple headquarters 40 years ago. The £6.5m project, to be opened in April, has been devised by the management of Iron Maiden, the heavy metal band, and Mark Fuller, the nightclub owner, as a retreat for the group and other musicians playing in the capital.

Protocol will demand that they are well behaved. Today’s pop stars are a less hedonistic bunch than their predecessors. “Does wrecking a hotel room make you look cool? ” said Nicola Roberts of Girls Aloud in an interview. “No, it doesn’t. It makes you look like a weirdo. It’s just sad.”

The 30-room boutique hotel, to be known as Sanctum Soho, will have heavy security to keep out the paparazzi and fans. A stay will cost from £150 for a “crash room” to £260 for rooms with names such as Purple Haze and Naked Baroque to £500 for suites called Naked Luxe.

They have art deco-styled interiors with wallpaper costing £600 a roll.

“It’s not a hotel for throwing televisions out of the window. It’s going to be a sexy hotel,” Ben Groom, the hotel’s publicist, insisted.

Iron Maiden will agree. Despite a name taken from a medieval torture device and a penchant for horror stage shows featuring Eddie, its monster mascot, its members are a fairly sober bunch. [read more at Times Online ]

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