DJ Tallulah was at the heart of London’s gay club scene for more than 40 years. His extraordinary life linked the closeted 1960s world of such figures as Joe Orton and Kenneth Williams with the anything goes Soho of today. He ended up as the “First Lady” of London’s gay clubland, by way of such venues as Studio 54, Heaven and the Shadow Lounge.

Tallulah was born Martyn Allam in Hamburg, 1948. His his father was in Germany to help with a project to re-establish the catering industry after the war. At the age of 3 Martyn was sent back to Kent to live with his grandmother. When his parents returned to the UK they moved to nearby Barnhurst and then Maidstone.

After leaving school, Martyn moved to Broadstairs to study catering at Thanet Catering College. It was here that his interest in music, fashion and clubs was awakened. He bought his first single in Maidstone, for 6s 8d. It was Then He Kissed Me by the Crystals.

Allam said the first gay pub he went to was The Ship in Chatham. He had met two gay men in Maidstone but at first could not understand a word they were saying, because they were talking Polari, the secret gay language of the 1950s and 1960s, made famous by Sandy and Julian in the BBC radio series Round the Horne. Horrified, the men decided that the young Martyn needed an education.

Allam found the Kent gay scene was frequented by many DJs from the pirate station Radio City based in Whitstable. Allam became friendly with the DJ, and links man for Thames Television, Tom Edwards. One night Edwards made up a nonsense song renaming his friend, singing: “Tallulah, Tallulah, they called you Tallulah cos your mother couldn’t spell yuck!” The moniker stuck, and from then on Martyn was known as Tallulah.

After college Tallulah’s first job was as assistant manager of the Cora Hotel in Upper Woburn Place. He later became manager. The hotel burned down in 1989, was rebuilt and is now a Hilton.

While at the Cora Tallulah made his first forays in the nascent club scene of Sixties London. Everything was by word of mouth and very secret, and Tallulah came to it courtesy of a Greek boy he met in Piccadilly Circus who took him to Le Deuce, a coffee bar in D’Arblay Street. The bars then played black American soul music and Tamla Motown but there were no clubs for dancing. Tallulah hung out with such people as Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, but it was not a glamorous life — “You’d just sit around the kitchen table,” he recalled.

Tallulah started to DJ in clubs at night, but continued to manage the Cora by day. His first proper residency was from 1972 at Shane’s in Finchley Road, one of the very first gay dance clubs. Without the equipment and computer aid that DJs now take for granted, not even headphones, Tallulah said he started to mix records on the pair of decks by "looking at the needle waver as the stylus picked up the sound denoting that the record had started!" From then onwards, you could find Tallulah behind the decks or on the dancefloor of just about every important gay club, from Bang, probably the first famous gay dance club in London, where he started using the overture to Gypsy! as his theme tune, to New York’s Studio 54, to Heaven, Crash and the Shadow Lounge.

After leaving the Cora Hotel in the mid-1980s Tallulah went to be catering manager for Barclays Bank headquarters, in the City, dressed as a proper English gentleman in pinstripe suit.

In recent years Tallulah concentrated on his DJ-ing career, with residencies across London and headlining fashion and celebrity parties. Last February, he was inducted as the first person in the new Homo Hall of Fame by the House of Homosexual Culture, a non-profit venture to explore and celebrate gay history.

Tallulah is survived by two brothers.

Martyn Allam, known as DJ Tallulah, was born on October 2, 1948. He died after a heart attack on March 25, 2008, aged 59