Nightclub
It catered to a downscale clientele and besides the usual illegal liquor, gambling, and prostitution, it featured nightly fistfights and occasional shootings, stabbings, and police raids.
Midtown New York had a string of nightclubs, many named after bandleaders such as Paul Whiteman, Vincent Lopez, and Roger Wolfe Kahn who opened Le Perroquet de Paris at a cost of $250,000.
[14] Pre-World War II Soho in London offered café society, cabaret, burlesque jazz, and bohemian clubs similar to those in New York, Paris, and Berlin.
Meyrick ran several London nightclubs in the 1920s and early 1930s, during which time she served prison sentences for breaching licensing laws and bribing a police officer.
Jazz singer and Broadway star Adelaide Hall and her husband Bert Hicks opened the nightclub La Grosse Pomme on Rue Pigalle in Montmartre on December 9, 1937.
[23][24] Hundreds of venues in the city, which at the time had a sinful reputation, offered in addition to bars, stages, and dance floors an erotic nightlife, such as small booths where lovers could withdraw to for intimate moments.
In Paris, at a club named Le Whisky à Gogo, founded in 1947 on the rue de Seine by Paul Pacine,[29][30][31] Régine Zylberberg in 1953 laid down a dance floor, suspended coloured lights, and replaced the jukebox with two turntables that she operated herself so there would be no breaks between the music.
Initially opening as a coffee-bar, it was run by Betty Passes who claimed to be the inventor of disco after she pioneered the idea of dancing to records at her premises' basement in 1957.
Discothèques began to appear in New York City in 1964: the Village Vanguard offered dancing between jazz sets; Shepheard's, located in the basement of the Drake Hotel, was small but popular; L'Interdit and Il Mio (at Delmonico's) were private; the El Morocco had an on-premises disco called Garrison; and the Stork Club had one in its Shermaine suite.
[35] While the discothèque swept Europe throughout the 1960s, it did not become widely popular in the United States until the 1970s,[27] where the first rock and roll generation preferred rough and tumble bars and taverns to nightclubs until the disco era.
Sybil Burton opened the "Arthur" discothèque in 1965 on East 54th Street in Manhattan on the site of the old El Morocco nightclub and it became the first, foremost, and hottest disco in New York City through 1969.
[36] In Germany in the 1960s, when Berlin was divided by the Wall, Munich became Germany's epicenter of nightlife for the next two decades with numerous nightclubs and discothèques such as Big Apple, PN hit-house, Tiffany, Domicile, Hot Club, Piper Club, Why Not, Crash, Sugar Shack, the underwater discothèque Yellow Submarine, and Mrs. Henderson, where stars such as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Freddie Mercury, and David Bowie went in and out and which led to artists such as Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, and Mercury settling in the city.
Both the UFO Club and Middle Earth were short-lived but saw performances by artists such as house-band Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Procol Harum, Fairport Convention, Arthur Brown, and Jimi Hendrix; DJ John Peel was a regular.
[60] The "massive quantities of drugs ingested in discotheques by newly liberated gay men produced the next cultural phenomenon of the disco era: rampant promiscuity and public sex.
While the dance floor was the central arena of seduction, actual sex usually took place in the nether regions of the disco: bathroom stalls, exit stairwells, and so on.
Other 1970s discothèques in New York City were Manhattan's Starship Discovery One at 350 West 42nd Street, Roseland Ballroom, Xenon, The Loft, the Paradise Garage, a recently renovated Copacabana, and Aux Puces, one of the first gay disco bars.
[62] The first ever "Superclub" in Ibiza was the now-abandoned "Festival Club" at Sant Josep de sa Talaia, which was built between 1969 and 1972 and serviced tourists who were bused in until it closed in 1974.
In parallel to the disco scene and quite separate from it, the glam rock (T. Rex, David Bowie, Roxy Music) and punk rock cultures in London produced their own set of nightclubs, starting with Billy's at 69 Dean Street (known for its David Bowie nights),[69] Louise's on Poland Street (the first true punk club and hangout of the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie Sioux plus the Bromley Contingent,[70] and then Blitz (the home of the Blitz Kids).
[72][73][74] The emergence of this highly experimental artistic scene in London can be credited almost entirely to Rusty Egan, Steve Strange, the Bromley Contingent's Philip Sallon, and Chris Sullivan.
The largest UK cities like Birmingham, Leeds (The Orbit), Liverpool (Quadrant Park and 051), Manchester (The Haçienda), Newcastle, and Swansea, and several key European places like Paris (Les Bains-Douches), Ibiza (Pacha), and Rimini, also played a significant role in the evolution of clubbing, DJ culture, and nightlife.
A mixture of free and commercial outdoor parties were held in fields, warehouses, and abandoned buildings, by various groups such as Biology, Sunrise, Confusion, Hedonism, Rage & Energy, and many others.
Well known examples of the 1990s include Tresor, E-Werk, and Bunker in Berlin; Omen and Dorian Gray in Frankfurt; Ultraschall, KW – Das Heizkraftwerk, and Natraj Temple in Munich; and Stammheim in Kassel.
Commercial clubs immediately capitalized on the situation causing a boom in "Superclubs" in the UK, such as Ministry of Sound (London), Renaissance, and Cream (Liverpool).
These developed the club-as-spectacle theme pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s by Pacha (Ibiza) and Juliana's Tokyo (Japan), creating a global phenomenon; however, many clubs such as The Cross in London, preserved the more underground feel of the former era.
However, in some nightclubs, bouncers may screen patrons using criteria other than just age and intoxication status, such as dress code, guest list inclusion, and physical appearance.
Some clubs waive or reduce the cover charge for early arrivers, special guests, or women (in the United Kingdom this latter option is illegal under the Equality Act 2010,[95] but the law is rarely enforced, and open violations are frequent).
Many exceptions are made to nightclub dress codes, with denied entry usually reserved for the most glaring rule breakers or those thought to be unsuitable for the party.
[citation needed] Affluent patrons who find that marketing message appealing are often willing to purchase bottle service at a markup of several times the retail cost of the liquor.
[99] Moreover, young consumers of nightclubs who tend to binge drink are often found to be less safe during sexual encounters as a result of the alcohol,[100] which could lead to the spread of STDs.
[108][109] Bouncers only allow a certain number of people into a club at a time by counting heads in order to prevent stampedes, and fire code, or liquor licensing violations.
