The discothèque began as a hidden basement where people defied a ban on jazz
Under Nazi occupation, jazz and the jitterbug were banned in France as decadent American imports. Young people slipped into hidden cellars to dance anyway, sometimes to a single turntable. Those secret rooms were called discothèques, and after the war the name, and the habit of dancing to records, took over the world.
Historian Timothy Gilfoyle traces the first nightclubs to New York in the 1840s and 1850s, venues such as McGlory's and the Haymarket that mixed vaudeville, dancing and illicit card games under the protection of paid-off police. Webster Hall, built in 1886 as a social hall, is often called the first modern nightclub. The jukebox, first installed in a San Francisco saloon on 23 November 1889, later powered Prohibition speakeasies that could not afford a band or spare the floor space. When Prohibition ended in 1933, glamorous clubs such as the Stork Club and the Copacabana revived with big bands.
Between the wars nightlife flourished across the globe. Josephine Baker ran clubs in 1920s Paris, and Adelaide Hall opened La Grosse Pomme in Montmartre in 1937. By 1930 Berlin had 899 venues licensed for dancing. In Shanghai, the Paramount and Ciro's competed fiercely for a bow-tied clientele until the Japanese invasion of 1937 sent the scene into decline.
After the Second World War clubs gradually shifted from an elite pastime to a mass phenomenon. At Le Whisky à Gogo in Paris, Régine Zylberberg in 1953 put down a dance floor, hung coloured lights and swapped the jukebox for two turntables she worked herself so the music never stopped, a setup often counted as the first true discothèque. In 1959 Germany's Scotch-Club got what is claimed as the first disc jockey, a 19-year-old reporter named Klaus Quirini who, fortified by whisky, began announcing records on stage as DJ Heinrich. In London, Soho coffee bars were already running afternoon record dances in the late 1950s.
Modern clubs keep some old habits: dress codes, bouncers screening the queue, and peak crowds on Fridays and Saturdays. Words shift by place; in Japan an older, smaller venue is a disuko while a bigger, newer one is a kurabu.
Source: Nightclub
