Discothèque dancing - 'you don't need a band' (1964)

'you Frug, Surf and Watusi and you don't need a band - Discotheque Dancing.  As of last night, the smart dances to do were the Frug, Wash Wash, Surf, Hitchhiker and Watusi. But so rapidly are dances invented and discarded nowadays that they may be outmoded tonight - along with the Saint, in which dancers wave hands as if they were marching in. It is being danced below in a new kind of nightclub called a discotheque - this one is New Jimmy's in Paris but they are popping up everywhere in Europe and the US. At a discotheque recorded music is played' (Life magazine, 22 May 1964). 

The full article includes photos of people dancing in Paris, London and Los Angeles.

Partying in Paris 1944: with Sartre, de Beauvoir & Camus

In 1944 the Nazi occupation of Paris was in its last deadly phase. The RAF was bombing the city's railway stations and the Resistance was stepping up its activities - to be met with fierce repression and mass executions. Following a show trial, 23 members of a Jewish and other migrant workers' resistance group led by Armenian communist Missak Manouchian were executed, most of them in Paris in February 1944.

A group of artists and writers linked with various degrees of commitment with the Resistance met and socialised in these conditions, holding parties in each others houses with quite a guest list.

Pablo Picasso was living in Paris at the time and wrote a play, Desire Caught by the Tail, which was performed in the home of surrealist writer Michel Leiris, with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beavoir and  Albert Camus taking part, and the audience including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan and Picasso himself. The party continued after the play: 'Those who stayed after midnight had, because of the curfew, to stay til dawn; Mouloudji sang 'Les Petits paves', Sartre sang 'Les Papillons de nuit' and 'J'ai vendu mon ame au diable'.

George Bataille

'Eager to continue the mood of celebration, some of their friends went on to organise a series of ‘fiestas’, as Leiris called them. The first was held in March at George Bataille’s flat, where the musician Rene Leibowitz was in hiding; for the second Bost’s mother lent them her villa in Taverny. They drank and they clowned. Queneau and Bataille duelled with bottles; Camus and Lemarchand played tunes on saucepan lids; Sartre conducted an imaginary orchestra from the bottom of a cupboards…'

Sartre and de Beauvoir

'The third fiesta was held in June 1944 at Toulouse’s flat, where the huge circular drawing room opened on to a garden. The hall and the rooms had been decorated with flowers, ribbons, garlands, knick-knacks… At three in the morning, Toulouse [Simone Camille Jollivet] made her appearance, wearing rouge on her eyelids and blue eye-shadow on her cheeks. Unsteadily she danced a paso doble with Camus. The party lasted til daylight, and when Sartre and De Beauvoir, together with Olga [Kosakiewicz] and Bost, were walking through the deserted Place de Rennes, they saw placards on the station wall: no trains would run until further notice. Later on in the day it was announced over the radio that English and American troops had landed in Normandy.’

Simone Jollivet ('Toulouse') 

Of course this group of friends were also famous for their socialising in Saint Germain cafes such as Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore. It was while hanging out at the latter in May 1944 that Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir first met Jean Genet who came over and introduced himself.

Jean Genet

After the war they continued to party - in 1946 for instance Sartre, de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Francine Faure took Arthur and Mamaine Koestler out on the town 'to a little dance hall in the rue des Gravilliers and then to a nightclub, the Scheherezade' followed at four in the morning 'to a bistro in Les Halles, where they drank a great deal'. As existentialism became fashionable Sartre popped in a couple of times to Le Tabou, a nightclub on the rue Dauphine that had became popular with its  black-clad aficionados. In May 1947, the news magazine Samedi Soir published a  report entitled 'This is how the troglodytes of Saint-Germain live!', which described the 'gigantic orgies organised by filthy young existentialists' who spent their time 'drinking, dancing and loving their lives away in cellars, until the atom bomb - which they all perversely long for - drops on Paris' (quoted in Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey).

Mamaine and Arthur Koestler

It's tempting to apply Sartre's notions of 'seriality' and 'group-in-fusion' to these convivial spaces, the former the everyday condition of individuals in isolation from each other and the latter characterising those situations when individuals overcome their separation in collective activity (Sartre famously quoted the storming of the Bastille as the supreme example). If post-rave we can conceive of the dancefloor or even the cafe as an example of 'group in fusion', Sartre tended to see the group's fusion being dependent on the individuals within it define themselves against some 'third' other. He wrote of the cafe as  'a milieu of indifference, where other people exist without troubling about me while I don't worry about them', and indeed did much of his writing in cafes on this basis.

Francine Faure and Albert Camus

Source of all quotes unless otherwise stated: Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre

Discotheque enters the English language: 1960-66

Thanks to Google news and other archive searches it is possible to date reasonably accurately when words came to be widely used, at least in printed form. I believe the term discotheque (which literally means 'record library') to describe a nightclub where people danced to records dates back in French to World War 2. Several online sources mention that a club called La Discothèque opened on the rue Huchette in Paris in 1941.   

But it seems to have taken another twenty years for the term to catch on in English. The 

first newspaper references I have come across date to 1963-5,  with a number of items in The Times (London) referring to The Discotheque Club in Soho.

The paper reported on 18 October 1963 on the trial of Norbet Rondel, a former heavy for landlord Peter Rachman, who was accused of 'demanding menaces from Sergiusz Paplinski, proprietor of the 150 Club at Earls Court Road'. The court heard that Rondel had been a doorman at the Discotheque Club run by another associate of Rachman, Raymond Nash.

The following year the club was named in Parliament as the 'Soho nerve centre' of the 'purple heart racket' (Times, 10 June 1964), and a quote in the article suggests that the Discotheque Club was already open by 1961 .  In January 1965, five people appeared in court charged under the new Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act 1964 after being arrested in a police raid at the club in Wardour Street ('Youths and girls on drug charges', Times, 26 January 1965).

Rondel died in 2009,  and I have written a bit more about La Discotheque Club here (incidentally Marc Bolan worked there as a cloakroom attendant in his early 'Mark the Mod' days). As well as being sometimes credited with being London's first disco, it seems to have acted as a bridge for the word itself becoming established in English. Before long there were other clubs with similar names, and the word was being used generically for a place where records were played to dance to. By 1966 there was a Discotheque club in Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford, where in September a crowd of youths fought with police (Times, 12 September 1966). The Times also reported that a plan had been approved at St Mary's church, Woolwich: 'In the crypt a discotheque will be established as  centre for youth work' (24 August 1966).

YeYe and New York Discotheque

Another route into the printed English language seems to have been via fashion writers at Associated Press (AP) at around the same time.  Elsie Beall, an AP Fashion Writer reporting on a New York Couture Group event, made the first reference I have found to discotheque in an American paper in July 1964 to describe a dress: 'There aren't many short evening dresses around for fall except for the discotheque - pronounced dis-co-tek, in case you are having trouble with that world as we did at first hearing. It is just a slip of a dress, almost always black and flaring, or ruffling out at the high knee, with plenty of whirl for doing those dances where the feet stay in one spot while the rest of the body twists in all direction. Discotheque, it seems, is the name of the little Paris dance halls where the whole thing started'  (Ocala Star-Banner 17 July 1964 - like other AP reports this would have been syndicated and probably printed in many local and regional papers, but not all of them are online).

On the same day an AP report of the same event printed in the Nashua Telegraph stated: 'The faithful and femme fatale black dress or suit will be on the scene next fall like a million shadows. It will be sleek and chic, dressed up with white for the day, but bare and naughty at night for wearing to the discotheque'

Another Associated Press Fashion Writer, Jean Sprain Wilson (1923-2009), used the word the following month. Reviewing a James Galanos collection noted that 'For the discotheque enthusiasts the dresses were barer, with V-plunges, halter necks or shoestring straps uncovering pale raw bones' (Owosso Argus Press, 14 August 1964 and other local papers)/

The same writer makes the first published use I have found of the word 'discotheque jockey' in the context of the influence of French 'Ye Ye Styles' in New York:  'YeYe, the French version of youth's rebellion against the stodginess of old folks over 25, is now going strong in the USA. Born in Paris as a hip response to songs with a beat, YeYe came to be a term for audacious styles worn by young misses, then grew in meaning to encompass the current mood of youth itself - lively and uninhibited. Ask a New York den what is YeYe in town, for instance, and she undoubtedly will describe a popular hamburger joint with juke box movies; or a discotheque jockey at one of the fancier hotels who keeps crowds gyrating frenetically by blasting not one but three jump-and-wiggle records at once' (Eugene Register Guard, 23 October 1964)

Associated Press also mentioned the word in the surprizing context of a report about a party at Windsor Castle with 16 year old Prince Charles as MC!:  'Like it was a rave, man... the first Beat Ball in the history of the British royalty... The castle's crimson drawing room was turned into a discotheque - a nightclub which provides only recorded music for dancing'.

(Miami News, 28 Dec, 1964)

After writing this I have come across a recent Oxford University Press article covering similar territory - and coming to similar conclusions. They also note the first printed references in 1964 to the abbreviated version 'disco' to refer to both the dress and the nightclub.

See also: http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/discotheque-dress-for-party-dancing-1964.html

Dancing Questionnaire 23: Luc Sante

Luc Sante is the 23rd person to complete the Dancing Questionnaire. Luc has written extensively on New York cultural history, and much more, and as you might expect has savoured much of that city's legendary nightlife as well as clubbing in Paris and elsewhere.

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

In 1963, when I was around 9 years old and in St. Teresa's School, Summit, New Jersey, our teacher would take us once a week to the adjacent Holy Name Hall to teach us square dancing. The tune was invariably "The Old Brass Wagon," and Mrs. Gibbs may have sung it herself--I don't remember a record. One week, though, she plugged in the jukebox and played "My Boyfriend's Back," by the Angels, and encouraged us to frug. I'm not sure the experience was ever repeated, but it left a permanent mark on me.

2. What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?


Oh gosh, that's a tough one... Possibly it was meeting Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club, probably late 1978. I swear I knew at first glance that there was something exceptional about him. He moved in with one of my friends, and then another, and he and I were good friends until he became famous, circa 1983.

Basquiat at the Mudd Club in 1979

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…


From 1977 to 1982, roughly. Isaiah's, a reggae club in an upstairs loft on Broadway between Bleecker and Bond  approx. '77-'79; the Mudd Club from its opening on Halloween 1978 until it started getting press three or four months later (and then there would be huge crowds inside and out); Tier 3 on White Street and West Broadway (tiny, but excellent sounds), 1980-81; Squat Theater on 23rd Street around '79-'81, irregular as a dance venue but *the* place for the all-too-brief punk-jazz efflorescence; the Roxy around 1982--a roller disco that once a week would become a sort of hiphop-punk disco, often with Afrika Bambaataa on the decks. And sometime around '77 or '78 a gay friend once took me to the Loft, which I'm sure you've read about; it fully lived up to the hype.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…

White people attempting to dance to white rock, pretty much always the case until 1973 or so, when a great many people of my acquaintance suddenly "discovered" James Brown. And then the last three decades, when dancing opportunities have been few and far between.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?

My first real dance experiences were all in gay discos, early '70s (I'm straight, but had a gay best friend): the (old) Limelight on Sheridan Square, Peter Rabbit's on West Street, and the amazing Nickel Bar on 72nd Street - where Robert Mapplethorpe, among others, would go to pick up young black men, and where the level of the dancing was so amazing I didn't dare attempt to compete.

Summer of 1974 in Paris: Le Cameleon on rue St.-Andre-des-Arts, a tiny African disco in a barely ventilated cellar - but it was the summer of "Soul Makossa." Nine years later I was back in Paris and Le Cameleon had moved to a much larger aboveground space--an exhilarating experience.

Also, besides the venues noted in #3, the Rock Lounge (sleazy, but good music) succeeded in the same space on Canal Street by the Reggae Lounge, circa '82; the World on 2nd Street a few years later (too sceney for words, but you could shut your eyes); assorted after-hours spots such as Brownie's on Avenue A (not to be confused with the legit rock club of the same name that succeeded it), although drugs were more of a priority than dancing or music in those places. Post '83 I can only remember the short-lived but excellent Giant Steps--a jazz disco--and a series of retro-soul clubs (don't remember their names, alas).

6. When and where did you last dance?


The New Year's Eve before last, a private party in Tivoli, New York, a pretty good techno mix.

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?

Tie: "One Nation Under a Groove," Funkadelic; "Got to Give It Up," Marvin Gaye.

All questionnaires welcome, just answer the same questions - or even make up a few of your own - and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires).

Paris by Night - Brassaï (1933)

In 1933, the photographer Brassaï (real name Gyula Halász, 1899–1984) published Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night), a remarkable photographic record of his wanderings through the night time city in the company of, among others, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prevert. The book was reprinted with the photographer's commentary in 1976, in which he sets out his perspective on the nocturnal underground of the city:

'Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna fall silent and go to ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness. Some once-familiar figures in the army of night workers have disappeared…

The real night people, however, live at night not out of necessity, but because they want to. They belong to the world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs. A secret, suspicious world, closed to the uninitiated. Go at random into one of those seemingly ordinary bars in Montmartre, or into a dive in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood. Nothing to show they are owned by clans of pimps, that they are often the scenes of bloody reckonings. Conversation ceases. The owner looks you over with a friendly glance. The clientele sizes you up: this intruder, this newcomer – is he an informer, a stool pigeon? Has he come in to blow the gig, to squeal? You may not be served, you may even be asked to leave, especially if you try to take pictures…

And yet, drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths, having taken pictures for my ‘voyage to the end of the night’ from the outside, I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the facades , in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate the other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past’

The book includes photos and descriptions of people socialising and dancing in bars, shows and lesbian and gay clubs - I will feature some more of this later.

These photos were taken at La Bastoche, a bar in Rue de Lappe, in 1932. Gotta love those kiss curls.

I believe the book is still in print, at least it's available from all the usual book sites. If you are interested in nightlife, dancing, photography, social history and alternative cultures you should take a look - and let's face it if you are looking at this site you must be interested in at least a couple of these...

Empire of the Senseless

In my street in New Cross last week, somebody left a pile of books outside for passers-by to help themselves to. So it came to pass that over the weekend I got round to reading Kathy Acker's 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless a mere 20 odd years after it came out (though I did read her Blood and Guts in High School back in the day).

The novel is set in an alternative then-present; Reagan is US president but life is the worst aspects of that time intensified. In scenes in New York and Paris (among other places), we are shown a world of despair, addiction, disgust and violence. It is a dystopia without redemption -the interpersonal relations between characters are marked by abuse, rape and loathing. The best that its main protagonist Abhor (half woman/half robot) can achieve by the end is this realization: 'I didn't as yet know what I wanted. I now fully knew what I didn't want and what and whom I hated. That was something'.

Class war is taken for granted - at one point she describes the use of sonic weapons to kill the poor:

'In the white noise the cops arrived so that they could kill everybody. Round revolving cars emitted sonar waves. Certain sonar vibrations blinded those not in cars; other levels numbing effectively chopped off limbs; other levels caused blood to spurt out of the mouths nostrils and eyes. The buildings were pink... The cops' faces, as they killed off the poor people, as they were supposed to, were masks of human beings. And the faces of the politicians are death'.

The promises of liberty and democracy are mocked:

'New York City, my home, Liberty... Liberty, shit. The liberty to starve. The liberty to speak words to which no one listens. The liberty to get diseases no doctor treats or can cure. The liberty to live in conditions cockroaches wouldn't touch except to die in'.

And:

'These days the principal economic flow of power takes place through black-market armament and drug exchange. The trading arena, the market, is my blood. My body is open to all people: this is democratic capitalism'.

Still, it is a class war without hopeful outcome - in Paris the impoverished and oppressed Algerians stage a successful revolution, but nothing much changes, the cops still think they rule the streets.

At one point Acker seems to describe her method - an attempt to move beyond the language cut ups that she employed in her earlier work to a strategy of transgression:

'That part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious' Since it's free of control, it's our only defence against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison.

Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.

What is the language of the 'unconscious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: pretend it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus, an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of a language or languages which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes'.

Twenty years after this, transgression as radical strategy seems equally exhausted. Yesterday's taboos are all over the internet and the TV. Still there's no doubt that Kathy Acker's premature death in 1997 silenced a powerful and radical voice.

Kathy Acker (1947-1997)

- she dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist

Flesh and Stone: Sennett on Café Society in London and Paris

Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization (1994)by Richard Sennett ‘is a history of the city told through people’s bodily experience: how women and men moved, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed their noses, where they ate, how they dressed, when they bathed, how they made love in cities’. More specifically it considers how architects and urban planners have impacted on all this through their influence on how people come together and move apart, for ‘The spatial relations of human bodies obviously make a great deal of difference in how people react to each other, how they see and and hear one another, whether they touch or are distant’.

There is an interesting discussion of the changing forms of café society in London and Paris from the 18th to the 19th century:

‘Cafés on the European continent owe their origins to the English coffeehouse of the early eighteenth century. Some coffeehouses began as mere appendages to coaching stations, others as self-contained enterprises. The insurance company Lloyd’s of London began as a coffee house, and its rules marked the sociability of most other urban places; the price of a mug of coffee earned a person the right to speak to anyone in the Lloyd’s room. More than sheer chattiness prompted strangers to talk to one another in the coffeehouse. Talk was the most important means of gaining information about conditions on the road, in the city, or about business. Though differences in social rank were evident in how people looked and in their diction, the need to talk freely dictated that people not notice, so long as they were drinking together...

The French café of the Ancien Regime took its name from and operated much like the English coffeehouse, strangers freely arguing, gossiping, and informing one another. In these years before the Revolution, political groups often arose from these café encounters. At first many different groups met in the same café, as in the original Café Procope on the Left Bank; by the outbreak of the Revolution , contending political groups in Paris each had their own place. During and after the Revolution the greatest concentration of cafés was in the Palais Royal'.

Sennett argues that the wide boulevards of Paris, as designed by Haussman, encouraged cafés to sprawl into the streets, with café owners beginning to put tables outside. Two main centres of café life developed, ‘one clustered around the Opera, where the Grand Café, the Café de la Paix and the Café Anglais were to be found, the other in the Latin Quarter, whose most famous cafes were the Voltaire, the Soleil d’Or, and Francois Premier’. He suggests that outside tables fundamentally changed the atmosphere of cafés:

‘These outside tables deprived political groups of their cover; the tables served customers watching the passing scene, rather than conspiring with one another... At an outdoor table in the big café one was expected to remain seated in one place; those who wanted to hop from scene to scene stood at the bar....the denizens of the café sat silently watching the crowd go by – they sat as individuals, each lost in his or her own thoughts'.

The working class was discouraged from these boulevard cafés by the cost and atmosphere, preferring the cafés intimes of the sidestreets. The café as haven of subversive sociability was gradually undermined:

'The exterior crowd composing itself into a spectacle no longer carried the menace of a revolutionary mob... in 1808 , police spies looking for dangerous political elements in Paris spent a great deal of time infiltrating cafés; in 1891, the police disbanded the bureau dedicated to the cafe surveillance. A public realm filled with moving and spectating individuals – in Paris as much as in London - no longer represented a political domain’.
Interesting, but not sure the reality fits quite so neatly into this narrative. After all cafés remained hotbeds of radicalism in Paris for much of the 20th century - see for instance the history of surrealists, existentialists and situationists.

Paris - city of sleep?

Interesting article in New York Times (10 Janyuary 2010) on decline in Paris nightlife:

'...Despite its reputation as the bustling spiritual home of the bohemian, the city has in recent years grown ever less mirthful and ever more staid and bourgeois, club owners say. Faced with mounting noise complaints, fines and closings, many Parisian bars and concert halls are struggling to stay afloat. D.J.’s and musicians have also been abandoning the French capital, forcing a startling conclusion upon the city’s night life professionals: Paris may soon be dead at night.

“The generalized law of silence that is battering down upon our events and our living spaces is soon to relegate the City of Lights to the rank of European capital of sleep,” a group of music promoters wrote in an online petition, to be submitted to the mayor of Paris and several government ministries on Jan. 31. The more than 14,000 signatories call for, above all else, more tolerance from residents and officials: it would be “dangerous hypocrisy,” the document says, “to let people think that the Parisian night could or should thrive without disturbing the perfect tranquillity of a single resident.” A headline in the newspaper Le Monde last month deemed Paris the “European capital of boredom.”

....A sampling of the city’s problems: densely packed, mixed-zoned neighborhoods; a lack of late-night transportation (the last metro leaves at 2 a.m. on the weekends, 1 a.m. during the week); and an unwieldy tangle of rules and regulations on bars and nightclubs, applied with uncommon zeal by a “repressive” police force.

Club owners say the central issue is the city’s accelerating gentrification. Real estate values have more than doubled here in the past 10 years, and residents increasingly demand peace and quiet, the club owners say... The police have lately, for instance, begun enforcing a long-overlooked law requiring establishments to hold a “night authorization” permit in order to stay open past 2 a.m., an annual license that club owners say is difficult to obtain.

(full article here)

Dancing Questionnaire (18): Pete from London

Next up is Pete, a one man link connecting jazz, mod and techno rave scenes. He is currently involved in the Young Unknowns gallery project on the South Bank.

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
When I was 8 my mother sent me to ballet lessons on Saturdays - in baggy football shorts because she couldn't afford tights. A mate saw me coming out of a lesson and grassed me up to other kids at school. It was all very Billy Elliot except I wasn't much taken by the music to bother fighting my corner.

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Dance has played a big part of my life since I was a kid in the 1950's, but I was in my 40's before the muse really took a hold. I'd become a world music fan in the late 80's then a guy came to share my flat who was big into techno, and for the first six months going to rave parties and clubs, my body just couldn't find a way to properly move with the sound. One night, seeing me struggling, a dancer whispered in my ear "Get between the beats". That tip stayed and the magic hasn't left me. I've since spoken to Africans who've said similar: "dance against the beat"

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
It was Xmas 1991 in a club called The Alarm (in Strasbourg where my nephew lived) and there it all fell into place.They had to drag me out of the place.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
An odd analogy springs to mind: In the same way a bad craftsman blames his tools, a good dancer can dance to any music. In my case there are limits - one is disco.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?
At 64 I've known many: Rock and Roll but I was a bit too young. At 15 it was Trad jazz , Ken Colyers Jazz club in Great or was it Little Newport St? I was happier with Modern Jazz, Mingus was a hero. I saw & bopped to Kenny Clark in The Blue Note, Paris in '62. Then the mod scene in which I felt at home, going to The Scene, in Soho, and The Lyceum. The 70's during my breaks as barman in Dingwalls, there was the The Average White Band.

There's so many: Chaguaramas, but I'm bad remembering names and that same venue became a Punk place [The Roxy] where I pogoed to Johnny Moped. The 80s I remember House at The Brain, but African did it most for me then, and I went to WOMAD three years running. Then on after it was Techno everywhere!

6. When and where did you last dance?
Celebrating my 64th birthday in a Paris Bar called Rosa Bonheur, last August.

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
You must be kidding!

All questionnaires welcome - just answer the same questions in as much or as little detail as you like and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires). Quick disclaimer: please note that people who complete the questionnaires do not necessarily share the wider views expressed at this blog on politics, sex, drugs or disco!

New Links

A couple of (related?) new blogs with similar interests to this site:

Apples from the Underground - ' blog inspired by the underground subcultures of resistance , rave music creativity , temporary autonomous zones and radical theory'. Some interesting stuff about French free parties, including last weekend's Free Parade in Paris - trying to find out more about this (will translate some material from the French Free Parade site, does anyone have any information in English that I can use?)

Shituationist Institute - 'progressive party palaver' from Berlin, Athens and beyond. Some good party reports, I liked this account of a weekend in Berlin, including going to an anti-nationalist 'Love Techno Hate Germany' party.

Paris Commune 1871: Dancing in the Debris

On this day in 1871 (the 16th May) there was a unique party in Paris during the days of the Commune. The occasion was the destruction of the Vendôme Column Column, built in to celebrate the might of Napoleon’s imperial forces. The Commune issued a decree pronouncing that the Column was to be abolished since it was ‘a monument to barbarism, a symbol of brute force and glory, an affirmation of militarism…’

And so it came to pass that the column came crashing down (pictured below). Louis Barron, an eyewitness/participant recalled: ‘This colossal symbol of the Grand Army – how it was fragile, empty, miserable… The music played fanfares, some old greybeard declaimed a speech on the vanity of conquests, the villainy of conquerors, and the fraternity of the people, we danced in a circle around the debris, and then we went off, very content with the little party’.

For Kristin Ross, this ‘attack on verticality’ was symbolic of the ‘horizontal’ nature of the Commune itself, characterised by ‘antihierarchical gestures and improvisations…extending principles of association and cooperation into the workings of everyday life’.

Sadly the forces of empire and order were soon take their revenge, massacring up to 25,000 supporters of the Commune in the streets of Paris.



Source: Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988).

Dancing Questionnaires (13): Tom from Cardiff

Tom from Vamos a Bailar: Salsa in Cardiff and Around steps up:


1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Dancing to a rhythm’n’blues band in the 1970s on the beer-soaked linoleum of Cardiff’s notorious – and long-demolished – New Moon Club.

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
My answer to this changes all the time, because it always relates to the most recent dance where I really make a connection with a partner.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
Paris last summer. Free dancing on a warm Saturday night in the open air on the banks of the Seine, and then Sunday afternoon in Barrio Latino: I was on form and the dancers and the music were great.


4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Cattle markets in Cardiff Students’ Union in the late 70s, trying to pluck up the courage to ask for a dance.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?
I used to jump about in an uncoordinated way at parties in the 70s. Myself and my (straight, male and female) friends also used to go to gay clubs and dance to disco music around the same time. I only got seriously into dancing around seven years ago: I’ve become addicted to dancing LA-style and more recently Cuban salsa (and the group version ‘rueda de casino’). I also dance merengue and bachata (dances from the Dominican Republic) and reggaeton if I’m sufficiently relaxed, though strictly speaking I'm too English and middle-aged for the latter.

6. When and where did you last dance?
Last night in Jumpin’ Jaks, Cardiff. A great night.

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
‘Este te Pone La Cabeza Mala’ by Los Van Van.

All questionnaires welcome - just answer the same questions and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

Voilà notre nuit!

Au Petit Rocher (also known as Chez Dinocheau after its owner) was a popular tavern/restaurant frequented by Parisian 'bohemians' such as Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s and 1860s. It was situated in a cellar at the corner of rues de Navarin and de Breda.

Among the drinkers was the writer Fernand Desnoyers who would regularly sing there, his songs being published in his 1865 collection Chansons parisiennes('Parisian Songs'). One of his songs, 'Les rôdeurs de nuit' ('The prowlers of the night') is a celebration of staying up all night:

Quand le bourgeois dort,
Il fait soif encore,
Passon la nuit a boire!
La rue est toute noire;
Mais les vitraux des boulevards
Sont en feu, comme des regards.
Atmosphere enflammée,
Filles dans la fumée,
Eau-de-vie et bruit,
Voilà notre nuit!

(When the bourgeois sleeps,
We are thirsty, still;
Let's drink the night through!
It's quite dark outside;
But the windows on the streets are
Ablaze like people's glances.
Burning atmosphere,
Girls in the smoke,
Brandy and noise,
This is our night!)

Source: Paris: The Secret History - Andrew Hussey (London: Viking, 2006)

Gino Severini - futurism and dance

The credit crunch clearly hasn't hit the world of super-rich art collecting - last week Danseuse (above), a 1915 painting by the Futurist artist Gino Severini sold for more than £15 million at Sotheby's.

Unlike some of his Futurist contemporaries, Severini (1883-1966) seems to have been at least as interested in the flow of the human form as in that of machines, and a number of his paintings feature the figure of the dancer. Severini frequented dance halls and cafés when he was living in Paris before the First World War, including the famous Bal Tabarin nightclub in Montmartre which opened in 1912 and featured in one of his paintings.

Blue Dancer (Ballerina blu), 1912

Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, 1912.

Sea=Dancer (Mare=Ballerina), 1914

Loie Fuller (Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks Dance Collection)

The Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks Dance Collection at the University of California consists of 'approximately 2,000 original drawings, paintings and photographs, as well as scrapbooks and other dance memorabilia', collected from around 1913 to 1945.

There are some fantastic images online of dancers from this period, such as paintings of Anna Pavlova and photos of Chicago-born Loie Fuller (1862-1928). The latter was not only a pioneer of free dance, but of the lightshow - as early as the 1890s she was experimenting with different coloured gas lighting on silk in her dance performances. She 'held many patents for stage lighting, including the first chemical mixes for gels and slides and the first use of luminescent salts to create lighting effects' (source).

After seeing Fuller perform at the Folies-Berigere in Paris in 1893, the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote:

‘Her performance, sui generis, is at once an artisitic intoxication and an industrial achievement, In that terrible bath of materials swoons the radiant, cold dancer, illustrating countless themes of gyration. From her proceeds an expanding web – giant butterflies and petals, unfoldings – everything of a pure and elemental order. She blends with the rapidly changing colours which vary their limelit phantasmagoria of twilight and grotto, their rapid emotional changes – delight, mourning, anger; and to set these off, prismatic, either violent or dilute as they are, there must be the dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice' (quoted in What is Dance?: Readings in Theory and Criticism By Roger Copeland, Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press 1983).

(thank to Fed by Birds for pointing me in the direction of this archive)

Here We Dance

Last week I went to the launch of Here We Dance, at Tate Modern. The exhibition aims to look at 'the relationship between the body and the state, exploring how the physical presence and circulation of bodies in public space informs our perceptions of identity, nation, society and democracy. The title derives from a work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, which refers to the celebrations that took place during the French Revolution, and alludes to the importance of social gathering in any form of political action or resistance. Bodily movements and gestures, collective actions and games are examined through media as diverse as film, photography, neon text and performance'.

At the private view there was a performance of Gail Pickering's Zulu - a woman moving around wooden shapes while reciting texts which seemed to be from the Weather Underground and similar 60s/70s urban guerrilla groups. This is powerful material that needs a lot of critical discussion and I am not convinced that playing with it in a gallery context really allows the space for reflection - given that most people viewing it would have no idea of the context or even where these words come from.

For me, the most striking piece is the late Ian Hamilton Finlay’s neon sign Ici on Danse ('here we dance/here one dances') - the words displayed at the entrance to a festival that was held on the site of the Bastille in July 1790 to celebrate the anniversary of the storming of the prison. On the gallery wall next to the sign, there is an accompanying text by Camille Desmoulins:

‘While the spectators, who imagined themselves in the gardens on Alcinous, were unable to tear themselves away, the site of the Bastille and its dungeons, which had been converted into groves, held other charms for those whom the passage of a single year had not yet accustomed to believe their eyes. An artificial wood, consisting of large trees, had been planted there. It was extremely well lit. In the middle of this lair of despotism there had been planted a pike with a cap of liberty stuck on top. Close by had been buried the ruins of the Bastille. Amongst its irons and gratings could be seen the bas-relief representing slaves in chains which had aptly adorned the fortress’s great clock, the most surprising aspect of the sight perhaps being that the fortress could have been toppled without overwhelming in its fall the posterity of the tyrants by whom it had been raised and who had filled it with so many innocent victims. These ruins and the memories they called up were in singular contrast with the inscription that could be read at the entrance to the grove – a simple inscription whose placement gave it a truly sublime beauty – ici on danse’.

The image of dancing on the ruins of the Bastille certainly appeals to me, even if the experience of Desmoulins – a revolutionary executed in 1794 by the new post-revolutinary authorities – suggests that those celebrating should always be looking over their shoulder for those building new Bastilles around the corner.

Colette: sex and dance in Fin de Siecle Paris

The French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873 -1954), known as Colette, lived life to the full in Fin de Siecle Paris, a period described by her biographer as ‘the era of cranks and seances. Alchemists have their followings. So do Krafft-Ebing and Sacher-Masoch. It is chic to have a violent or perverse death... The ranks of Gomorrah swell with the wives of bankers and politicians, as well as with the cabaret singers and laundresses of Montmartre. Like everyone else, Schwob provides himself with an exotic servant and an opium pipe. Like everyone else, Judith Gauthier embraces the Orient and takes a female lover. Wild animals, especially felines, become popular pets’.

In 1905, Colette began a lesbian affair with Mathilde de Morny, known as Missy: ‘By the end of the year Colette had formally entered Lesbos on Missy’s arm. “With such insignia as a pleated shirtfront, a stiff collar, sometimes a waistcoat, and always with a silk pocket handkerchief, I frequented a dying society on the margins of all societies”. There were discreet parties in Neuilly to which the guests wore “long trousers and tuxedos”... There were clubs whose specialities were fondue and dancing, and cabarets where the blue haze of cigar smoke hung over a zinc bar and a contralto with a fake moustache sang Augusta Holmes. Mostly, there were late nights, curtained carriages, and opera cloaks that concealed the forbidden male attire. There was cruising in the Bois between ten and noon, and on the Champs-Elysees between four and dusk... There was a code of signs and gestures: a certain glance, a certain dog”.

In public, women's behaviour was sometimes tightly policed - for instance women were not allowed to wear men's clothes. In 1906 at a masked ball in Nice ‘when Colette began waltzing with a "svelte, supple blonde" in a satin train, she felt an arm on her shoulder and heard the brusque voice of a bouncer advising them to "separate, if you please, ladies. It’s forbidden here for women to dance with each other’’'.

In January 1907, Collete caused a scandal when she performed at the Moulin Rouge in a short dance piece called Reve d’Egypte. She played a mummy who ‘comes back to life in a jeweled bra, slowly and seductively unwinds her transparent wrappings, and at the climax of the dance, passionately embraces the archaeologist’ who discovered her – the latter role played by her cross dressing lover Missy. The Moulin Rouge management hoped for a sensation when it opened and they got it – wealthy opponents filled the theatre with hired thugs and when the curtain opened ‘The stage was immediately bombarded with coins, orange peels, seat cushions, tins of candy, and cloves of garlic, while the catcalls, the blowing of noisemakers, and shouts of ‘Down with the Dykes’ drowned out an orchestra of forty musicians... When the archaeologist took the unwrapped mummy in ‘his’ arms to give her a lingering and unfeigned kiss, the uproar reached a fever pitch’. The next night a man played the male part, by order of the police.

At the end of the First World War, Colette was still roaming the streets of Paris looking for ‘new sensations’ in the company of her friend Francis Carco: ‘He introduced Colette to those picturesque little clubs of the place Pigalle where pimps, thugs and their molls danced the java to accordion music, and where the tables were bolted to the floor so that they couldn’t be smashed up in the nightly brawls. Once says Carco, he took Colette to a dive in the rue de Lappe owned by Marcel Proust’s former valet. When the police made their usual entrance, swinging fists and nightsticks, the baroness de Jouvenal [Colette] climbed on a table and shouted ‘Hooray! At last, a bit of fantasy’.

Source: Secrets of the Flesh: a life of Colette – Judith Thurman (London: Bloomsbury, 1999)

Ten Years On: 1997, a year of dancing dangerously

This chronology of raves, clubs and policing was compiled from the dance music press at the time (Mixmag, Muzik, Eternity, DJ etc.). Much of it is the familiar story of cat and mouse chases between police and sound systems in East Anglia, Wales etc. - just as happened in 2007. But some things have changed - no more Reclaim the Streets parties in England, and more positively people being able to go out dancing in the north of Ireland without having to worry so much shootings and plastic bullets.

January 1997, Scotland: Fusion close down operations in Grampian after police threaten the licence of any venues allowing them to put on events

January 1997, London: Club UK in south London loses its licence. The club had appealed against the council withdrawing its licence, but this was upheld by a magistrates court.

February 1997, Holland: Police confiscate vans containing tripods, sound systems and banners to prevent a Reclaim the Streets party outside the Amsterdam motor show. After police baton charge the crowd, there is free food, music and dancing with a huge bonfire in a market square [Earth First Action Update, March 1997]

February 1997, USA: A nail bomb explodes at the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian club in Atlanta, Georgia, injuring five people. The attack is claimed by the far right Army of God saying it is aimed at “sodomites, their organisations and all who push their agenda”.

February 1997, London: Battersea police licencing section announce they are to oppose the renewal of the public entertainments licence for the club Adrenalin Village, up for renewal by Wandsworth Council.

February 1997, Leicester: Hardcore club Die Hard raided by 50 police - everyone searched.

February 1997, London The Cool Tan the building in Brixton, previously evicted, is resquatted for two parties and then evicted after a fortnight.

April 1997, London: A man dies from a heart attack and 8 people are arrested when riot police raid a squat party in Putney.

April 1997, Luton: The Exodus collective win the right to appeal against eviction from their site by the Department of Transport

April 1997, London: Linford Film Studios in Battersea, south London loses its licence

April 1997, N.Ireland: Robert Hamill a 25 year old Catholic father of two, is kicked to death by Loyalists while on his way home from a dance at St Patrick’s Hall in Portadown. The attack happens in full view of police who refuse pleas to intervene. In March 1999 his family’s solicitor, Rosemary Nelson, is killed by a car bomb. She has been preparing to bring private prosecutions against those involved and the Royal Ulster Constabulary

April 1997, London: 5000 party in Trafalgar Square at the end of march for social justice in support of Liverpool dockers, organised by Reclaim the Streets. Police seize sound system at the end and arrest four people in the van, charging them with conspiracy to murder for allegedly driving through police lines (charges later dropped). 1000 riot police clear people out of the square

May 1997, London: Southwark Council refuse licence to Urban Free Festival (formerly held in Fordham Park, New Cross), after earlier given permission for it to take place in Peckham in July
May 1997, Wales: Police use helicopters and road blocks to stop free party at a disused quarry in North Wales, seizing the T.W.A.T. sound system and dispersing a 4 mile convoy of party cars to the English border (despite this two parties go ahead later)

May 1997, Manchester: Police and bailiffs evict treetop and tunnel protesters, including the Zero Tolerance sound system tied into the trees, at the site of the proposed Manchester Airport Terminal 2

May 1997, Brighton: Police action prevents parties at three venues in Brighton, but one goes ahead on a travellers site at Braepool on the outskirts of town. A Noise Abatement notice is served, and the Council begins legal action to evict the site [Big Issue, 4.8.97]

May 1997, Hull: 300 party at Hull Reclaim the Streets, with sand pits and dancing for three hours (no arrests)

June 1997, Bristol: Police make 22 arrests at Bristol Reclaim the Streets and confiscate the Desert Storm sound system

July 1997, N.Ireland: Police open fire with plastic bullets on young people returning from a teenage disco on the Falls Road, Belfast. A 14-year-old boy is left in a coma.

July 1997, USA: The Stonewall Inn in New York is once again under threat, scrutinised by the city’s Social Club Task Force because of concerns about noise levels and ‘illegal dancing” [Pink Paper, 8/8/97]

August 1997, Wales: Two people on their way to set up an open air party in Deiniolen, North Wales are stopped and strip searched by police, who set up road blocks to prevent the party going ahead.

August 1997, London: Local councillor calls for the Dog Star pub/club in Brixton to be closed, claiming it is a magnet for drug dealers.

August 1997, Surrey: Hundreds of people turn up at a free party in old chalk pits in the Mole Valley in Surrey by the time police turned up the next morning to serve a notice under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act most people had gone home [Guilfin, September 1997]

August 1997, Portsmouth: Police with dogs and video surveillance teams ring a common in Portsmouth and search people trying to attend the Smokey Bears Picnic; council byelaws banning music on the common are enforced and 10 people are arrested [Guilfin, September 1997]

Summer 1997, Surrey: Police close down a free party in a forest near Guildford put on by Timber sound system.

September 1997, France: Police in Paris close down five mainly gay clubs supposedly because of ecstasy dealing (Le Queen, Le Cox, L’Enfer, Le Scorp and Les Follies Pigalle). 2000 people march in protest with one banner declaring “Paris, capitale de l’ennui” (Paris, capital of boredom).

October 1997, Russia: Moscow gay club Chance is raided by “a team of men wearing special troops uniform, black masks and carrying automatic guns”. The special police claim to be searching for drugs; dancers are beaten up and abused a 90 people are arrested [Pink Paper, 17.10.97]
.
October 1997, Wales: 24 police raid a party in a private house in North Wales and impound the sound system. The Country Landowners Association have set up a Rave Watch scheme in the local area encouraging local farmers to tip off the police about possible parties

November 1997, Greece: police violently raid the ACID trance club in Thessaloniki.

November 1997, Norfolk: Police bust squat party at Thelveton Hall, an unoccupied country house in Norfolk, seizing the Brighton-based Innerfield Sound System and carry out intimate body searches. The house belongs to Sir Rupert Mann, but had been empty for seven years.

November 1997, Oxford: Police use a helicopter and horses in an effort to stop Oxford Reclaim the Streets party. Despite the seizure of the solar powered sound system, and the Rinky Dinky Sound System being escorted out of the city, 400 people party in the road [Peace News, December 1997]

December 1997, N.Ireland: Loyalist Volunteer Force open fire on a disco in Dungannon, County Tyrone, killing a doorman. Another man is killed in an attack on a bar in Belfast.

December 1997, Scotland: Street party halts traffic for 1.5 hours outside the Faslane nuclear submarine base . Several people injured by Ministry of Defence police.

December 1997, Wales: 22 arrests in police drug raid on Hippo Club, Cardiff.

December 1997, Israel: Trance outfit Juno Reactor are deported from the country, where they were due to be playing at a 5000 capacity rave, prompting the launch of a Freedom to Party organisation. “Indoor parties are usually legal, as opposed to outdoor parties which are usually not. But even so, many of the indoor parties are constantly being raided by the police” (Dream Creation July 1997)

December 1997, N.Ireland: Edmund Treanor killed and five injured in a Loyalist Volunteer Force attack on New Year celebrations at the Clifton Tavern, Belfast.

December 1997, Brighton: 27 people arrested as police try and close down New Year’s Eve squat party in Brighton; people throw bottles at police.

Anais Nin: Dancing in 1930s New York City of Rhythm

The writer Anais Nin (1903-77) lived between Paris and New York in the 1930s, and her diaries provide a vivid account of bohemian nightlife in this period. In the latter city, it was the clubs and rent parties of Harlem that were the big draw. The journals describe a 1934 trip with the psychologist Otto Rank:

"Harlem. The Savoy. Music which makes the floor tremble, a vast place, with creamy drinks, dusky lights, and genuine gaiety, with the Negroes dancing like people possessed. The rhythm unleashes everyone as you step on the floor. Rank said he could not dance. 'A new world, a new world,' he murmured, astonished and bewildered. I never imagined that he could not dance, that he had led such a serious life that he could not dance. I said: 'Dance with me.' At first he was stiff, he tripped, he was confused and dizzy. But at the end of the first dance he began to forget himself and dance. It gave him joy. All around us the Negroes danced wildly and grace­fully. And Rank sauntered as if he were learning to walk. I danced, and he danced along with me. I would have liked to dance with the Negroes, who dance so spontaneously and elegantly, but I felt I should give Rank the pleasure of dis­covering freedom of physical motion when he had given me emotional freedom. Give back pleasure, music, self-forgetting for all that he gave me".

A few months later (April 1935) she was back, this time with the writer Rebecca West and the actor Raymond Massey: 'to Harlem, first to a nightclub, to hear some singing, and then to a private apartment. Everyone was dancing and drinking. Half white people, half black, beautiful women, well-dressed men, and jazz, it was intoxicating and magnifiicent, the laughter, the dancing, but I miss the intimacy which grows out of such parties in Paris. Here it is all jokes, banter, evasion'.

Nin's descriptions of black people can certainly be read as patronising, but nevertheless in an era of segregation the very fact of mixed dancing was remarkable.

She perceived a clear link between music and the moods of a modern city. Her night out with Otto Rank concluded 'Driving home the radio in the taxi continues the jazz mood. New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essen­tially a city of rhythm".

Later she writes "The radio plays blues. Paris, New York, the two magnetic poles of the world. Paris a sensual city which seduced the body, enlivened the senses, New York unnatural, synthetic; Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York".

Source: The Journals of Anais Nin, Volume Two: 1934-1939.

1950s Raves Continued

In an earlier post, we referred to the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and George Melly in London in the early 1950s, the earliest use we have found so far of the term 'rave' and 'ravers' in a musical context (as opposed to 'raving mad').

Another key figure in this first London rave scene was the clarinettist Cy Laurie (1926-2002), pictured here. Cy Laurie’s Jazz Club was held downstairs at Mac's Rehearsal Rooms at 41 Great Windmill Street, Soho. The space had earlier been the base for Ronnie Scott's Club 11, one of London's first modern jazz clubs which opened there in 1948, before moving to Carnaby Street. But it was Laurie's club that became famous for all-night raves.

One 50s raver recalled 'The Windmill Street club was the Saturday Night magnet in my late teens; it was the music and the atmosphere, but also the place to find out the address of that week's rave; there were five of us, and between us we could muster three cars - unusual in those days - which ensured that we always gathered passengers who knew the ropes. On one then celebrated occasion, four of us went to Manchester, at the drop of a hat in an Austin A35, by the time we got there it was all over, so we returned to London with an extra passenger, who had been given a trumpet which he taught himself to play on the journey' (so years before the late 1980s London orbital parties, the convoy of rave pilgrims was established).

Another remembers 'all nighters at Cy's were a buzz. I was one of the - all dressed in black and often barefoot - dancers who was first AND last on the floor.... Cy's place was a culture thing, and included the early morning rush to Waterloo station to get the Milk Train to Hastings, for "FUN" in the Hastings caves'. Others would stumble into the Harmony Inn cafe in Archer Street. By the end of the 1950s, Laurie had moved on to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, beating the Beatles to it, while revivalist jazz had been superseded by the trad jazz boom and a new crowd of ravers.

In Bomb Culture (1968), his overview of 1950s and 1960s underground culture, Jeff Nuttal observes that the revivalist jazz scene was very much a Paris as well as London bohemian sub culture:

"Paris, after the war, has been the traditional home of bohemianism... the post­war pop-bohemianism launched itself with a cult of the primitive, of ceramic beads and dirndl skirts, of ankle-thong sandals and curtain-hoop ear-rings, of shaggy corduroys and ten-day beards, of seamen's sweaters and home-dyed battle-dress.... the clubs which set themselves up in London and Paris and promoted New Orleans jazz like a religion were totally outside of commerce, running at the start of things on a non-profit-making basis, employing amateur bands, collec­tions of students, particularly art students, who imitated the great recordings by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton with varying skill and complete self-decep­tion... The following was a minority following, self-conscious and partisan, opin­ionated and crusading. The world was evil, governed by Mam­mon and Moloch. New Orleans jazz was a music straight from the heart and the swamp, unclouded by the corrupting touch of civilization. It would refertilize the world".