Nightclub
A nightclub or dance club is a club that is open at night, usually for drinking, dancing and other entertainment. Nightclubs often have a bar and discotheque with a dance floor, laser lighting displays, and a stage for live music or a disc jockey who mixes recorded music. Nightclubs tend to be smaller than live music venues like theatres and stadiums, with few or no seats for customers.
Nightclubs generally restrict access to people in terms of age, attire, personal belongings, and behaviors. Nightclubs typically have dress codes to prohibit people wearing informal, indecent, offensive, gym, or gang-related attire from entering. Unlike other entertainment venues, nightclubs are more likely to use bouncers to screen prospective patrons for entry.
The busiest nights for a nightclub are Friday and Saturday nights. Most nightclubs cater to a particular music genre or sound for branding effects. Some nightclubs may offer food and beverages.
Terminology
In some countries, nightclubs are also referred to as "discos" or "discothèques" ; ; Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish: discoteca, ''antro, and boliche. In Japanese ディスコ, disuko refers to an older, smaller, less fashionable venue; while クラブ, kurabu refers to a more recent, larger, more popular venue. The term night'' is used to refer to an evening focusing on a specific genre, such as "retro music night" or a "singles night". In Hong Kong and China, nightclub is used as a euphemism for a hostess club, and the association of the term with the sex trade has driven out the regular usage of the term.History
Early history
In the United States, New York increasingly became the national capital for tourism and entertainment. Grand hotels were built for upscale visitors. New York's theater district gradually moved northward during this half century, from The Bowery up Broadway through Union Square and Madison Square, settling around Times Square at the end of the 19th century. Stars such as Edwin Booth and Lillian Russell were among the early Broadway performers. Prostitutes served a wide variety of clientele, from sailors on leave to playboys.The first nightclubs appeared in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s, including McGlory's, and the Haymarket. They enjoyed a national reputation for vaudeville, live music, and dance. They tolerated unlicensed liquor, commercial sex, and gambling cards, chiefly Faro. Practically all gambling was illegal in the city, and regular payoffs to political and police leadership was necessary. Prices were high and they were patronized by an upscale audience. Timothy Gilfoyle called them "the first nightclubs". By contrast, Owney Geoghegan ran the toughest nightclub in New York from 1880 to 1883. 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. Webster Hall is credited as the first modern nightclub, being built in 1886 and starting off as a "social hall", originally functioning as a home for dance and political activism events. Reisenweber's Cafe is credited for introducing jazz and cabaret to New Yorkers.
Jukebox and prohibition
The jukebox was invented by the Pacific Phonograph Company in 1889 by its managers Louis Glass and his partner William S. Arnold. The first was installed at the Palais Royale Saloon, San Francisco on November 23, 1889, becoming an overnight sensation.The advent of the jukebox fueled the Prohibition-era boom in underground illegal speakeasy bars, which needed music but could not afford a live band and needed precious space for paying customers. Webster Hall stayed open, with rumors circulating of Al Capone's involvement and police bribery.
From about 1900 to 1920, working class Americans would gather at honky tonks or juke joints to dance to music played on a piano or a jukebox. With the repeal of Prohibition in February 1933, nightclubs were revived, such as New York's 21 Club, Copacabana, El Morocco, and the Stork Club. These nightclubs featured big bands.
During America's Prohibition, new speakeasies and nightclubs appeared on a weekly basis. Texas Guinan opened and ran many, and had many padlocked by the police. Harlem had its own clubs including the Cotton Club. 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. It was billed as America's most beautiful and sophisticated nightclub and featured the young Kahn and his band most evenings.
Pre-WWII
Europe
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. Nightclubs in London were tied much to the idea of "high society", via organisations such as the Kit Kat Club and the Café de Paris. The 43 Club on Gerrard Street was run by Kate Meyrick the 'Night Club Queen'. 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. In this era, nightclubbing was generally the preserve of those with money.In Paris, Josephine Baker ran several nightclubs during the 1920s including Chez Josephine, as did her friend Bricktop who ran Bricktops. 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. Hall and Hicks also owned the chic Florida Club in London's Mayfair.
In Germany during the Golden Twenties, there was a need to dance away the memories of the First World War. In Berlin, where a "tango fever" had already swept dancing establishments in the early 1910s, 899 venues with a dancing licence were registered by 1930, including the Moka Efti, Casanova, Scala, Delphi-Palast, Kakadu, Femina-Palast, Palais am Zoo, Gourmenia-Palast, Uhlandeck, and the Haus Vaterland. In the 1920s, the nightlife of the city was dominated by party drugs such as cocaine. 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. These venues were aimed at rich and poor people, gays, lesbians, nudists, and gangsters alike.
Asia
In 1930s Shanghai, the big clubs were The Paramount Club and Ciro's. Other clubs of the era were the Metropole and the Canidrome. Jazz bands, big bands, and singers performed for a bowtied clientele. The Paramount and Ciro's in particular were fiercely rivalrous and attracted many customers from the underworld. Shanghai's clubs fell into decline after the Japanese invasion of 1937 and eventually closed. The Paramount reopened after the communist victory in 1949 as The Red Capitol Cinema, dedicated to Maoist propaganda films, before fading into obscurity. It reopened as The Paramount in 2008.World War II years
In occupied France, jazz and bebop music, and the jitterbug dance were banned by the Nazis as "decadent American influences", so as an act of resistance, people met at hidden basements called discothèques where they danced to jazz and swing music, played on a single turntable when a jukebox was not available. These discothèques were also patronized by anti-Vichy youth called zazous. In Nazi Germany, there were underground discothèques patronized by anti-Nazi youth called the "Swing Kids".Post-WWII: Emergence of the disc jockey and discothèque
The end of World War II saw the beginning of a transformation in the nightclub: no longer the preserve of a moneyed elite, over several decades, the nightclub steadily became a mass phenomenon.In Germany, the first discothèque on record that involved a disc jockey was Scotch-Club, which opened in 1959. Its, and therefore the world's first DJ was 19-year-old local cub reporter Klaus Quirini who had been sent to write a story about the strange new phenomenon of public record-playing; fueled by whisky, he jumped on stage and started announcing records as he played them and took the stage-name DJ Heinrich.
In the US, Connie's Inn and the Cotton Club in Harlem, NY were popular venues for white audiences. Before 1953 and some years thereafter, most bars and nightclubs used a jukebox or mostly live bands.
In Paris, at a club named Le Whisky à Gogo, founded in 1947 on the rue de Seine by Paul Pacine, 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. This was the world's first-ever "discothèque". The Whisky à Gogo set into place the standard elements of the modern post-World War II discothèque-style nightclub.
In London, by the end of the 1950s, several of the coffee bars in London's Soho introduced afternoon dancing. These prototype discothèques were nothing like modern-day nightclubs, as they were unlicensed, daytime venues where coffee was the drink of choice and that catered to a very young public – mostly made up of French and Italians working illegally, mostly in catering, to learn English, as well as au pair girls from most of western Europe.
A well known venue was Les Enfants Terribles at 93 Dean St., in Soho, London. 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. It stayed popular into the 1960s. It later became a 1940s-themed club called the Black Gardenia but has since closed.
The Flamingo Club on Wardour Street in London ran between 1952 and 1967 and was known for its role in the growth of rhythm and blues and jazz in the UK. It earned a controversial reputation with gangsters and prostitutes said to have been frequent visitors in the 1960s, along with musicians such as the Beatles.