How the Nazis gave us disco

[Dave Monroe]

 How the Nazis gave us disco
(Filed: 12/08/2006)

A French wartime subculture gave rise to the modern
DJ, says Frank Broughton

Exactly 100 years ago, by broadcasting Handel to some
very surprised ships' radio operators, Canadian
inventor Reginald Fessenden became the world's first
DJ. To celebrate the disc jockey's centenary, Bill
Brewster and I have greatly expanded our book Last
Night a DJ Saved My Life - The History of the Disc
Jockey (Headline). Most think of DJs as mere
entertainers, players piggybacking on other people's
talent. We argue that the DJ is central to the story
of popular music - that as taste-maker and musical
gatekeeper, he has been the main motive force in its
evolution. By championing the obscure, by importing
and cross-pollinating different styles, and by
gleefully splintering recorded sound in ways that have
horrified musicians, the DJ has been music's most
ardent revolutionary.

Research for the new edition took in acid house, the
births of drum and bass and UK garage, and the strange
Galapagos Islands of dance music which blossomed in
mainland Europe when disco dried up. But for me most
pressing was the part of our story that was slipping
from living memory: the birth of the modern nightclub
in Paris. Exactly why does the discothèque bear a
French name? Tracing the answer took us all the way
back to smoky cellars in occupied Paris. It also
revealed one of the most bizarre youth movements in
history.

Imagine, amid the grey serge of wartime France, a
tribe of youngsters with all the colourful decadence
of punks or teddy boys. Wearing zoot suits cut off at
the knee (the better to show off their brightly
coloured socks), with hair sculpted into grand quiffs,
and shoes with triple-height soles - looking like
glam-rock footwear 30 years early - these were the
kids who would lay the foundations of nightclubbing.
Ladies and gentlemen, les Zazous.

The Zazou look was completed with high collars,
impossibly tight ties and long sheepskin-lined
jackets, with a curved-handled umbrella carried at all
times (copied from British prime minister Neville
Chamberlain, regarded as quite a style icon). Female
Zazous wore short skirts, shabby furs, wooden platform
shoes and dark glasses with big lenses, and chose to
go hatless, to better show off the single lock of hair
they had bleached or dyed. They took their name from
the Cab Calloway-style scatting in a song Je Suis
Swing, by their hero, French jazz singer Johnny Hess.

Like peacock versions of Hamburg's swing kids, the
Zazous thrived in opposition to the Nazis' hatred of
jazz. When Goebbels issued edicts banning the "rhythms
of belly-dancing negroes", the remnants of
Montmartre's jazz community were deported, interned,
or at very least unemployed. The scene that had raised
Josephine Baker to legend resorted to home-grown
musicians playing US jazz standards, renamed on
programmes to fool the censors.

While the adults skirted the Nazi regulations, their
younger counterparts favoured far more public
defiance. Raising a finger to the world, the Zazous
would shout "Swing", give a little hop, then cry out,
"Zazou hey, hey, hey, za Zazou!," followed by three
slaps on the hip, two shrugs of the shoulder and a
turn of the head. Not surprisingly, Zazous were
regular targets for the boot-boys of the
collaborationist Vichy government, suffering organised
beatings, having their heads shaved and being cast out
to sweat in the fields.

As the pogroms began, some Zazous went even further
and took to wearing yellow stars of David to show
solidarity with the Jews. To underline their outlaw
musical taste, they wrote "swing" across them. Several
found themselves in internment camps as a result. Even
stranger, when liberation was imminent, female Zazous
blacked up their faces to show their love for jazz and
America.

Crucially, it was the Zazous who gave Paris its
enduring taste for dancing in cellars to records.
Unable to congregate openly, they took their precious
swing 78s underground, for les bals clandestins in
cafés off the Champs-Élysées or in the Latin Quarter.
There, they would throw English slang at each other,
swap American novels and jitterbug to all hours.

In Paris, les Zazous remain a potent symbol of
resistance - against both the Nazis and the stuffiness
of an older generation. They were also the first club
kids. After the liberation, Eddie Barclay, wartime
jazz pianist, legendary lounge lizard and founder of
the French record industry, followed their example and
established the first nightclub to dispense with live
music. So while the precise etymology of discothèque
has so far defied discovery, we know that the concept
of an intimate underground record club is ours thanks
to the Third Reich and the jazz-loving layabouts who
defied it.
# 'Last Night a DJ Saved My Life' is published by
Headline. For a complete timeline of 100 years of
DJing, go to http://djcentenary.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=FCJ5DQLBE11DZQFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/arts/2006/08/12/bmdisco12.xml

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