Last Friday, as part of its 10th anniversary celebrations, BBC 4 devoted three hours to the joys of disco. (‘A glorious programme about glorious music’, as the lovely Lucy Mangan enthused in the Guardian the following day).

By chance, just two days before the programmes went out, I was in Paris with Jane where I took the photo above, of the bar/ club where I first heard the word discothèque (of which ‘disco’ is a contraction) : Le Caméléon, in the Rue St. André des Arts, just west of the Place Saint Michel.

I got to know the Caméléon in the late 50s, in one of the three summers where I stayed in the ‘Beat Hotel’ at number 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, which runs from the Rue St. André des Arts north towards the river.  (I’ll write more about the Beat Hotel some other time, but let’s stick to disco for now).

There was live music downstairs, while - during the day at least - you could get a coffee or whatever on the ground floor accompanied by jazz of your choice.  What happened was this: the person who took your order also handed you a battered copy of their collection of records, their

discothèque (coined by analogy with bibliothèque, a ‘collection of books’), and you told him or her which track you wanted to listen to.  At some stage the word discothèque switched meanings, becoming attached to the place where music was played and, eventually, in its truncated version, becoming the music heard at such places in the 70s.

Now, I had assumed that I was in Paris just as the word discothèque began to be used. However - if the Wikepedia entry on ‘disco’ is to be believed -

the term "discothèque" was coined in Europe to describe clubs where there was no live music played (a.k.a disk-only events). In Occupied France, jazz and bebop music plus the jitterbug were banned by the Nazis as decadent American influences, so members of the Resistance met at hidden underground dance clubs called discotheques (fr. record collection) where they danced to American swing music, which a DJ played on a single turntable when a jukebox was not available.

That may well be so, but we all know that Wikipedia can err at times (and I imagine that most members of the Resistance had other things than jazz on their mind at the time). I wonder, for example, if their explanation of the related word ‘go-go’ (as in ‘go-go dancer’) is to be believed.  The relevant entry claims that go-go:

derives from the phrase "go-go-go" for a high-energy person, and was influenced by the French expression à gogo, meaning "in abundance, galore".

I see no reason not to link the term go-go directly to the French expression, more particularly in the phrase Whisky à gogo, the French translation of Compton Mackenzie’s  ‘Whisky Galore’ which appeared as a novel in 1947, the successful film version being released two years later.

There seems to be some doubt about exactly when Whisky à Gogo  was first used as the name of a club in France, but there seems to have been one in Paris - run by the redoubtable Régine - by 1949, when the Ealing film actually came out.  It’s certain that other clubs of the same name opened in France over the next ten years or so. (I actually attended the opening night of the Cannes version some time in 1961, I recall, by which time there were quite a lot of what were beginning to be called ‘go-go dancers’.

Oh yes, and William Burroughs was living  a few doors from the Caméléon the last time I went there in the late 50s.  But that, as I said, is another story.