Youth and Popular Culture

Discotheques will be celebrating their 50th anniversary at the end of October 2009. The first DJ started to play records in Aachen back in 1959. Initially ridiculed by the competition, Klaus Quirini alias DJ Heinrich soon became famous.

Mr Quirini, in 1959, you were the very first DJ to play records in a discotheque. In the USA, for example, the first disco only opened 13 years later. How did you become a DJ?

By chance. I was sent to the Scotch Club not as a DJ but as a journalist to report on the opening of the new nightclub. A singer from the Cologne Opera had been hired to put on records and present the music. But it was terribly boring. The guests were sitting around and the opera singer did not move. My two colleagues from the newspaper started moaning. I was still very young back then, 19 years old, and that evening I had drunk whiskey for the first time in my life. At any rate, I was having a good old moan too. All of a sudden, the proprietor of the Scotch Club, Franzkarl Schwendinger, was standing in front of me and asking me if I did not want to take over.

And you spontaneously said you would?

I went straight behind the DJ stand and reached for the first record lying there, which was Ein Schiff wird kommen, and just said into the microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen, roll up your trouser legs please, we’re just letting water into the hall, because a ship is coming with Lale Andersen on board.” And everyone just started to clap. So I put on the second record, Ramona – “the most beautiful girl in the world,” and everyone was clapping again. Later, the proprietor asked me if I did not want to carry on doing the job and offered me 800 marks. That was an incredible amount of money at the time, and I was thrilled to bits.

You became famous as DJ Heinrich. How did you come up with the idea for your stage name?

Before I could take on the job, I had to ask my father for permission because I was not 18 yet. He said OK, but only on one condition: I was not allowed to call myself Quirini because an uncle of mine held public office. So I wanted to call myself Egon, but the record Ach Egon, Egon, ich hab ja nur aus Liebe zu Dir was nowhere to be found at the Scotch Club. So I carried on looking through the records and one of them, by Trude Herr, was called Ach Heinrich, ich hab nur Dich. From then on, I was DJ Heinrich.

Something that has remained the same after 50 years of discotheques is the dress code. Today, doormen still look people up and down. At the Scotch Club, a tie and jacket were compulsory.

They were very strict about that. At the beginning, even women in trousers were not allowed in. Also, from the beginning, only as many men were let into the club as there were women. People danced at the Scotch Club and got to know each other. I still get letters from people who met at our discotheque and have been married for decades now.

In 1959, the Scotch Club was not yet called a “discotheque”, but a “Jockey Dance Bar”. It was only in the mid-1960s that the Duden dictionary included the word “Diskothek”. Did the word “Diskjockey” exist earlier than that?

The term already existed in 1959, and I called myself a disc jockey from the start. The very first DJ to announce records without a manuscript was Christopher Stone for the BBC in England in the late 1920s.

Had you already started to do any scratching back then?

That wasn’t done back then - the records were played as they were. I was guided by the music that was popular at the time: Glenn Miller, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. Many visitors came from Belgium and Holland to the border town of Aachen and they brought the latest dances with them – square dance and hilly billy. I practised them with the guests on the dance floor. The mood was always great.

Were people already taking drugs back then?

At that time, drugs weren’t an issue yet. But people drank more than they do today – disco-goers were older. We had to be very strict about protecting young people. People under 18 were only allowed to stay until 10.00 p.m.. There were regular controls. That is why we introduced a “children’s hour” for the youngsters on Sunday afternoons.

Was music in 1959 as loud as it is in a disco today?

At least as loud! Our loudspeakers were right on the dance floor. Our record player came from Switzerland and a company from Düsseldorf built the system for us. The sound was terrific. I would say it was even better than today, it was warmer because of our valve amplifier.

Have you been to a disco recently?

Just recently I did. I go to a wide range of discotheques regularly. But age-wise I’m no longer part of the in-crowd at the big discos frequented by young people.