Famous Cabaret Quotes

La Belle Époque was a cabaret dance hall, much like the famous Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergere. We didn’t know that the evening's Beauty Pageant was a competition for The Lady Boy of Paris. The winner would proceed to compete at a flamboyant gala Lady Boy of the Year Award, held in Berlin on New Year's Eve.

There were micro-squabbles almost unbelievable to imagine now. The BBC was giving live coverage to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961 and they had to actually shut down the broadcast when trad jazz and modern jazz fans started to beat the shit out of each other, and the whole crowd lost control. The purists thought of blues as part of jazz, so they felt betrayed when they saw electric guitars—a whole bohemian subculture was threatened by the leather mob. There was certainly a political undercurrent in all this. Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl—singers and famous folk song collectors who were patriarchs, or ideologues, of the folk boom—took a Marxist line that this music belonged to the people and must be protected from the corruption of capitalism. That’s why “commercial” was such a dirty word in those days. In fact the slanging matches in the music press resembled real political fisticuffs: phrases like “tripe mongers,” “legalized murder,” “selling out.” There were ludicrous discussions about authenticity. Yet the fact is, there was actually an audience for the blues artists in England. In America most of those artists had got used to playing cabaret acts, which they quickly found out didn’t go down well in the UK. Here you could play the blues. Big Bill Broonzy realized he could pick up a bit of dough if he switched from Chicago blues to being a folksy bluesman for European audiences. Half of those black guys never went back to America, because they realized that they were being treated like shit at home and meanwhile, lovely Danish birds were tripping over themselves to accommodate them. Why go back? They’d found out after World War II that they were treated well in Europe, certainly in Paris, like Josephine Baker, Champion Jack Dupree and Memphis Slim. That’s why Denmark became a haven for so many jazz players in the ’50s.

This is the ordinary Scottish recipe for toddy; an alternative interpretation is that of my old Russian friend, the late M Baleiev, who founded the famouse Chauve-Souris cabaret show in Moscow and, after the Russian revolution, brought it to London and New York. Here is his version: 'First you put in whisky to make it strong; then you add water to make it weak; next you put in lemon to make it sour, then you put in sugar to make it sweet. You put in more whisky to kill the water. Then you say "Here's to you" - and you drink it yourself.

Rodolphe Salis was a tall, red-headed bohemian with a coppery beard and boundless charisma. He had tried and failed to make a success of several different careers, including painting decorations for a building in Calcutta. But by 1881 he was listless and creatively frustrated, uncertain where his niche might lie. More pressingly, he was desperate to secure a steady income. But then he had the ingenious idea to turn the studio which he rented, a disused post office on the resolutely working-class Boulevard de Rochechouart, into a cabaret with a quirky, artistic bent. He was not the first to attempt such a venture: La Grande Pinte on the Avenue Trudaine had been uniting artists and writers to discuss and give spontaneous performances for several years. But Salis was determined that his initiative would be different – and better. A fortuitous meeting ensured that it was. Poet Émile Goudeau was the founder of the alternative literary group the Hydropathes (‘water-haters’ – meaning that they preferred wine or beer). After meeting Goudeau in the Latin Quarter and attending a few of the group’s gatherings, Salis became convinced that a more deliberate form of entertainment than had been offered at La Grande Pinte would create a venue that was truly innovative – and profitable. The Hydropathe members needed a new meeting place, and so Salis persuaded Goudeau to rally his comrades and convince them to relocate from the Latin Quarter to his new cabaret artistique. They would be able to drink, smoke, talk and showcase their talents and their wit. Targeting an established group like the Hydropathes was a stroke of genius on Salis’s part. Baptising his cabaret Le Chat Noir after the eponymous feline of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, he made certain that his ready-made clientele were not disappointed. Everything about the ambience and the decor reflected Salis’s unconventional, anti-establishment approach, an ethos which the Hydropathes shared. A seemingly elongated room with low ceilings was divided in two by a curtain. The front section was larger and housed a bar for standard customers. But the back part of the room (referred to as ‘L’Institut’) was reserved exclusively for artists. Fiercely proud of his locality, Salis was adamant that he could make Montmartre glorious. ‘What is Montmartre?’ Salis famously asked. ‘Nothing. What should it be? Everything!’ Accordingly, Salis invited artists from the area to decorate the venue. Adolphe Léon Willette painted stained-glass panels for the windows, while Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen created posters. And all around, a disorientating mishmash of antiques and bric-a-brac gave the place a higgledy-piggledy feel. There was Louis XIII furniture, tapestries and armour alongside rusty swords; there were stags’ heads and wooden statues nestled beside coats of arms. It was weird, it was wonderful and it was utterly bizarre – the customers loved it.