Sadly Le Tabou closed its doors in the late 90s and the building is now a very swanky hotel, L’Hotel d’Aubusson. After two weeks Molly and I gave ourselves a metaphorical slap on the hand and promptly and individually fell out of love with him. His conversation consisted of “Vous êtes belles” and “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” Not a word about the weather or the state of our health.
TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB TOUR PARIS OPENER FREE
We would watch him polishing the glasses behind the bar to an impressive, smudge free shine and we afforded him all the attention and admiration due a surgeon performing open heart surgery with a tin opener. The bar man downstairs in Le Tabou was so archetypically French, dark, handsome and not tall, that Molly and I fell in love with him on sight. Strangely when I got up the courage this year to revisit Le Conti, the Nesle and Le Relais Odeon on Blvd St Germain, they all seemed smaller than I’d remembered, as if I’d only been a small child there instead of a 20-year old. About 2 in the morning we’d have a break (and breathe in fresh cigarette smoke) in the Bar Nesle, just across the road. There was no air conditioning or extract fans– just pure unadulterated cigarette smoke.
Pablo sat surrounded by his records at the back of the room. There was a tiny stage at the far end, a dance floor and a bar at the other end. Down a steep flight of stairs was the vaulted cellar club. Upstairs there was a cloakroom, toilets and a small bar. The entrance door to Le Tabou opened directly off Rue Dauphine.
(They had a passionate affair, Paris was a refuge for black jazz musicians in the post war era Greco was horrified when later she met up with Davis in America to find that as a black man he was not allowed to drink in the same bar.)Īs the popularity of Le Tabou took off, it was not uncommon for neighbours fed up with the noise of customers leaving in the early hours, to empty their chamber pots on to their heads. Fortunately for us, this unsavoury habit had stopped. Juliette Greco sang there and Miles Davis played on the tiny stage. Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian and Jean Cocteau were regular customers. It was soon taken over by the intellectuals, musicians and poets of St Germain and Montparnasse, after the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots had closed their doors for the night. Originally it was a late-night drinking haunt for press distribution workers as it had an alcohol license until 4am. Le Tabou opened in 1947, following in the footsteps of the Club des Lorientais. Le Tabou became our second home, we frequented it two or three times a week, stumbling out at four in the morning to find a brightly lit café for a much needed café au lait before taking the first metro home. Pablo, the DJ, downstairs in the smoke filled cellar, played R&B and soul music- Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, James Brown-anything that was good, exciting and loud. In January 1968, within a month of arriving in Paris and with all the acute olfactory senses of a pig finding truffles, Molly (my new friend) and I unearthed Le Tabou, a cellar club in Rue Dauphine.