The Belgian singer who “invented the discotheque”
Régine 1929-2022
In 1957, a Belgian-born singer known as Régine opened a basement nightclub in a backstreet of Paris’s Latin Quarter. She could not afford a live band, said The New York Times, so she bought a jukebox for her clientele to dance to. Business was not good, however, and she eventually decided that the jukebox was to blame. “When the music stopped, you could hear snogging in the corners,” she told the BBC, years later. “It killed the atmosphere. Instead, I installed two turntables so there was no gap in the music. It was the firstever discotheque, and I was the first-ever club disc jockey.” Over the next 30 years, she spun that single outpost into a disco empire stretching to 23 clubs in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. In 1976, Régine’s opened in New York and became one of the city’s most glittering venues, frequented by everyone from Yves Saint Laurent and the Kennedys to Audrey Hepburn and Salvador Dalí. Once Régine – the self-billed “Queen of the Night” – danced all night with Gene Kelly, then disappeared for 15 days. They had, she later revealed, had “private relations”.
Régine Zylberberg was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Brussels in 1929. Her mother abandoned the family when she was young, and later, her father ran a café in Paris, where she waited tables. She spent much of the War in hiding; after it, dreaming of a more glamorous life, she became a torch singer; and by 1953, she was managing nightclubs as well as performing in them. In the 1970s, as her business expanded, she moved to Manhattan, where she took the penthouse suite at the Delmonico Hotel, and opened Régine’s on its ground floor. The city was practically bankrupt, but its rich and famous still wanted to party: she sold 2,000 memberships for $600 apiece, and instituted a strictly enforced dress code that stipulated evening gowns for women, and black tie for men (Mick Jagger was once turned away for arriving in trainers). The club was so exclusive, the New York authorities threatened to sue it for “social discrimination”.
As well as Régine’s, she owned restaurants, acted in various films, designed her own line of clothing, and continued to sing. By the 1980s, however, the club was on the slide: a younger generation had gravitated to Studio 54, and even her older clientele found the latter’s decadent vibe hard to resist. As one commentator said, “you didn’t feel you could do cocaine on the tables at Régine’s”. By the 1990s, most of her clubs had closed. Latterly she had lived in Paris, where she was known for supporting various charities. In 2008, she received the French Légion d’Honneur, and in 2016 she appeared at the Folies Bergère, in her trademark feather boa, to sing a French version of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. “Retire? There’s absolutely no rush,” she told AFP at the time.