From the Liverpool Club to the Salon des Amateurs

Since the 1960s at the latest, there have always been trendy clubs in Düsseldorf where influential bands performed or well-known DJs played. We have listed the six most important clubs, each representing a specific era. These legendary pop culture meeting places were always shaped by their owners, such as Carmen Knoebel's Ratinger Hof or Henry Storch's Unique Club. Sven-André Dreyer and Michael Wenzel, the guides on our "The Sound of Düsseldorf" city tour, provide an overview.

Unique Club

The Unique Club at Bolker Straße 30 has been an institution when it comes to music since 1995: in the plush ambience of a former entertainment venue, operator Henry Storch provides a colorful program without style boundaries: National and international DJs from hip-hop, electronic, funk and soul attract the night owls. Detroit legend J Dilla and R&B veteran Bobby Hebb will be performing live. The Roots, now the studio band for Jimmy Fallon's Late Night Show, also performed here. The club closes in 2005. The music lives on on the Unique Records label founded by Storch. 

Liverpool Club

In the 1960s, the Liverpool Club on Graf-Adolf-Straße was a place of pilgrimage for beat music fans. Local bands experience their baptism of fire on stage in front of English soldiers and young people from the region. Inspiration is provided by music groups from abroad who stop off here and perform piecework - five days a week from eight o'clock until the early hours of the morning and at matinees at the weekend. One of them is a young singer from South Africa. His name is Howard Carpendale. The rest is (pop) history. 

Ratinger Hof

What was a rather inconspicuous pub on Ratinger Straße in Düsseldorf's old town until the end of 1975 developed into the most important meeting place for underground culture in Germany when Carmen Knoebel and Ingrid Kohlhöfer took over. The opportunity to listen to the latest music there - often punk from Great Britain and the USA - and especially the unusual design of the place made the courtyard the place where German punk was invented. Artist Imi Knoebel subjected the pub to a radical formal change that was unique in 1976: while the walls were painted white, neon lighting provided daylight. Artists who studied or taught at the neighboring art academy, such as Blinky Palermo, Katharina Sieverding, Sigmar Polke and Thomas Ruff, as well as A. R. Penck, Markus Oehlen, Jörg Immendorff and Joseph Beuys, were guests, and bands such as Wire, 999 and Pere Ubu performed there, some for the first time in Germany. Bands such as DAF, Male, Fehlfarben and Östro 430 were founded in the vicinity of the Hof. 

Creamcheese

In 1968, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper described Creamcheese at Neubrückstraße 12, which had opened just under a year earlier, as a spectacular venue. Founded by Bim and Hans-Joachim Reinert, the venue was more than just a nightclub right from the start: conceptually designed by members of the Zero artists' group, including sculptors and painters Günther Uecker and Heinz Mack, as well as Lutz Mommartz and Ferdinand Kriwet, the concept of the new music venue also followed the example of Andy Warhol's club "The Dom". The artistic elements of light, space and time, vibration and dynamics are to be reflected in the artistic design in order to artistically stage the audience itself and thus integrate it into the overall work of art. While Frank Zappa provided the name for the insider meeting with his song "Son of Suzy Creamcheese", the artists demanded autonomy and self-determination with their Creamcheese manifesto. Bands such as Tangerine Dream, Can and Kraftwerk performed there in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Klingklang - Elektro Müller

This place breathes history like no other, as it was here, in a rather inconspicuous house on Mintropstraße and thus in the immediate vicinity of the train station, that records were created that were to change not only electronic music, but pop culture as a whole forever: Autobahn, Radio Activity, Trans-Europa-Express, Die Mensch-Maschine, Computerwelt and Electric Café - from 1974 to 1986, Kraftwerk's sound designers tinkered with the sounds of the day after tomorrow in their Klingklang studio, which covered around 50 square meters. New sounds in old rooms: after the band left the hallowed halls in 2007, open source curator Philipp Maiburg used them for his Elektro Müller event series and invited artists to experiment musically. With Moritz Staub, a sound designer once again moved into the creative nucleus of the city in 2014. 

Salon des Amateurs

In 2017, the travel portal hostelworld.com voted the Salon Des Amateurs one of the 20 best clubs in the world. Embedded in the Kunstverein on Grabbeplatz, it is the interface between fine art and music, café and club culture. Its sound is timeless and special, somewhere between an old movie soundtrack and electronic avant-garde. In 2005, Aron Mehzion and Volker "Hauschka" Bertelmann launched the Approximation Festival here, which presents the stars of the international contemporary music scene every year. There's no doubt about it: every visit here is a musical voyage of discovery! 

Photo: © Richard Gleim / Heinrich Heine Institute of the City of Düsseldorf