The most spectacular of the clubs listed in Echos Vedettes’ guide was la Mousse Spacthèque, launched by the aforementioned businessmen Carufel and Archambault in collaboration with one of Quebec’s most daring artist/designers of the period, Jean-Paul Mousseau. (Believing this claim means accepting that the Peppermint Lounge, which had operated in New York City since 1958, wasn’t really a discotheque (perhaps because it relied more on a house band for its music than on the playing of records.)) La Licorne was launched by two entrepreneurs, Claude de Carufel and Gilles Archambault, who quickly became major players in Montreal’s nightlife scene, opening some of the best-remembered clubs of the ’60s and early ’70s. Rightly or wrongly, local journalists have long claimed that the first discothèque in North America was La Licorne, which opened in Montreal in 1963. Quebec’s hasty modernization in the ’60s, which produced a new middle class drawn to the signs of chic cosmopolitanism, nourished a discothèque boom which first peaked in 19. By the middle of the decade, entrepreneurs from France moved to Quebec to open clubs and French youth came to work in them. The idea of the discothèque was first brought to Montreal in the early 1960s, by locals who had seen this kind of nightclub on visits to Europe. In the beginning, the discothèque was a European invention, born in Parisian cellars during World War II and then spreading – in the late 1950s – through the nightlife of the Mediterranean Riviera and other vacation spots. One of these began in the early 1960s, and was marked by the influence of ideas and people coming from France. It makes sense to distinguish between two phases in Montreal’s history as a disco capital. “Montreal’s music is disco,” the Toronto Star claimed in 1977, “in either language.” During the ’70s, Montreal was home to a richly-layered disco industry in which label heads, remixers, musicians and DJs mediated the flow of records and influences between North America and Europe. This status signalled the large number of clubs in the city, but had more to do with the extraordinary sales of disco music in Montreal, particularly in the 12-inch vinyl single format.
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