Check out this video of the acid house scene in Hamburg in 1988… [December 1988]

Think ‘acid house in the late 80s’ and you inevitably think of clubs like The Hacienda or Shoom.

But Hamburg, Germany, also played host to a blossoming acid house scene, as this video, taken from German TV in 1988, illustrates.

The club is Front, and the DJ is Boris Dlugosch, who would go on to achieve international acclaim a few years later with his remix work, most notably of Moloko’s Sing It Back in 1999.

The Peppermint Jam Records founder was the resident at Front, a gay club that set new boundaries for dance music in Germany – as a recent Electronic Beats article noted, Dlugosch and fellow resident Klaus Stockhausen “steered the club through the most cutting-edge music that the disco aftermath had to offer. It eventually became one of the first clubs in Europe to embrace house music and the styles that followed suit.

“The club’s intense nights were built on a wildly hedonistic crowd, a fierce quadrophonic sound system and a secluded DJ booth that stood in opposition to the cult of personality that increasingly surrounded DJs in ensuing years.”

Front would eventually close in 1997, with Germany’s dance scene thankfully a lot livelier than when it opened…

[Kudos to PatrickHH2 for the YouTube upload]