La Java

At the back of a superb Art Deco building, La Java has been the venue for Parisian night owls since the 1930s. In this working-class area of Belleville, Django Reinhardt, Edith Piaf and Jean Gabin all made their names to the sound of the accordion. In the decades that followed, the rebellious bourgeois youth came to let their hair down to a rock soundtrack. Then, in the 1980s, the nocturnal fauna of the Parisian ‘trash underground’ came here to listen to punk rock. There followed a fallow period of low-quality salsa, but La Java has recently rediscovered its original vocation as an anti-establishment club, with a programme featuring garage rock, punk dub and electro-techno nights. There is no Parisian hype here, and that does it the world of good.