Bimbo Town: World Of Mischief

This article was original published on the Club Culture of Switzerland site and was written by Tara Hill with photographs by Andy Pal. It provides an interesting historical account but also a flavour of Bimbotown’s other worldliness from some of those involved. It was written about 4 years after the final Bimtown venue closed. Maybe one day, Jim’s various work that was incorporated into his variété venue that are currently stored in containers will be rediscovered like his Mechanical Theatre from the original Luna Luna has been (see more here). Hopefully, this account and some of the photos I have selected from it above, will give an idea of the kind of magical reality Jim helped create with his various incarnations of Bimbtown:

In the summer of 1992, a unique fusion between art and club culture was created on the border between Basel and Germany. A wonderland spanning several thousand square metres, Bimbo Town was designed by artist Jim Whiting for cultural magnate Klaus Littmann, and its influence radiated far beyond Basel.

Bimbo Town wasn’t even supposed to be a club. The project began as an art installation, after Basel gallery owner Klaus Littmann was offered a space in the city’s “Stücki”—short for Stückfärberei, a decommissioned industrial site in the Kleinbasel neighborhood, out near the village of Kleinhüningen. Just a few metres away, Planet E was already raging; by 1992, it was one of the most famous techno venues in Switzerland, attracting thousands of techno freaks every weekend. Next door sat the former dye works, which had also been made available for temporary use—Littmann jumped at the opportunity.

He hired Jim Whiting, an enfant terrible from the London art scene. Whiting had initially asked for a ridiculous salary—“after all, I was hungry and tired!,” he recalls—but he never doubted the project for a second. The idea of being able to try out his early pneumatic man-machines—robots he’d programmed himself—on a larger audience in the heat of the night was too appealing to pass up. He moved to the site along with a dozen acquaintances from London, and that colourful artistic circus went to work creating Whiting’s very own dark Luna Park, an otherworldly and bizarre world of mischief.

The exact concept? Only Jim knew. “I wanted to create a secret world, a world hidden behind normality but accessible to anyone with open eyes and ears.” It wasn’t a conventional art exhibition, but a collection of little structures and scenes that recreated the social exchange of daily life: a church, a nursery, a kitchen. Together, they formed a sort of wonderland, or perhaps a runaway ghost train.

“My fascination with robots and mechanized bodies came from having to wear a black leather and steel leg brace as a child.” – Jim Whiting

Whiting had two great role models: Hieronymus Bosch and the exceptional Swiss artist Jean Tinguely. Following Bosch’s example, he wanted to fill Bimbo Town with extraordinary projections, all of them associated with sensual pleasures. Like Tinguely, however, Whiting was also fascinated by the idea of mechanical structures that would autonomously set themselves in motion. Tinguely himself once described Jim Whiting as a “fabulous manufacturer of nightmares.”

KLAUS LITTMANN: I have always been interested in collaborations that arose spontaneously. That’s what happened with Tinguely and Jim [Whiting]. Tinguely once told me, “You are one of us because you think like an artist.” I have never worked like a classical gallery owner. My very first exhibition was about football, about everyday culture. I was often a bit too early, whether it was my exhibition on Chinese contemporary painting, or these installations by Guillaume Bijl where you entered the gallery and suddenly felt like you were standing in a supermarket. You couldn’t buy anything though. That was a three-dimensional still life.

JIM WHITING: My fascination with robots and mechanized bodies came from having to wear a black leather and steel leg brace as a child. On medical advice, my family actually moved to South Africa because of it. I was eventually cured, but I had the worst nightmares about mechanical torture. That strongly influenced my later designs. I actually wanted to become an inventor like my grandfather; he studied under Einstein and unfortunately died before I was born. However, studying engineering was out of the question for me. I went to the London School of Art and I wanted to build things, to make art in the broadest possible sense.

KLAUS LITTMANN: I saw a report on the BBC about Herbie Hancock’s video for “Rockit”, with those famous dancing legs and trousers. I was thrilled.

JIM WHITING: I created robot legs that moved and fluttering trousers around them, the “Dancing Trousers”. My girlfriend and I laughed our heads off at that. I called the BBC and convinced them to make a film – just like that! The film was well received by Godley & Creme, who hired me to do the video for the Herbie Hancock song “Rockit”. That was probably the most commercial moment of my career. Herbie and I stayed friends though. I love the guy and his light-hearted, easy-going manner! 

KLAUS LITTMANN: The next day I was in the car with Daniel Spoerri, the famous Swiss-Romanian artist. We were driving to Italy and I told him about this video. Daniel said he knew the artist, that this was Jim Whiting, and that he was half Swiss, half English and had an aunt in Thusis, Lilly Keller. I was flabbergasted.

JIM WHITING: Lilly Keller was a well-known artist and my role model. She was a painter and weaver. I was eight when she showed me her studio in Bern. Lilly and her husband were very open, free-spirited artists. We could spend evenings talking and laughing about our fantasies. I was heartbroken when she died in 2018.

KLAUS LITTMANN: I then tried to contact Jim, but it was insanely complicated. Eventually it worked out, and I visited him in London. That was the beginning. I was determined to bring his big installation to Basel. In London we still spoke English together, and in Basel he suddenly spoke Swiss dialect. I had no idea he knew Swiss German [laughs]!

JIM WHITING: André Heller did the legendary Luna Luna project in Hamburg, an avant-garde amusement park with many important artists still alive at the time, from Dalí to Beuys to Tinguely. I was invited to install my robot figures in a very large square tent. Littmann, who was a gallery owner and curator at the time, but also had an artistic streak himself, then brought us to Basel for the exhibition “Unnatural Bodies”.

KLAUS LITTMANN: I was given a space at Stücki by a friend with the idea of realising art projects that could not be realised in normal spaces. At that time I ran my gallery as a normal business, with my gallery on Elisabethenstrasse. Then I did the exhibition Stücki I with Dieter Roth, Mario Merz and Ulrich Rückriem, among others.  This was followed by Stücki II, with art installations from Japan. Stücki III was then Bimbo Town. But first Jim came to my gallery in Elisabethenstrasse with his exhibition “Unnatural Bodies”, that was in 1987, for which we painted the gallery completely black. Jim also lived there with his crew, I moved out and rented an office opposite. At the end of the day, Jim used to play his saxophone.

“We experimented with these toxic substances. The site was basically a hazardous waste dump.” – Carlo Crovato

JIM WHITING: Through my exhibition at Galerie Littmann, I met artists like Jeannot [Tinguely] and some of the old Swiss guard. They were established, original artists, and all very friendly!

KLAUS LITTMANN: Tinguely was then quite excited about Jim’s work, and was the first one at the vernissage. Swiss television was also there and they immediately pounced on him; Tinguely then huddled the team of reporters together and said, “You don’t have to film me, you have to film Jim! He’s doing something new that’s never existed before. My predecessor was Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile. I used motors to bring movement into those sculptures, and now Jim is going one step further by working with computer technology and air pressure.” Of course, that was fantastic publicity for us.

BIMBO TOWN I: AT THE “STÜCKI”

Jim Whiting found the objects for Bimbo Town at the last minute. Together with his artistic crew, he went in search of usable material at the trash dump in Basel-West. Their efforts were a success, as the Bimbo Town showpieces were largely created using discarded junk. Highlights included the coats that flew through the room, as if moved by magic. There was the man-eating sofa, which unexpectedly threw its occupants backwards. Then there was the “eject chair,” an ejector seat that sent people flying in a high arc across the room, and of course the mobile bedroom and mobile kitchen, which half-naked performers literally piloted the club.

On stage, the Bimbo Town artists were up to all sorts of mischief, and at the bar, a cloaked robotic figure (complete with a handbag) knocked drinks out of visitors’ hands. Behind a curtain sat a frightening descent into the underworld, a place inhabited by a black-humoured Brit and his makeshift hair salon. The place was simply a front for his comedy, as he delivered improvised monologues while cutting guests’ hair—with garden shears. That was Londoner Andrew Bailey.

Freedom and experimentation were of course encouraged, but guests who went too far over the top were taken away and forced to spend the rest of the evening behind bars. The Bimbo Town prison put a spotlight on everyone who had gone overboard.

At the bar was Jonas Strom, who’d learned how to run a club while serving as the manager at venues like Nullachtfünfzehn and Etcetera. Also in the mix were the Beat Masters, the house band and resident mood makers, who were always ready to move on to the next stage—Bimbo Town had multiple stages—and heat up the audience with their late-night funk. After all, sound is what made Bimbo Town a total work of art, and the club’s music programmer was Martin Schaffner, who’d begun DJing at Basel’s Totentanz club in 1983 when he was only 16 years old. Later on, he became one of the first Swiss video jockeys (VJs) with his Fairlight CVI, and after convincing Peter Gatien of his skills with the “shortest elevator pitch ever,” he would eventually bring his visual show to the infamous New York techno club Limelight.

“The name Bimbo Town caused a stir in Basel right from the start.” – Kat La Luna

JONAS STROM: I first went to drama school in Zurich, then the ’80s youth movement cast its spell on me. Art and culture became political practice, and I also got involved in the so-called “culture week” at the Alte Stadtgärtnerei, but our dream of setting up an autonomous cultural centre was drowned in tear gas and fierce street fighting. Why am I telling you this? Some of the key players of Bimbo Town—for instance, Martin Schaffner—were also involved in this scene. And Klaus Littmann, I remember how he once stood between us demonstrators and the police to mediate between the two camps.

CARLO CROVATO: I left England because of Margaret Thatcher. After some time at sea and in Monaco, I came to Biel, where I found exciting projects by young activists in the Gaskessel and the Coupole. Here I met Klaus Littmann, who told me that in a fortnight he was planning to start an even bigger project in Basel, a club. He joked that If I could screw two pieces of wood together, I would also be welcome. Arriving in Basel, I couldn’t believe that the leading figure in the local art scene was Jim Whiting, whose work on Herbie Hancock’s award-winning “Rockit” video had inspired me so much.

KLAUS LITTMANN: One of the “unnatural bodies” in Jim’s “Unnatural Bodies” exhibition was Andrew [Bailey], a British comedian whom I held in very high esteem. Andrew later brought his whole social circle over from England for our experiment at the “Stücki”. They acted and did performances, living there in the space as they also welded, built and assembled, day and night.

JIM WHITING: The little town we built there came about because we urgently needed accommodation ourselves! Mike lived inside the mountain he had built for himself. Johnny [Tappenden]’s house consisted mainly of two huge paintings from the ’60s that Klaus had stored in a cellar.

ANDREW BAILEY: We lived like a commune. Jim was working on his robotic sculptures, and the rest of us, all artists, were building these weird houses.

JIM WHITING: Many of the creations in Bimbo Town came about more or less spontaneously. We found valuable objects at the Kleinhünigen trash dump right up until the opening. Once I found two large, triangular tables, which I transported by tying them to my bicycle in a symmetrical formation. We laughed because I looked like a giant, moving housefly. It was midnight, and high above our heads, “Are you out of your minds?,” in broad Basel German. Well, I’ve often asked myself that same question.

ANDREW BAILEY: Honestly, the “Stücki” was a dangerous place for this sort of undertaking. It was littered with toxic chemicals. At that time, we didn’t think much about removing them, and once we even cut through a tube that had been insulated with fibreglass. Even for the time, that was far too risky.

CARLO CROVATO: We even experimented with these toxic substances. The site was basically a hazardous waste dump.

KLAUS LITTMANN: Bimbo Town was always a dangerous place. [laughs] Every day, every hour, the installation grew. We always offered something new. Bimbo Town was a constant work in progress.

JIM WHITING: The guests who came early would watch Andrew’s play, which happened on the stage in the foyer. They didn’t know what was going on at all! It wasn’t until the mobile kitchen and bedroom came bursting through the stage curtain at the end, taking some of the stunned guests for a ride, that they saw the big basement, which was full of all sorts of robotics, art and scenery.

KLAUS LITTMANN: The spectacle of Bimbo Town took a lot of getting used to for some of the guests, because it wasn’t as civilised as the museum and the normal art world.

KAT LA LUNA: It was crazy, yes. Spooky. But totally inspiring.

JIM WHITING: There was also a second entrance, with an automatic door that greeted you with eerie voices: “Come on, come on in, don’t be shy, come o-o-n!” That was Andrew and a Greek assistant.

KLAUS LITTMANN: I also brought Martin [Schaffner] onto the team. He was the son of Marcel Schaffner, an artist friend of mine, and his father was worried about him and what he was doing in New York. Martin was a video artist, and was always experimenting with video. I went to see him in New York and told him what we were going to do, together with Jim. I said, “You can stay with me and create the musical programme.” I had a little house, a terraced house. That’s where we lived together. So I brought him back from New York. Looking back, I think that was better for him. His father was very grateful.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: Klaus probably thought I was spinning out of control in New York [laughs] and brought me back home. I was particularly attracted by the artistic aspect of the project, and by how Jim’s machines crossed over into the world of art installation. Plus, I had a budget to bring in great acts, not to mention a small but steady income. Back in New York, I’d worked at Limelight, but I’d made very little money.

JIM WHITING: Some people thought Klaus had a lot of money up his sleeve. I knew that wasn’t the case. He always found investors and was proud of that. But we earned as much per day as an electrician earns per hour. That’s why we built everything ourselves and lived there rent free. In Switzerland, everything is simply too expensive for this sort of undertaking. Making such a huge, anarchic party area, it’s something that works better in Germany.

Bimbo Town was half La Fura dels Baus, half New York underground club – Carlos Leal

THOMAS NANN: At the time, people said that the money came from Maja Oeri, the Roche heiress.

KLAUS LITTMANN: That’s rubbish. We never had a sponsor from the Basel “Daig” [the families of old money in Basel]. Our only benefactor was a Zürich IT company that co-financed Jim’s first exhibition with me at the gallery and at the Mühle Tiefenbrunnen. There was also a fundamental misunderstanding at the root of the project: when we made an initial cost breakdown in London, Jim said we were talking in pounds, but I thought we were talking in Swiss francs. In truth, we didn’t ever have any money, and there was no budget for this kind of art project. We always lived hand to mouth. It was financial harakiri. [laughs]

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: For me, Bimbo Town was the pinnacle of club culture, a venue for experimentation that intoxicated all of the senses. One of the models we definitely followed was the New York club scene, where art and club culture flowed together. That inspired us.

SAM KELLER: It was an interesting and amusing time, and Bimbo Town is at least partly responsible for the fact that I’ve always seen clubs as more than just music—they’re a form of art and culture.

KLAUS LITTMANN: Truthfully, Bimbo Town wasn’t a club at all. This nomenclature bothers me, because what developed there was much more than a club. It was a total work of art! There were the installations, plus Andrew and his people, this group of artists who were completely crazy and out of control.

JIM WHITING: The performances from Andrew and his friends were totally important. Sometimes Andrew dressed up as a baroque minstrel, sometimes he’d be a hairdresser and make a mess of the guests’ hair, and sometimes he crawled out of a tunnel as Dracula. He was fearless, and nothing could stop him. He had an absolute talent for improvisation, and he was also a good teacher who took a few young Baslers under his wing. When he was away, I also invited other artists, like Trevor Stuart from London and two artists from “L’Homme Au Noir” in Belgium.

ANDREW BAILEY: We rehearsed diligently, working with several young, aspiring actors like Hugo [Buser] and Sasa. Each week, we presented a new show. The dark tunnels of the “Stücki” were great for shadow theatre, puppet shows and surreal performances.

CARLO CROVATO: There was this hole in the wall where you could go down into a tunnel. In the underground of this vault we brought our visions to life, it was quite cyberpunk.

KAT LA LUNA: There was also this metallic feeling in the air, emanating from all of the machines. It was totally sensual, an immersive experience. And Jim was always on the move, assembling things and mending his installations.

JONAS STROM: Jim, Andrew, Carlo and the other artists, they were all driven by an admirable idealism. Otherwise our project would never have been realised in this way.

KLAUS LITTMANN: And the visitors were important, of course! For example, there was an older guy with a bald head who was pretty weird. Bimbo Town was his stage, and he came to perform. There were also these performance artists who bathed in the nude, and the next night, you’d see young, naked people from the audience in the bathtubs! Sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference between the guests and the performers any more. That confusion was what made the atmosphere.

ANDREW BAILEY: One of our helpers, Markus, was supposed to find us a bathtub. He then delivered three bathtubs to us with his car! I joked that we should use them to build baths for “couchettes.” That week, the crew built them three storeys high in Bimbo Town, and they even had a waterfall.

STEPHAN “MANDRAX” KOHLER: When Martin [Schaffner] first told me about Bimbo Town, this surreal club wonderland, I initially thought he was exaggerating. But when I went there for the first time, I realised he was right. It was an immersive, living, 360-degree installation where all of the elements were constantly in motion. And once you had a drink or two, it became a completely transcendent experience.

KAT LA LUNA: The name Bimbo Town polarised people, of course, and caused a stir in Basel right from the start, especially within the alternative scene.

KLAUS LITTMANN: From today’s point of view, the name is absurd. That’s for sure.

JIM WHITING: Klaus wanted me to give the project a name, but I didn’t have one. In the short time I had to think about it, I realised that I was imagining a small town inspired by Enid Blyton’s Toytown Tales, but I also wanted it to be like a John Waters film and populated by nutters. So the name Bimbo Town came to mind. It was a town for “bimbos,” which was London slang for party girls. It was supposed to be a town where people felt comfortable and had fun. I only realised much later that the term “bimbo” was also pejorative in German for Black people.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: We mainly played Black music: acid jazz, house and hip-hop. Musically, that corresponded to what Klaus and I liked. We orientated ourselves to the sound of New York and greats like Gilles Peterson, along with Swiss acts like Silent Majority and Sens Unik. We also brought Dana Bryant from Giant Steps to Basel several times.

We attracted this mix of people that ran the gamut between the alternative types and the snobbier crowd – Denise Flaig

KAT LA LUNA: I had already DJed at the “Stücki”, in the villa where Henry [Halbeisen] ran the bar. And Paco [Manzanares], who was my friend at the time, was also my DJ mentor. He really encouraged me. But this was met with resistance from Sasa [Crnobrnja], who was also DJing there, and other men as well. They told Paco that I should stop DJing because I wasn’t technically up to it, but being a good DJ isn’t primarily about that. First and foremost, it’s about selection—what kind of tracks you play at certain moments. It was Paco who brought me into the game as a DJ at Bimbo Town.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: We also did a children’s disco.

KLAUS LITTMANN: I DJed there a few times on Sundays. We played things like Walt Disney, of course the little ones liked that a lot. The really serious partiers would leave their children with us and go off to celebrate at Planet E.

CARLO CROVATO: Some parents went over to Planet E with their kids to see all the sweaty ravers. A father would stand on the dancefloor with his maybe six-year-old son and explain to him what everyone was doing. We shared the toilets in the “Stücki” with Planet E and often went dancing there ourselves because we officially closed at two in the afternoon.

DENISE FLAIG: I liked Henry Halbeisen from Planet E a lot. He also explained to me that techno could have one, two or three K’s—depending on the intensity, it was called tekno, tekkno or tekkkno. I listened with interest, but that sound was never really my thing.

ANDREW BAILEY: In the end, we had queues that were hundreds of metres long in front of the “Stücki”. I would often pretend to be an eccentric guest, and the security people could hardly contain their laughter.

DENISE FLAIG: When this big article appeared in the Schweizer Illustrierte magazine, we were literally overrun.

KLAUS LITTMANN: I was just amazed by the crowds. There were always about 1000 to 1500 people who turned up. There was also a guy who suddenly started selling his hot dogs in front of the entrance. He paid us a commission for it.

DENISE FLAIG: Someone had to stand at the door. The drunks had to be sorted out. I always made eye contact and knew straight away whether or not someone would fit in. We had to make sure that no one would go berserk at Bimbo Town and mess with the flying coats, for instance.

KLAUS LITTMANN: Denise had such a presence as a bouncer, she had the guys at the door completely under control.

DENISE FLAIG: Having the right mix was essential for us. That was another one of Klaus’ special skills, attracting this mix of people that ran the gamut between young and old, and between the alternative types and the snobbier crowd.

KLAUS LITTMANN: We had a really loyal regular audience. Many of them came every Friday. Some of them were like tour guides. They would say, “Look, there’s an aquarium! That’s new! There’s a church! And there’s a hair salon!” Behind them would be Andrew with his gardening scissors, laughing and completely insane. Once we even had a wedding. It was totally bonkers.

JIM WHITING: I liked the church. It was right next to the stage. Next to it I built a talking puppet—a Catholic priest who would scold the minaret singers standing across from him. Another puppet was Bert, a London gangster type who always talked about the private lives of all the Bimbo Town staff.

ANDREW BAILEY: Carlo lived in the church. We burned incense there, as is customary in Catholicism. That’s when we had the idea of dressing up as monks and making a ritual out of it, a show.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: I was DJing in this monk costume. The horror!

ANDREW BAILEY: We also had this industrial dough-kneading machine. We made a cart out of that and the half-naked performers pulled me around the club so I could pester the patrons.

KAT LA LUNA: You never knew what was going to happen. You came in and it was dark, and then there were these coats fluttering on the coat rack, a “coat ballet.” And there were these robot hands at the entrance to the bar—you had to be quite careful.

KLAUS LITTMANN: One time some people were standing at the bar in their fur coats, and suddenly this hand came and knocked the drink out of their hands, causing them to spill all over their fur coats. No one complained though.

JIM WHITING: Breaking taboos is one of my life goals. I have to admit, in a way, I am a little bit sadistic. I wanted to keep the audience on their toes, and also tease or scare them from time to time.

ANDREW BAILEY: There was a haunted house that I had hastily made. It had a fireman’s pole inside. One night I was whizzing down the pole and I slipped and broke my arm. But in the end, it was quite nice, because the whole crew took care of me.

KLAUS LITTMANN: It was incredibly exhausting to keep it all together, with this wild bunch.

Suddenly our burning installation was heading for a petrol station. Oops! – Andrew Bailey

JIM WHITING: After all, the installations would often break down. Once someone loudly shouted at me because of an accident. The mobile bedroom had come off its wire, crashed through the huge window pane in the sitting room at full speed and simultaneously bumped into the moving kitchen. By the time I got there, the pretty fortune teller, along with the guests in both the silk bed and kitchen, had already fled in panic. What remained was a mess of scattered tarot cards, pillows and broken glass.

ANDREW BAILEY: On Jim’s 40th birthday, we filled a model boat with firewood and sent it sailing down the Rhine as a burning installation—until Jim said, “Hey, the boat’s heading for a petrol station.” Oops! I had no choice but to dive into the icy water on that dark, foggy January night. Through my heroic efforts, I spared Kleinhüningen from a minor catastrophe. Jim was so impressed that he awarded me a medal the next day: the “Burning Boat” medal.

JIM WHITING: Andrew once had a very blue hand because he got it caught in the wire for the flying shirts while he was riding around on the moving dough mixer. And once while I was fixing some installations in the workshop, all the slats suddenly fell off the door. Everything bent and the whole workbench fell on me, and after that, Johnny Tappenden’s house collapsed. The mobile bedroom had gotten snagged on it. There was a cameraman standing a metre away, but he missed it all. He was completely focused on something else, aiming his lens at a small talking handbag.

BIMBO TOWN II: AT TOTENTANZ

Bimbo Town lasted a little more than a year at the “Stücki” site. For many artists who lived there, this period had been a unique and highly emotional state of emergency. The end came suddenly, however, as the project ran out of money and the factory premises were approved for demolition so that a shopping centre could be built there.

Not surprisingly, the dozens of artists living on site quickly dispersed in search of new opportunities. Andrew Bailey and his troupe went back to London, and the designer Sasa Crnobrnja was on his way to New York was  Littmann,  where his DJ partner Alex Gloor (now known as duo In Flagranti) lived since 1984.

Klaus Littmann, on the other hand, did not want to give up yet. On a plane to New York, he told Martin Schaffner that the project was going to continue in the catacombs of the Totentanz, one of Basel’s oldest party locations. This is where Bimbo Town II, the sequel, would take place.

KLAUS LITTMANN: Jean-Marc Wipf had the Totentanz at that time, and we could move into these rooms.

JIM WHITING: Klaus offered me the chance to do a second Bimbo Town at Totentanz. We built a super set, with high concrete rocks, paths and bridges, and designed it to look like the “Alter Schiin” in Graubünden.

JONAS STROM: It was quite an adventure. Somehow we managed to build a bar at the last minute before the opening. Jim’s team also dug into the earth and began expanding the dancefloor, but quickly stopped once they came across some bones. The club isn’t called Totentanz for nothing—it’s a historic site where there used to be a cemetery.

When suddenly there was talk of business plans, I lost interest – Klaus Littmann

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: In the 1980s, Totentanz also had a glass cabinet with a real skull on display. The goths thought that was cool back then.

SASA CRNOBRNJA: The fashion show we organised for the opening at Totentanz was a highlight for me. I am a fashion designer. My heart was in it, along with six months of preparation.

ANDY PAL: The clothes Sasa showed were strange—were they nightgowns or high fashion? The words “Civil defence” were written on a t-shirt. Everything looked like it had been bought at a second-hand shop, but it was newly tailored and really cool. Vogueing was the dance of the moment, and some of the dancers at the show also appeared in Madonna’s “Vogue” video.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: In June 1993 and April 1994, we flew in big names from the New York ballroom scene. The first time was for the opening of an exhibition, and the second was for the opening at Totentanz.

KLAUS LITTMANN: I remember these drag performers from Amsterdam. Like most of the artists, they lived with us in our terraced house. It was wild there. The queens were constantly in the bathroom, getting dressed up.

KAT LA LUNA: When Gil Scott-Heron, The Roots and Urban Species played at Totentanz, I was officially booked as a DJ to play after the concerts. Struggling and practising in the villa at the “Stücki” had paid off, and I earned myself a place in a few great musical nights. By the way, DJ Antoine, who was still quite unknown at the time, once asked me at Totentanz what record I was playing. He seemed arrogant and pushy, so I didn’t much like him. Antoine later played at Bimbo Town himself.

JONAS STROM: A lot of things changed at Totentanz. There were a few wealthy people in Basel with a flair for culture who had fallen in love with Bimbo Town at the “Stücki”, and they supported its continuation at Totentanz. In their mind, this former “work in progress” would now have a permanent location, and although Bimbo Town didn’t have to make a profit like a commercial disco, these investors still needed it to be economically viable, or at least self-supporting.

KLAUS LITTMANN: At the new Bimbo Town, some people were involved whose motives were purely commercial. Once there was suddenly talk of business plans, I lost interest. I was never happy about it.

JONAS STROM: In order to take over Totentanz, Bimbo Town Ltd. was founded. Klaus and I were entrusted with its management. Klaus took care of art and networking—he was the face of the operation to the outside world—and I was responsible for operating the business. It was no longer an interim project like it had been at the “Stücki.” We had to plan everything better and pay much closer attention to our budget. One time we booked Sheila E., Prince’s drummer, but got started too late with the promotion (especially for a gig of that size) and we felt it in the cash register.

KLAUS LITTMANN: People also began to copy us. Villa Wahnsinn, in Basel and Zurich, wanted to do what we were doing, only commercially. And at Totentanz, Bimbo Town just wasn’t the same. You can’t repeat something like that, a project which organically grew without any sort of intention.

JIM WHITING: The end came because we had already passed our peak. It was a short, intense time that was unforgettable for everyone, and we could not repeat the magic of the “Stücki” at Totentanz. There was a lack of income as a result.

JONAS STROM: At the end, everyone was dog tired. We had worked non-stop, and financially, we were getting further and further into trouble. We could no longer avoid bankruptcy.

JIM WHITING: At some point, everyone got tired of partying all the time and wanted to do their own thing. I got attractive offers from Vienna, Glasgow and Hamburg.

We always talk about nightclubs as something permanent, but with us it was quite the opposite – Martin Schaffner

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: The ’90s were shrill, eccentric, materialistic and excessive, but this endless excess, full of designer drugs, was no longer for me. We were named Club of the Year in Rolling Stone, and reached the pinnacle of what you could call club culture. After that, it was all downhill! [laughs]

KLAUS LITTMANN: I am convinced that something like Bimbo Town would unfortunately no longer be possible today. You could never get a permit for this kind of project, you’d have nothing but problems.

CARLO CROVATO: Looking back, the connection between the alternative art scene and the emerging party community was something unique. Both have influenced each other very strongly. I’ve lived in Berlin for 10 years, where you can clearly see how these different concepts of freedom and independent living have grown together to create a sort of alternative lifestyle. I was also impressed by how open Swiss society was during the Bimbo Town period.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: It was tremendous and unique, but also ephemeral. We knew that. We’d set up, and the whole thing would collapse again. That was our routine: Thursday, Friday, Saturday and on Sunday, we’d do the children’s disco. Then we’d do it all over again. What sticks with me is how amorphous it was. We always talk about nightclubs as “temples,” as something permanent, but with us it was quite the opposite.

JONAS STROM: The Bimbo Town in the “Stücki” was also fueled by the idealism of lots of people who never really earned anything from the project, and often did without a lot of basic amenities. You can’t do that with a public limited company, as Bimbo Town Ltd was. The Bimbo Town at Totentanz probably left everyone disappointed—including the shareholders.

SASA CRNOBRNJA: When I went to New York, Bimbo Town was the last thing we noticed. For a short moment, it was a veritable land of milk and honey. A bunch of people got together, did something, and it was a hit, a culmination, a crowning glory for Basel nightlife.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: Culmination? It was a hell of a ride! A rollercoaster ride, from start to finish.

EPILOGUE

Bimbo Town was a ghost trip into the unknown, a project which couldn’t be steered into regular channels and certainly couldn’t be commercialised. Although the Bimbo Town experiment in Basel wound up as a spectacular failure, it nonetheless represents an era when everything was garishly colourful and nothing seemed impossible. Full of exuberant and cheerful materialism, it was a place where idealistic artists excelled, constantly creating new wonderworlds while a glorious saxophone solo played. At Bimbo Town, dinner jackets rubbed shoulders with urban street wear. But it was also the starting point for many other projects that facilitated the connection between the club and the art world. What remains are memories of a high point in Basel’s cultural legacy, a time when party people revelled in a surrealist arena full of motorised artworks and thousands of visitors succumbed to subversive British humour, New York glamour and the opulent champagne bliss of the ’90s. These were carefree, wild times.

MARTIN SCHAFFNER: I’d had enough of the party life, so I got out and went back to making films and videos. I did that as a lecturer at the art academy at the Hyperwerk Institute. That was also based at Totentanz, but now I worked during the day, not at night. I’d returned to the place where everything had started for me, back when I was still a very young DJ.

KLAUS LITTMANN: We moved on to Cologne-Ehrenfeld with Bimbo Town. A guy from an IT company in Cologne gave us the start-up capital for it. There were huge factory halls with high ceilings, so Jim’s installations went up accordingly. We also had great collaborations with the local scene, working with the performance artist Frank Köllges and the Intermission collective. It was totally spontaneous again, much like the first Bimbo Town at the “Stücki”. We were invited to be guests on Bios Bahnhof, the television programme with Alfred Biolek, and our appearance was brilliant. We drove into the studio at breakneck speed on a couch. [laughs] That got us a lot of attention, similar to how Tinguely had helped us back in Basel.

JIM WHITING: I continued to run Bimbo Town for another 25 years, on three different sites in Leipzig. That’s how it continued to develop. Twice we did tours though Hamburg, Vienna and Montbéliard. It’s my baby, my life’s work, and it’s all been possible thanks to the support of friends. There have been so many fantastic sets and sideshows. Four years ago, we had to close the Bimbo Town doors in Leipzig for good, due to renovation. That was very sad for me.

KLAUS LITTMANN: Eventually I had to go back to Basel and make sure that my gallery didn’t blow up in my face. To this day though, I’m constantly asked about the club: “Come on, do another Bimbo Town!” But something like that can’t be repeated, and that’s a good thing. As beautiful as it was, you have to be careful not to glorify the past.