Venue: Blow Up
Town: Schwabing-West, DE
Capacity: 2,500

The Blow Up (1967-1972) was a nightclub in Munich and Germany's first large-scale discotheque. During its existence, the nightclub was the favorite topic of magazines and daily newspapers because of countless happenings, drug stories and its psychedelic light projections. The British Pathé described the club as being "the hottest and most expensive happening center in West Germany. It's wild, it's way-out, it's with it, it's got everything." The nightclub was founded in 1967 by the Samy brothers in a former cinema that had been erected in 1926 in Munich's Schwabing district and named after Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow Up. The brothers Temur and Anusch Samy (called "The kings of the flower power era in Schwabing"), who were of Iranian descent and the first concept- and event gastronomers in Germany, founded a business empire including several nightclubs, pubs, restaurants, underground bars, a brewery, a shopping center called Citta 2000 and a cab company, and were described by contemporary witnesses and business partners as trendsetters who established a whole new kind of gastronomy trade in Munich that changed all of the city. Blow Up, their masterpiece, had multiple levels and platforms on which the bands could play and the go-go girls dance, as well as gangways from which the guests could reach the different levels and watch the main dancefloor, which was "bombarded" by the flashes of 250 stage lights and light projectors. One of the innovations was that the stage lights reacted to the rhythm of the music, which marked the beginning of synchronized light shows in discotheques. The Samy brothers invested 850,000 German marks just for the installations of the club. Up to 5,000 people tried to squeeze into the building for the opening party, and only 1,600 tickets had been sold until the pressure of the throng could no longer to be withstood and the crowd stormed the building. 3,500 people made it in, a thousand more than officially allowed. Men in smoking