Encore for Le Bus

Dreaming in Pigalle: the Suite Dalí at Bus Palladium.

Serge Gainsbourg sang about it, Salvador Dalí arrived with a panther, and Mick Jagger celebrated his birthday there. Now Paris’s legendary nightclub Bus Palladium has a second act as a hotel

By Alexander Lobrano

Arriving at Bus Palladium at the end of a sunny spring afternoon, I was thrilled to see a familiar vertical, two-word neon sign glowing orange again in a side street in Pigalle. An old friend I ran into on the way summed up the general disbelief: “A luxury hotel? The Bus was such a skanky fuck pit.” He wasn’t entirely wrong. For more than half a century, Bus Palladium was Paris’s best-known rock ’n’ roll nightclub. Serge Gainsbourg wrote a song about it, “Qui Est ‘In,’ Qui Est ‘Out,’” which he later performed there. Salvador Dalí arrived with a panther, READ ON