Top Ten Club

• 1. Introduction

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  The Top Ten Club opened its doors on the 31st of October 1960 at Reeperbahn 136, in Hamburg's St. Pauli district. Its founder was Peter Eckhorn, born on the 12th of February 1939 in Hamburg, who inherited a hippodrome from his family and decided to tear it down and build something new in its place. What rose from the rubble of that old circus venue would become one of the most storied addresses in rock and roll history. In 1961, the Beatles performed 92 nights in a row on that stage. That number alone raises a question: who was this Peter Eckhorn, and how did a young man in his early twenties create a room that pulled the future of popular music through its doors?

• 2. A Hippodrome Rebuilt

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  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Reeperbahn 136 was the home of the Grand Hippodrom and Cafe of Carl Richter. Over time, the building passed to Herbert Eckhorn, who ran both the hippodrome and the bar attached to it. When Herbert's son Peter inherited the property, he chose not to preserve it. Peter Eckhorn closed the hippodrome, oversaw its rebuilding, and launched the Top Ten Club in its place on the 31st of October 1960. He opened the venue with his manager, Horst Fascher. The partnership did not last. After disagreements, Eckhorn and Fascher parted ways shortly after the club opened. Fascher went on to work as a waiter at a restaurant on the Grosse Freiheit, where he persuaded a man named Manfred Weissleder to convert a former cinema called the Stern into a rival music venue. That venue became the Star-Club, and Fascher became its manager. So from the very first months of the Top Ten Club's existence, its own falling-out planted the seed for the competition it would later face.

• 3. The Beatles Arrive

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  Through the second half of 1960, the Beatles were under contract to Bruno Koschmider, the owner of the Kaiserkeller club. They visited the Top Ten Club often, drawn by a band called the Jets, a group that included guitarist Tony Sheridan and had come over from London. The Beatles sometimes played alongside the Jets. When Koschmider found out, he took it as a betrayal. On the 21st of November 1960, George Harrison was stopped by police and deported back to England. Harrison was seventeen years old at the time, too young under German law to work in a nightclub after midnight. It is assumed Koschmider tipped off the police, angry that the band was courting a rival venue. Harrison had no choice but to return to Liverpool. Within days, the situation unravelled further. On the 29th of November 1960, Paul McCartney and Pete Best were arrested on a charge of attempted arson. They were said to have set fire to a condom while packing their belongings inside Koschmider's Bambi cinema, where the band had been sleeping, in preparation for moving to the Top Ten Club. McCartney and Best spent three hours at the Davidwache Police Station before being deported on the 1st of December 1960. John Lennon followed on the 10th of December, and Stuart Sutcliffe left in February 1961. The entire band had been pushed out of Hamburg before ever formally playing the venue they had been trying to reach.

• 4. Ninety-Two Consecutive Nights

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  The Beatles returned to the Top Ten Club on the 1st of April 1961, this time as the headline act rather than visitors. They stayed until the 1st of July, performing with Tony Sheridan for 92 consecutive nights. The terms of their residency were specific: seven hours on stage each weeknight, eight hours on weekends, with a fifteen-minute break every hour. Over those three months, the band played a total of 503 hours on stage. Each member was paid 35 deutschmarks. The grind of those conditions is difficult to overstate. The tight format meant the Beatles had to fill enormous amounts of time in front of live audiences, night after night. Photographs from this period were taken by a journalist who happened to be in the club on an assignment for a trade union newspaper. His report did not appear in the magazine Quick until 1966. Some of the photographs he took during those sessions were later sold in the mid-seventies to Paul McCartney for 30,000 pounds.

• 5. A Rotating Cast of Bands

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  The Top Ten Club ran for decades after the Beatles left, and the roster of bands that passed through its doors reads as a cross-section of British and European rock. The Jets, who had shared the stage with the Beatles, featured Iain Hines on keyboards, Pete Wharton on bass, Colin Melander on guitar, Tony Sheridan on guitar, and Rick Hardy on guitar. One band called Summer Set counted among its members a musician named Les Humphries, who would later go on to discover Boney-M, marry a Yugoslav princess, and lead a large ensemble he called the Les Humphries Singers. Humphries was believed to be playing his first band since leaving the Royal Marines when he took the Top Ten stage. In February 1966, a band named Bluesology was allegedly among the acts, and carved into the woodwork of the venue was a reference to their keyboard player, a young man called Reg Dwight. Reg Dwight grew up to be Elton John. The Mastersounds, a Liverpool rhythm and blues group, played the club in August 1964 and recorded material in a secret in-house studio operated by Iain Hines. Those recordings were released on 45 rpm singles through the club's own Top Ten record label. The Mastersounds had a number of German jukebox hits, including a number one with a track called "Ooh My Soul!", sung by the group's leader Mal Jefferson.

• 6. After the Name Changed

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  The Top Ten Club kept its name until 1994. After that, the address at Reeperbahn 136 changed hands roughly ten times, and the venue's name changed just as often. It became, in sequence, MC-Music Club, new Top Ten Club, Soap Opera, The Irish Harp, and then La Cage, which ran from 1997 to 2001. From 2002 to 2003 the venue was called Titty Twister, a name borrowed from the bar in the film From Dusk Till Dawn. It became Golden Stars in 2003, then Glam from 2003 to 2005, then La Rocca from 2005 to 2006. From 2008 to 2024, the address operated as Moondoo, under an operator called Lago Bay Betriebsgesellschaft mbH. In March 2025, a venue called the Molotow Club opened at the location. The original name also made one documented appearance far from Hamburg: in 1994, the London club Dome in Tufnell Park, in the London Borough of Islington, was transformed into the Top Ten Club as a set for the film Backbeat, a dramatisation of the Beatles' early Hamburg years. Peter Eckhorn, the man who built it all, died on the 19th of May 1979, at the age of forty.