It’s midnight on Friday on the 33rd floor of Centre Point, the skyscraper that towers over the West End, and the place is partying like it’s 1977. There’s no Bianca Jagger on a white horse, but the Reverse Sunrise night could be Studio 54 in its late-1970s heyday — a 360-degree view of the city from the floor-to-ceiling windows, lights spinning off the mirror balls and the dancefloor throbbing to the sounds of Rose Royce, Chic and Chaka Khan.

A week later, at about the same time, a long line is snaking down the block outside a blacked-out bar in south London. Inside lies Horse Meat Disco. It has blaxploitation films on a big screen, Sylvester and Donna Summer on the decks, and an atmosphere of sweaty hedonism that has already encouraged half the men to take off their tops. Once again, the music draws its inspiration — and some of its tunes — from a time when John Travolta strutted his stuff in Saturday Night Fever. But the twentysomething dancers are far too young to remember that; most of them were not even born.

It can mean only one thing. Mocked for decades and blown away by successive waves of electronic dance music, disco is back.

With the economy collapsing around them, unemployment rising and summers getting hotter, growing numbers of young people who grew up during the digital download revolution are turning back to the sounds their parents danced to when they began dating. Clubs are springing up to play once derided disco music. London has regular nights run by Disco Bloodbath, Horse Meat Disco and LowLife, Glasgow has Melting Pot, Dundee has Auto Disco, Manchester has El Diablo’s and Nottingham has Basement Boogaloo. And that is the tip of the iceberg.

It has been an underground scene so far — just as it was when it began in the black clubs of early-1970s America — but DJs raised on house, trance and techno are increasingly delving into their old vinyl collections to fill floors. And already a new generation of disco singers is appearing. Helena Jessie calls herself a jazz singer, but camped-up tunes such as Take It Like a Man tap straight into the disco tradition. Likewise, the debut album by Shena features a set of tunes that could come direct from the turn­tables of a 1970s night.

Both are produced by Shena’s husband and musical partner, James Winchester, who is pioneering a modern take on the old sound. He believes the recession is part of the reason for the genre’s renewed popularity. “In the early 1970s, we had the three-day week, power cuts and mass unemployment, and that prompted an era of hedonistic escapism, with disco as well as punk railing against the machine,” he says. “You always get that reaction in music when things go belly up.”

Winchester says that a record-company talent scout tipped him off six months ago that disco was coming back. “Music goes in cycles,” he explains, “and after Duffy and Adele reinvented 1960s girl singers, the thinking was that the next thing would be early-1970s disco.”

In the club world, the revival has been coming for some time. “There is definitely a disco revival happening,” declares Mixmag’s editor, Nick DeCosemo. “But it is with a twist. It’s not student nights and hen nights with crap wigs and flares.”

Cool clubbers have been enjoying new mutations of disco — cosmic or space disco, nu-disco, Balearic disco, prog disco — for the past five years or so. Out of this has grown a flourishing scene that includes Pete Herbert and Reverso 68, Crazy P, Secret Stealth and Atlantic Conveyor. Further afield, Belgium boasts Aero­plane, Norway has Lindstrom & Prins Thomas, New York has Metro Area and San Francisco has 40 Thieves.

DeCosemo is not surprised that a young crowd is drawn to disco. “There is a whole generation of people aged 18-25 who missed out on club culture,” he points out. “They never had that sweaty, ecstatic dancing club experience. If they turned 16 in 2001, when the Strokes came along, they were more interested in indie bands than clubs, and they thought dance music was a bit cheesy. Now they are sick of landfill indie and looking for something different.”

He also believes that it’s an inevitable reaction against the most recent big movement in dance. “The minimal-techno thing stripped it down to the bare bones, creating stark, ominous music. Disco, on the other hand, is very much about melody and the groove.”

His opinion is echoed by Greg Wilson, a DJ who began playing in 1975. A veteran of the Hacienda, where he introduced its first dance night in 1983, he recently returned to the decks after a 20-year retirement. “Disco has been growing in popularity in the five years since I started DJ-ing again,” he says. “It’s a global underground and it’s definitely accelerating, as well as getting younger. Over the past five years, it’s gone from mainly mid-thirties to mostly mid-twenties.”

Wilson, 49, says he thinks of the Trammps and the O’Jays when he thinks of disco, but points out that the music goes back further than that. “Nowadays, people think of Travolta and the Bee Gees, but before it went mainstream, disco was a catch-all term for groove-based black funk and soul music. And that’s the difference from the dance music of the past 25 years. House music is all about 4/4 beats and disco is all about the groove.”

He believes the web has been a key factor in the disco revival. “The internet age means people can explore music going back decades, and young people are savvy about how to use it, so boundaries are breaking down between old and new. When I came back to DJ, I didn’t want to be the old geezer playing old tunes. I was looking to build connections between past and present, and make a balance between them. What enabled me to do that was the re-edits culture — putting a contemporary twist on a tune from the past.”

Back at the Reverse party, which goes on until the euphoric moment, at about 5am, when the sun rises over the rooftops of London, the organisers and DJs Guy Williams and Serge Santiago survey the scene. Williams recalls a set at Bora Bora, on Ibiza, two years ago. “After two hours of house music, I played You Make Me Feel, by Sylvester, and the place absolutely exploded,” he recalls. “That was an indication of how it was going, and over the past two years it has been growing and growing.”

The evidence is clear. The follow­ing night, in London’s latest hipster hot spot, Dalston, the DJ in the Jazz Bar mixes Brazilian flavours into classic disco. And a few days later, a billboard appears outside the Forum, advertising one of its forthcoming attractions — a live gig by disco legends Chic.

Helena Jessie’s album, The Law of Attraction (Kaffi), is out now (helenajessie.com); Shena’s album, One Man Woman, is out on August 31 (shena.co.uk )

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010