Thirty years ago this week, in a Chicago stadium, disgruntled rock fans staged Disco Demolition Night, literally creating a disco inferno by setting fire to the records, rioting and getting arrested. Nile Rodgers, the genre’s foremost producer, who worked with acts such as Sister Sledge, then enjoying the greatest hits of their career — Lost in Music, He’s the Greatest Dancer and We Are Family — compared the event to Nazi book-burning. But by the year’s end, American television and radio stations had felt the protest’s heat and taken the music with black, gay and Latin origins off the playlist, replacing it with punk and rock. The boogie nights were over.
Fast-forward three decades to a hot, dark nightclub in Ibiza, where girls in gold bikinis and musclemen in tight trunks twirl around podiums and a glitterball spins overhead. An excited audience have waited until 3am to see Sister Sledge, who arrive on stage to wild applause, long-legged and glamorous as ever. They belt out Lost in Music, He’s the Greatest Dancer and We Are Family. It’s July 2009 and disco is back, baby, back. But why are people going all Saturday Night Fever now?
Lead singer Joni Sledge says that people turn to disco when the world is full of bad news, and that right now we want to hear real voices and real tunes again. When the world is burning, the glitterball starts turning. The show tonight has been organised by Carwash, the disco night that has been running in London for more than 15 years. Its promoter, Nigel Atkin, says that clubbers are sick of boring minimal techno and faceless house music; they want dirty basslines and a funky groove.
Of course, songs like these never really went away in Europe. Any wedding DJ worth the salt in his margarita has some Chic, Sister Sledge and Jackson Five in his record bag. Atkin says that 2009 was the right time for him to launch a Carwash season in Ibiza “because disco’s back and if we didn’t start it, somebody else would have done”.
The disco revival he is talking about has also mushroomed in underground nightclubs around East and South London. Disco Bloodbath, Horse Meat Disco and ESP are all disco parties where much less obvious hits are played, as record crate-diggers find ever more obscure disco records and ever more interesting ways to do new things to old disco tunes.
Nathan Gregory Wilkins, who runs the ESP night every month at a pub venue in Bethnal Green, East London, and has also DJ-ed at Disco Bloodbath, says that these underground clubs are a world away from the mainstream Carwash vibe. “Some people like that really soulful Philadelphia sound which had the big orchestras on it, but some prefer the colder electronic stuff that was coming from Europe — Italo, cosmic disco, other spin-off genres. I play a mixture of old and new music; the old stuff tends to be super-obscure but can be anything from a slow, sleazy rock disco thing to fast, electronic gay disco. Disco is quite a loose term. It’s lots of fun, it’s camp, it’s irreverent, it’s glamorous and its essentially fun.”
As for disco having been a dirty word, Wilkins says that devotees of dance music never had any shame in their love for it “and I’m a straight white male”. But he admits that there is renewed interest in it now, which has prompted him to start a record label called Hungry Clock, to release “old disco stuff that has been newly tampered with and tailored to the dancefloor to extend the good bits”.
The DJ Erol Alkan agrees — he made his name uniting indie with electro, running the influential club Trash for ten years. He is now doing a sideline that he calls his Disco 3000 sets: “I’ve been buying records every week for years and years and I’ve always ended up buying some form of disco. For me it embodies all the best elements of club music, and people have been re-editing the old stuff to give it a dynamic that works pefectly for now. I really love one by Azoto called San Salvador — someone chopped it up a bit, moved it around and put this blistering acid line through it. It sounds as futuristic now as it did 30 years back.
“Disco has a kinship with psychedelia — it’s very imaginative, very bizarre. It’s people dreaming of the music of the future — and it still sounds like the future. My kind of disco is not about afro wigs and flares.”
Alkan also likes a new disco act called Mindless Boogie — so does he think the genre, for all its merits, is mindless? He laughs. “I dunno if mindless is the word but it certainly translates really easily; it doesn’t seem studied or laboured at all. It’s fun.”
Disco is characterised by a four-by-four beat, coming from rhythms brought to New York by Latino immigrants. A syncopated bassline and a groove you could dance to were the keys. The Jackson Five used disco, so the death of Michael Jackson and his widepsread playlisting can only add to the revival. Disco came about at a time of segregation and brought people together, black and white, gay and straight, on the dancefloor.
“It changed the music industry,” Joni Sledge says. “There used to be specific genres played on different stations in the US but when disco came out it didn’t matter what station was on, they had to play disco. Even Barbra Streisand was singing disco music! Politically, it did change things and bring people together.”
So where has it been hiding? Mark Moore, DJ and musician, says that there is a disco revival every ten years. He points out that a decade ago Sophie Ellis Bextor and Groovejet topped the charts by sampling a disco groove, as did Lady (Hear Me Tonight) by Modjo, and as Moore himself did when his band S’Express went to No 1 in 1988, using a disco line from Rose Royce’s Is It Love You’re After. Yet, rather than disco being supported by gay clubs, as you might have expected, it became marginalised “when the rest of the gay scene got stuck in its high-energy, eurobeat thing. It was all clones with handlebar moustaches listening to dreadful techno, and that’s when the gay scene started to lose it. Gay clubs became strangely conservative and disco was only for the drag queens and the freaks”.
Yet it still bubbled along. Bill Brewster, author of the book Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, an interest in disco acts has been growing on his Disco DJs web forum for about the past six years, taking in everyone from David Mancuso, whose loft parties were part of the original 1970s phenomenon, to the Norwegian disco DJ Todd Terje to the New Yorker behind Hercules and Love Affair, Andrew Butler, and producers Lindstrom and Prins Thomas.
“Disco has become like northern soul,” says Brewster. “You can’t play all those obvious records — they have been rinsed out; you can’t keep going back and playing Chic for ever. So a lot of people have been digging and found European productions — not even English-language stuff. There is Italo, of course, but also French, German and even a Middle Eastern record called Taliban Discotheque.”
The recent resurgence of drag queens and dressing up has also contributed to the disco boom.
“Hooray for Hoxton!” says Mark Moore, reflecting on how trendy clubs including those in that district of East London have moved things forward at a time when gay culture seemed reluctant to do so (although the Horse Meat Disco night has more specifically gay roots). “The four-to-the-floor beat will always prevail in clubland, whether it’s house or techno or hip-hop, because they all come from disco. It’s always gonna be there. But the reason why disco has has come back is because everything got so serious — the DJs got so po-faced about this dark groove with no vocals.
“I think people want to have a fun again, especially during a recession. Disco came around the first time in a recession caused by an oil crisis. It’s all about putting on your sequins and feathers, dressing up and forgetting about the world outside — you want to be happy for a few hours. I think that’s why it’s back.”
Of course, there is a drugs angle to this, too: any club scene will be accompanied by one. But Sister Sledge say that they didn’t need drugs back in the heyday of disco, even when they were hanging out at the legendary Studio 54 club in New York. “We never even knew about the secret drug rooms,” they laugh.
Gregory Nathan Wilkins says that the new disco is for “kids who don’t want to do ketamine or Ecstasy to boring techno all night. Of course, there will always be some who take drugs. But disco brings a natural high.”
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