Dance Yourself Dizzy:Four to the Floor and So Much More.

"House music all night long" - Move Your Body, Marshall Jefferson.

BBC4's Can You Feel It:How Dance Music Conquered The World set out with a mission to travel back into the past to tell the story of the future, taking in Chicago, Detroit, New York, London, Ibiza, and a few more surprising destinations along the way. Set across three programmes focusing on the beat, the club, and, finally, the DJ it did a wonderful job in showing how the prevailing orthodoxy was overthrown by dance music and, often, gay black men from less privileged backgrounds. In doing so however it also showed how the music had, like the blues and rock'n'roll before it, been co-opted by commercial forces to the extent that the lofts of New York and darkened clubs of Chicago have now all but been replaced by firework displays, millionaire DJs, and the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas.

It all starts, of course, with a beat. A disco beat. A four-to-the-floor beat. Invented by Earl Young when the Philadelphia drummer was laying down the beat for Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes' The Love I Lost, it soon become apparent that disco dancers weren't shaking their stuff to Melvin or the guitarist but, instead, to Young's steady drum pattern. What's more, once there were other four-to-the-floor accented disco bangers out there (Running Away by Roy Ayers for example) it was possible to cross-mix these tunes, all roughly 120bpm, into each other.

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes - The Love I Lost

Roy Ayers - Running Away

A tribal, trance like essence took over as dancers got lost in music. Many of them were young, black, Latino, and/or gay and this hedonism was a refuge from the very real hassles and racial tensions of the big US cities in the 1970s.

The remix appeared, allowing for tracks to be specially engineered for extended dancefloor sessions. Vocals were chopped up or chopped out completely and grooves were accentuated by canny operators like Tom Moulton. Moulton was the remix king credited for turning soul music into disco music. The funky, edgy bass riff, build, and breakdown based sound he created was famously called 'the honey which attracts the bees'.

Loleatta Holloway - Love Sensation

Donna Summer - I Feel Love

Moulton's mix of Loleata Holloway's Love Sensation came out in 1980 though this show suggests it came out about the same time as Donna Summer's I Feel Love (with that deathless Giorgio Moroder sound) which was released in '77. Never mind, they're both great tunes and they both demonstrate quite clearly how soul had mutated into disco while at the same time pointing forward to future developments.

The 12" record was created to cater for these new, much longer, pieces of music but not everybody was happy about what was going on. On the 12th July 1979 in Comiskey Park, Chicago (the home of the White Sox) the disco inferno started to look scarily similar to a Nazi book burning. Local shock jock (and anti-disco campaigner) Steve Dahl invited local rock music fans to bring along a disco record so that after the White Sox had finished their game with the Detroit Tigers they could all be put into a crate and blown up.

Dahl was so against disco because it was, he thought, doing him, a rock DJ, out of a job, But there's no denying an obvious racist overtone to the whole event. The term 'dog-whistle' had yet to take on a political meaning but this was, surely, a blatant example of dog-whistle politics. Local observers report that the records, on the whole, weren't even specifically disco, but simply anything by a black artist.

How apt that not only should a phoenix rise from the ashes of this shameful incident but that it should rise in that very same city, Chicago, before taking over the world. That phoenix was house music. With Chicago being, obviously, quite racially divided in the late 70s and its nightlife 'moribund' a man named Robert Williams took a chance and opened up an NYC style club, The Warehouse, on 206 South Jefferson Street and employed a DJ from the New York gay scene, Frankie Knuckles, who soon became The Warehouse's secret weapon.

Chi-Town had a party and as Knuckles mixed up disco and funk with European electronic sounds the attendees started to call the music 'house' after the venue. Even now, forty years later, the music sounds fantastic and futuristic. I simply can't fathom out why rockists persist, still, in hating on this avant-garde, unifying, and fun music.

Jesse Saunders - On and On

Williams, now getting into his stride it seems, launched another club based on the vision of a bisexual drug addict by the name of Ron Hardy. The sounds at The Muzic Box were harder than the groovy stuff Knuckles was seducing the dancefloor with over at The Warehouse and soon young Chicagoans were seeking to somehow imitate them.

Steve 'Silk' Hurley mixed Isaac Hayes for the dancefloor but it was Jesse Saunders who first got an actual Chicago house record out there. Despite Marvin Gaye's endorsement (it'd been used on Sexual Healing) the Roland TR-808 drum machine had, initially, flopped because people thought it sounded too 'artificial'. The lack of take up meant prices were dropped and soon the 808s were being picked up by Chicago house producers who relished that artificial sound.

Jesse Saunders On and On was released in 1984, soon to be followed by Marshall Jefferson's anthemic Move Your Body and the tune that inspired 'jacking', Chip E's Time to Jack. This was sweaty Saturday sex music infused with the Sunday salvations of gospel and a perfect case in point could be found by comparing the hard, gyrating, drums and bass of Farley Jackmaster Funk's Love Can't Turn Around with Darryl Pandy's almost pastor like soulful vocal and the strings and keys that wash beatifically over the top of it.

Marshall Jefferson - Move Your Body

Chip E - Time to Jack

Farley Jackmaster Funk - Love Can't Turn Around

From the banks of Lake Michigan to those of Lake St Clair. Nearly three hundred miles from Chicago, in Detroit the style was being mutated into a more cerebral sound that somehow reflected the social deprivation of a once great city. Motor city. Motown city. 

In the summer of 1967 racial tensions exploded into riots on the streets of Detroit, 43 people died, the National Guard marched in and the middle class marched out nearly as fast. The white middle class, sure, but the black middle class too - and the black middle class didn't receive quite such a friendly welcome in the suburbs.

Three of those kids were Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins, and Derrick May - the Belleville Three as they became known after the city, oddly the sister city of Machynlleth in Wales, thirty miles southwest of Detroit their families had relocated to. They loved Star Trek, Star Wars, space travel, and the music they created to reflect these passions was a form of Afrofuturism inspired as much by the likes of Kraftwerk, which they'd listen to on The Electrifying Mojo's various radio shows, as it was by soul and disco. As the ever erudite and always articulate May puts it they were in a cultural dessert and music was the water they dug for.

Kraftwerk - The Robots

Cybotron - Alleys of Your Mind

You can hear how those influences were merged in Cybotron's Alleys of Your Mind. This early piece by Juan Atkins came out as far back as 1983, beating Jesse Saunders over in the Windy City by a year. Fired by sequencers and drum machines, Atkins, Saunderson, and May were inspired by Alvin Toffler's futuristic 1980 book The Third Wave which featured techno rebels as 'agents of change', 'agents of a third way', and even an 'advance of a new stage civilization'.

That gave their music its name, techno, and in May's Strings of Life and Saunderson's Good Life its first real anthems were born. Both are now considered classics of the genre but it was Good Life, being hookier, that brought the world to the Detroit sound.

Rhythim is Rhythim - Strings of Life

Inner City - Good Life

Steve 'Silk' Hurley - Jack Your Body

The action jumps from Detroit to London. The Trellick Tower. The Hammersmith and City line. Peter Powell interviewing Pete Tong about crate digging in City Sounds, Holborn (Tong pronounces the L - he was born in Dartford, he should know better) and Groove Records, on Greek Street, near Soho Square, Soho. 

House arrived in the UK in 1986 with The Sound of Chicago compilation (it featured Jefferson, Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk, Chip E, and Steve 'Silk' Hurley) and despite no mainstream radio play 'Jack Your Body' reached number one in the UK charts. It wasn't even a hit back in Chicago. On a visit to the UK, Joe Smooth was so inspired by how multicultural the capital was, how black and white people danced together rather than at separate clubs, that he wrote Promised Land to celebrate it and once house became acid house, with the advent of another piece of Roland software - the squelchy 303 bass synthesizer, it became something of a phenomenon.

Joe Smooth - Promised Land

Sleezy D - I've Lost Control

The dirty ol' TR-303 of Sleezy D's I've Lost Control and other tracks got 'under your toenails' and it wasn't long before UK producers and musicians wanted a piece of the action themselves. Radio One may have refused to play Mark Moore's S'Express but that didn't stop their very first single going straight to the top of the charts in 1988. 

It was a very British take on house and techno music and people in the UK may well have argued about the relative merits of the two different genres but, in truth, very few really understood the difference. From Manchester A Guy Called Gerald's hypnotic and lithe Voodoo Ray seeped out into the public consciousness where it remains to this day, a timeless classic influenced, as Gerald confirms, by Kevin Saunderson's Detroit techno bass lines.

S'Express - Theme from S'Express

A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray

808 State - Pacific State

Acts like The Prodigy and LFO appeared (it'd be interesting to see what this show would be like if made for the US market, would the UK acts feature so heavily?) and with the increasing popularity of ecstasy (which, predictably, turbocharged the tabloid storm) it started to seem like 'rave music' was taking over the UK and even mainland Europe. To the extent that when the Berlin wall came down they even played 808 State's Pacific State. I remember the times. They were exciting. We were looking towards the future with hope rather than fear like now. Though that could have been the drugs talking. Or it could just be that I was young then!

From there dance music went stratospheric. It infiltrated unlikely territories like Lebanon, China, and Indonesia. The age of megaclubs and superstar DJs would soon be upon us and the last two shows in this excellent (if far from comprehensive) series focus on those. Each show tells a fairly similar story but through a different prism so there is some repetition (both on the show and in this account) but repetition, of course, is what dance music is all about. Repeat after me:repetition is what dance music is all about.

The genesis of the modern club experience can be traced back to David Mancuso's loft parties in NYC in the 70s. Starting at midnight, and with free food, they'd continue until an unspecified time the next day. As they were house parties, not clubs, licensing wasn't an issue (though one can imagine some disgruntled neighbours). There was no mixing and no pitch control, just tunes played from start to finish so that the attendees could appreciate them in their entirety.

The Blackbyrds - Rock Creek Park

The sound engineer Alex Rosner came up with a surround sound system. a 'four way tweeter' whatever that is - I'm not technical,  so people could 'feel' the music more authentically but when Rosner was grumpily awoken by a 3am call to see if he'd shift his allegiances to Studio 54 he refused and his assistant Richard Long took the gig.

Studio 54 was, famously, a place of narcotically charged hedonism. Andy Warhol hung out there, Bianca Jagger turned up on a white horse, Chic wrote Le Freak (initially Fuck Off) after being turned away, and even the future POTUS Donald fucking Trump rocked up. If only Bianca Jagger's horse had hooved him.

People, though presumably not Trump, were too wasted to enjoy the music but it made Long's name and, after he'd installed the sound system in some disco bumper cars on Coney Island (which are still there), he set up a system at the Paradise Garage (another venue whose name became a whole genre of music) in collaboration with the club's leader Larry Levan.

Levan would play twelve or fourteen hour sets. He was pioneering the idea of the DJ taking the clubber on a 'journey' but, equally, the Paradise Garage was almost a shelter from the violent, squalid, and broke streets of New York outside its doors. Nothing like the New York of today. The cops held the power during the day and the gangs at night so the outsiders, the gays, and the curious took safe haven in the club.

This club wasn't about boozing, fighting, and going on the pull but about the music, about the dancing, and when New Order visited from the UK their experiences both dramatically, and fundamentally, altered their sound and gave them an idea. If New York, Chicago, and Detroit could have a space like this then why couldn't Manchester?

 New Order - Confusion

New Order - Blue Monday

Tony Wilson had the vision to see that culture would be what filled the hole left by the closing down of the big northern city's traditional industries, that music and art could give a city purpose when all else felt lost. The opening night of the Hacienda featured ESG (flown in from New York) and, er, Bernard Manning who called the place a shithole and refused his fee suggesting the owners would be needing the money very soon.

ESG - My Love for You

Jungle Wonz - The Jungle

Things weren't initially improved by the arrival of import house and techno records from the US. DJs playing house music were threatened and had bottles and cans lobbed at them so a wire mesh, a cage basically, was erected for them to play behind. Which certainly added to the already extant edgy, urban vibe.

The Hacienda was located south of the Rochdale canal and the first few London dance music clubs cropped up in equally unglamorous locations. Paul Oakenfold opened The Project Club in Streatham with Carl Cox to try to recreate the vibe he'd got on a holiday in Ibiza. The club didn't open until 2am in the morning and it's easy to see how a rainy night in Streatham may have a different atmosphere to watching the sun rising in Ibiza.

Over in Southwark (south of the river, this time of night, mate? - as taxi drivers of the time would have it), Danny Rampling opened Shoom in a former fitness centre. Though the streets surrounding Shoom were all but deserted, inside a motley crew of football hooligans, transvestites, and pop stars gyrated together in a state that some called 'shamanistic' but the more down to earth would recognise as being drug induced. As the DJ Fabio puts, they were 'off their faces' on E.

Opus III - It's A Fine Day

The Beloved - The Sun Rising

Truth be told it was the combination of the ecstasy and the oxytocin that was released by the music that created the positivity cocktail that saw more and more wild eyed youngsters losing their shit in frankly unsanitary looking conditions to music that was completely alien to most of the older generation. It feels now like the last great youth movement but, again, maybe, at my age, I would say that.

New promoters moved in, planning to use derelict buildings without paying for them (or doing any basic safety checks). These events started to attract crowds of thousands and earned these promoters (still in their early twenties) six figure profit margins as well as a whole heap of trouble. One Genesis '88 rave promoter tells of being kidnapped three times, beaten up twice, and having a gun pulled on him at least five times in a twenty-four month period.

The gangsters were moving in and Genesis '88 came to end in 1992, But fellow promoters Sunrise found a legal loophole and 'invited' 25,000 people to a field in Buckinghamshire for a 'private party'. They paid the DJs no more than £150 each (Carl Cox would now set you back £50,000+) and many even less.

Despite this obvious entrepreneurialism the Tories, in government at the time, still didn't like it. They didn't like it the idea of home counties Tory voters losing sleep and, I suspect, they didn't like the idea of young people having more fun than them. One thing we all know is the Tories do not like fun.

David Morales - Needin' U

In Liverpool, James Barton saw an opportunity and opened Cream in 1992. The sound system was so vast it took up 50% of the floor space and with Cream's policy of booking not just the world's biggest name, and top, DJs - but several of them each night, the club was soon attracting coach loads from all over the country. On a big Cream night, it's recounted, the bars, the restaurants, the tanning salons, the hotels, the hairdressers, and the shops were all packed solid. 

Cream was regenerating Liverpool in just the same way Tony Wilson had hoped the Hacienda would do Manchester. Perhaps it's no surprise that in these two big football cities that clubbers would chant the name of DJs like Sasha, Paul Van Dyk, and resident Paul Oakenfold. Cream, and the London mainstay Ministry of Sound that had opened a year earlier in '91, were given the honorific 'Superclub'.

Over in Manchester, gangsters had taken over the Hacienda to the extent that Tony Wilson had reluctantly had to announce its closure. By all accounts the police didn't seem particularly interested in helping which is a strange, destructive, way to deal with a business that has put so much into a city and its economy. As is pointed out by various talking heads on the show you can't imagine gangsters being allowed to take over Marks & Spencer or Liverpool FC (Newcastle FC, yes) but in clubland, it seems, even legality doesn't buy you safety.

Once the superclubs were established in the UK the next opportunity came in taking the clubs, and the clubbers, on holiday. To Ibiza of course. Manumission opened on the White Island in 1994 and, within a couple of weeks, had 6,000 punters. All tempted in by the combination of not just music but cabaret, spectacle, and, possibly apocryphal accounts of each evening climaxing (sorry) in a live sex show provided by the club's creators, Mike and Claire. And you thought foam parties got messy.

Daft Punk - One More Time

But superclubs and foreign holidays were seeing ordinary clubbers getting more and more priced out of the experience that they'd started, just look at the opulence (and prices) at the Ushuaia Ibiza Beach Hotel, as well as the music getting whiter, straighter, less sonically adventurous, and, to put it bluntly, shitter. 

In the US dance music has become EDM and has found its home in, of all places, Las Vegas. As far away, both in miles and attitude, from Chicago, Detroit, and New York as the sounds the likes of David Guetta make are from those of Marhsall Jefferson and Derrick May. It still looks fun and things, of course, always need to move on but it does seem to pander to the lowest common denominator and prioritise the making of money over the making of music. The Omnia club in Vegas is a 'deluxe' clubbing experience with 'tables' (tables??) going for up to $50,000 and punters expected to splurge more than double that on champagne etc;

Avicii's huge funeral in Stockholm earlier this year only underlines just how much dance music has become a global lingua franca and to what extent DJs are now celebrities rather than the slightly bawdy guys who'd intersperse their golden oldies with banter and quips while, essentially, providing a background for people "getting tanked and getting off with one another". It's unlikely that any of Avicii's regular three hundred gigs a year involved him launching into an 'erection section'.

In 1983 The Tube on Channel 4, Friday evenings, was essential viewing for young music fans and that was the year that Manchester's Greg Wilson, who'd been 'discovered' by Channel 4, appeared on it using turntables to the bafflement and probable disdain of Jools Holland who, despite all the 'groovy fuckers' talk, always seems to be a fairly reactionary conservative when it comes to music.

Sylvester - You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)

Wilson's technique had originated in the Bronx in the 70s with hip-hop and Grandmaster Flash while downtown in Manhattan the mostly Italian-American DJs, many of them hired by the mafia who weren't far short of running the night time city, were playing disco. The order of the records (the programming) was more important than any technical skills or mixing ability.

One of the prime exponents of this was Alfredo in Ibiza. Like Levan, Alfredo was all about the 'journey' and his style became known as 'Balearic', seeing him mix up obscure Latin rock cuts with oddball pop hits and, eventually, house music during his residency at Amnesia.

When Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, and our old friend ecstasy pitched up at Amnesia in '87 it changed their lives and when they returned to London, as we've read earlier, they went on to set up clubs in the British capital. As well as The Project and Shoom there was Spectrum, each Monday at Heaven underneath Charing X station, and this brought Oakenfold to greater attention. Soon, a DJ with no real knowledge of production or remixing was being asked to remix/produce indie bands like Happy Mondays and, if you ignore A Certain Ratio and New Order and lots of other bands, indie-dance was born. Certainly the craze known as Madchester or Baggy came out of this. A Paul Oakenfold, or Andrew Weatherall if you were even cooler, remix was the season's must have item.

Happy Mondays - WFL (Think About The Future Mix)

The Bucketheads - The Bomb (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)

The DJs were becoming the stars, sometimes playing several venues in several different cities across one night, often driving themselves between locations, and earning serious cash. Some started releasing their own records and one, Fatboy Slim, became possibly the biggest name in UK music for a few years around the end of the nineties. 

There's some exposition on Norman Cook, his time in The Housemartins, his marriage to Zoe Ball and all that, for those, younger presumably, people who need it but for anyone over thirty years old I'd imagine that's all old news. It's worth taking stock of just how massive he was, though. Praise You was a number one hit, Right Here, Right Now got to number two, Gangster Tripping - three, and he sold over 3,000,000 albums and attracted nearly a quarter of a million people to Brighton to hear him DJ (as well as get drunk and sniff poppers, let's be honest).

Fatboy Slim - Right Here, Right Now

Wildchild - Renegade Master (Fatboy Slim Old Skool Mix)

Fatboy Slim - Rockafeller Skank

Fatboy Slim - Praise You

Norman Cook/Fatboy Slim took some shit for playing 'dance music for people that don't like dance music' but I always thought that was a little harsh. There was an energy and a playfulness to his music and his personality that I always enjoyed - even if, perhaps, the party went on just a little bit too long for some people. Mainly him.

Trance, which emerged at about the same time, didn't work quite so well for me. While it was great that dance music had now conquered eastern Europe and was seen by many there as a soundtrack to their freedom after the fall of the Berlin wall (808 State - Pacific State, remember) I found the music of people like Paul Van Dyk a little anaemi. In retrospect I was missing its funk and disco roots which had been lost somewhere along the journey in much the same way that Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven bears no resemblance to the blues that resides somewhere deep in its DNA.

Even bigger than Van Dyk is Tiesto, the Dutch trance/progressive house DJ who decided to eliminate the promoter, book football stadiums, and play eight hour long sets to adoring crowds with not a single other act on the bill. 

But Tiesto felt lonely sleeping on all that money (in 2016 Forbes estimated Tiesto raked in $39,000,000). He'd made sacrifices for his success. He had no wife and no kids and he started to fall out of love with trance music and even out of love with DJing. So he went to Los Angeles and, in his own words, partied his 'socks off'. A strangely archaic phrase for a superstar DJ until you realise Tiesto is now forty-nine years old.

When he returned from California he was re-energised and more eclectic in his tastes, and he was soon joined at the top table by the likes of David Guetta, Calvin Harris, and Steve Aoki. Harris doesn't get a mention in this show (I'm sure he can live with it) but Guetta gets a reasonable look in. 

The hard working, if modestly talented, DJ caught a break in 2009 when he started collaborating with urban artists and outright pop stars. Getting former Destiny's Child singer Kelly Rowland on his song When Love Takes Over proved the making of him and, within two months, he was all over the ubiquitous, and massively fucking irritating Black Eyed Peas tune I Gotta Feeling which went to number one in more than twenty countries worldwide and has continued to blight summer holidays ever since.

David Guetta ft Kelly Rowland - When Love Takes Over

It spent fourteen weeks at the top of the US charts and sold 8,000,000 copies and did more than any other piece of music to herald in the arrival of EDM, a more commercial and poppier take on dance music that mainstream audiences, many seemingly unaware of its roots in their own inner cities, in America took to in a way they never had before.

Steve Aoki, like Tiesto and Guetta who can command $1,000,000 for a 2 hour set, is now one of the world's most in demand DJs. Aoki doesn't just play records though. He takes his top off, stands on his record decks waving his hands in the air like he's just another fan, and throws huge wedding cakes out to his fans who eagerly await them and wave huge placards emblazoned with the legend 'CAKE ME'!

It's all a very long way from Earl Young laying down a drum beat for Harold Melvin, from David Mancuso's loft parties, and from Alfredo greeting the sunrise in Ibiza but what's been gained in showmanship, and certainly commercialism, seems to have been lost in musical innovation.

It's no coincidence that the Detroit techno musician Jeff Mills recorded under the name Underground Resistance and, of course, there are still people out there who are about the music rather than the money. This show suggests two artists, Midland and the Black Madonna, and they're both pretty good but I don't doubt there's way more interesting, innovative, and exciting stuff out there and it'll probably be coming from the last place anyone is looking. Just like it did when it first crawled, then danced, then skyrocketed out of the lofts and basements of Chicago and Detroit. 

I've a few qualms with the programme, not least the constant revisiting of the same stock footage of pretty girls dancing in Ibiza in their bikinis (yes, I'm complaining about THAT), but, for the most part, this was a fine series that pitched itself just right. 

Those who hate dance music surely won't watch it and those who have spent the last three decades immersed in it won't learn much new but the great mass of us somewhere in between will be both educated and entertained as David Morrissey (fast becoming the British go to guy for documentary narration, Morgan Freeman better watch out) and an impressive selection of talking heads (Marshall Jefferson, Francois Kervorkian, Steve 'Silk' Hurley, Farley 'Jackmaster' Funk, Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold, Mark Moore, David Morales, Robert Owens, New Order, Mike Pickering, Danny Rampling, Fabio, David Guetta, Paul Van Dyk, Jeff Mills, Fatboy Slim, Nina Kraviz, John Digweed, Terry Farley, the Hacienda's architect Ben Kelly as well as archive footage of the now deceased Frankie Knuckles and Tony Wilson and lots and lots of Moby) confirm to us that music is, and perhaps always has been, one of the only things in the world you can count on.

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once" said Friedrich Nietzsche and though the self-styled antichrist may have been more at home with Wagner, I can't help thinking that his existential sensibilities would recognise the need for abandon and the desire for connection that dance music enables. After all, he did also say "and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music".

From burning records at a Chicago baseball stadium to being caked in the face by Steve Aoki in Las Vegas, if a DJ set is a journey then the story of the history of dance music is more than a journey. It's a trip, man.

Abba - SOS