Mirrorball Moves:Disco:Soundtrack Of A Revolution.

"D.I.S.C.O, D.I.S.C.O, D.I.S.C.O, D.I.S.C.O, She is disco" D.I.S.C.O. - Ottawan

For many years the word, and the genre, disco was considered a bit uncool. Associated with flairs and medallion men drenched in Old Spice. In recent years, however - recent decades even, disco has been reclaimed and now to say you don't like, or enjoy, disco music would mark you out as some unreconstructed rock bore. Scared to have fun. Scared to let yourself go. Living in fear of the mirrorball.

Disco:Soundtrack Of A Revolution (BBC2/iPlayer) takes us back to the start of disco and then follows the story of the music right through to its demise with a fairly brief coda on its renewal and renaissance. It is, at all times, a thoroughly fantastic watch - and, for me, it's all the better because it delves into the political, sexual, and racial dimensions of the disco scene.

You can't fault the music (Chic, Donna Summer, Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes, The Trammps, The Bee Gees, The Village People, MFSB, Marvin Gaye, Manu Dibango, Gloria Gaynor, Anita Ward, Labelle, KC And The Sunshine Band, Rod Stewart, Cerrone, Sylvester, Elton John, The Hues Corporation, George McCrae, Love Unlimited Orchestra, and Popcorn by Hot Butter. If not D.I.S.C.O by Ottawan) and you can't fault the huge number of talking heads either.

There's David Morales, George McCrae, Anita Ward, Francois Kevorkian, Nona Hendryx, Candi Staton, Dexter Wansel, Honey Dijon, Thelma Houston, Jocelyn Brown, Kim Petras, Marshall Jefferson, Jamie Principle, Ron Trent, MNEK, Jessie Ware, Jake Shears and Ana Matronic from Scissor Sisters, and Victor Willis who you may know better as the cop from the Village People. More than anyone, there is Nicky Siano who is a walking encyclopaedia of the disco era and seems to have been involved in almost every pivotal event discussed. Yet retains complete enthusiasm at all times.

Backing that lot up there's a host of DJs, clubbers, sound engineers, gay rights activists, music critics, producers, photographers, music journalists, art historians, and media strategists. It's a heady, and compelling, mix and the whole story starts in late sixties America at a time of the civil rights movement, Black Panthers, women's rights activism, flower power, and anti-Vietnam war protests.

It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius and the establishment didn't like it. They didn't like hippies, they didn't like gay people, and they didn't like black people. The law at the time prohibited sodomy, it prohibited cross dressing, and it even prohibited two people of the same sex dancing together. The few gay bars there did exist were illegal and, for the most part, were run by the Mafia who were able to pay the police off.

For the most part, dancing in these bars was banned but one exception was the Stonewall bar in New York's Greenwich Village. There was no DJ but people, gay people, would cut a rug to the jukebox. When, in the summer of 1969, the police decided to raid the bar a riot broke out. People were fighting for their right to party.

The New York of the early seventies was something of a ghost town and was full of huge empty warehouses. You can probably guess what happened. Some of them became social spaces. The most famous of these was the David Mancuso's Loft which opened up, and took the party to the next level, in 1970. Choosing the 14th of February, Valentine's Day, as its opening night, the Loft was Mancuso's home so police couldn't bust it. That did mean, however, that you needed an invite to attend.

The crowd (estimated to be about 75% African-American/Hispanic, 25% white) would dance to what Mancuso called "danceable r&b" and the punch was spiked with LSD (Mancuso is said to have had a "love/love relationship" with acid). An early anthem became Girl You Need A Change Of Mind by ex-Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks.

The success, and notoriety, of the Loft saw other clubs open in New York (including Siano's Gallery) and clubs soon came to be seen as safe spaces for the city's marginalised cultures and communities - even if the journey to and from the club was sometimes fraught with the potential of danger. It was a time when gay men were vilified, sacked from their jobs, and even murdered.

When, in 1971, New York City passed a law making it legal for two men to dance together wider society did not, on the whole, approve. Segregation continued, unofficially, in various forms and in New York, as in other big cities across America, white flight took place leaving the city centres to become predominantly black.

The parties continued in Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York but not, just yet, in Manhattan. Change came from a rather surprising angle. In 1973 a beef crisis meant many Manhattan restaurants, and restaurants elsewhere, were struggling to put meat on punter's plates so they put their venues to another use. They pushed the tables and chairs to one side and let the music in, let the dancers in.

MCs started appearing and asking, in now time honoured fashion, the dancers to throw their hands in the air and wave 'em like they just don't care. To begin with the gay community and the black community were mostly separate even as they danced in the same rooms but the song that brought them all together was Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa, a Cameroonian import!

People started to call the music 'discotheque' (after the venues in which it was played) and that was soon shortened to the punchier 'disco'. Once the music had a name a distinct sound developed. A four to the floor beat with the bass drum as the music's heartbeat. Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International label birthed a lot of musicians (including the drummer Earl Young) and The Love I Lost by Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes exemplified the early disco sound.

One DJ, Francis Grasso, started "blending", or "beatmatching", records. We'd call if fading or mixing now and at the time the dancers loved it, they screamed with excitement. It meant the dancing was now non-stop. No awkward pauses waiting for the next tune to be cued up. Elsewhere, records were looped, basslines cranked up, and special effects added to tunes. Love Unlimited Orchestra's Love's Theme reached number one on the Billboard chart without either radio play or record company promotion and that was followed by Rock The Boat by The Hues Corporation and George McCrae's Rock Your Baby.

Disco was rocking and Rock Your Baby reached number one in not just the US but in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, and Sweden. Disco had become a global phenomenon and the commercial era of disco had begun.

Against the backdrop of Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation (as well as the continuation of the Vietnam war), disco dancers had decided, in the words of Dr Lisa Farrington, that "when life gets hard, you party harder". Life for black women in America was harder than for most others. A government report, the Moynihan report, had decided to blame the problems of black men on black women. On black women being too strong and too matriarchal. Not submissive enough, basically.

Black women answered back with disco music. There was Gloria Gaynor - "the first lady of disco", Anita Ward, Donna Summer (of course), and a revitalised Candi Staton as well as Labelle whose Lady Marmalade became a huge hit. Labelle's outlandish outfits were designed by Larry Legaspi who also designed the schmutter worn by Kiss and Funkadelic at the time.

 

Disco music had given black women an agency they had previously been denied them (with all due R E S P E C T to those inspirational outriders who had gone before them) and when you hear Candi Staton's story behind the writing of Young Hearts Run Free you'll have to agree this agency was long overdue.

Hard times may have meant hard partying but when the Vietnam war finally ended the party didn't stop. It got even bigger. Boomers wanted to celebrate and Donna Summer's Love To Love You Baby gave them something to dance to. A song that gave women, as if it was needed, permission to feel, and express, their sexuality as candidly as men had always been able to.

It wasn't a success until a radio unfriendly sixteen minute version of it was released but then it became huge. Some stations banned it, Reverend Jessie Jackson railed against it, and Time magazine, either favourably or not - I'm not sure, noted that it contained a very specific twenty-two orgasms.

The covers of disco records started to feature more overtly sexualised images of women, and - much less - men, though to look at them now, with the benefit of hindsight, some of them seem exploitative. Many of them look tacky but obviously tastes change and disco, at its peak, wasn't always concerned with being tasteful.

San Francisco was, of course, the gay capital of America. Harvey Milk had become the first openly gay man elected to public office in California and making a name for himself as a performer was Sylvester with his deathless classic You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). New York wasn't letting San Francisco completely take over though. On 26th April 1977, Studio 54 opened its doors for the first time.

It offered a very strict, depressingly elitist and exlcusionary, door policy that, to me, undid a lot of the good work of the early disco pioneers. It didn't stop the stars coming. We see footage of David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart, and Grace Jones all hanging out there and Andy Warhol, according to various accounts, never missed a night. The FOMO was strong with that one.

Studio 54 made a lot of money and made a lot of headlines but probably more important were the thousands of provincial discos that were opening all across America. Undoubtedly the biggest thing to happen to disco at this time was the release of John Badham's 1977 film Saturday Night Fever. The lead character, Tony Manero - played by John Travolta, was a straight white guy. The gays, the blacks, and the women who had started the disco scene had been, predictably, sidelined.

Still, the film set the world on fire and the soundtrack, by The Bee Gees - resolutely not a disco band before Saturday Night Fever, became one of the best selling soundtracks ever. In fact, only Whitney Houston's Bodyguard soundtrack has ever sold more.

Saturday Night Fever changed what people perceived disco to be and soon people were taking disco dancing lessons so they could (try to) ape Travolta's moves and impress potential partners on the dancefloor. The likes of Rod Stewart (Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?) and The Rolling Stones (Miss You) released 'disco' records and even Frank Sinatra and Dolly Parton got involved. Though their efforts are not well remembered.

But for the originals, for the purists, it was all about Gloria Gaynor's new single. Sorry, Gloria Gaynor's new b-side. The a-side, Substitute, has been largely forgotten but the flip, I Will Survive, is now such a famous anthem that there are probably tribes in the Amazon who know every word of it off by heart. I Will Survive sent the disco heads nuts and stormed to the top of the Billboard charts but it happened at a time when the disco backlash was starting.

Racism, homophobia, and sexism did play a very big part in the backlash but there was also the question of disco saturation (at one point fifty of the top one hundred singles in America were disco tunes, other genres were struggling to get a look in) and some very poor novelty records didn't help disco's reputation - not least among disco fans.

Rick Dees And His Cast Of Idiots' Disco Duck is interesting as a curio but it's hard to imagine the dancers in a New York warehouse losing their shit to it. The same could probably be said of the Sesame Street disco album (featuring Me Lost Me Cookie At The Disco by Cookie Monster) though, to be fair, the big Village People tunes (YMCA, Macho Man, and In The Navy) still drag wedding guests to dancefloors to this day. 

Created by the French producer, the Village People were, as Honey Dijon snipes, disco for "people from Kansas" and the irony is that when they sang "we want you for a new recruit" in In The Navy it was during a time when the navy barred homosexuals from enrolling.

The Village People were a Greenwich Village band but in and around Greenwich Village, New York disco fans were not listening to them much. Outrageously dressed, they were filing in to the Paradise Garage, a venue with no clocks, no mirrors, no windows, and no alcohol license - though lots of LSD, weed, and poppers, to dance to Larry Levan's bass heavy DJ sets. His early anthem was his own mix of Inner Life ft. Jocelyn Brown's Ain't No Mountain High Enough and the music he played, with a nod to the venue in which he played it, became known as garage.

The underground disco/garage scene was going strong but the record label's obsession with repeating big hits was leading to diminishing returns and a lot of chart disco records started to sound familiar, similar, and stale. Disco had become bigger than rock'n'roll and the white straight dudes who weren't happy about this were feeling emboldened to take action.

A Disco Sucks movement began. Steve Dahl, a DJ on WLUP on Chicago, started to blow up disco records on air. It went down well - with some - so he decided to host a disco demolition night at Comiskey Park baseball stadium in Chicago as part of a match between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.

On the 12th July 1979 disco hating punters flowed into the stadium enticed by tickets being sold at a very cheap 99 cents. The White Sox, whose stadium it was, tended to draw a predominantly black crowd but those who bought tickets to the disco demolition night were mostly white - and they were blowing up black people's records - and not just disco ones.

The demolition was followed, unsurprisingly, by a mini-riot. Dahl's disco demolition night didn't cause the demise of disco but it did, in a way, mark the end of the disco era. If not disco itself. A far bigger threat was soon to visit the gay community. A "gay cancer" that we all soon came to know as AIDS, started to kill a lot of gay men. In the early days, an AIDS diagnosis was pretty much a death sentence. On average, you'd have two years left to live. Many of those who died were stalwarts, and major players, in the disco scene.

Homophobia had never completely gone away, it never does, but the rise of AIDS led to a rise of homophobia and newly elected president Ronald Reagan didn't do anything to stem the tide of either AIDS or homophobia. Reagan was not particularly concerned with AIDS and refused to close blood banks leading to infected blood being used for transfusions and further spread of the disease. It was four years after AIDS had been identified before Reagan acknowledged its existence.

These tough years led those that loved disco and the disco lifestyle to retreat into a more underground scene and that scene was based in Chicago where a new music, a new sound, emerged from the ashes of disco. They called it house music and it was the music that the likes of David Mancuso, Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, and Ron Hardy would have played at their clubs.

The likes of Marshall Jefferson and Jamie Principle carried the disco flame into the era of house music. For a while, many house music fans would probably have denied the music they loved owed a debt to disco but time is a great healer and now you can hear disco not just in house, garage, and techno but in hip-hop, post-punk, rock, and almost all other genres of the music. Like Gloria Gaynor, as long as disco knows how to love I'm sure it will survive.