Christmas and the Rite of Disco

There comes a time in most people’s lives when life catches up with them and they are willingly or otherwise, exposed to the social event that is the disco and more specifically, the Christmas Disco.  Generally this occurs around the teenage years and beyond where a large number of participants are squeezed into a very small space for the purpose of dancing or shouting at each other over the din.  Schools, higher education establishments and nightclubs are all responsible for this rite of passage and whether you are the life-and-soul or wallflower, the experience does tend to alter your perception of humanity, but for better or worse?

But it is not the outcome that interests me here, but the din.  Dependent on your age, and I shan’t ask, there are always a few tunes that seem to haunt you through the years – those hits that were so prevalent at discos that the very thought of them now makes you shudder with long suppressed memories.  Of course there is always ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ but this doesn’t count as it has been a juvenile disco staple for so long that nobody bothers about it anymore.

No, it is the ones like the Eagles’ ‘Lyin’ Eyes’ that are one of my bêtes noirs.  It was EVERYWHERE during my non-dancing years and didn’t I just hate it.  It put me off The Eagles for several decades.  Another season ticket holder was Steve Harley’s ‘Make Me Smile’ which even today brings back that slight eye twitch that I’d thought I’d finally got rid of.  What is it about these tunes – and I’m sure you can supply your own list - that provokes such a reaction, years after the event?  Is it the thought of your younger, gaucher and generally less assured self trying to grapple with life after one too many vodkas or is it something deeper?

For me it was certainly the above but also it was because I loved music and somehow the environment of the disco always seemed to degrade it and make it nothing more than background noise or worse, the soundtrack to someone else’s mating ritual.  Nothing will erase the memory of the isolation of the partner-less last dance and for this, 10cc has much to answer for.  I realise that this is a very esoteric stance to take as all through history, music has been specifically composed for the express purpose of dancing (Minuet anyone?) and to complain about it now is a bit churlish but nevertheless that is still how I feel about it.

Which is why you will always find me at a concert rather than a nightclub.  It became clear to me very early on that discos are for those who enjoy dancing and who need not be music lovers at all.  In fact, they were frauds.  ‘Make me Smile’ indeed.


Merry Christmas, everyone!

The Worst of Times

Sometimes, when I’m sitting here thinking about what the hell am I going to write next, if I am very lucky, someone comes along and gives me an idea. And in this instance it is just as well that they did or my next post would’ve been a blank screen - very artistic, I’m sure, but not really in the true spirit of a blog. So I am deeply indebted to Luminous Muse whose post ‘Guilty Pleasures: 70s Songs I Hate to Love’ has set in train a series of thoughts about pants music generally rather than specifically.


I’ve already covered my Guilty Pleasures in a series of posts some time back, so I thought rather than wheel out my list of Hate-to-Love songs yet again, I’d nominate my contender for the worst period in rock’s history and spookily it, too, comes from the 1970s – the decade that fashion forgot. My nomination for ‘Worst Period of Rock…Ever’ is the five year period 1973 – 1978.

The reasons why can be summed up in three words: Glam, Disco and Smart-Arses. It should be remembered that up to about 1973 everything had been going swimmingly from the Rock ‘n’ Roll explosion of the 1950s through the 1960s Beat Boom to Psychedelia and the beginnings of Progressive.

But by 1974 it had all gone wrong. Glam had ousted my beloved Prog and got it firmly on the run. Of course, Prog really only had itself to blame as it had disintegrated into self-indulgent noodling and we were drowning in pixies, but if only it knew what it was letting in... Whilst Glam had its upside, just, in Bowie and Roxy, the remainder was just the worst 1950s pastiche claptrap imaginable. Mud, Rubettes, Showaddywaddy, Sweet, Wizzard (Roy Wood what WERE you thinking?) were all as guilty as hell. Aged 18, music to me was a serious business and this lot were just taking the p…

Disco was almost as bad (with the possible exception of Chic). By the mid 1970s the likes of KC and the Sunshine Band, Sylvester, Heatwave, Donna Summer and Odyssey, were gearing up to batter our ears with stuff that only clubbers understood but the worst offender in this category was the person who invented the 12-inch single. If I ever get my hands on them…well, don’t worry, I’ll think of something. If Disco wasn’t bad enough over 3 minutes it was indescribably tedious over 10 long minutes of melody-free monotonous rhythm.

So for people like me, there was only one area left and unfortunately it was inhabited by the Smart-Arses as represented by the unholy trinity of Steely Dan, Supertramp and 10CC. I will put my hand up and admit to liking the first three 10CC albums but I never really took to either Supertramp or Steely Dan who were just far too clever by half. Thank God for Abba!

Never has one music lover been so relieved than when the Punk revolution swept away all this dross and replaced it with badly played, raucous yet passionate short sharp songs. Luckily this racket didn’t outstay its welcome but its lasting legacy was to open the door to a whole New Wave of artists from Blondie to XTC and by the end of the 1970s music was back on track. Phew!

Aaah......Freak Out!

I don’t know whether you have ever been forced to live out your worst nightmare but it’s not something I would generally volunteer for. Yet inexplicably, I found myself watching a 90-minute retrospective on the Disco phenomenon of the 1970s/1980s on TV recently, a genre of music that I avoided at all costs when it first appeared.

It felt like someone at the BBC had raided my younger sister’s (12 inch) singles collection and played the whole lot, one after the other in an unending battery of chink-a-chink rhythm guitar and thumping bass lines. We won’t even mention the clothes…or hair.

Chic, Sylvester, Dan Hartman, KC & the Sunshine Band, Kool and the Gang - the list went on and on. But let’s try and be positive. What can we learn from this lot, using as our guide the academically approved tool of hindsight?

Well, first off it seems pretty clear that the disco template belongs to Chic. Nile Rogers developed the chink-a-chink guitar style and the late Bernard Edwards was the master of the hum-a-long bass line. Between them they set up the formula for the genre and they did it best. Some of the rest did a reasonable impersonation and the rest were Disco by numbers. Worse, most didn’t know when to stop (and to think that old prog-rockers got pilloried for this). Interestingly, the Bee Gees didn’t really stick to the approved template – perhaps that’s why they are considered the Disco kings?

Secondly, it is surprising how bare the music now seems without drum machines and computers filling in every nano-second with machine gun precise, mind numbing polyrhythms. With just a real live drummer and bass player the rhythm sections of these 30-year-old recordings sound stark and well, human. I reckon that the first wave of ‘band based’ Disco came a cropper at about the time that drum machines and sequencers appeared – about the mid eighties and by, say, 1988 when the Rave culture took hold, Disco was dead.

Would I like it back? Well, no. But on the other hand, it was instructive to hear ‘Groovejet’ by Spiller, released in about 2000 well after the demise of 1970s Disco, included at the end of the programme and guess what? Chink-a-chink rhythm guitar and hum-a-long bass lines!

At least it made a change from the sort of technology-produced ‘dance’ music we are now subjected to. Perhaps I’ve gone into nostalgia mode over real drummers. Now, where did I put that silver jumpsuit?