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Goin’ Disco

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Many acts “went disco” in the late seventies and early eighties and not all of them were wretched. Some of them were genuinely good.

I have a real soft spot for Here Comes The Night, the Beach Boys 11 minute disco monster from their album LA mainly because I’d never have thought that the Beach Boys could successfully go disco at all…

Any other successful disco ventures from non disco acts?

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Comments

  5. Dabbling his toe in the funky ocean: Leonard Cohen.

    Was (not was) were good at bringing out unexpected sides of artists. Here’s another unexpected dancefloor denizen: Ozzy Osbourne.

    I’d have JCC down as something of a wallflower, but I may be wrong.

    Finally, a very danceable track from Eartha Kitt

  9. New York New Wavers and regular CBGBers go disoc with the assistance of 1970s bubblegum pop merchant.

    Blondie – Heart Of Glass

    Mike Chapman rebuilt that track from the snare drum upwards.
    Clem Burke is in no way a lame drummer, but he isn’t playing too much on this one.

      • Clem’s drumming is all over this track. Just broken down to constituent parts and re-built.
        I think each part (hi-hat, share, bass etc) had it’s own track which was then synchronised to perfect time and combined.
        Clem Burke is a great drummer, but this track was not about great drumming, just technically time perfect beats

      • You don’t need that for your opinion. His playing on Atomic and The Hardest Part just to name two examples.

        Love Clem. Great playing, puppyish enthusiasm and a total pillock. More of this sort of thing.

        • I trained to be a teacher with a brilliant woman called Corinne. In her fifties when she trained, had lived in NYC in the late 70s/80s and knew Clem and quite a lot of the CBGBs bunch. Wish I’d stayed in touch with her. I absolutely adore Blondie.

          Speaking of that whole thing, do you think it annoyed British punks that they were all pretty average and The Ramones were insanely good?

        • Not just a big hit but the first U.S. Number One* record to prominently feature rapping (and one which introduced the wider audience to significant names and images of the genre) and you had to wait quite a while for the next one.
          (Was it Ice, Ice Baby? Holy sh*t! And, in the U.K. I’m going to stick my neck out and say it was The Power by German dilettantes Snap!
          Happy to be corrected!)
          *in Robotland all Blondie’s singles from Denis to Rapture were number ones..

  14. I loathed disco, struggling and squirming as Blondie broke the mirrorball, shattering the broken glass of my heart onto my preconceptions. So when Roxy joined in, I was ready for it.

    And as for the Stones……

    Now?
    Love it, unless it’s you know who.

  15. Keep them coming! Spotify hasn’t got all of these but here’s a playlist to be getting on with just now… (Sorry it’s not that nice embedded thing, for some reason I can’t get it to post that way)

  16. Thanks for the playlist, Gangle.

    This is a very interesting topic,

    Back to Disco Demis. It seems that later he regretted his excursion onto the dancefloor, so those tracks are difficult to find, but here is one more.

    Shame, because they are rather good.

    I suspect that many artists were turning to Moroder and others of his ilk to give their careers a boost. With some quite pleasing results.

    Not quite disco, but DNA’s rebooting of Suzanne Vega seems relevant here.

    90s bands like Saint Etienne and Dubstar had Djs standing in a queue to give their pop gems a dance makeover.

    How about a Crosby, Stills and Nash dancefloor makeover, pop pickers? From The Flying Mojito Brothers.

    http://www.aordisco.com/2016/10/turn-your-back-on-love-flying-mojito.html

    Anyone fancy Balearic Sabbath? The metal gods given a chill out reboot!!

    http://teamrock.com/feature/2017-04-06/black-sabbath-receive-unlikely-balearic-makeover

  17. Johnny Marr liked a bit of Nile Rogers type guitar playing and could have ended up in a funk band with Andy Rourke, and sometimes with The Smiths it shows, like on Barbarism At Home. Here are the two funsters Morrissey and Marr getting on down.

      • Well he liked Motown and Phil Spector, according to his autobiography. 60s was OK I think. More poppy less groovy. There was a Morrissey dance. Many of us did it at student discos to indie sounds. Strictly no bumping and grinding.

        • Motown? That’s news to me. SPM to my knowledge only likes the white, early 60s end of rock’n’roll, camp 60s British pop, and extremely white indie from the 70s and 80s. And, er, that’s it. Ronnie Spector and the Marvelettes might get a pass for having a bob cut some of the time.

          • I heard Andy Rourke talking on Sirius a while back about favourite basslines – his is “I Was Made To Love Her” by Stevie Wonder. So much so that he learned it and would invariably play it during Smiths soundchecks. Moz was NOT a fan.

            • His contempt for black music is pretty well documented, innit?

              “I detest Stevie Wonder. I think Diana Ross is awful. I hate all those records in the Top 40 – Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston. I think they’re vile in the extreme.”

              He even does the “black activism is racist” thing so beloved of all your favourite multiculturalists from Steve Bannon to PW Botha, when talking about reggae: “It’s an absolute total glorification of black supremacy… There is a line when defence of one’s race becomes an attack on another race…”

              There’s this gem: “Obviously to get on TOTP, one has to be, by law, black”.

              And, best of all:

              “Interviewer: You seem to be saying that you believe that there is some sort of black pop conspiracy being organised to keep white indie groups down.

              SPM: Yes, I really do.”

              Why I ever let myself feel surprise at what the old bore has become is quite beyond me. No “becoming” required.

  19. Sorry! Wandering off from the topic under discussion a tad, but Gloria Gaynor meets Metallica is rather fun.

    As is Michael Jackson vs Iron Maiden!

    Time for bed for me perhaps?

  20. Pink Floyd wouldn’t have come up with this gloomy toe-tapper without disco and as a result they got a number one. I used to not think so much of this, I thought DSOTM onwards was less interesting Floyd but I like it more these days. It sounds better on the album in context.

    • Very good but a serious oddity which sounds neither like the early Wyatt era Softs nor the later jazz noodlers.

      This YT comment by Terry Platt explains a lot.

      “By the time of this track, and its parent album (1978, Alive And Well, Recorded In Paris), the band had been through so many changes that they were virtually unrecognisable from the original 60s and early 70s outfits, and had fallen under the guidance of keyboards genius Karl Jenkins, who brought a somewhat more melodic beating heart to the often uncompromisingly abstruse Soft Machine character (further refined and distilled a couple of decades later into the magnificent Adiemus project).
      I suspect that this track is very much a solo showcase for Karl’s meticulous Moroder-style electronic programming, with little or no obvious input from the other band members, and coming out sounding very much like an amalgam of other currently popular acts like Telex, Jean-Michel Jarre, Manuel Göttsching/Ashra and Yellow Magic Orchestra, as well as Brian Bennett’s seminal keynote genre reference work Voyage, which was out the same year. This airy, brightly-hued gallop (…if a gallop can be said to be brightly-hued…) down a luminous hyperspace by-pass should never be dismissed as a national treasure band caving in to the demands of commercialism, which I know is the view of so many, but rather regarded as a realignment informed by pioneering new money.”

  27. On a documentary about disco a few years ago, Lady Kier Kirby opined that disco was all about looking beautiful and dancing all night. There and then I had two solid reasons that I never saw eye-to-eye with it.

    • In 1979, I agreed to help a mate who had a work colleague organising a “Death To Disco” night with headline act Rose Tattoo. I foolishly agreed to work behind the bar – it was one of the longest nights of my life.

    • You never heard these idiots go on to complain about the subsequent adoption of programmed drums in 95% of rock records, which made it so formulaic and so, er, 80s.

  30. I always preferred funk and soul to disco; give me Johnny “Guitar” Watson, the Bros Johnson, Brass Construction, and Maze. Nevertheless, when I heard Sylvester’s “Mighty Real”, i had found a disco song that i could happily join the boogieing throng. That said, I am surprised to not see this mentioned:

  35. Bruce goes disco – and nicks from Kiss while he’s at it.

    It’s a favourite of mine, if only for the silliness of a cowboy disco opera. We need more of those.

    • Love that Sparks song but had not realised until today that it was co-written and produced by Moroder. He did the Maels proud. The combination of his throbbing beats, Russell’s ethereal voice and their typically quirky lyrics works wonderfully. A marriage made in heaven?

  41. At the MOR end of the spectrum, may I offer light-entertainment stalwart Marti Caine, slinking her way onto the dancefloor with this little cracker…

    And just to blow the cobwebs away, Al Martino’s 1976 version of Volare, worth it for the video alone…

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