Studio 54: Halloween 1977

God may have made the boringly bucolic country, but the devil made the town. Ever since Sodom and Gomorrah, cities have been synonyms for vice, infernos of wicked delight where prohibitions collapse. In New Yorkduring the late 1970s, the favoured location of the beautiful and the damned was Studio 54 – a defunct television studio on West 54th street, reoutfitted as a spangled nightclub where a thousand customers could drink, dance, drug themselves, and retire to a shady balcony to have public sex...

Guardian Online - taken from a new (ish) book of photographs by Hasse Persson, Studio 54.

Disco: Disco Revisionism Sucks!

I think that's enough articles about how Disco changed the world - and brought all society's most marginalised people LIKE TEH GAYS! into the mainstream and set us free from our bondage blah blah blah de-blah - for the time being, thanks.
Is there nobody who's prepared to stand up and say they always thought Disco was shit?

Donna Summer: Our Love

There's been some strange comfort in how much coverage there's been about Donna Summer and her death since yesterday.
And, for someone who was rarely taken seriously by critics in her 70s heyday, much of it pleasingly placing her as a pivotal figure in popular music.
(Though I've lost count of how many tributes I've heard from Paul Gambaccini...)
Just about every story and obit said she was very popular with The Gays, and then mentioned the controversy over that alleged "Aids is God's punishment" comment.
I think it's sad how this myth, and it is a myth, became such a big part of her story - it would look odd if an obituary didn't mention it - and despite her endless refutations and a high profile libel case.
The two best articles I've read by twelve inches or more both came from The Guardian.
Here's a beautiful piece by Alex Needham on her game-changing records and the power of her music; "charged with feelings of liberation, a pre-Aids world of pansexual freedom and adventure... her best records still pulsate with that spirit, the lifeforce of pop itself."
And here's Paul Flynn on Donna Summer as the "the accidental gay icon".
(I read it soon after it went online and many of the readers' comments brought up that Aids comment, often assuming it was true. Grrr...).
I know what Paul means, and agree - though I don't think it was completely accidental.
Interviewing Giorgio Moroder some years ago he told me during the Casablanca days rather a lot of the people they worked with were gay.
Casablanca's rarely given credit as a gay-friendly and pioneering gay-savvy label.
Giorgio told me he was too naive to notice they'd queered up the sleeve of his Nights In White Satin album, by adding a K to the title, and getting Giorgio shot for the cover photo in what looks like a gay sauna surrounded by some... knights in white satin.
KISS may have built Casablanca's city on Rock 'n' Roll, but their manager, Bill Aucoin, was gay - and I bet it was him who told those four nice Jewish boys to turn up the camp to 11.
As for Casablanca's other really big act, Village People, what need I say?
Though yes, they were often coded - and their bizarro film, Can't Stop The Music (often blamed for bankrupting the label) had them playing themselves laughably straight.
Casablanca also put out two of Disco's boldest singles, The Ritchie Family's Cruising The Streets and Skatt Brothers' Walk The Night.
And then there was Patrick Juvet and Paul Jabara - the latter wrote No More Tears (Enough Is Enough and It's Raining Men - and they signed Dusty and ruddy Cher!
But anyway I'm wibbling away.
As I said, these are two great pieces.
Donna Summer deserved writing about her as good as these.

Update: There's more! Jon Savage and Ewan Pearson on How I Feel Love Changed Pop. Wow.

Disco: No Longer Sucks - Official

"Disco's globe-conquering presence by the late 70s even meant the world's first openly, make that brazenly and fabulously, gay pop star – the late great Sylvester – could graduate out of San Francisco's drag ghettos and chart a private jet to the most exclusive stages of the world. Mighty real, indeed. The message of love had spread out of New York's underground clubs and everyone from Abigail in Romford with a glass of Blue Nun in one hand and a Donna Summer 12-inch in the other to a little gay boy growing up in Devon dancing to Diana Ross was bathing in the refracted glitterball glow. Even as the songs sold in their millions, the original core message was always there: disco's pansexual spiritual call to arms of unity ("We Are Family"), empowerment ("I Will Survive") and sheer sexual liberation ("I Feel Love")..."

Fagburn very much enjoyed this piece in The Observer by Adam Mattera on Disco, zooming in on its debt to - and contribution to - gay culture.
The hook is BBC4 broadcasting The Joy Of Disco on Friday.
Blurb! "Documentary about how a much-derided music actually changed the world. Between 1969 and 1979 disco soundtracked gay liberation, foregrounded female desire in the age of feminism and led to the birth of modern club culture as we know it today, before taking the world by storm."
BBC4's music documentaries are usually first-rate - Fagburn hopes they do Disco similar justice.

The Politics Of Dancing: Freedom

Nile Rodgers on The Politics Of Dancing - How Disco Changed The World is beyond amazing.
"It's all about fags and fag hags..."
I liked it when he said most Chic songs were an exercise in irony; like writing 'Good Times' in the middle of a recession.
Great programme.

Thought For The Day: Wolfgang Tillmans

"I had my first sexual experiences in 1984–85 and my first big Aids panic was in 1985, so the tragedy of a disco song, which others would see as superficial or as just trash music, runs very deep. It's very real, the narrow line between a night danced away and the potential of death around the corner. This sense of what others consider superficial has been a fundamental experience. It is something that anyone growing up gay is aware of from a very early age." - Wolfgang Tillmans