1/5/2024 0 Comments Best disco songs“And here we go again, we know the start, we know the end.” It’s a song about pleasure, about addiction, about compulsion. No pure disco tune ever gave so barbed an account of empty hedonism. It isn’t a disco rock album exclusively but it contains As Good As New (which with its handclaps and chamber strings finds a contemporary disco-rock sibling in ELO’s equally joyous Shine a Little Love from the same year) the hilarious and adorable Does Your Mother Know, partly purloined by fellow disco-rock titans Pulp for Disco 2000 and best of all, the title track. On the Voulez-Vous LP, it reached its pinnacle. It had begun with Dancing Queen three years before. And disco-rock was their métier, a form in which they excelled like no other, and in which no others excelled as they did. It took some time for Abba to be recognised as what they are: a group who belong in the very first rank of the greats. ![]() The masters, the Olympians, the ne plus ultra of disco-rock. Blondie went all the way over, and did it perfectly. Even the title is just right, capturing both the emotional fragility and the crystalline surface of the song, which is deliciously simple: a metronomic Clem Burke pulsebeat the instruments gliding in its wake the nagging little organ riff, like a secret sorrow poking at you as you head to the dancefloor Debbie Harry’s rueful vocal - “We could’ve made it cruising, yeah.” As a medium for sadness under bright lights, Disco was rivalled in its time only by the kind of soft rock Roxy Music steered so close. Before those came the new wave/bubblegum blockbuster album Parallel Lines, and there on side two was Heart of Glass, one of the first disco-rock tunes to recognise and reflect how disco lent itself not just to Good Times but to a kind of shimmering melancholia. Abba were the greatest of them, but Blondie in their prime weren’t far off: the gleaming, chrome-plated thrill machine that is Atomic the dreamlike shuffle of Rapture. There were some bands for whom disco-rock wasn’t just a dalliance it was the purest expression and zenith of their craft. No music has ever been more utterly of the night than disco, and that suited the Stones perfectly.Ĥ. It’s the lodestar of the band’s last truly great – although undervalued – period, melding their own lustful whiplash menace with their adopted genre’s glistening, nocturnal allure. It was the way they saluted the format itself, stretching it over eight minutes on to their first 12-inch single. It wasn’t just Charlie Watts turning that wonderfully loose yet precise method of his upon the four-to-the-floor, nor Bill Wyman hanging around in clubs until he perfected the pneumatic bassline that drives the song. Whether or not Miss You was conceived as a disco tune ( Mick Jagger and Keith Richards differ on that), it was painstakingly crafted as one. It was quite another for disco to be seized upon by “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world”. It was one thing for the Bee Gees, not so long since a mildly psychedelic pop-rock group, to adapt themselves brilliantly to disco and thus revive their flagging career or for cartoon rockers Kiss to join the dots between the glam rock stomp and the disco beat on the glorious I Was Made for Lovin’ You (1979). Here it is: the moment in 1978 when rock embraced knowingly and without reservation the cultural ascendancy of disco. Rolling Stones: Miss You (Special Disco Version) ![]() Do the bump … Ron Wood and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.
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