I’m a happy man, I became an uncle for the first time yesterday evening and met my niece, Iris, today. Now I may be a hard-drinking, womanising, quasi-toilet trained, party beast from the planet Rawk! but I’ve always been an absolute sucker for little babies. It’s the perfect little fingers and toes that floor me every time. Without fail.
So after a nice easy day which was happy in every other way too, I needed something to reflect that. Sadly in lieu of ISIS putting out an acoustic LP of campfire sing-a-longs, I’ve been moved to look elsewhere for my happy kicks tonight. I’ve cheated a bit too, I only got this record a couple of weeks ago, but my excuse is that I’ve owned the main track digitally for years*.
Disco, or ‘Dicso’ as I mistyped it three times in a row just now, is a bit of a latecomer to my affections, despite growing up with warm memories of various exotic looking space dudes dressed predominantly in Bacofoil disporting themselves regularly weekly on Thursday nights on Top of the Pops. After becoming a bit less of a rock snob in my later teens I began to buy edited highlights, a bit of Chic there, a chunk of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack there, but it took me much longer to get hold of any Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder. I always had a bit of a thing for that icy cold quality that their music had, humanised, but only just, by Ms Summer’s wails, moans and coos. I bagged the LP Love to Love You Baby, which makes me blush when I listen to the orgasmic sex-act of a title track – which at 16:49 is damned unrealistic if you ask me, especially with my bad back, come on how about a 2:02 ’19 Years of Marriage Mix’ ?!
It took me a bit of research and prodding to work out which was the best way to get hold of my favourite DS/GM track I Feel Love. I mean who wants the 3 minute Greatest Hits version? or the 5 minute original LP version? or even the edited 8 minute version? not me. I wanted the full on 15:53 Patrick Cowley Megamix version which was released on Casablanca Records in 1982. Now that’s what I call D-I-C-S-O !! The 8 minute version on the B-side is just for wimps and wimpettes.
The original I Feel Love dates from 1977, but this still sounds like the future to me^ and something about it is so unearthly. As with all of Moroder’s best work, the synths sound cold and mechanistic and the man was just so far ahead in his use of beats it was scary, much as I love Kraftwerk and (blushes) Jean Michel Jarre, Moroder’s version of future music turned out much nearer the mark. Donna Summer’s vocals are just spot on too, her voice soars and swoops here, without resorting to the silliness of ‘Love to Love You Baby’. Before a bad PC crash robbed me of it I even had a really interesting BBC documentary narrated by the wonderful Alison Goldfrapp solely about this track, but I digress. Patrick Cowley’s megamix is the superior version for me, he emphasises the beats a little more than the original did, adds a whole breakdown section towards the middle before bringing it back for a rousing climax and is just MORE, MORE, MORE; which works a treat for me here. Purists do prefer the 8 minute version I’m told, and that’s fine, they are entirely welcome to their opinion, despite it being manifestly wrong.
So I’ve sat and listened to this 12″ about five times tonight, even risking a bit of a creaky jig around the room** when the family weren’t looking. I was happy anyway and I Feel Love made me even happier, which is something great dance music can do for me every time.
Those ‘Disco Sucks’ dudes from the clip that always gets shown on music documentaries had it all wrong, let’s face it Dicso Rocks!
235 Down.
*making this one of the few records in the entire 1537 that I didn’t get my heart broken to / spent an hour savouring on the bus home / put on a mixtape for my future wife. I could always make some history up for it though, if you’d prefer.
^The track ‘Giorgio By Moroder’ as well as being one of only two great tracks on the last Daft Punk LP, features the man himself talking about creating future music; ‘I knew that it could be a sound of the future but I didn’t realise how much the impact it would be’, as the great man says.
**or ‘your bloody awful disco mince’, as Mrs 1537 calls it; harsh woman that she is.