Disco, the beautiful, idealistic, escapist music of the marginalised was seized and exploited by the music industry.
Disco, the beautiful, idealistic, escapist music of the marginalised was seized and exploited by the music industry.
In an homage to Pleasuredome the Musical, three arbiters of cool reflect on the influence of the club culture era on music, cinema and fashion.
Music
I remember 1983. That was the year I arrived in Auckland, 20 years old, to work in a funky attic as deputy editor of Rip It Up magazine. Although the magazine was full of the music of my peers - untidy kids playing noisy electric folk - the music in the office could be quite different.
My boss, soul brother Murray Cammick, was importing, bludging and buying records from America, and most notably, from New York. That year, Nile Rodgers' Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove came out, and we had its strange, loopy title track on rotate. Murray took the name for his 95bFM radio show, Land of the Good Groove, which you can hear to this day.
But another record really captured me that year. I played the 12" of Shannon's Let the Music Play so loud and so often that the T-shirt designer next door threatened me with actual bodily harm if I did not stop.
It's a remarkable tune: the soaring lead vocal, the punchy, latinesque electronic rhythm. I now know those beats to be the early sound of the Roland 808 drum machine, the Fender Stratocaster of club music - and that the soaring vocal on the chorus is, weirdly, not Shannon's, but that of session guitarist Jimi Tunnell.
It became a worldwide hit, breaking out of a DIY NYC scene where radio DJs still did their remixing by cutting up magnetic tape. Shannon's label, Emergency Records, had been getting by releasing records for gay clubbers, the last audience still listening to disco after it was blown up by corporate capitalism in the 70s.
Disco, the beautiful, idealistic, escapist music of the marginalised was seized by the music industry and exploited till it no longer meant anything by the late 70s. The final insult was the Disco Demolition Night at a Chicago baseball stadium in 1979, when 50,000 white yobs gathered to view the detonation of records by largely black artists, and then drunkenly rioted.
Disco retired hurt to the clubs, then re-emerged as the music paid tribute in Pleasuredome The Musical. Like Nipple to the Bottle, by Grace Jones, a former disco diva who escaped to Compass Point Studios in Jamaica, where a pair of reggae musicians called Sly and Robbie were redefining rhythm with the new digital gear available to them. Thirty-five years on, it still sounds modern and almost threateningly urgent.
In another adventure, New Order shed their northern melancholy and landed in New York to work with Arthur Baker, the producer behind Afrika Bambaata's cavernous electro hip-hop records. The result, among other tunes, was Thieves Like Us. There are many other Brits in Pleasuredome: the Human League, the Eurythmics, Tears for Fears and, of course, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, who fed barely-coded gay culture riffs back to the New York clubs that spawned them. And there's Diana Ross' I'm Coming Out, produced for her by Rodgers (she hated it at first) and eventually an anthem in gay clubs everywhere.
If, like me, you're DJing at a party for people - and by "people" I mean the ladies - of a certain age, there is a select group of records you can drop and fill the floor without surrendering your soul. Records that were both pop hits and creative landmarks. Quite a few of them - The Message by Grandmaster Flash, I'm Every Woman by Chaka Khan - feature in Pleasuredome. True, the show also includes Foreigner's caterwauling Waiting for a Girl Like You. But every party DJ's record bag has a cheese compartment, right?
Cinema
Clubbing is a rite of passage for the youthful, reinterpreted by each generation, steeped in counter-culture and connected inexorably with the history of music and fashion - be it big hair and flares or gumboots at Glastonbury.
The genius of cinema is that, done right, it can immerse you in a moment of time, capturing not just the music or fashion but the zeitgeist of the era, dance moves, the need for escapism and euphoria, drugs and the social and political climate.
Club culture began in the disco era of the 1970s, which started as an underground scene populated by an ethnically and sexually diverse mix of people. But if you ask someone of a certain age today what comes to mind when they think of disco they'll likely bust out an iconic John Travolta move from the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever.
While disco was well established in the decadent nightclubs of America and across the Atlantic before 1977, it wasn't until Travolta shimmied on to the big screen in his flares and high heeled boots that it went from being a culture to a phenomenon, and in the process introduced the mainstream to club culture.
A box office smash, this dance drama turned Travolta into a superstar, cemented "the hustle" dance move into the history books, and launched one of the most successful soundtracks of all times - the highest selling album before Thriller was released. But more than just making money, the film sold the concept of the club.
Saturday Night Fever captured the spirit of a generation that rejected family authority to find a way of escaping the drudgery of daily life. It's a common theme for films about club life. SNF ruled the 70s and inspired a 90s disco revival with films such as Boogie Nights (1997), Whit Stillman's satirical The Last Days of Disco (1998) and 54 (1998), but it was films such as the adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novels Trainspotting (1996), Ecstasy (2011), and the Welsh comedy Human Traffic (1999) that took club culture to a new level in cinema.
Danny Boyle's adaptation of Trainspotting brought UK club culture and music to a mass audience. There's not a lot of clubbing in Trainspotting - it's after all a film about disaffected, angry youth in a post-Thatcher era - but the way Boyle used electronic music was ground-breaking.
A film more directly related to the sub-genre of club cinema is Justin Kerrigan's debut feature film Human Traffic, which follows a group of mates over one hectic Friday night of partying in Cardiff. Just like Travolta's Tony Manero, these young Welsh kids struggle through their customer service jobs only to spend their money at the local club each weekend. The film owes a lot to Trainspotting (the drug taking and fantasy sequences) but deals with the material in a more upbeat, humorous and relatable way.
You can't talk about club culture in cinema without mentioning another cult classic, 2002's docu-drama 24 Hour Party People.
Michael Winterbottom's film chronicled the birth of dance music in the UK through the rise and fall of record label Factory Records and acid house club the Hacienda. Featuring a memorable performance by Steve Coogan as founder Tony Wilson, 24 Hour Party People rounds off the club cinema experience that starts with the discotheque (SNF) and ends with the rave.
Regardless of generation, the ability of these films to capture the chaos and excitement of dancing the night, or weekend, away will have you reminiscing about your own clubbing adventures, with some no doubt experiencing a sense of relief about having made it out the other side.
1980s club fashion by Doris Du Pont. Photo / Kerry Brown
Fashion
Auckland City was booming and sparkled with the glitz, glamour and mirror glass of 1980s corporate success during daylight hours but after dark the sparkle moved downstairs. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday night apres work the mirror ball took centre stage at the newest and hottest party venues around town. Nightclubs like Quay's, the Six Month Club and the Brat, which morphed into the Playground, popped up in converted warehouses, basements and empty floors in and around the city. They became the cool place to be and to be seen. The clubbing scene was all about fashion, hair and dressing up and clubs were rated on the qualities of their clientele. Patrick Steel, 1980s fashion designer and party boy about town, gave ChaCha magazine a rundown of the clubs. "Alfies", he said, "was full of hairdressers, at Staircase everyone is staring at everyone else and no one is having a good time and at Steps the music is great but there are so many ugly people - if there is a lack of style - it is there."
Stairs are a common trope with clubs, invariably upstairs or downstairs, where you climb or descend into a heady haze of hairspray and dry ice. There was no hanging around outside in the street smoking, all the action, including smoking, happened indoors between 10pm and 3am with a well-stocked bar or two, a DJ booth and a large lit dance floor.
Clubbing had its own dress code. Influenced by the extravagance of corporate fashion with its gaudy colours, shoulder pads and bling and at a time when gays were being outed by the Aids epidemic, young clubbers embraced flamboyance and androgyny in behaviour and dress.
Men and women of all genders dressed up to party in clinging lycra, tulle tutus, svelte frocks and pants in panne velvet, puffball skirts, bow-ties and pirate shirts in bright silks, gold lurex bodysuits, lame tailored jackets and with large smatterings of skin-fitted leather and stretch vinyl, denim barely got a look in. Everyone wore make up; eyeliner and coloured shadows and poppy lips, no holds barred. Earrings too were a universal accessory; long and dangling or big bold bright and matching, well certainly matching something you were wearing. Clubbing was definitely not about letting your hair down rather it was all about getting that hair up, as high, full and dramatic as possible. This was the era of hair extensions, artificial hair for the naturally less well-endowed. Hairdressers and their salons were the celebrities of the day and names like Eithne Curran at Crimpers, Greg Murrell at Servilles and Trevor Potter at Potter Blair still have cachet today. Nightclubs were also the venue of choice for that popular 80s phenomenon, the Fashion Extravaganza. With intriguing titles like Orgasmic Fantasia, the Zoned Fashion Play and Scruff's Birthday, audiences were challenged to outshine the on-stage action, a high energy show of the latest fashions in hair from said salons and garments from fashion favourites of the day like Zambesi, Obscure Desire, Alison Hutton and Streetlife. In light of Patrick Steel's assessment I am a little reluctant to admit that I too once organised such an event for my own label in 1986, at Steps nightclub. With ex-Zephyr designer Raewyn Alexander, Renaissance Menswear, High Street hair extension specialists the Salon, and models Rachel Hunter and Mikhail Gherman, the show and its audience did make the social pages of ChaCha magazine. That magazine regularly featured the faces and antics of the club set, with late night characters like Phaedra, King Harold and Barbaraella lifted from the dance floor and thrust in front of Darryl Ward's camera.
The dance music, with its strong vocals front and centre and lyrics that relayed both mood and narrative, was crying out for an expressive and expansive response and at the Brat on a Friday night there was no shortage of performers in their party gear on the dance floor.
For those of us who wore the clothes and made the moves, it is sad to see the fun of really dressing up to go out clubbing is no longer fashionable. But I am happy to share that hearing Queen's I Want to Break Free can still make me dance like a dervish.
