Donna Summer: Bad Girls: Deluxe Edition

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * *)

In musical arguments, as with political ones, the area of grey between the black and white can be as big as the other two combined. History books say you were either a Beatles or a Stones fan, but my friends and I liked them both - and the Four Tops, Lou Christie, Roy Orbison and Dusty.

Although that said, Rick Bryant was tossed out of his first band for the ideological impurity of saying he liked the Pretty Things.

Sensible people listen with open ears and the Dance v Rock debate of a few years ago seemed mighty stupid, especially when musicians from both camps started crossing the artificial lines, creating a vast grey area. Certainly the Disco v Punk Wars were fought with some vengeance. More fool me, as I learned some years later.

Donna Summer's name came up and I made some mildly disparaging comment because it seemed the smug thing to dismiss her.

Murray Cammick, co-founder/longtime editor of Rip It Up and a man with impeccable taste in black music, mildly offered the typically reasonable observation that her Bad Girls was a great album.

I went home and listened to it again. He was right and I was wrong. It was far better than I remembered or thought at the time and one of the few essential double-vinyl albums.

Released at the close of the 70s, it was simultaneously a summing up of disco and offered a signpost to an electro-future.

With tracks - no, hits - which segued seamlessly into one another (Hot Stuff to Bad Girls is an extraordinary double whammy to open with), it was clubland music with a pop heart. And, lest we forget, dynamite rock guitar on Hot Stuff from session whizz and Doobie Brothers/Steely Dan member Jeff Baxter.

And Bad Girls was about sex, from the "Donna the Hooker" cover on in.

Disco may have been a largely faceless music but you could hardly ignore the sultry Summer - she looked stunning. The set sold more than four million copies that year, not bad for a double album of a style the "serious" music press derided and ridiculed.

Summer was more than the face to the music machine of German producer and studio genius Giorgio Moroder, who brought Eurodisco to America thanks to a solid run of hits from his Boston-born star.

Although Bad Girls only hints at it around the midpoint, as a child Summer was a gospel-soul singer in church. Later, she fronted a rock band, The Crow, and did theatre, which explains the "bad girl" concept of the album - it was part of the act.

In the late 60s, she went to Germany to join a production of Hair, then got session work where she met producer/writers Moroder and Pete Bellotte. In '75, under their tutelage, she recorded her first transatlantic hit, the sensual Love to Love You Baby.

Summer was suddenly the hot'n'sexy diva of disco and there was no stopping her.

She and her producers upped the stakes with I Feel Love, a technological masterpiece of the time, then it was the dancefloor classic Last Dance and, improbably, a monster disco version of Jimmy Webb's psychedelically confused MacArthur Park.

And that was just the beginning. Then came Bad Girls, released the same year as Rod Stewart's Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? It was no contest.

With Bellotte, Moroder, co-writer/arranger Harold Faltermeyer (who later wrote movie themes like Top Gun) and Summer as singer-songwriter on board, it is full of Eurodisco beats, r'n'b horns (Journey to the Centre of Your Heart), oddly treated vocal passages (Dim All the Lights) and, best of all, magnificently driving bass lines. Recorded in LA, it has the extroverted quality of that city yet has the buttoned-down intensity of its German origins.

Almost 25 years on it is still a remarkable collection of clever, lapel-grabbing songs and the repackaged Deluxe Edition just doubles the pleasure by adding the demo of Bad Girls, and an extra disc of relevant 12-inch single versions of album tracks, the eight-minute extended mixes of I Feel Love and Last Dance, the full 17-minute MacArthur Park Suite and more.

Unfortunately for many, this was Summer's last flash. The disco backlash kicked in and, like the BeeGees, she was stigmatised by her association with it.

She tried to reposition herself and moved to Miami. Some said she got religion and made some anti-gay statements.

Anyway, it was all but over, although she has continued to record and does an enormous amount of fundraising gigs (some for Aids charities). She's probably had a Behind the Music profile.

None of that matters when you've got Bad Girls. She might have been disco's reigning temptress for the sexed-up tracks but she also sings soulful ballads (There Will Always Be a You, All Through the Night) and soars like Bette Midler on the uplifting (soundtrack, surely?) On My Honour - which might explain her disco duet with Barbra Streisand on No More Tears included on the extra disc.

But from I Feel Love through to the gloriously chugging, synth-splattered anthem Sunset People, this was classic - camp in places - disco and only the unwise or unworthy would dismiss Donna Summer's Bad Girls.

So thanks for putting me straight, Mr Cammick, and happy birthday for last weekend. Hope someone thought to give you a copy of this.

Label: Universal