The Twelve Inch 💿

The story of how dance music kept reinventing itself, one twelve-inch at a time.

Welcome to The Twelve Inch, a weekly exploration of the golden era of dance music, 1975 to 1995, when the twelve-inch single ruled the dancefloor.

Every week we take one record and use it to explore the artists, remixers, studios, clubs and cultural moments that shaped dance music on both sides of the Atlantic.

If you love disco, synth-pop, post-punk, electro, early house and club culture, you’re in the right place.

What you’ll get

Just like a real twelve-inch record, the newsletter has two sides.

💿 Friday — The A-Side (free)

The main story.

A deep dive into one record and its place in dance music history.

Who made it?

How did the remix come together?

What was happening on dancefloors at that moment?

Each episode connects the dots between scenes, genres and artists.

🎧 Saturday — The B-Side (for members)

This is where the extended version begins.

Paid members unlock:

Beats

Extra discoveries, explanations and fun details that expand the story.

Acapella

Personal reflections and deeper dives into the mixes of the featured record.

Dub

The musical rabbit hole: discussion of the weekly mix and a subscriber-only playlist of gems inspired by the record.

In short:

The A-Side tells the story.

The B-Side expands the universe.

The soundtrack

Each episode also comes with a weekly mixtape on Mixcloud and YouTube.

The featured twelve-inch is always the starting point of the mix, and from there we explore the musical world around it.

Think of it as the soundtrack to the story you just read.

Start here

New to The Twelve Inch? I’ve made a special selection of the foundational posts. The episodes that tell the story of the most important tracks.

Each one shows how different scenes and genres connect across the dancefloor.

Look for the section “The Foundational Posts”

About the author

Hi, I’m Pé Dupre (yes, the handsome one in the photo 😁).

I’m a lifelong music addict and proud child of the eighties.

I grew up in a strange moment for disco. By the early 80s it had already fallen out of fashion, but I absolutely loved it. Unfortunately I was mostly alone in that enthusiasm among my friends.

Let’s just say I was a slightly contrarian child. (My mother can confirm.) 🫣

Disco became my gateway into a much wider musical world: new wave, synth-pop, post-punk, electro and early house.

What fascinated me most was how all those sounds connected.

Then one day I heard a DJ beatmix two disco records together.

That was it. I was hooked.

I saved up for turntables and a mixer, and my allowance went straight into buying twelve-inch singles. Soon I wasn’t just following artists, I was following remixers.

If I saw names like Arthur Baker, Shep Pettibone, François K, Trevor Horn, John “Jellybean” Benitez or Mark Kamins on a record sleeve, I didn’t need to hear the track first. The twelve-inch came home with me.

Much to the despair of my parents… and occasionally the neighbours when the wheels of steel were spinning and the bass was shaking the walls.

I later made mixtapes, played local radio and even tried a few nightclubs.

The problem was: Antwerp wasn’t New York.

The clubs wanted the same hits every night. And there are only so many times you can play YMCA before you start rebelling.

One evening I tested the crowd with an obscure new-beat era record called Call of the Desert by Ali “Abdul” Makossa.

I got fired faster than you can imagine.

But I knew that might happen going in.

Remember: contrarian child.

The birth of The Twelve Inch

During the COVID period I decided to finally do something serious with all those mixtapes and decades of music obsession.

I realised something:

Behind every great dance record there is a story worth telling.

So I started The Twelve Inch, a place to explore the history of dance music one record at a time.

A growing community

Over time the newsletter has become more than just a blog.

It’s slowly turning into a community of disco kids, 80s & 90s music nerds and dance-floor historians who enjoy rediscovering the music together.

Readers regularly share memories of clubs and records, suggest topics for future episodes, and help uncover forgotten gems.

Some of the best discoveries come from the community itself.

Why subscribe?

Subscribing gives you access to:

• the weekly B-Side editions

• subscriber-only playlists

• the full archive of past episodes

• occasional longer deep-dive essays connecting the stories together

• the chance to suggest future episodes

Think of The Twelve Inch as a living book about the history of dance music — written one twelve-inch at a time.

Members also become part of the Twelve Inch community, helping keep these stories alive.

Members of the Twelve Inch Society receive an extra perk:

a personalised one-hour beatmix built around their favourite twelve-inch record.

Join the dancefloor

If you love disco, 80s dance music, forgotten club classics and the stories behind them, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe, explore the archive, share your memories, and suggest a record.

And now…

let’s put the needle on the record. 💿

— Pé Dupre

Creator of The Twelve Inch

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