Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🥁 Detroit Between Motown & Techno 🔥 The Lost Dancefloors That Changed Music History

One of the reasons I wanted to write this week’s episode is because I kept bumping into the same strange gap. When people talk about Detroit music history, the story usually goes something like this:

Motown.

Then… nothing.

Then Techno.

As if one of America’s greatest music cities simply stopped creating culture for more than a decade.

The more I dug into the story behind Brainstorm and Lovin’ Is Really My Game, the more obvious it became that this version of history doesn’t hold up. In fact, it hides one of the most fascinating and overlooked chapters in dance music history.

Detroit didn’t go quiet after Motown left for Los Angeles in 1972.

Quite the opposite.

The city developed a thriving dance culture that connected soul, funk, disco, New Wave and eventually techno. And while New York tends to get most of the attention, many of the ideas that would later define electronic dance music were already being tested on Detroit dancefloors.

Let’s open the crate a little deeper.

🪩 From Funk Bands To Disco Dancefloors

Before disco became a mainstream phenomenon, Detroit clubs were dominated by live funk bands. The city was full of R&B groups that gradually expanded their sound. Horn sections got bigger. Arrangements became richer. Strings started appearing alongside drums, guitars and keyboards.

Longtime Detroit DJ Felton Howard summed up the transformation beautifully: “If you took classical and put it with a funk band that had a full piece, you got disco.”

What I love about that quote is how perfectly it captures the reality of the period. There wasn’t a switch that suddenly flipped from funk to disco. The two worlds coexisted. Especially in Black clubs.

Howard recalled that you couldn’t simply play Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive and ignore the funk records everybody loved. If you played Gloria Gaynor, you also needed Brick House by the Commodores.

The crowd wanted both.

And for a while Detroit’s dancefloors became a fascinating balancing act between old and new.

Then economics entered the picture.

A live funk band could cost a club owner around $500 a night.

A DJ cost roughly $50.

And the DJ had every hit record in America. Suddenly the future looked very obvious. Club after club made the switch. The 20 Grand, a favourite hangout of Motown artists, embraced disco. Soon venues like Millie’s, Ethos, Wash’s Flamingo and the Pink Poodle followed.

Radio moved just as quickly.

Stations such as WJLB, WCHB, WLBS and WGPR put their DJs directly into clubs. Personalities like Tiger Dan, Jay Butler and Al Perkins became voices on the radio during the day and tastemakers on the dancefloor at night.

The connection between radio and club culture became seamless. But the most important story was happening elsewhere. And like so many important stories in dance music, it was unfolding largely out of sight.

What happened next is the missing chapter in Detroit’s musical history.

The story takes us into Black gay after-hours clubs, legendary DJs, disco battles, underground radio, and the direct line between disco and the future inventors of Techno.

Read more

🚦The Missing Chapter In Detroit’s Music History

When researching this newsletter, I almost inevitably end up back in late seventies New York.

If you’ve been hanging around The Twelve Inch for a while, you already know why. The city sits at the center of so many musical revolutions that shaped dance music between 1975 and 1995. Disco, hip-hop, club culture, remix culture, the rise of the DJ, New York often feels like the place where everything started.

But every time I disappear into another Manhattan nightclub story or another Larry Levan rabbit hole, the same question eventually pops into my head.

What was happening everywhere else?

Because while New York may have been the epicenter, the rest of America certainly wasn’t sitting still.

We’ve already visited some of those other scenes together. Philadelphia and the Philly Sound. Miami and T.K. Records. San Francisco and Los Angeles when we explored Sylvester and Casablanca Records. Chicago keeps returning too, although usually because of one infamous moment, the Disco Demolition Night.

And then there’s Detroit.

Not Motown-era Detroit, that one falls outside the scope of this newsletter. And by the early seventies, Motown had largely moved operations to Los Angeles. And not techno-era Detroit either. We all know what would happen there in the later eighties.

But what happened in between?

How exactly did Detroit travel from Motown to techno?

That missing chapter is where this week’s story begins.

And our guide into it is a one-hit wonder you probably know, even if you don’t immediately recognize the title.

Lovin’ Is Really My Game by Brainstorm.

The kind of record that starts playing and instantly triggers recognition.

“Oh that one.”

👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.

This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

If this landed in your inbox because a friend forwarded it, I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss the weekly episodes. Each one dives into a track, its story, and the culture around it.

And if you’re already enjoying the free posts, would you consider becoming a paid subscriber? Your support helps me keep researching, writing, and unearthing the stories behind the music. And You’ll get access to the weekly B-side post: the full archive and extra Subscriber Only Posts

Subscribe now

💿 One Hit Wonder… Or Not Quite?

I called Brainstorm a one hit wonder in this week’s intro. That’s not entirely true.

Yes, Lovin’ Is Really My Game was by far their biggest success. But the group actually placed several singles on the R&B charts and even managed another Top 30 dance hit afterwards. The problem was that none of those records came remotely close to the impact of Lovin’ Is Really My Game.

Timing mattered. A lot.

But we’ll get to that.

Brainstorm were a large Detroit band built around founder Chuck Overton. Nine members large, they looked much more like a traditional funk or soul collective than a sleek disco studio project. A few names immediately stand out when you look at the lineup.

One is Treaty Womack. The surname instantly made me wonder if there was a connection to Bobby Womack or Womack & Womack. After some digging though, I couldn’t find any real link.

The other name is much more significant.

Deon Estus.

Yes, that Deon Estus, later bassist for Wham! and George Michael. The same Deon Estus who would briefly emerge as a solo artist in 1988 with Heaven Help Me.

Brainstorm were signed to Tabu Records, the label run by the legendary Clarence Avant (More on him in episode 177 on the S.O.S. Band and Just Be Good To Me)

At the time, Tabu was still finding its identity. In the eighties it would become one of the defining homes of sophisticated synth-funk and modern R&B through acts like The S.O.S. Band, Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle. But in 1977, none of that existed yet.

And initially, the label didn’t seem entirely sure what to do with Brainstorm either.

Their first single, Wake Up And Be Somebody, didn’t exactly set the charts on fire. Everything changed when Tabu released a remixed twelve-inch version of Lovin’ Is Really My Game. Suddenly, Brainstorm had a hit. And for a brief moment, it looked like the band might become one of disco’s major crossover acts.

🪩 The Moment Disco Exploded

To understand why Lovin’ Is Really My Game broke through, you have to look at when it appeared.

The second half of 1977 changed disco forever.

Saturday Night Fever exploded into popular culture and transformed disco from a thriving club movement into a gigantic mainstream industry. By 1978 disco had become a four billion dollar business.

Everybody wanted in.

Labels rushed to sign acts. Studios rushed to record disco tracks. Entire careers were redirected overnight toward the dancefloor. And once the floodgates opened, competition became brutal.

Brainstorm arrived just before the tidal wave fully hit.

That timing mattered enormously.

Lovin’ Is Really My Game had enough space to break through before the market became overcrowded with disco product from every imaginable direction. Afterwards, things became much harder, especially for smaller labels like Tabu and newer acts without massive promotional machinery behind them. Their second album already showed the problem clearly.

Brainstorm’s second album “Journey To The Light”

Instead of doubling down on the dancefloor, Brainstorm moved back toward pure R&B. And this brings us to something we’ve encountered several times before in The Twelve Inch. A lot of African American artists did not initially see disco as the destination.

They made soul music. Or funk music. Or R&B.

If the records also worked on the dancefloor, great. But unlike the European producers flooding the market at the same moment, many American R&B acts were not building records specifically for club culture.

That difference became crucial by 1978.

European producers increasingly approached disco almost scientifically. The dancefloor was the entire objective. Everything revolved around momentum, BPM, arrangement and physical movement. And that’s exactly where Brainstorm suddenly found themselves caught between two worlds.

⚡ Why Lovin’ Is Really My Game Worked

While compiling this week’s companion mix, something suddenly jumped out at me.

The BPM. (Beats Per Minute)

Lovin’ Is Really My Game runs at around 138 BPM.

That’s fast.

Very fast for an R&B-rooted disco record in 1977. And the more I listened, the more something became obvious. This record sits right on the border between American funk-driven disco and the emerging Eurodisco and Hi-NRG sound that would dominate the years afterwards.

It almost accidentally predicts where dance music was heading next.

That’s probably the real secret behind the record. It worked simultaneously in multiple club environments. It fit inside predominantly Black dance clubs because of its funk and soul roots. But it also had enough energy, drive and speed to work in gay clubs increasingly embracing more aggressive Hi-NRG rhythms.

That combination was rare.

And Brainstorm never quite found it again. Their second album lost much of that dancefloor urgency. By the time they corrected course on their third album with tracks like Hot For You, the landscape had already changed again.

Hi-NRG was becoming colder, sharper and far more electronic. The world was moving toward sequencers, synthesizers and machine-driven rhythms. Brainstorm still sounded like a brilliant live band. Unfortunately for them, disco was evolving at frightening speed.

And as The Twelve Inch keeps proving over and over again, dance music constantly reinvented itself, often by accident.

🏭 Detroit’s Forgotten Disco Story

What makes Brainstorm truly fascinating though is not just the record itself. It’s what the record reveals about Detroit. Because after Motown left for Los Angeles in 1972, Detroit’s music culture did not disappear.

It simply moved underground.

Into clubs. Into DJs. Into after-hours spaces. Into dancefloors.

Detroit followed New York’s example while developing its own variation of club culture. DJs like Ken Collier became hugely important figures in shaping local nightlife and dance music culture. Venues like The Chessmate and The Factory became laboratories for what would eventually evolve into Detroit techno.

But here’s the strange thing. This entire period is often barely discussed. Music history tends to jump directly from Motown to techno as if Detroit simply went silent for more than a decade. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

There were massive disco parties. Thriving after-hours clubs. A flourishing underground dance culture. New Wave acts passing through the city. DJs experimenting with records and rhythms in ways that would eventually influence an entire generation of future techno pioneers.

Detroit’s disco years became the missing bridge between soul and machine music. And somehow that story largely disappeared beneath the global success of techno that followed. Which is exactly why records like Lovin’ Is Really My Game matter.

Not just because they’re great dance records.

But because they reveal entire forgotten worlds hiding in plain sight.

🎧 Why This Record Still Matters

Lovin’ Is Really My Game perfectly captures a moment of transition.

It still carries the warmth of seventies funk and soul, but you can already hear dance music accelerating toward something more electronic, more European, more mechanical and eventually more futuristic. In hindsight, that makes Brainstorm sound surprisingly important.

Not because they became superstars. But because they accidentally landed in the middle of a musical crossroads.

And those crossroads are often where the most fascinating stories happen.

This Week’s B-Side 🎁

This week’s subscriber-only B-Side goes much deeper into the forgotten Detroit dance scene between Motown and techno.

We’ll explore:

• The clubs and DJs shaping Detroit nightlife

• The city’s overlooked disco and New Wave culture

• Other Detroit dance records from the seventies

• How Detroit’s underground scene laid foundations for techno

• and a guided crate-digging dive through some fantastic lost Motor City dancefloor gems

Because the more I researched this story, the more it became clear that Detroit’s “missing years” may not have been missing at all.

They were simply ignored.

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It iIt’s paywalled, but for the price of 8 premium coffees, you get:

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

Join the club. I’d genuinely love to have you on board.

The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.

If you know someone who would enjoy these stories, feel free to share this post with them or pass it along on Substack Notes. Every share helps the music, and the community, travel a little further. 💿✨

Share

Let’s Keep The Discussion Going 💬

I’m curious:

• Do you remember hearing Lovin’ Is Really My Game back in the day?

• Do you hear it more as disco, funk or early Hi-NRG?

• And which American city outside New York do you think played the biggest role in shaping dance music history?

Let’s continue the conversation 👇

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

It’s fun to write about music but let’s be honest. Music is made to listen to.

Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Youtube. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre. The ideal soundtrack for…. Well whatever you like to do when you listen to dance music.

Listen to the Soundtrack of this week’s post on MIXCLOUD

Or On Youtube

Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🥁 Inside The PWL Hit Factory, Why The SAW Sound Was Impossible To Escape

One of the funniest things about Stock, Aitken & Waterman is that almost everybody claims they hated them.

Until you put one of their records on.

Then suddenly the dancefloor fills up again 😁

That contradiction has always fascinated me. Critics rolled their eyes, serious music fans complained the songs all sounded the same, yet between roughly 1986 and 1990 you simply could not escape the PWL (Pete Waterman Limited) sound. It was everywhere. Radio, clubs, school discos, TV shows, shopping streets, gay bars, roller rinks, holiday camps, bedrooms filled with Smash Hits posters, literally everywhere.

And the strangest part?

A lot of it was built from the exact same ingredients.

That was not an accident. It was the whole point.

⚡ From Hi-NRG To The PWL Production Line

SAW didn’t invent dance music. They industrialized one very specific strain of it and turned it into one of the most commercially successful pop formulas ever created.

Their roots sat deep inside three scenes that were slowly colliding during the first half of the eighties:

• American and European Hi-NRG

• Italo disco and Eurobeat

• early electronic club music coming out of Chicago and New York

Especially the Hi-NRG connection matters.

If you go back and listen to the early Divine or Hazell Dean productions, you can still hear SAW before they fully became SAW. The DNA is already there. Fast tempos. Relentless kick drums. Bright synth stabs. Music designed to keep bodies moving without interruption.

And importantly, music deeply connected to gay club culture.

That part often gets forgotten now because the later SAW productions became so mainstream, but the early momentum absolutely came from LGBTQ dancefloors. Pete Waterman himself has repeatedly acknowledged how important gay clubs were in breaking their records. Part of his early dj career was in gay clubs

By the time they hit with Dead Or Alive and later Bananarama, the formula started locking into place.

Fast BPMs, usually between 120 and 140.

Four-on-the-floor kick drums.

Punchy synth basslines.

Huge chorus hooks.

Bright keyboard textures.

Very little empty space.

Everything engineered for momentum.

The result became what people now simply call the PWL sound. And once you recognize it, you can hear it within seconds.

🎛️ The Secret Wasn’t Complexity, It Was Speed

One of the biggest misconceptions about SAW is that they were studio perfectionists endlessly sculpting sounds for weeks. In reality, speed was one of their biggest weapons.

Tracks were often written and assembled incredibly quickly. They worked inside a tightly controlled studio environment using familiar synths, presets, MIDI combinations and repeatable workflows. Instead of endlessly reinventing sounds from scratch, they focused on efficiency and recognizability.

That’s a huge part of why the records feel so connected to each other.

You hear the same sonic fingerprints constantly reappearing: Linn drum programming, DX7 textures, Emulator II sampling, gated snares, bright brass stabs, percussive synth chords and thick vocal doubling

A fun video that explains how SAW recycled the drum pattern for every production.

Today some people hear that as repetitive. But back then it created something incredibly powerful.

The moment a SAW record started, people immediately knew what kind of emotional experience they were about to get.

That matters enormously on dancefloors.

Especially in the eighties.

Because DJs were still working fully manually. No sync buttons. No visual waveforms. You were constantly looking for records that locked together naturally. And SAW productions were an absolute dream to mix.

I can still remember playing them in clubs and almost relaxing when one came on because you knew the transition would work. The rhythm tracks were so stable, so metronomic, so machine-perfect that you almost couldn’t fail.

“Right from day one, the records we were making had to be metronomic, because that’s what it was all about” would Pete Waterman later say in the legend of pop documentary

That mechanical precision became part of the addiction.

🔄 Repetition, Predictability & Why People Loved It

Read more

At some point I knew it was coming.

You can’t tell the story of dance music between 1975 and 1995 and keep avoiding Stock, Aitken & Waterman forever. I tried, believe me 😁

I carefully danced around them during the first season of The Twelve Inch. Not because they weren’t important, quite the opposite. Sometimes it was because they were too important.

And maybe also because I’ve always had a complicated relationship with their music.

I own a ridiculous amount of SAW productions on twelve inch. As a DJ they were almost impossible to resist. They mixed effortlessly. The BPM never drifted. The intros locked together perfectly. And within seconds you knew exactly what kind of record you were holding in your hands.

But then came the other side of the story.

Some of their productions were fantastic. Others were absolutely dreadful. Listening to a full SAW album from start to finish often felt like eating an entire birthday cake… alone. Fun for ten minutes, painful shortly after.

Still, love them or hate them, dance music today would not sound the same without Stock, Aitken & Waterman.

And even if you dislike half their catalogue, you still have to thank them for one thing.

They gave us Kylie Minogue.

Everybody loves Kylie.

So where do you begin with a production team that dominated the second half of the eighties?

Logically, Kylie would have made sense.

But instead I ended up somewhere slightly stranger, and maybe even more important. With Bananarama and a cover version that changed everything.

👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.

This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

If this landed in your inbox because a friend forwarded it, I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss the weekly episodes. Each one dives into a track, its story, and the culture around it.

And if you’re already enjoying the free posts, would you consider becoming a paid subscriber? Your support helps me keep researching, writing, and unearthing the stories behind the music. And You’ll get access to the weekly B-side post: the full archive and extra Subscriber Only Posts

Subscribe now

🎤 Three Girls From The Post-Punk Underground

Long before the glamorous videos, choreographed camp and global chart domination, Bananarama looked nothing like the polished pop group they would become.

The group formed in London in 1980 when childhood friends Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward moved from Bristol and met Siobhan Fahey at the London College of Fashion. Money was tight. Very tight. At one point they were nearly homeless until Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols offered them a place to stay above the former Sex Pistols rehearsal room in Denmark Street.

Which tells you almost everything you need to know about where Bananarama really came from.

Not polished pop.

Punk.

The trio moved through the same late seventies and early eighties post-punk circles as bands like The Jam and Subway Sect. They performed impromptu backing vocals, hung around clubs and absorbed the chaotic DIY spirit that was flowing through London at the time.

The Twelve Inch is the story of how dance music kept reinventing itself, often by accident.

And Bananarama were another perfect example of that. Because despite their later image, they started out much closer to underground club culture than mainstream pop.

Their first single, “Aie a Mwana”, was a Swahili cover of a song by Black Blood. It barely scraped the UK charts but became an underground club hit. Covers were already part of their DNA.

Over the next few years they regularly performed songs like “Really Saying Something”, “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)” and another song they kept returning to during rehearsals and live appearances.

“Venus”.

But there was a problem.

They didn’t want to become the cover version group. So Venus didn’t make it on to the first two albums. And even when they worked on their third album with producers Jolley & Swain, “Venus” stayed in the drawer.

At least for a while.

⚡ The Record That Changed Everything

By 1985 Bananarama had a problem. The third album was finished. The record company listened to it. And they didn’t hear enough hits.

At almost the exact same moment, another record was exploding out of clubs across the UK.

You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive.

If you were anywhere near a dancefloor in 1985, you knew it immediately. That relentless Hi-NRG pulse, those machine-tight drums, the sheer force of the production. It sounded mechanical, synthetic and euphoric at the same time.

Bananarama instantly understood what they wanted.

Take “Venus”.

Make it sound like that.

They first approached Jolley & Swain with the idea. The producers thought it couldn’t work. Then they went to the relatively new production trio behind “You Spin Me Round”.

Stock, Aitken & Waterman.

At first, they said no too.

Ironically, despite the success of Dead Or Alive, SAW were still struggling financially. Pete Waterman later admitted they genuinely believed artists would be lining up outside their studio after scoring a UK number one.

Nobody came.

So eventually they accepted the job.

And dance music history quietly changed direction.

🎛️ The SAW Formula Begins To Lock In

The story of Stock Aitken Waterman almost feels impossible in hindsight.

More than 100 UK Top 40 hits. Tens of millions of records sold. A production sound that became one of the defining musical languages of the late eighties.

But in the beginning they were simply trying to merge club music with pop songwriting.

​”Our plan was to write a song and put it on a dance beat so you can capture radio and clubs” said Mike Stock

That sentence explains almost everything.

Pete Waterman brought DJ culture, A&R instincts and business ambition. Mike Stock was the core songwriter. Matt Aitken handled much of the musicianship and studio work. Their roots were deeply connected to Hi-NRG club culture. Early productions for Divine and Hazell Dean had already become favourites in gay clubs, where SAW first built momentum.

But “Venus” would become something different.

Not underground.

Global.

🌍 Venus Goes Nuclear

The original “Venus” by Shocking Blue had already been a worldwide hit in 1970. But Bananarama weren’t interested in nostalgia. They wanted adrenaline.

The first SAW version apparently sounded too different from “You Spin Me Round”. The girls hated it. So overnight, Pete Waterman and the team made a radical decision. They lifted the rhythm track feel directly toward the Dead Or Alive template.

And suddenly everything clicked.

‘‘As soon as we heard Dead Or Alive’s ‘’You Spin Me Round’‘, we knew – that’s where we’re going. I loved that record. At that point, we were all on the same page. It was like, who produced Dead Or Alive’s single? Let’s do ‘’Venus’‘ like that. We’d been struggling with that third album and we didn’t have a lead single and suddenly we had a single and it turned everything around.”said Siobhan Fahey

If you listen to both records today, the similarities are impossible to miss. And yes, that became part of the criticism surrounding SAW for years. The idea that many productions were essentially variations of the same formula.

But here’s the thing.

Formulas work because they capture something people physically respond to.

And SAW understood dancefloors better than most rock critics ever did.

“Venus” exploded worldwide.

Number one in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Mexico and South Africa. A dancefloor smash across Europe. Number one on the US Dance Chart.

And suddenly Bananarama transformed too. The women who once wore overalls and moved through post-punk circles now appeared in one of the campest pop videos of the decade, dressed as goddesses, vampires and devils, surrounded by shirtless men and exaggerated choreography.

And they loved every second of it.

‘’That was the first time we really went for an extravaganza in the costume department; obviously triggered by the lyrics of the song. And I think that’s where we discovered our enjoyment of camp​​.’‘ said Siobhan Fahey

Apparently they recorded the vocals in just two takes. The result became one of the defining crossover records of the decade.

🔥 Why “Venus” Mattered So Much

What made “Venus” important wasn’t just the success.

It was the blueprint.

SAW had figured out how to package underground dance energy into pure mainstream pop without removing the bodily impact of club music.

That was the breakthrough.

Radio loved it. MTV loved it. Clubs loved it.

And millions of people who never stepped inside a nightclub were suddenly dancing to Hi-NRG production techniques born in gay clubs and underground dance culture.

That crossover changed pop forever.

Without records like “Venus”, you probably don’t get the full late eighties SAW explosion. Maybe not the same Kylie phenomenon either. And certainly not the idea that dance producers could completely dominate mainstream pop culture.

That bridge between underground rhythm culture and mass-market pop became one of the defining stories of the next decade.

And in many ways, we still live inside that blueprint today.

This Week’s B-Side 🎁

This week’s subscriber-only B-Side goes much deeper into the Stock, Aitken & Waterman machine.

• The Stock, Aitken & Waterman sound. How did they create it and why was it so appealing?

• Why where they so important in the evolution of dance music?

Plus a special playlist with the best SAW productions for your weekend listening.

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It iIt’s paywalled, but for the price of 8 premium coffees, you get:

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

Join the club. I’d genuinely love to have you on board.

The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.

If you know someone who would enjoy these stories, feel free to share this post with them or pass it along on Substack Notes. Every share helps the music, and the community, travel a little further. 💿✨

Share

Let’s Keep The Discussion Going 💬

Did you love Stock, Aitken & Waterman, hate them, or both at the same time like me? 😁

What’s your favourite SAW production?

And do you think “Venus” still works on a dancefloor today?

I’d genuinely love to hear your memories, favourites and hot takes in the comments.

Let’s continue the conversation 👇

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

It’s fun to write about music but let’s be honest. Music is made to listen to.

Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Youtube. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre. The ideal soundtrack for…. Well whatever you like to do when you listen to dance music.

Listen to the Soundtrack of this week’s post on MIXCLOUD

Or On Youtube

Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🎤 Message Music, Philadelphia International Records and How Disco Tried to Change the World ✨

One of the biggest misconceptions about disco is that it was only about escapism.

That the music was all glitter, mirrorballs, dancing and hedonism.

And yes, disco absolutely offered escape. Sometimes desperately needed escape. But if you dive deep enough into the roots of Black American dance music in the seventies, you quickly discover something else entirely.

A part of the music was trying to say something. Message Music

Trying to uplift communities.

Trying to explain what life felt like in America’s inner cities.

Trying to warn, inspire, educate and mobilise.

And few labels embodied that idea more completely than Philadelphia International Records. Because if Motown often polished Black music so it could comfortably enter white American living rooms, Philadelphia International Records brought politics, pride, spirituality and social consciousness directly onto the dancefloor.

Which makes “Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto” far more than just another disco record with a fantastic bass line. It was the culmination of an entire philosophy.

✊ The roots of Message Music

Long before R&B became openly political, the foundations of “message music” already existed deep inside Black American culture. Church traditions, gospel music and oral storytelling had always used songs to teach lessons, mobilise communities and transmit collective experience. Music was never just entertainment. It functioned as a form of shared speech, especially in (slave)communities where speaking openly was often dangerous or impossible.

But things began shifting dramatically during the Civil Rights era.

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A forgotten chart mystery with one of the greatest bass lines in disco history

Researching The Twelve Inch sometimes delivers genuine surprises. This week gave me one of the biggest so far. I was absolutely convinced that this week’s song had been a worldwide Top 10 hit in 1977. The moment I started assembling the shortlist for this first batch of episodes, it went in immediately.

“Of course this classic has to be in there,” I thought.

Because in my head, and probably in the heads of many people who grew up in Belgium or the Netherlands, this is one of the most famous Philly Sound dance records ever made.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that “Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto” by the Philadelphia All Stars was barely a hit anywhere except the Benelux, where it reached the Top 10.

To be fair, it’s not the first time this has happened while writing this newsletter. In the first season of The Twelve Inch I devoted an episode to Love Epidemic by the Trammps, another record that somehow only exploded commercially in Belgium and the Netherlands.

But this one felt different.

And that has everything to do with the way I first encountered the song.

🎛️ The stereo upstairs at my aunt’s house

My nephew, eight years older than me, had a fantastic stereo system and a proper turntable. He had a weekend job, which meant he had both the money and the obsession required to buy quality equipment and vinyl records.

Whenever I stayed at my aunt’s house, one of the things I looked forward to most was hearing the latest additions to his collection.

Now, our tastes weren’t completely aligned.

By then I was already falling deeply in love with disco, as you probably know by now. My nephew wasn’t exactly a disco kid. But he wasn’t allergic to it either. We are talking about the years before Saturday Night Fever, when disco still existed in a more fluid form. As far as I remember, he only owned one twelve inch single.

That record was Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto by the Philadelphia International All Stars.

And the moment the needle dropped, I heard the sound that would forever define what Philly Soul sounded like in my head. That groove became my benchmark.

Years later, when I started DJ’ing, Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto became one of those records I could always rely on. In Belgium and the Netherlands, dropping this record on a dancefloor was one of the easiest ways imaginable to fill it instantly.

Because over here, this wasn’t just another soul record.

This was quintessential Philly Sound. Quintessential disco.

And it stayed that way for decades.

Which immediately raises the big question at the heart of this week’s episode.

❓ Why did this record become huge only in the Benelux?

That’s the mystery.

Why did this record resonate so strongly in Belgium and the Netherlands while barely making an impact elsewhere?

Finding an exact answer is difficult, but before we get there, let’s first talk about the song itself. Because even if you have never heard it before, I’m fairly certain you are about to fall in love with that bass line and the sweet Philadelphia Soul Sound. And behind the groove sits a much bigger story.

A story about New York in crisis, socially conscious soul music, urban decay, Black America in the seventies, and the producers who helped shape disco into something far more meaningful than many people still assume today.

Because The Twelve Inch is the story of how dance music kept reinventing itself, often by accident.

👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.

This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

If this landed in your inbox because a friend forwarded it, I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss the weekly episodes. Each one dives into a track, its story, and the culture around it.

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✊ Message music on the dancefloor

Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto is not just a story about the Philly Sound. It’s also a story about what was once called “message music”.

The Philadelphia Sound was smooth, lush and danceable, but its lyrics often went far beyond romance and escapism. Gamble & Huff believed soul music could carry social meaning without losing its groove. And Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto may be one of the clearest examples of that philosophy.

Released in 1977 on Philadelphia International Records, the song brought together a large group of artists from the label roster in what almost feels like a prototype for later charity records such as We Are The World or Do They Know It’s Christmas? The Philadelphia All Stars included: Archie Bell, Billy Paul, Dee Dee Sharp Gamble, Lou Rawls, Teddy Pendergrass and The O’Jays.

The message itself was simple but powerful.

The “ghetto” in the title was not presented as a place of shame, but as a community worth protecting, rebuilding and reclaiming. The song called for pride, solidarity and responsibility within Black inner-city neighborhoods.

Change begins with the people who live there.

And that immediately connects this record to one of the most important themes in disco history. Because one of the reasons New York became the epicentre of disco culture in the seventies was precisely the difficult situation the city found itself in.

🏙️ New York in the seventies, disco born from crisis

There’s often a connection between difficult economic times and the rise of dance music.

It makes sense.

If life is hard and the city around you feels like it’s collapsing, people need places where they can release pressure, forget reality for a few hours and feel alive again.

Dance music has always been incredibly good at providing that escape.

If time travel ever becomes possible, seventies New York would absolutely be one of the destinations I would want to visit. But I also fully realise that for somebody who grew up in a relatively quiet and provincial Antwerp, it would probably come as quite a shock. Because New York in the seventies was not an easy place.

The decade was marked by stagflation, the dreaded combination of economic stagnation and inflation. Prices rose while opportunities disappeared. At the same time, wealthier residents were leaving the city for the suburbs, shrinking the tax base exactly when social needs were increasing dramatically.

The city moved toward bankruptcy.

The federal government was reluctant to intervene.

Strikes became common.

One of them was the sanitation worker strike that left mountains of garbage piling up in the streets. And this is where the opening of Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto becomes fascinating.

Like many people, I originally assumed Lou Rawls was referring to the sanitation problems happening around 1977. But he was actually referring to the famous sanitation strike of 1968, the one that produced the notorious garbage crisis Time Magazine would later describe as “Fragrant days in Fun City” 😁

Lou Rawls mentions a “recent visit”, which confused me completely at first. Unless he had access to an early prototype of the Twelve Inch Time Machine, that obviously makes little chronological sense 😁

But ultimately, the exact timing matters less than the broader symbolism. Because the song’s purpose was much bigger than a single strike.

“Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto” was built around the idea that communities needed both a physical and a mental cleanup.

And Philadelphia International Records went even further.

Proceeds from the record were directed toward real neighborhood cleanup programs in Philadelphia itself. That was highly unusual in 1977.

This wasn’t just symbolic activism.

This was a major label directly connecting music, commerce and community action.

🎹 Gamble & Huff, the architects of Philadelphia Soul

It’s impossible to tell this story without talking about Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. Together they created the Philadelphia Soul sound, one of the most influential styles in modern Black music. A lush, orchestral, groove-driven sound that shaped soul, disco, funk, R&B and eventually hip-hop.

Kenneth Gamble was born in Philadelphia in 1943. Leon Huff was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1942. They met in the Philadelphia music scene during the early sixties, where Gamble worked as a singer and Huff as a session pianist. Their chemistry clicked immediately.

What makes their story even more remarkable is that Kenneth Gamble could barely play guitar beyond a few basic chords and could neither read nor write music. Leon Huff was a brilliant pianist, but he also struggled with formal musical notation.

Yet together they built one of the most important Black-owned labels in music history.

In 1971 they founded Philadelphia International Records, distributed by Columbia Records. The label became home to an extraordinary roster: The O’Jays, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass, Billy Paul, Lou Rawls, Patti LaBelle, Phyllis Hyman and MFSB, the legendary house band behind the Philly groove.

Their productions blended sophistication with accessibility.

Songs like Back Stabbers, Love Train, For The Love Of Money, If You Don’t Know Me By Now and Me And Mrs. Jones became cultural landmarks.

But what separated Gamble & Huff from many of their contemporaries was their insistence on social consciousness. Tracks like Wake Up Everybody, Message In Our Music and Give The People What They Want openly addressed poverty, racism and social responsibility. Kenneth Gamble in particular believed deeply that music should be used as a force for positive change.

And Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto may be one of the purest examples of that belief.

📻 So why did the Benelux embrace it so strongly?

This is where the story becomes especially interesting.

The song barely crossed over internationally. It reached only #34 in the UK. In the United States it stalled at #91 on the Billboard Hot 100 and only reached #26 on the Disco Action chart.

And yet in Belgium and the Netherlands it became a genuine classic reaching n°7 in the pop chart.

Why?

Part of the answer probably lies in the unique radio culture of the Benelux during the seventies. In episode 132, where I discussed Love Epidemic by The Trammps, I already explained how many Flemish listeners regularly tuned into Dutch radio stations.

And one name keeps appearing when researching this period:

Ferry Maat.

Ferry Maat became one of the most important dj’s & ambassadors of soul and disco music in the Netherlands. Starting on pirate radio before moving to mainstream broadcasting, he hosted the hugely influential Soul Show every Thursday evening.

No, I have absolutely no idea how he came up with such a complicated title 😁

While detailed playlists are difficult to reconstruct today, I strongly suspect Ferry Maat played a crucial role in pushing this record into the Dutch mainstream.

But it also landed on fertile ground.

Because in the Benelux, Philly Soul disco became the benchmark for what classic disco should sound like. Warm bass lines, lush strings, soulful vocals and a groove deeply rooted in Black American music. That sound connected immediately with audiences here.

And honestly, decades later, the reaction on dancefloors still proved exactly the same thing.

🎧 The strange American underperformance

What still genuinely puzzles me, though, is the muted American reaction.

Most of the artists involved had already proven multiple times that they could cross over commercially.

The record itself has/had an incredible groove.

The message was strong.

The production was classic Gamble & Huff.

And yet the song never really exploded outside the R&B market. It did reach #4 on the R&B charts, so it clearly resonated strongly with Black urban audiences. But the broader crossover never happened.

Why?

I honestly don’t fully know.

Maybe the BPM was slightly too slow for certain disco clubs?

Maybe the socially conscious theme made it harder to market as pure escapist dance music?

Maybe the collaborative “all stars” format made it feel less like a single artist event?

Or maybe some records simply arrive at exactly the right moment in certain countries and never fully connect elsewhere.

That happens more often than we think.

🌍 Why this record still matters

Even without massive American chart success, Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto remains hugely important in the history of dance music. Because this record showed that disco could carry social meaning without sacrificing pleasure.

It connected activism with the dancefloor.

It turned a commercial release into a tool for community action.

And in many ways, it anticipated later developments in conscious hip-hop, charity records and socially engaged Black music. At the same time, it built directly on the legacy of artists like Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye. The Philadelphia International All Stars represented something bigger than entertainment.

They represented the idea that soul music itself had responsibilities.

That art and community should not be separated. And that dance music could still say something meaningful about the world around it.

The influence of Gamble & Huff remains enormous: Their orchestral arrangements helped shape disco itself and influenced producers like Giorgio Moroder and Nile Rodgers. Their catalogue became foundational material for hip-hop sampling. And they elevated the role of the producer into something far beyond technical supervision.

Gamble & Huff did not simply create hit records.

They built a sound.

A city’s musical identity.

A philosophy.

Philadelphia gave the world soul.

And Gamble & Huff gave the world Philadelphia.

This Week’s B-Side 🎁

This week’s B-side goes deeper into:

• Message Music, and how socially conscious Black music really was during the seventies

• The crucial role Philadelphia International Records played in the evolution of disco

• Why Salsoul and PIR are much more connected than most people realise

• A guided listening dive into the Gamble & Huff catalogue for your weekend soundtrack

And trust me, once you enter that catalogue, it becomes very difficult to leave again 😁

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It iIt’s paywalled, but for the price of 8 premium coffees, you get:

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

Join the club. I’d genuinely love to have you on board.

The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.

If you know someone who would enjoy these stories, feel free to share this post with them or pass it along on Substack Notes. Every share helps the music, and the community, travel a little further. 💿✨

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💬 Let’s keep the cleaning conversation going

Did Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto become a classic where you grew up?

Do you also associate Philly Soul with the “purest” form of disco?

And what do you think explains why some records become massive in one country while barely registering elsewhere?

I’m also curious:

What is your favourite Gamble & Huff production?

And are there records you were convinced were worldwide hits, only to discover later they really weren’t?

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

It’s fun to write about music but let’s be honest. Music is made to listen to.

Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Youtube. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre. The ideal soundtrack for…. Well whatever you like to do when you listen to dance music.

Listen to the Soundtrack of this week’s post on MIXCLOUD

Or On Youtube

The Twelve Inch is not only about artists, genres, musical evolutions, or the bigger historical picture. It’s also about the joy of discovering, or rediscovering, the records that filled dancefloors without necessarily crossing over into the pop charts.

Some stories are simply too small for a full A-side and B-side deep dive. Yet the tracks themselves still deserve a spotlight. So from time to time, I’ll be dropping these smaller deep dives instead of the regular extended episodes.

And to keep some sort of connecting thread between these hidden gems, each selection will revolve around an overarching theme.

Looking at the titles, I suspect the theme of this episode won’t be too difficult to figure out 😁

Click on the covers and it’ll lead you to the (sun) music

Walking On Sunshine (Extended Mix) (Eddy Grant)

Are you like me, getting completely giddy when, after a winter that lasted far too long, the first warm sunny days finally arrive? That sudden reconnection with light and warmth always does wonders for my mood and, it seems, for everybody around me too. It feels like walking on clouds or maybe more appropriately… Walking On Sunshine.

Ok, this may well be the tackiest introduction I’ve ever written 😂 But it’s true. Spring is probably my favourite season. Mostly because it compensates for my complete lack of love for winter. Yes, yes, I know, winter can be cosy. Sitting around an open fireplace, binge-watching Netflix series and all that. The problem is: we don’t have an open fireplace in this house and I’ve never really been someone who enjoys binge-watching series.

I’d much rather spend my evenings doing something creative. Listening to music, putting a mix together, reading a good book, writing…

Which is good news for you because it means I keep digging into the stories behind the dance music that flourished between 1975 and 1995 😁

And that brings us to this second batch of deep cuts, gathered around one obvious theme: sun/sunshine.

The first track is probably the best known of the bunch, although perhaps not in its original version by Eddy Grant. Because when the song appeared in 1979 as one of the singles from his third album, it surprisingly wasn’t a hit.

That changed in 1982 when Arthur Baker’s project Rockers Revenge released their cover version. I’ll return to that story in a future weekly episode because it deserves one of its own. Suffice to say that the remake stormed the European charts and became a major dance hit in the US.

Since then, the original has slowly undergone a kind of rehabilitation. One of those records people now look back on and say: how on earth did this not become a hit?

I even crossed paths with that story myself years later when I was handling catalogue at Warner Music Belgium. We released yet another Eddy Grant best-of compilation and the UK Warner office, who owned the repertoire, decided to commission a series of remixes in an attempt to relaunch the track as a single.

But once again, no luck.

And honestly, they probably should have known better because they had already tried the exact same thing in 1989, only reaching number 63 in the UK.

Which still leaves the obvious question:

Why didn’t this record chart in 1979?

It had everything. A fantastic groove, a perfect disco feel, and it was even released during the spring of that year.

👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.

This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

If this landed in your inbox because a friend forwarded it, I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the posts.

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L.A. Sunshine (Robert Quimet Remix) Aura

The title says Deep Cuts and song number two is probably about as deep as we can go 😁

Aura Urziceanu, who at one point also performed under the wonderfully cosmic name Aura Borealis, yes really 😁, was a Romanian jazz and folk vocalist born in Bucharest. She was fortunate enough to marry a Canadian, which allowed her to leave the communist “workers paradise” Nicolae Ceaușescu had created in Romania.

Once in North America, her career took a remarkable turn. She made her debut at Carnegie Hall with Duke Ellington’s orchestra and would go on to perform alongside major jazz names such as Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Hank Jones, Quincy Jones and Dizzy Gillespie.

Which immediately raises the obvious question.

How does someone with that résumé end up recording this rather modest little disco tune?

Well… information is scarce, dear readers 😁

Her recording career after leaving Romania in 1972 took her through a series of small labels during the seventies and early eighties. In 1978 she recorded an album for a newly founded Canadian label called Change Records, eventually distributed by MCA in Canada.

I couldn’t find much information about the album itself, or even the other tracks on it. But considering the period, and judging from this single, my educated guess is that this was simply an attempt to tap into the disco boom.

This particular track was chosen as the single and they even commissioned a remix by Robert Ouimet, one of the key figures of the Montreal disco scene and DJ at the city’s legendary club Limelight.

And before confusion sets in 😁

This is not the same as Aurra, with two r’s, the side project connected to the funk band Slave on Salsoul Records.

They may not have had a Borealis…

but they definitely had more hits.

Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In - Disco Spectacular aka Evelyn “Champaign” King

At the height of disco, when the major record companies fully jumped onto the disco train, it sometimes felt as if any theme could be turned into a disco record.

In 1979, RCA Records released a disco album built around songs from the musical Hair. The idea was not to recreate the soundtrack itself, but to transform the material into one continuous disco experience, complete with disco arrangements and contributions from artists such as Evelyn Champagne King, The Brothers, Vicki Sue Robinson, the New York Community Choir, and Revelacion.

The album was recorded in February 1979 at RCA Studios in New York and clearly tried to tap into the post-Saturday Night Fever craze. The enormous success of that soundtrack triggered a wave of similar projects from other record companies.

So RCA tried the same trick with Hair.

The problem was that it wasn’t really connected to the hugely successful 1979 film version of Hair. In fact, none of the versions featured in the movie itself appeared on this album and, unlike Saturday Night Fever, Hair wasn’t really a disco film to begin with.

There was another issue too. RCA hadn’t exactly assembled a superstar cast. Vicki Sue Robinson had enjoyed success earlier in the decade but by 1979 she was no longer a major chart presence. The only artist truly on the rise was Evelyn Champagne King, who at that exact moment was breaking through with “Shame.”

What makes the whole thing even stranger is that RCA barely promoted the artists themselves. The tracks were simply credited to Disco Spectacular.

Still, you can safely assume that the track I selected is sung by Evelyn “Champagne” King. It later appeared on several of her compilations and, by some distance, it was also the record from the album that connected most strongly with the dancefloor.

The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.

If you know someone who would enjoy these posts, feel free to share this post with them or pass it along on Substack Notes. Every share helps the music, and the community, travel a little further. 💿✨

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Sunshine Hotel (Extended) Richard T.Bear

Only this week I was reacting to a post by Andres about blind-buying records, admitting that I used to do exactly that when I was very young and spending afternoons roaming the import record shops in Antwerp.

The Vinyl Room

Method to the Madness

I was recently chatting with fellow record collectors in a forum you probably haven’t heard of in a while: real life…

Read more

24 days ago · 15 likes · 21 comments · Andres

The reason was simple. Those shops stocked huge amounts of cut-outs, records dumped overseas by American labels after the disco backlash. Most of them I only knew by artist name or title. Some I didn’t know at all.

That’s how I stumbled upon the twelve inch of Richard T. Bear and Sunshine Hotel.

It became one of my most treasured twelve inches.

There’s just something about that record. The groove, his voice, the atmosphere… it pulls you in immediately. Or maybe it’s simply the subject matter. I do love the sun 😁

Now, at this point, you probably expect the classic late seventies story: a rock artist makes an awkward disco detour, the record flops, and everybody involved spends the next decade pretending it never happened.

But that’s not really what happened here.

Richard T. Bear, born Richard Gerstein in New York City and raised in the Caribbean, started out playing open mic nights in Greenwich Village. Gradually he worked his way deeper into the music business, becoming tour manager for Carly Simon, opening for Jeff Beck and Richie Havens, and even contributing to Havens’ breakthrough album Mixed Bag.

After a short stay in London, he returned to the US and eventually ended up in Los Angeles, where he was introduced to Pat Benatar and worked on demos that helped her land her recording contract. Soon afterwards, he signed his own deal with RCA Records and released his debut album Red, Black & Blue.

The single?

Sunshine Hotel.

Now let’s be honest 😁 Richard T. Bear was not exactly an obvious disco star when this twelve inch appeared in 1978. First of all, he looked very much like… well… a bear 😁 Let’s just say shaving did not appear high on the priority list. Secondly, looking at the artists he was associated with, his world was clearly rock and pop, not disco or R&B.

So how did we end up with such a first-class disco gem?

The answer lies in the remix.

Not by one of the superstar remixers of the era, but by Warren Schatz. We’ll encounter him again in a future episode where he remixes the disco adventure of a major Country & Western artist. Warren may not have been a club DJ, but he absolutely knew how to shape a dance record.

The result was good enough to push Sunshine Hotel to number 41 on the US Dance Chart. No crossover success, though. So for RCA, this wasn’t considered a hit. Which explains why copies later flooded the cut-out bins.

My luck 😁

As for our furry friend Richard? He continued recording for RCA, wrote songs for and with other artists, and eventually signed with the German label Teldec in the mid eighties. There he released the album The Runner.

And here comes the kicker.

The title track was written by Giorgio Moroder.

Not produced by him, but by Moroder engineer Juergen Koppers. And yes, it sounds very mid-eighties Moroder. Think Flashdance.

It wasn’t a hit. Honestly, it isn’t even a particularly great song 😁

But still…

he got to work with Giorgio Moroder. How cool is that?

And more importantly for today’s story, he made this week’s deep cuts selection because Sunshine Hotel genuinely sounds like sunshine. Warm temperatures, summer evenings, and that first drink on a terrace after winter finally disappears. You can hear it all in the groove.

Take It To The Zoo (Extended) Sunshine

For the final track in this selection, we move to the other major disco soundtrack of the late seventies: Thank God It’s Friday.

The soundtrack was a huge project for Casablanca Records, something I already touched upon in my Casablanca series.

The obvious blockbuster from the soundtrack was, of course, Last Dance by Donna Summer. But this final deep cut is connected to Donna in a much more direct and personal way.

Sunshine was a short-lived disco group made up largely of Donna Summer’s backing vocalists. The members included Carlena Williams and Donna’s sisters Linda Gaines (now Lotman), Dara Bernard, and Mary Ellen Bernard.

Their moment of chart success came in 1978 when “Take It to the Zoo” reached number one on the Billboard Disco chart as part of the soundtrack:

“Last Dance / After Dark / Thank God It’s Friday / Take It to the Zoo”

The song appeared both in the film and on the soundtrack album and was co-written by Donna Summer herself, together with Bruce Sudano and Joe Bean Esposito. Donna also sings backing vocals on the track.

An album titled Sunshine Watching Daddy Dance was planned but pulled at the very last moment.

Mary Ellen Bernard would continue performing with Donna Summer right up until Donna’s death on May 17, 2012. At Donna’s funeral at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Linda Gaines Lotman, Mary Ellen Bernard, Dara Bernard, and Jenette Yancey performed “We’ve Come This Far By Faith.”

Why the album was cancelled remains unclear.

There are several possible explanations. It may simply have fallen victim to the full PolyGram takeover period, when many projects and contracts were suddenly shelved. It could also have been collateral damage from Donna Summer’s increasingly acrimonious split with Casablanca Records. Or perhaps the label simply decided, in the aftermath of the disco backlash, that the album would be too difficult to market.

Whatever the reason, this single remains one of the very few places where you can really hear the wider Donna Summer family together on record.

And if you listen closely, you’ll also hear them throughout Donna’s wonderful live album Live And More, where her sisters provide the backing vocals. Donna even introduces them during the show.

So tell me, which of these tracks brings a little sunshine into your life? And which sunshine-themed (disco) gem did I miss in this selection?

I’d genuinely love to hear your picks, memories, and hidden favorites ☀️

Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🎛️ The Fairlight CMI, How Two Seconds Of Sound Changed Everything 🎹

The Twelve Inch is the story of how dance music kept reinventing itself, often by accident.

🎯 The Machine Behind The Moment

This week’s story brought us to a very specific moment.

A Friday night. A studio session. Two seconds of sound.

And suddenly, Beat Box exists.

But that raises the real question.

👉 What kind of machine allows you to take two seconds of sound… and build the future of dance music from it?

⚙️ Context Build, The Birth Of The Fairlight

To answer that, we need to go back to the late seventies.

Microprocessors were slowly entering everyday life. Music was at a turning point. And somewhere in Australia, in a grandmother’s garage 😁, two young engineers started experimenting: Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel.

They worked overlooking Sydney Harbour, where a hydrofoil ferry named Fairlight crossed the water. That name would stick.

🧪 The Accidental Invention

Their original goal?

Read more

If you look at the dance music scene in eighties England, three producers stand out as truly shaping the sound of the decade. I’ve zoomed in on Martin Rushent a few times already, and in two weeks I’ll take the dreaded step 😁 and dive into Stock Aitken Waterman.

But one thing surprised me. Across all the songs I’ve covered so far, I hadn’t yet done a proper episode on a Trevor Horn project.

We’ve crossed his path, of course. Sometimes indirectly, Adamski, Naked Eyes, Scritti Politti. A bit more directly with the production that never quite happened with Wendy & Lisa, and as co-producer of Paul McCartney’s Flowers In The Dirt, from which I picked that very un-McCartney track “Où Est Le Soleil.”

But this week, we go deeper.

Because the band at the centre of this story is not only directly connected to Trevor Horn, it also explains why he became such a crucial figure in the evolution of dance music.

The track I’ll be discussing is one of the most influential records we’ve encountered so far. It didn’t just fit into the eighties, it helped define them. It set a new benchmark, it sounded like nothing else at the time, and it was the very first release on Trevor Horn’s own, and soon legendary, label ZTT Records.

Behind it was a pop group.

A pop group that was, at the same time, completely extraordinary and very ordinary.

No central vocalist. No traditional songwriter. Music built from car engines, found sounds, and fragments of reality. Powered by banks of cutting-edge samplers that, at the time, cost thousands of pounds. And all of it wrapped in a very British sense of humour, confronting the public with dense essays and promotional images that didn’t even feature the band members.

Today, I’m zooming in on the story of Art Of Noise and their first release Into Battle With…, introducing two essential tracks, “Moments In Love” and the record at the heart of this episode, “Beat Box.”

A track as influential as Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Martin Rushent.

Their music was built on samples, yet in a twist that feels almost inevitable, they would go on to become one of the most sampled acts of all time.

This is the story of one of the most important and consequential left turns in the history of dance music.

👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.

This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

If this landed in your inbox because a friend forwarded it, I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss the weekly episodes. Each one dives into a track, its story, and the culture around it.

And if you’re already enjoying the free posts, would you consider becoming a paid subscriber? Your support helps me keep researching, writing, and unearthing the stories behind the music. And You’ll get access to the weekly B-side post: the full archive and extra Subscriber Only Posts

Subscribe now

🔊 The Art Of Starting The Noise

There are songs that freeze a moment in time. You remember exactly where you were, what you were doing, and how it felt when you first heard them. I can trace that moment for quite a few of my favourite records. Beat Box is one of them.

I first heard it on Dutch radio, on a Wednesday afternoon show I didn’t usually tune into. It simply didn’t play enough of the music I was looking for. But that day, for some reason, I listened. And they played one track that changed everything.

“Beat Box.”

I had already heard plenty of synth-driven records by then. But this felt different. On another level entirely. It sounded almost industrial. Raw, mechanical, yet at the same time driven by an irresistible groove. It felt organised and disorganised at once. Noise and music, colliding perfectly.

And that immediately raised a question.

Who are these guys?

It wasn’t an easy one to answer. They stayed hidden behind masks, philosophical essays, and a very British sense of humour.

Behind the scenes were Gary Langan, J. J. Jeczalik, and Anne Dudley. Studio specialists who had already worked on several Trevor Horn productions. They hadn’t set out to form a band. But during one of those sessions, with a new tool at their disposal, something happened.

A moment of experimentation that would quietly lay the foundations for what would become Art Of Noise (and a big part of eighties (dance) music)

🎛️ The Art Of Finding The Noise

That tool was the Fairlight CMI, and the production was 90125 by Yes, released in 1983.

We were at the very beginning of the digital age. Drum machines, sequencers, and more affordable synthesizers were appearing everywhere. But one invention stood out above all the others.

The sampler.

🤖The Machine That Changed Everything

The Fairlight CMI didn’t just add new sounds. It redefined what sound could be.

With it, short digital recordings, samples, could be played across a keyboard, while a computer reshaped their pitch, tone, and texture. Suddenly, you could turn a voice into a melody, a noise into harmony and everyday life into music

Anything could become musical material.

Trevor Horn immediately understood the implications. While others used samples as decoration, Horn and his collaborators saw the bigger picture.

You could build entire compositions from them.

I’ll go deeper into the Fairlight and its impact on dance music in this week’s B-side.

🎹 From Buggles To Yes

By 1983, Trevor Horn was still relatively new as a producer. Before that, he had a short but successful synth-pop career with The Buggles, alongside keyboardist Geoff Downes. They only made two albums, but their journey took an unexpected turn. Both joined Yes for one album and one tour in 1980. That album was fittingly titled Drama.

Horn later described that tour as far from the highlight of his career 😁. Yes would soon split (two facts wholly unrelated). But in 1983, after a series of twists, they regrouped to record 90125, with Trevor Horn as producer.

It became their biggest success.

Driven by their biggest hit ever: Owner Of A Lonely Heart

🔁 The Twelve Inch Breakthrough

A large part of that success came from the twelve inch version.

Traditionally, producing and remixing were/are very different skills, and most producers didn’t excel at both. Trevor Horn was one of the rare exceptions. In fact, you could argue that his remix work was even more groundbreaking than his productions. And once again, the Fairlight played a central role.

If you want to hear just how revolutionary it was, the Red & Blue mix of “Owner Of A Lonely Heart” is the perfect starting point. It wasn’t his first twelve inch, but it remains one of his most iconic.

⚡ Ground Zero For Art Of Noise

The sessions for 90125 would become ground zero for Art Of Noise.

One Friday night, after a session, Gary Langan told J. J. Jeczalik about an idea. There was a discarded recording of a drum riff, played with full force by Yes drummer Alan White. Instead of erasing it, Gary wondered:

What if we load the entire drum riff into the Fairlight and cut it into pieces?

Today, that sounds routine. In 1983, it had never been done before.

🧪 Two Seconds That Changed Music

JJ, eager to go home, reluctantly agreed to help.

The original drum recording already sounded huge. Deep, cavernous, completely different from the small, rigid drum machine sounds that dominated at the time. The Fairlight could only sample two seconds. But that was enough.

They captured a single drum, reshaped it, and built the rhythmic backbone of what would become Beat Box.

Then they started layering fragments of a tennis match, archived studio sounds and even the sound of Gary’s car engine starting. That engine sample would later become the equivalent of a guitar solo.

Gary jokingly called it: “Cantata for VW starter” 😁

🚀 The Moment It Clicked

When Trevor Horn heard the demo, he immediately knew something special had happened.

And the timing was perfect.

He was already planning his own label and had secured a distribution deal with Island Records. What he needed now were artists and ideas strong enough to launch it. When Chris Blackwell of Island Records heard the track, he didn’t hesitate. After testing it in a New York club and seeing the reaction, he told Horn: this should be your first release.

And at that moment, a fifth figure entered the story.

Paul Morley.

🧠 The Art Of Marketing The Noise

When you look at Art Of Noise and ZTT Records, one question naturally comes to mind.

What mattered most, the music or the marketing?

Because there’s no denying it. The marketing machine that defined ZTT’s identity, starting with Art Of Noise, would later fuel the massive success of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. At the centre of it all was Paul Morley.

✍️ From Critic To Architect

Morley began his career at the New Musical Express, where he quickly stood out. His writing wasn’t just about songs. It was intellectual, provocative, often influenced by art theory and politics. He didn’t just review music, he analysed culture.

In doing so, he helped redefine music journalism into something much closer to cultural criticism. Ironically, he hadn’t always been a fan of Trevor Horn. At one point, he dismissed him as the “dustbin of pop.”

But that changed.

As Horn delivered productions like The Lexicon Of Love and Duck Rock, Morley began to see something more. And Horn, in turn, became intrigued by Morley.

What if a passionate writer, someone obsessed with ideas, became executive of a record label? That curiosity led to Morley becoming co-founder of ZTT. (I’ll dive deeper into the label’s early history in this week’s B-side.)

📢 Turning Music Into Myth

Morley didn’t just promote music.

He reframed it.

He was among the first to bring ideas from advertising into the music world, and in doing so, he changed music marketing forever.

When Trevor Horn asked him what to make of these strange tapes, Morley responded with an eight-page manifesto: “The Art of Noise Sampling the 20th Century.” And just like that, the name was born.

🎭 Concealing The Art

Morley’s thinking was rooted in a classical idea: “Ars est Celare Artem” the art is concealing the art. From that premise, everything followed. The music should become a legend. Built on myth. On illusion. The band members would remain anonymous.

Morley himself would act as their voice, writing sleeve notes, giving interviews, shaping the narrative.

No band photos.

Instead, the back cover of their first release featured…

a spanner.

Because, as Morley provocatively suggested,

the spanner is intrinsically more interesting than the lead singer of Tears For Fears. (And yes, that jab was very much in line with his writing at the time, more on that in the B-side.)

🎼 Building The Record

While Morley was constructing the myth, the music kept evolving. Gary Langan, J. J. Jeczalik, and Anne Dudley continued experimenting outside their regular studio work. Langan and JJ would generate ideas, fragments, structures. Then Dudley, classically trained, would step in to shape them, adding harmony, chords, and melodic direction where needed. From this process came a large number of demos.

Horn and Morley selected nine of them for the first release: “Into Battle With…”, issued in the summer of 1983.

📀 Playing With Format

Morley later insisted the record wasn’t an album, not a single, not even an EP. Just: “a length of music that we put on the 12 inch record.”

That mindset would define ZTT’s approach in the years that followed. They pushed format to its limits. Multiple versions of the same release. Endless remixes and variations treated as separate products

A deliberate strategy to extend the life of a record.

It confused buyers. It frustrated them. But it also changed expectations.

🔁 A Legacy Still Felt Today

Most of those variations have now migrated to streaming platforms.

And even today, trying to untangle what is what within the Art Of Noise catalogue can feel like an impossible task. A fitting legacy for a project that was never meant to be straightforward in the first place.

📀 The Art Of Releasing The Noise

“Beat Box” and “Moments In Love” were the two defining tracks on that first release. “Beat Box” would later be repositioned as the first real single, and in doing so perfectly illustrated what made Art Of Noise so unique.

There wasn’t just one version. There were many.

Remixes, variations, edits, and not all of them even carried the same title.

🗽 From Underground To Dancefloor

The first EP, let’s stick with that term to avoid even more confusion 😁, didn’t chart. But it did find its way onto radio, that’s where I first heard it, and more importantly, it quickly embedded itself in the emerging New York hip hop scene.

Breakdancers embraced it immediately.

The track had everything they needed, rhythm, space, energy, and something entirely new.

🔁 One Track, Many Lives

From there, things evolved quickly. “Beat Box” was re-released, first as “Beat Box” itself, and then transformed into something new. “Close (To The Edit).”

But this wasn’t just a random remix. It came from the same creative DNA. A new identity, born from the same source.

📈 When It Clicked

And it worked.

• “Beat Box” reached #1 on the US Dance Chart in February 1984

• “Close (To The Edit)” followed with a #4 position

In the UK, the story flipped slightly.

• “Close (To The Edit)” broke into the Top 10 Pop charts

• “Beat Box” later appeared as the B-side of “Moments In Love” in 1985, but didn’t reach the Top 40

In the Benelux, success came even later.

• “Moments In Love” only entered the charts after a re-release in 1987

Confused? You’re not alone 😁

🎭 When Myth Meets Reality

The anonymity strategy worked, at first. But it also led to some… unexpected situations.

Because the music fit so naturally within the urban club scene, some assumed it came from the Black communities of Chicago 😁 The result?

• “Beat Box” reached #10 on the US R&B chart

• And in 1984, the group was informed they had won an award for Best Black Act of the Year 😁

They politely found a way not to attend.

📺 The Problem With Visibility

Things became even more complicated when “Close (To The Edit)” started climbing the UK charts. Television appearances became unavoidable, especially on shows like Top Of The Pops. But TV had its own rules.

The commedia dell’arte masks, central to the band’s image, were rejected. So the group appeared without them, miming parts they hadn’t originally performed. Thankfully, the producers frequently cut to the official video, limiting their on-screen exposure.

But it didn’t sit well with the band.

⚡ The Art Of Breaking The Noise

When ZTT Records organised a series of showcase concerts at the Ambassador Theatre in Soho, London, Art Of Noisewere positioned as one of the headliners. But what the audience actually saw was… something else entirely. Dancers, performing to a backing track.

No band. No presence. No connection.

At one point, Paul Morley himself stepped onto the stage to explain. This, he told the audience, was exactly how Art Of Noise was meant to be experienced. No visible members, because masks and spanners were more interesting…

The reaction was far from enthusiastic.

⚡ Behind The Scenes, Tensions Rise

What the audience didn’t see was that things had already started to fall apart behind the scenes. The relationship between ZTT and the group had been deteriorating for some time. It reached a breaking point when Anne Dudley, J. J. Jeczalik, and Gary Langan pulled out of the performances at the very last moment.

Not long after, they left ZTT altogether and signed a new deal with China Records. The full story has never been completely clarified. But there were clear signs of friction.

There was a growing sense that the public narrative around the group focused far more on Trevor Horn and Paul Morley than on the actual creators of the music. Horn and Morley often handled interviews, despite being more involved as producers and executives than as direct contributors to the recordings.

At the same time, Morley’s conceptual approach, sleeve designs filled with statues, and abstract texts comparing tortoises retreating into their shells to human stupidity, didn’t land well with everyone.

For some, it had gone from bold to… a bit too much.

Trevor Horn would later reflect on the situation in his biography, saying: “What also didn't help was certain pronouncements made by Paul (Morley) when he told an interviewer, I am the Art Of Noise, which really wound up the rest of the band”

🌍 The Art Of Influencing The Future (Noise)

“Beat Box” and Art Of Noise didn’t just create a new sound, they shifted the direction of dance music.

They pushed it toward something more sample-based, machine-driven, and built inside the studio itself. And in doing so, they created a bridge between UK electronic experimentation and U.S. club culture, hip-hop, and breakdance scenes.

🧩 Rhythm As Construction

At the heart of that shift was their approach to rhythm. Instead of relying on live drumming, they built grooves from: cut-up fragments, found sounds and synthetic textures

Rhythm became something you constructed, not something you recorded.

And once you understand how the Fairlight CMI was used, you start hearing its fingerprints everywhere in the years that followed.

🔁 The Birth Of Remix Logic

Their influence wasn’t just sonic. It was structural. “Beat Box” existed in multiple versions, each with its own identity.

A track was no longer fixed. It could evolve.

• remixed

• re-edited

• extended

• reimagined

That way of thinking would become central to remix culture and later electronic dance music.

⚡ Why It Sounded So New

In 1983, this approach felt completely fresh. “Beat Box” didn’t sound like traditional pop. It sounded like: a machine-made sound collage

Its power came from contrast: a hard, mechanical groove paired with intricate, detailed textures. It was instrumental, rhythm-first, and incredibly effective on the dancefloor. Dancers could lock into it instantly, while the sound still felt futuristic and underground.

🧠 A New Production Mindset

Their real legacy goes far beyond a single track.

It’s a mindset: use the studio as a creative instrument, treat rhythm as design and build music that sounds like the future That thinking fed directly into sampling culture and shaped how electronic dance music would be made in the decades that followed.

Dance music became more edited, more synthetic, more modern.

If you’ve ever wondered when the sample-based house sound of the late eighties truly began…

this is the moment.

🔥 Echoes Everywhere

The influence didn’t just stay theoretical. Some artists went as far as sharing writing credits. Take Firestarter by The Prodigy.

And then there’s television.

Try to imagine an eighties pop or clip-based show that didn’t use sampling techniques in its theme or soundtrack.

It’s almost impossible.

🔊 The Bigger Shift

In the end, “Beat Box” helped move global dance music away from straightforward disco grooves and toward something far more fragmented and creative.

A collage of sounds. A new language of rhythm. A different future.

One that would shape club culture, hip-hop, and the wider pop landscape for years to come.

This Week’s B-Side 🎁

This week’s B-side goes deeper into:

• The Fairlight CMI, who invented it and why it mattered

• ZTT Records, and its radical approach

• Paul Morley vs Tears For Fears, what was really going on?

Plus a guided dive into the Art Of Noise catalogue for your weekend listening.

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It iIt’s paywalled, but for the price of 8 premium coffees, you get:

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

Join the club. I’d genuinely love to have you on board.

The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.

If you know someone who would enjoy these stories, feel free to share this post with them or pass it along on Substack Notes. Every share helps the music, and the community, travel a little further. 💿✨

Share

Let’s Keep The Discussion Going 💬

I’m curious:

• Do you remember the first time you heard “Beat Box”?

• Did it sound like music… or something else entirely?

• When do you think sampling truly changed the game?

• And which track made you realise the studio had become an instrument?

Let’s continue the conversation 👇

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

It’s fun to write about music but let’s be honest. Music is made to listen to.

Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Youtube. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre. The ideal soundtrack for…. Well whatever you like to do when you listen to dance music.

Listen to the Soundtrack of this week’s post on MIXCLOUD

Or On Youtube

Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🔊 What Do We Call This Music, Italo Disco, Italo Dance or Just Italo?

One of the funniest things about music history is that the names often arrive after the music does.

Scenes are built in clubs, studios and record shops long before journalists, labels and collectors decide what to call them. That is exactly what happened here. So you can ask yourself this simple question: What is the right term, Italo Disco, Italo Dance, or simply Italo?

A fair question, because the answer changes depending on time, sound and context. And if we want to understand why a record like Tantra’s Hills Of Katmandu matters, it helps to get the language right first.

So let’s untangle the knot.

🎹 Italo Disco, The Original Eighties Sound

Italo Disco is the historical genre that emerged in the late seventies and exploded in the early eighties.

Think:

• drum machines

• analogue synths

• catchy hooks

• melodic basslines

• often English-language vocals

• records made for clubs, exports and dancefloors

This is the world of Italian producers building their own version of disco after the American backlash. So yes, Tantra absolutely belongs in that story, even if it also leans into space disco, progressive ideas and early Hi-NRG. For practical purposes, Italo Disco runs roughly until 1988, when house music starts reshaping Europe’s club scene.

But here comes the twist.

The Italian producers did not disappear.
They simply evolved into the next phase.

💿 Italo Dance, A Different Generation

Italo Dance, sometimes written Italodance, is a much later style.

It mainly appears in the mid-nineties and draws more from:

• Eurodance

• commercial club pop

• piano riffs

• brighter hooks

• faster digital production

It is linked to Italy, yes. But it is not the same movement as the original eighties Italo Disco scene.

Same country, different chapter.

🇮🇹 And What About “Italo”?

This is where confusion enters the room.

Italo is often used as a casual umbrella term for Italian dance music. Depending on who is speaking, it can mean:

• classic Italo Disco

• later Italo Dance

• Italian club music in general

• any synthy Italian import from the era

Useful in conversation, risky in research. If someone says “I love Italo,” you may need a follow-up question 😁

🧠 Who Invented the Name Italo Disco?

The term Italo Disco is most commonly linked to ZYX Music and its founder Bernhard Mikulski. ZYX specialised in licensing and exporting Italian dance music, especially into Germany and Northern Europe. Mikulski is widely credited with coining or at least popularising the label through compilation albums in the early eighties.

To be historically careful, the safest wording is this:

ZYX and Mikulski popularised, and likely coined, the term Italo Disco. That is more accurate than pretending the paperwork is airtight.

📼 How Should We Use These Terms Today?

Here is the cleanest guide.

Use Italo Disco when you mean:

• the eighties sound

• synth-led Italian club music

• classic producers and exports

• records like Tantra, Kano, Gazebo, Ryan Paris, Fun Fun, etc.

Use Italo Dance when you mean:

• mid-nineties onward

• Italy’s Eurodance branch

• radio-club crossover acts

Use Italo when you mean:

• broad shorthand

• casual discussion

• not strict genre writing

Useful, but vague.

🕺 What About Late Seventies Italian Dance Music?

This is where it gets interesting, and where many collectors disagree.

For late seventies to early eighties Italian electronic club records, Italo Disco is usually the best modern shorthand, even if the term did not yet exist at release date.

But if a record leans more toward:

• straight disco

• Hi-NRG

• funk

• pop

…then those narrower labels may be more precise than automatically saying Italo Disco.

Which brings us back to Tantra. Hills Of Katmandu is Italo Disco, yes. But it is also more than that. It is one of those bridge records that stretches the category itself.

⚡ Practical Rule for Fast Use

Need a quick shortcut? Use this:

1978 to 1985-ish, synthy, clubby Italian records
➡️ Call it Italo Disco

1990s Italian Eurodance
➡️ Call it Italo Dance

General conversation
➡️ Italo is acceptable, but too vague for serious cataloguing or writing.

🎁 B-Side Collector’s Question

I’m curious how you use the term.

Do you call Tantra, Change, Klein & MBO, Kano and Gazebo all Italo Disco? Or do you prefer finer distinctions like space disco, electro disco, Hi-NRG or post-disco?

Paying subscribers are the serious heads here, so tell me how you catalogue this world.

Because sometimes the most revealing thing in music history is not the record.

It is what we choose to call it.

🇮🇹 How Italian Politics and Society Created the Perfect Conditions for Italo Disco

Genres rarely appear by accident.

They emerge when culture, economics, technology and timing suddenly align. That is exactly what happened in Italy.

Many people hear Italo Disco and think only of synths, neon sleeves and irresistible hooks. But behind that glossy sound sits a deeper story, one shaped by political conflict, economic pressure, youth identity and a country learning how to turn creativity into industry.

So here is the real question:

Why did Italy, more than any other European country, become such a powerhouse of dance music in the late seventies and eighties?

Read more

I remember it well, the first time I came across Italian Disco.

It happened when Raffaella Carrà almost reached number one in the Benelux at the end of 1977, early 1978, with the irresistible earworm “A far l’amore comincia tu.”

Prophetic words, considering my later love for Italy, its language, its music and, naturally, its cuisine. I could fill pages on…

Read more

Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Mix 1 — The Dub

How Dub Mixes Became Dance Music’s Secret Weapon 🕺

If there is one format that became essential to dance music’s evolution almost by accident, it is the dub mix.

And yes, this week we are shaking up the usual B-side order a little. It would feel rather strange to discuss the importance of the dub version in the Beats section, wouldn’t it? 😂

For anyone who bought twelve inches in the eighties, seeing “Dub Version” written on the B-side was often a major selling point. Sometimes that label hid nothing more than a simple instrumental under a sexier name. But sometimes, the dub was the real treasure, a version that transformed the original song into something entirely different.

Some remixers built entire careers on mastering that craft. Arthur Baker, The Latin Rascals and Shep Pettibone all became famous in part because of the quality of their dub work.

But before any of them, and before dub became standard practice in remix culture, one question matters:

Where did the dub actually come from, and why did it become so important?

Because once you understand that answer, you understand why a record like D Train’s “You’re The One For Me”mattered so much beyond its vocal version.

From Jamaica To New York 🌍

The word dub originally comes from reggae.

In Jamaican studios during the seventies, producers had begun experimenting with deconstructing finished tracks, stripping songs down to their most basic parts, bass, drums, rhythm fragments, then rebuilding them into something new.

As they did so, they manipulated the sound heavily: adding reverb, delay, creating space and atmosphere and transforming instruments into textures rather than melodies

The end result often sounded radically different from the original track.

So yes, reggae gave us dub, both as a concept and as a production technique.

And when dance music became increasingly electronic in the late seventies and early eighties, those same ideas began entering disco and post-disco.

Why DJs Fell In Love With Dub 🎧

François Kevorkian often described dub as a DJ tool, something that allowed DJs to take a song further than the original arrangement would permit.

He specifically pointed to D Train as an example of a record where the dub could function almost like a tool for overlaying and reshaping the mood.

Because that is the crucial thing to understand:

The dub was not just an alternate version. In many clubs, it became the preferred version.

Why?

Because dubs gave DJs:

• more space to build tension

• more room to manipulate atmosphere

• more rhythmic freedom

• fewer vocals interrupting the groove

And nowhere was that more important than at one particular nightclub.

The Paradise Garage Effect 🕺

The second major factor in dub’s rise was The Paradise Garage.

Paradise Garage DJs gravitated toward dub versions because they perfectly suited the club’s musical philosophy: long, hypnotic, percussion and bass driven journeys, where vocals became texture rather than centerpiece.

Dub mixes like François K’s “Keep On” mix gave Garage resident DJ Larry Levan far more freedom to shape the night emotionally. Levan’s reputation was built on atmosphere and pacing.

Contemporaries recall him as a DJ who:

• built his sets slowly

• loved using breakdowns and unexpected “curveballs”

• was unafraid to reduce tracks to bass, drums and fragments

Dub versions gave him the ideal blank canvas. Because with their extended drum passages, stripped-back arrangements, reduced verse/chorus structures and heavy use of effects, they allowed him to loop sections mentally and emotionally, tease the crowd, layer moments of tension and release and create something close to a live experience

François Kevorkian later explained his own philosophy this way:

“It was about breaking it up and making it go wild. There was that element of wildness that I think I really think I picked up from Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage. Cautiously | wanted to put that into the records.”

That “wildness” became one of the defining features of eighties remix culture.

But here is where the story gets even more fascinating.

Because if dub versions sounded raw, spontaneous and alive…

that is because they literally were.

How Dub Mixes Were Actually Made ✂️

Read more

Some Songs Arrive With a Memory, Others Simply Become Part of You ✨

The moment you first hear one of your favourite records is sometimes tied to a very precise memory, a place, a time, even a state of mind. That exact setting can be a major reason why you end up loving that song. And because music is such a powerful repository of memory, every listen tak…

Read more

Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🪩 Yacht Rock or Disco, Where Do We Draw The Line?

The Twelve Inch is the story of how dance music kept reinventing itself, often by accident. And nowhere is that more visible than in the blurred line between Yacht Rock and disco.

🎧 A Familiar Question Revisited

I’ve touched on this before in the episode on the Doobie Brothers’ “What A Fool Believes”. But let’s zoom in again, because the question keeps coming back:

Where exactly does Yacht Rock end… and disco begin?

And more importantly for us:

Why did some of these tracks work perfectly on the dancefloor, even if they were never meant to?

🌊 Two Worlds, One Sound

At first glance, the distinction seems clear. Yacht rock and disco overlap in their polish, studio craftsmanship, and use of R&B-derived groove, but they differ sharply in purpose and feel: disco is built to drive bodies on a dance floor, while yacht rock is usually smoother, more relaxed, and song-focused. In practice, they often meet in the same late-1970s production world, which is why some tracks can sound like they sit on the border between the two.

That shared production world is where things start to blur.

🔍 Where They Meet

Both genres prize strong production, clean instrumental textures, and rhythm sections that feel locked in. Yacht rock draws from smooth soul, smooth jazz, R&B, and disco, so the connection is built into the style itself.

Disco, meanwhile, commonly uses four-on-the-floor kick drums, syncopated basslines, strings, horns, electric piano, and synthesizers, many of which also appear in yacht-adjacent recordings.

Both can be lush, both are groove-centered, but disco pushes that groove forward with intent.

⚖️ Core Difference, Function vs Feel

Here is where the real distinction lies.

Read more

🧠 Opening Question, Why Do We Love What We Love?

I often asked myself what exactly makes a song into a personal favorite? Why do I love almost everything Rick James ever released but will I be seriously cherrypicking when it comes to Prince?

There are a number of scientific explanations. They have to do with

• the release of dopamine,

• your internal referen…

Read more

This is the B-Side to this week’s episode.

Every twelve inch had a B-side where the DJs and collectors found the extra tools: beats, dubs and alternate versions.

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig deeper into the story behind the record. Read it in one go or enjoy the different sections on different moments. The choice is yours

🥁 Section 1 — The Beats

🎛️ BEATS: How Dub Rewired Synth-Pop (The Human League’s Secret Weapon) 🔊

🎯 The “Dub” That Changed Everything

Let’s start with something that might sound… slightly confusing.

We have a “Dub” section later in this B-side.

And yet…

👉 We’re talking about dub here, in the Beats section. 😁

Stay with me.

Because this is not just a detail.

This is one of the reasons why The Human League became The Human League.

🔍 Why Dub Matters Here

The reason I’m opening this B-side with dub is simple. It was essential to the story. When we talk about Martin Rushent, we often focus on: the clean production, the precision of the sound and the synth-pop blueprint

All true.

But there is another layer. For many of us, this is where we first discovered the power of the “dub version.”

I’ve put together a full playlist in the Dub section 😁 where I go deeper into each version, and how I used them as a DJ at the time.

But for now, let’s focus on the shift.

⚡ Before and After Rushent?

Let me put it like this.

👉 There is a period in dance music before Martin Rushent, and after Martin Rushent.

After this moment, something shifts.

Every artist. Every label.

👉 They all understand that a dub version can add to the story of a song, an album, an artist.

And honestly?

I doubt Dare and The Human League would have had the same impact without those dub versions.

Even if they didn’t directly move the sales needle.

🧠 So Was Rushent First?

So… was Rushent the first to create a dub version ?

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A few weeks ago I dedicated an episode to Homosapien, the first solo single of Pete Shelley.

It all started with producer Martin Rushent, who wanted to explore the, then new and increasingly affordable, world of synthesizers. It was an idea he shared with Shelley. So when the sessions for the fourth Buzzcocks album failed to spark anything meaningful, th…

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Each week, I follow a track back to the clubs, the studios and the moments that shaped it, and somewhere along the way, I usually end up digging a little deeper into the crates.

Click on the covers and it’ll lead you to the (devil) music

Devil’s Gun (CJ & Co)

Disco was once called the devil’s music… so with Easter weekend around the corner, why not dig a little deeper into his influence on the genre? 😈

Here’s a selection straight from The Twelve Inch archives: five tracks that might just have you dancing like you’ve been possessed.👺

And the first one is a perfect case in point.

If disco was the devil’s music, then Studio 54 was surely his playground. This track by CJ & Co holds a special place in that story, it was the very first record ever played at the club, opening night included. And for good reason. From the haunting sound of the wind at the intro to that deep, hypnotic bassline, everything about it pulls you in.

CJ & Co was one of the many projects produced by Mike Theodore & Dennis Coffey for the Westbound label.

If you want to go deeper into their work, I’ve written about another of their productions here:

👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.

This is The Twelve Inch, a community about the history of dance music from 1975 to 1995, told one twelve-inch record at a time.

If this landed in your inbox because the devil a friend forwarded it, I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the posts.

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Up Jumped The Devil (John Morales M&M Mix) (John Davis And The Monster Orchestra)

Dancing to disco can be hazardous. When you’re out on the dancefloor, fully giving in, he can suddenly show up and take over. So consider this your warning for Easter weekend… you never quite know what might happen 😁

And if we go by the cover of John Davis & The Monster Orchestra, the devil seems to take on a rather different form, female, scantily clad, with a red tail that looks suspiciously like a water hose… Alright, let’s not go there 😂

Up Jumped The Devil is one of those signature productions from John Davis and his Monster Orchestra. Before that, Davis was part of the legendary MFSB studio band during its peak years, playing on countless Philadelphia International recordings. He also had a hand in producing and arranging William DeVaughn’s million-selling hit Be Thankful For What You’ve Got.

For this selection, I went with the extended John Morales M&M mix, it gives the groove more room to breathe and really lets those rhythm elements shine.

Devil Woman (Fire & Ice)

We’ve already established that the devil seems to lean toward the female persuasion… so what better follow-up than a track that confirms it outright: Devil Woman by Fire & Ice.

Fire & Ice is one of those anonymous disco projects that flooded the market at the height of the boom. At that point, everyone wanted a slice of the very lucrative disco pie, launching projects left, right and centre, with plenty of labels ready to cash in. Quick money, quick releases.

But this one comes with an interesting twist. The project was the brainchild of none other than Lalo Schifrin and his wife Donna. Lalo handled the music and production, while Donna took care of the lyrics, which, let’s be honest, didn’t need to be Shakespeare. The dancefloor wasn’t exactly the place for elaborate poetry.

The woman on the cover? Not the devil herself, just a professional, and rather striking, model: Valentine Monnier. Vocals were provided by Cheyene Fowler, an American singer of Native American descent. And no, despite the title, this has absolutely nothing to do with Cliff Richard’s earlier hit.

Devil Woman turned out to be a modest dancefloor success for Butterfly in 1979, reaching number 66 on the dance charts.

The Twelve Inch is a growing community of people who love disco, eighties, and early-nineties dance music.

If you know someone who would enjoy these posts, feel free to share this post with them or pass it along on Substack Notes. Every share helps the music, and the community, travel a little further. 💿✨

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Devil’s Run (The Peter Jacques Band)

No disco selection without some top-notch Eurodisco. I’m European after all 😁

The Peter Jacques Band was one of the many creations of Mauro Malavasi and Jacques Fred Petrus. They were behind several projects at the time, the most famous being Change, which I covered in a recent episode (and where I go deeper into their story). Change played a key role in the transition from disco into the sound of the eighties. The Peter Jacques Band, on the other hand, sits firmly before that shift and was instrumental in bringing Italian-made disco to US dancefloors.

I’ve always had a soft spot for their second album, but this track comes from their debut Fire Night Dance (1979). And it’s a perfect example of what made them so effective: pure Hi-NRG, built for the dancefloor and heavily embraced in LGBTQ+ clubs. You can easily imagine tracks like this lighting up places like The Saint night after night.

The formula was classic: music crafted in Italy by top-tier studio musicians, vocals recorded in New York with session singers brought in for the job. Disco at its finest.

The track I’ve selected is Devil’s Run, and at 137 BPM, you’ll need every bit of energy you’ve got.

The Devil Made Me Do It (A Tom Moulton Mix) (Robert Upchurch)

Let’s slow things down a little for the finale. Even the devil himself can’t keep up with those relentless tempos forever.

The Devil Made Me Do It, sings Robert Upchurch on this 1974 dancefloor gem. Pure Philly. Produced by the legendary trio Baker, Harris & Young and later given the full treatment by Tom Moulton, who turned it into a 10-minute-42-second epic. This is the Philly Sound at its finest.

Robert Upchurch was a Philadelphia-based gospel and R&B singer who became associated with The Trammps in the seventies. Before joining them, he released this very single on Golden Fleece Records, and would later provide backing vocals on Disco Inferno.

A perfect way to bring things down… without ever really leaving the dancefloor.

What’s your most devilish disco pick? Which track did I miss? Let me hear it 😈

Welcome to the B-side.

This is where things get a little closer to the source.

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that really tell you how a track worked on the dancefloor.

The B-Side is now exclusive to subscribers.

Good news though, the 20% offer is still available.

👉 A full year of B-Side posts, plus all additional subscriber-only content, for just 40 €/$.

The offer runs until the end of March, so this is the moment to jump in.

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This week, we stay with The Isley Brothers and It’s A Disco Night.

Because this is one of those records where the closer you listen… the more interesting it becomes.

If you missed the A-Side story, you can read it here. 👇

Or The video version :

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🔥 Soul to R&B, When Did the Name Change… and Why?

🎧 A Simple Question That Isn’t So Simple

One of the questions I always find myself asking while researching these posts is this:

👉 When did “soul” stop being called soul… and become R&B?

It sounds like a small detail. Almost trivial. But once you start pulling that thread, you realise it opens up a much bigger story. And you know by now:

The Twelve Inch is the story of how dance music kept reinventing itself, often by accident.

📻 Early Positioning, The World I Grew Up In

When I was growing up and discovering my love for Black music, it was simply called soul. In the A-side, I mentioned my favorite radio show, the Soul Show. A hugely popular weekly two-hour show on Dutch radio, hosted by one of the country’s biggest DJs, entirely dedicated to Black music.

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