Summer’s here (something that’s been impossible to ignore in Europe these past few weeks 😁), so what better time to give you a sneak peek at what usually happens every week on the B-Side?

I’m currently enjoying a holiday, which for me means reading, listening to music, and spending quality time with my partner, friends, and family. The regular schedule resumes next week, but to bridge the gap, I thought we’d turn up the temperature even more with a selection of ten disco records that were every bit as sexy, if not sexier, than Musique’s In The Bush.

👋 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.

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🎧 The Crate of Carnal Knowledge, 10 Disco Records That Turned Up the Heat 🔥

First things first.

My sincere apologies to everyone reading this somewhere in Europe.

I know.

It’s hot.🥵

I’m experiencing it myself as I write this.

So suggesting we spend the next half hour talking about disco’s naughtiest records is probably irresponsible.

And yet…

…here we are. 😁

Putting together this playlist was both great fun and surprisingly difficult. Not because there aren’t enough candidates, quite the opposite.

I could easily have made a Top 50.

Probably a Top 100.

Disco loved a good double entendre. Sometimes subtle, sometimes about as subtle as a brick through the bedroom window. So I forced myself to stop at ten.

Think of this as a guided tour through disco’s more mischievous side. Some of these records were banned by radio stations. Some were whispered about. Others somehow slipped through the net altogether.

No prudish posturing here. We’re all adults. Besides, you’ve read two chapters about sex and disco last week. Now it’s time to hear it.

Let’s drop the needle…

💋 It All Starts With Donna

Every good story needs a beginning, and so does this playlist.

If one record opened the bedroom door for disco, it was Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby. Today we’re so familiar with it that it’s easy to forget just how shocking it sounded in 1975. Twenty-three simulated orgasms later, the world of dance music had changed forever.

Of course we also know Donna herself was considerably more reserved than the record might suggest. The famous album-length version only exists because Casablanca boss Neil Bogart, reportedly calling Giorgio Moroder from the middle of a rather drug induced orgy party, wanted something long enough to fill an entire side of an LP.

The seventies really were… different. 😁

❤️ Barry White Didn’t Need To Shout

If Donna introduced disco’s most famous moans, Barry White had already proved that you didn’t actually need them. His voice did most of the heavy lifting.

I’m convinced, underwear around the world simply dropped down the moment Barry opened his mouth. 😁 Gravity had nothing to do with it.

If you remember our discussion about the original meaning of “funk,” on last week’s B-side, Barry White might just have been one of the funkiest men who ever lived.

I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Baby, presented here in a magnificent live version, is enough to make you sweat without any help from the current European heatwave.

😏 Some People Didn’t Need To Pretend

I’ve already devoted an entire episode to Andrea True’s More, More, More, so I won’t repeat the whole story here.

The short version? Andrea started her career in adult films. Let’s just say she probably needed less acting than most singers recording sexy disco records.

The title really tells you everything you need to know. She promised “More, More, More”…and she certainly had the professional experience to back it up. 😁

🔥 Ben Liebrand Turned Up The Temperature

Track four is another familiar friend to regular readers.

Poussez!’s Come On And Do It.

If you thought Donna Summer was pushing boundaries, wait until the breakdown arrives. Especially because I’ve chosen the later Ben Liebrand remix, where somebody clearly decided there simply wasn’t enough moaning on the original.

An understandable production decision, obviously… 😁

Legend has it that one of Dutch television’s best-known personalities provided those additional vocal contributions.

Whoever she was…

She fully understood the assignment.

🧴 Unlimited Supplies

One of my personal favourites comes next.

Slick’s Sexy Cream.

Apart from being a fantastic disco record, it features none other than The Sweethearts of Sigma, the wonderful voices behind countless Philadelphia soul classics. I’ll eventually dedicate an entire episode to Slick because they deserve one.

As for the cream…

Well…

It isn’t something you buy at the chemist.

Nor does it come in a handy tube.

The good news is that supplies appear to be unlimited, provided the circumstances are right and everyone involved is suitably enthusiastic.🤩

One detail has always amused me though. They seem determined to rub it absolutely everywhere. Which brings us rather neatly back to that original meaning of “funk.” 😂

😂 Barbara Markay Doesn’t Believe In Euphemisms

Human beings have invented an astonishing number of ways to avoid saying the word “sex.” Sometimes I wonder whether we’ve spent more time inventing euphemisms than actually having it. 🙃

Barbara Markay clearly had no patience for any of that.

No beating around the bush”.

Or indeed “in the bush”.

As she sings:

“It’s time to stop all this Puritan shock. Cause they are dead and we are Aliiive.”

Well…

Fair point. 😁

🙈 Beyond Hope

Now here’s a record that probably escaped the attention of roughly 99.9% of humanity. With a title like It’s All Rite to Fuck All Nite, radio programmers somehow failed to embrace it.

I know.

Difficult to understand. 🤔

The chorus doesn’t exactly hide its intentions either. “It’s all rite to fuck all nite and it’s ok to suck all day.” I suspect this wasn’t destined for Sunday morning family radio.

It did, however, make my Top 10. I’m probably beyond saving anyway.

🌈 Cruising After Dark

You already know that gay men were the beating heart of disco culture. Yet surprisingly few disco records dealt openly with gay sexuality.

The Boys Town Gang’s Cruisin’ The Streets is one of the rare exceptions.

If you only know the radio edit, you’re missing half the story. The full twelve-inch contains an extended spoken section set on what is clearly implied to be San Francisco’s Folsom Street.

There’s cruising. Flirting. Negotiating. A prostitute. Police officers. And a sequence that leaves remarkably little to the imagination.

When I was DJing in the eighties, I loved dropping just that spoken section into my sets. Not every party appreciated it quite as much as I did though… 😁

🤭 Arthur Russell Wasn’t Exactly Being Subtle

If Sexy Cream made you smile… Loose Joints practically removes all remaining doubt. Arthur Russell wasn’t interested in leaving much to interpretation.

When your lyrics include:

“I masturbated till my KY faded. Unh, I’m exhausticated. It’s all over your face. Tell me how does it taste?”

…even someone with the imagination of a beige wall will probably understand what’s going on. No radio station wanted anything to do with it.

The clubs certainly did. Released on West End and mixed by François Kevorkian, it became a Paradise Garage favourite. Larry Levan wasn’t exactly building his reputation on safe choices.

Thank goodness.

🚗 We All Know What Grace Was Talking About…

We finish where elegance meets innuendo.

Grace Jones.

Pull Up To The Bumper.

Apparently some people genuinely believed this was a song about traffic. Bless them.

With lyrics like: “Pull up to my bumper baby In your long black limousine Pull up to my bumper baby And drive it in between.”

…I’m struggling to think of any motorway interpretation. 😂

Curiously, in many non-English-speaking countries nobody seemed terribly bothered. The record received plenty of radio airplay, including here in Belgium, where I still hear it regularly. Perhaps not understanding every word occasionally has its advantages. 😁

🪩 Enjoy… Responsibly

So there you have it.

Ten records that demonstrate just how enthusiastically disco pushed boundaries.

Or perhaps…

…how enthusiastically disco pushed, full stop. 😁

I’ve gathered them all into one handy playlist for your listening pleasure.

Whether you use it for serious music appreciation, a romantic evening, or simply to discover ten wonderfully cheeky pieces of dance music history is entirely your business.

I was brought up not to ask awkward questions.

And I’m certainly not going to start now.

Whatever your plans…

Enjoy.

Listen to it HERE

• Love To Love You Baby (Full Album Mix) (Donna Summer)

• I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Baby (Barry White)

• More More More (A Tom Moulton Mix) (Andrea True Connection)

• Come On And Do It! (Ben Liebrand Remix) (Poussez!)

• Sexy Cream (Slick)

• It’s All Rite To Fuck All Night (Barbra Markay)

• Cruising The Streets (Full Version) (Boys Town Gang)

• Is It All Over My Face? (Loose Joints)

• Groove Me (Fern Kinney)

• Pull Up To The Bumper (Grace Jones)

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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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

This week’s B-Side isn’t really about Musique anymore.

Musique simply opens the door.

Once you walk through it, you discover a much bigger story about sex, liberation, coded language and one of the most misunderstood aspects of disco culture.

Together we’ll explore three questions that have fascinated me while researching this episode.

Why did disco become known as “the sexy genre,” when popular music had been flirting with sex long before disco came along?

If gay men were among disco’s greatest pioneers and most devoted audience, why do so many of the genre’s biggest songs seem to tell exclusively heterosexual stories?

And finally, which records pushed the boundaries furthest, sometimes so far that radio simply refused to play them?

Because no discussion about disco and sex would be complete without music, I’ve also assembled ten wonderfully cheeky records that stretched the limits of what could be pressed onto vinyl.

So dim the lights, pour yourself a drink, and let’s dig a little deeper into one of disco’s most fascinating stories.

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🪩 Sex, Freedom and the Dancefloor, Why Disco Was About So Much More Than Seduction

If you’ve been reading The Twelve Inch for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I rarely shy away from the bigger questions behind a record.

Musique’s In The Bush almost forces us to ask one.

Why did disco become known as “the sexy genre”?

It’s such an accepted part of disco’s identity that we hardly question it anymore. Mention disco and people immediately picture glitter, sweaty dancefloors, Studio 54 and lyrics full of double entendres.

But was disco really more sexual than everything that came before it?

I don’t think so. At least, not in the way people often imagine.

🥁 Sex Was Already Everywhere

One of the biggest misconceptions about disco is that it somehow invented sex in popular music.

It didn’t.

American popular music had been flirting with sexuality almost from the beginning.

Take the word “funk”. It originally referred in African American slang to the smell of a body in a state of sexual arousal. Dirty. Sweaty. Authentic. Uninhibited.

Jazz. Bebop. Rock ‘n’ roll. All those names all carry sexual connotations if you trace them back far enough.

The blues practically built an entire language around innuendo. Everything was coded. Suggestive. Full of metaphors that everyone understood but nobody had to admit they understood.

By the early 1970s those metaphors had already become far less subtle. Marvin Gaye wasn’t hiding much when he recorded Let’s Get It On. Barry White practically built an empire around the seductive power of that unmistakable bass voice.

So disco didn’t invent musical sexuality.

It changed where that sexuality lived.

And that’s a much bigger story.

🌈 The Dancefloor Became A Liberated Zone

To understand disco, you have to forget Studio 54 for a moment. Go back a few years. Back to New York’s underground. Back to places like The Loft, The Sanctuary, 12 West, Flamingo, and later Paradise Garage and The Saint.

These weren’t simply clubs. For many people they were the only places where they could become themselves. It’s almost impossible to imagine today, but at the beginning of the 1970s homosexuality was still illegal in 49 American states.

Until 1973 the American Psychiatric Association even classified homosexuality as a mental illness.

Dancing with someone of the same sex could attract police attention (and was forbidden in New York). Holding hands could be dangerous.

Now imagine finally walking into a room where none of those rules applied. Where nobody cared who you danced with. Where nobody judged how you dressed. Where you could kiss your partner without constantly looking over your shoulder.

That’s the world disco was born into.

After Stonewall in 1969 those clubs became far more than entertainment venues. They became spaces of self-discovery. Of community. Of freedom. Of joy.

And yes… Of sex.

But it’s important to understand why. The sexuality wasn’t simply hedonism. It was liberation.

💊 Music, Drugs and Freedom

Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton describe Francis Grasso’s legendary Sanctuary as being: “poured full of newly liberated gay men, then shaken and stirred by a weighty concoction of dance music and a pharmacopoeia of pills and potions.”

It’s one of my favourite descriptions of early disco culture because it captures something essential. The music. The drugs. The atmosphere.

None of them existed in isolation. They fed each other. Sex wasn’t happening on the dancefloor itself. But throughout these clubs there were dark rooms, corridors and hidden spaces where intimacy became just another expression of freedom.

Seen from today’s perspective it’s tempting to reduce that world to excess. I think that’s unfair. For many people these clubs offered something they’d never experienced before. The freedom to exist exactly as they were. The dancefloor wasn’t escaping reality.

It was creating a better one.

💃 It Wasn’t Just A Gay Revolution

Read more

How does a song that hundreds of radio stations refused to play become one of the defining disco records of all time?

That’s exactly what happened to Musique’s In The Bush.

By 1978, disco had become much more than music. It was a cultural phenomenon, a way of life, and according to its critics, everything that was supposedly wrong with modern society. It was too loud, too black, too gay, too decadent and, perhaps worst of all, too sexual.

Few records embodied those fears better than “Push, push, in the bush.”

Even today there are plenty of radio stations around the world that have never played the record, and probably never will. The lyric hardly leaves much to the imagination, unless your imagination happens to be as exciting as a beige wall 😁

Personally, I never found it particularly shocking. Suggestive? Absolutely. But offensive? Not really. Then again, perhaps it’s easier to say that when English isn’t your first language. Besides, history has shown that banning a record often has the exact opposite effect. Just ask Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Sometimes censorship is the best publicity money never had to buy.

That was certainly true for me.

By 1978 I was already a hopeless disco addict. Every week I faithfully tuned into the only Dutch radio programme I knew that played the latest American disco imports and discussed the Billboard Disco charts.

But I gradually noticed something curious.

Certain records never appeared. Musique’s In The Bush was one of them. Naturally, that made me want to hear it even more. When I eventually spotted the single in my local record shop, I did something I almost never did. I bought the 7-inch. Normally I ignored singles altogether. I wanted the twelve inch, or at the very least the album if it contained the long version. Yet there was something about In The Bush that made me break my own rules.

And once I heard it, I understood why.

Because here’s the thing.

Strip away the controversy for a moment and you’re left with an irresistible disco record.

The groove never lets up. The rhythm keeps pushing forward. The arrangement is lean, hypnotic and relentlessly danceable. Add the magnificent vocals of Christine Wiltshire, whom we already met in the episode about Poussez!‘s equally suggestive C’mon And Do It, together with Jocelyn Brown’s unmistakable power, and you have all the ingredients of a genuine dancefloor weapon.

The lyric may have attracted the headlines, but the groove is what kept people dancing.

That combination makes In The Bush the perfect record to explore a much bigger story.

Because disco’s relationship with sex is often reduced to clichés.

Depending on whom you ask, disco either celebrated sexual liberation or encouraged excess and moral decline. The truth, as always, is rather more interesting.

We’ll begin exploring that story today, and continue it on this week’s B-Side. We’ll look at why sexuality became so closely associated with disco, why that reputation has endured, and tackle a question that has fascinated me for years.

If gay men were among disco’s greatest architects and its most devoted audience, why do so many of its biggest songs tell unmistakably heterosexual stories?

We’ll save that conversation for later.

For now, let’s return to one remarkable record that accidentally found itself at the centre of it all.

Because the story behind Musique is almost as unlikely as the song itself.

👋 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

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🎹 A Group That Didn’t Exist

One of the recurring themes of The Twelve Inch is that dance music keeps reinventing itself, often by accident.

Musique is a perfect example.

Forget the familiar story of musicians spending years touring tiny clubs before finally getting their lucky break. There was no struggling band, no carefully crafted artistic vision and certainly no lifelong dream of becoming Musique.

The project began with a conversation.

At the height of the disco boom, Prelude Records founder Marvin Schlachter called producer Patrick Adams into his office and asked him a remarkably simple question.

Could he make a disco album?

Adams replied that he could.

How much would it cost?

After a quick calculation he named his price.

How long would it take?

“Maybe three weeks.”

Schlachter quietly opened the bottom drawer of his desk, pulled out his chequebook and wrote Adams a cheque for the entire project. His only instruction was wonderfully straightforward.

“Bring me a good album.”

He never asked which musicians Adams would hire. He never asked what songs would be recorded. He never asked what the concept would be.

There was just one final question.

“What are we gonna call it?”

Adams smiled.

“Well, it’s music, let’s just call it Musique.” 😁

In the summer of 1978 that cheque amounted to $16,000, a substantial investment for what was essentially an idea without a band. In fact, there wasn’t even a group yet. The album artwork was designed before anyone had been hired to sing on the record.

As Marvin Schlachter later admitted with refreshing honesty: “There was no artist named Musique when Patrick Adams produced that for us. These were just session singers that were hired to do the vocals, and then ultimately we turned around and created a group.”

The entire debut album, Keep On Jumpin’, was recorded at Bob Blank’s Blank Tape Studios in New York. The tracking session took just four hours.

Four.

Hours.

Adams even wrote the horn arrangements while the session musicians were waiting in the studio.

The finished album contained only four tracks: Keep On Jumpin’, Summer Love, In The Bush and Summer Love Theme.

The vocalists were hardly unknowns, although few listeners realised it at the time. Jocelyn Brown was still some years away from becoming one of dance music’s greatest voices. Christine Wiltshire was already proving herself one of New York’s finest session singers, joined by Angela Howell and Gina Tharps.

On paper it looked like a modest studio project.

History had rather bigger plans.

🎛️ The Invisible Genius Behind the Groove

Musique may have been assembled almost overnight, but the man pulling the strings had spent years preparing for this moment.

Patrick Peter Owen Adams was born in Harlem on March 17, 1950.

Outside collector circles his name is still surprisingly unfamiliar.

Inside them, it’s spoken with genuine reverence.

Adams knew exactly what he wanted long before most children had even thought about careers. “Even when I was 12 years old, I wanted to be a record producer. I wasn’t actually sure what a record producer did, but I had this burning desire to be one. So I practiced all my instruments—guitar, bass, drums, keyboards—and wrote as many songs as I could. Between the time I was 12 and 17, I probably wrote 200 songs—not that any of them were spectacular, but practice makes perfect!”

It would take years before anyone gave him that opportunity.

Throughout the early 1970s Adams built a formidable reputation as an arranger, one of those rare musicians capable of transforming good songs into great ones. Yet producers kept overlooking him when it came to running sessions himself.

That frustration had been building for years.

When Marvin Schlachter handed him that blank cheque, Adams finally had the freedom to prove what he had always believed. As he later put it: “The Musique album was an outburst of frustration on my part because I’m tired of people telling me what I can’t do and I knew full well I could”

He certainly could.

Musique became Prelude Records’ first major success and launched one of the most remarkable behind-the-scenes careers in dance music. Yet Adams never chased celebrity. “The generation I grew up in, you just wanted to be known for the work that you did. You didn’t want to be known for just being known.” That attitude explains why many casual listeners have never heard his name, while crate diggers treat him almost like royalty.

Cloud One, Bumblebee Unlimited, Universal Robot Band, Inner Life, Phreek ,Musique. If you’ve spent enough time digging through the golden years of New York disco, you’ve almost certainly been dancing to Patrick Adams without even knowing it.

And then, almost by accident, he wrote three words that would make hundreds of radio programmers reach for the panic button…

🔥 Three Words That Shocked America

So where did those infamous lyrics actually come from?

Like many great stories in dance music, the answer is far less calculated than you might imagine. Patrick Adams explained it years later: “My older brother and his friends were always chanting ‘to the Bush, to the Bush,’ referring to this club they used to go to. So in my dirty mind, I translated it to ‘in the bush.’ I had no idea where that was going to go lyrically, but one of the background singers came up with ‘push.” And it all came together in my head at that point: “push, push, in the bush.” Now, I’m a First Amendment guy who loves freedom of speech, but 600 stations refused to play it! To this day, WNBC here in New York has never played the record, and they probably never will.”

It’s a wonderful reminder that not every cultural flashpoint begins with a grand strategy. Sometimes it starts with a joke, with an accidental rhyme. And sometimes with a producer whose own words describe him as having “a dirty mind.”

Yet what happened next says far more about American society than it does about Musique.

By 1978 disco had become an easy target. The music was increasingly associated with sexual freedom, nightlife and communities that many conservative Americans already regarded with suspicion. The lyrics of In The Bush simply gave critics another reason to attack the genre.

Or perhaps more accurately, another excuse.

Because popular music had always flirted with sex.

Blues musicians had mastered double entendres decades earlier. Rock ‘n’ roll had built much of its early reputation on suggestive lyrics and provocative performances. What made disco different wasn’t simply that it sang about desire. It invited thousands of people to celebrate that desire together on the dancefloor.

That made it feel different. More public. More visible. More threatening to those who preferred sexuality to remain hidden behind closed doors.

The irony, of course, is that attempts to suppress music have a remarkable habit of making it even more desirable. Every radio station that refused to play In The Bush made somebody else curious enough to seek it out.

I know.

I was one of them.

🪩 The Dancefloor Didn’t Care

If radio programmers thought they could stop the record, they underestimated one crucial thing. By the late 1970s, radio was no longer the only route to success.

Disco had built its own ecosystem: the clubs, the DJs, the twelve inch single. The dancefloor itself.

I’ve written before that one of disco’s greatest revolutions was shifting power away from radio and towards the clubs. DJs had become tastemakers in their own right. A record didn’t have to dominate daytime radio if it could fill dancefloors every weekend.

In The Bush became one of the clearest demonstrations of that new reality.

Despite being ignored, or actively rejected, by hundreds of radio stations, club DJs embraced it almost immediately. And dancers responded. That relentless groove, Christine Wiltshire’s commanding vocals, Jocelyn Brown’s unmistakable energy and Patrick Adams’ economical production did exactly what they had been designed to do.

They kept people moving.

The controversy may have sold the first copy.

The groove sold the next million.

📈 Bigger Than Its Charts

Looking purely at its pop chart positions, you could easily underestimate In The Bush. It reached No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Respectable, not spectacular.

But that’s looking at the wrong chart.

Where the record truly came alive was on Billboard’s Disco chart, where it reached No. 1, paired with Keep On Jumpin’. That was the chart that mattered most.

It also climbed to No. 29 on the R&B chart, reached No. 16 in the UK, spent twelve weeks there, and became a major club record across Europe, particularly in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany, where disco culture was thriving.

Considering the resistance it faced from mainstream American radio, those achievements become even more impressive.

But numbers only tell part of the story. The real measure of In The Bush isn’t where it peaked in November 1978.

It’s where it still gets played almost fifty years later.

Walk into a disco night almost anywhere in the world and sooner or later you’ll probably hear those opening bars.

That’s because disco has always had two histories.

There’s the history written by chart compilers.

And there’s the history written by dancers.

They’re not always the same.

Many of disco’s greatest records achieved something far more valuable than a high Hot 100 position. They became permanent fixtures in DJs’ record boxes.

The dancefloor has a much longer memory than the charts.

That’s one of the lessons In The Bush teaches so beautifully.

And it wasn’t the only surprise waiting for Patrick Adams. Because the success of Musique was only the beginning…

✨ A Four-Hour Session That Changed Disco

The success of In The Bush naturally led to a second Musique album.

Musique II arrived in 1979 with a largely new line-up. Mary Seymour, Denise Edwards and Gina Taylor replaced the original vocalists, but lightning refused to strike twice. The debut had captured a very particular moment in disco history, one that proved almost impossible to recreate.

The project quietly disappeared.

Its members did not.

Jocelyn Brown would become one of dance music’s greatest voices through Inner Life before embarking on a hugely successful solo career.

Christine Wiltshire would later appear on Class Action’s immortal Weekend, itself a reworking of Weekend, originally recorded by Phreek, another Patrick Adams creation.

And Patrick Adams?

He simply kept making extraordinary records.

Over the following decades his fingerprints appeared everywhere. Cloud One. Bumblebee Unlimited. Universal Robot Band. Inner Life. Shannon. Even Eric B. & Rakim’s groundbreaking Paid in Full, which he engineered, creating one of the most remarkable bridges between seventies disco craftsmanship and the birth of hip hop.

Today Discogs credits him with well over 400 production credits and more than 600 writing and arrangement credits.

Even those astonishing numbers probably underestimate his contribution.

Yet his greatest achievement may be something less tangible. Patrick Adams helped shape the sound of New York dance music without ever becoming a household name. Sometimes the people who change music the most are the ones standing furthest from the spotlight.

💃 Why In The Bush Still Matters

So where does In The Bush fit into disco history?

Not at the beginning.

Donna Summer had already proved that sexuality could become part of mainstream dance music with records like Love To Love You Baby. Other artists had flirted with innuendo long before Musique walked into Bob Blank’s studio.

What In The Bush represents is the moment disco stopped apologising for pleasure.

By 1978 the genre had found its confidence. Dance music was no longer asking for permission. It celebrated freedom. Bodies. Desire. The simple joy of losing yourself in a packed room full of strangers moving to the same relentless beat.

That confidence also made disco a target.

For some people, records like In The Bush represented everything they disliked about the culture growing around the clubs. The music became an easy symbol for changing attitudes towards race, sexuality, gender and nightlife.

Looking back almost fifty years later, it’s remarkable how much anxiety could be generated by three repeated words. Yet perhaps that’s exactly why the record has endured. Because beneath the controversy sits a brilliantly constructed disco groove.

The groove made the controversy matter.

That’s why DJs never abandoned it. That’s why dancers never forgot it. And that’s why the record still appears on disco compilations almost half a century later.

Like so many classics we’ve explored in The Twelve Inch, its greatest success wasn’t measured by the Billboard Hot 100. It was measured by full dancefloors.

This Week’s B-Side 🎁

If In The Bush tells us anything, it’s that disco’s relationship with sex was far more complex than most people remember.

This week’s B-Side picks up exactly where today’s story ends.

We’ll look at why disco became labelled as “the sexy genre” and whether that reputation was actually deserved.

We’ll tackle a question that has fascinated me for years.

If gay men were among disco’s greatest innovators and its most loyal audience, why do so many of disco’s biggest songs tell unmistakably heterosexual stories?

Was that ever a contradiction?

Or have we been looking at those lyrics in entirely the wrong way?

And because no discussion about disco and sexuality would be complete without a soundtrack, I’ve also put together my personal Top 10 most suggestive, provocative and scandalous disco records of the seventies.

The ideal soundtrack to get a bit more “Push” to get In The Bush.

The B-side is where we go deeper. (Pun intended)

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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🪩 One Last Thought

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

Musique embodies that idea perfectly.

A producer finally given his chance.

A blank cheque.

A group that didn’t yet exist.

An album recorded in four hours.

A throwaway lyric that became one of disco’s most recognisable hooks.

Almost fifty years later people still smile when they hear those opening bars.

Not bad for a record that hundreds of radio stations refused to play.

Sometimes history really does have a sense of humour.

I’d love to hear your memories.

Did your local radio station play In The Bush, or was it one of the records that mysteriously disappeared from the airwaves?

Do you think disco genuinely deserved its reputation as music obsessed with sex, or has history exaggerated that side of the story?

And perhaps the biggest question of all.

Can a controversial lyric become a classic without a great groove behind it?

As always, I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.

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

☀️ Summer Break… but only for two weeks!

Before you panic, don’t worry. 😁

I’ll be taking a short two-week summer break while travelling, so The Twelve Inch will be back in the second half of July with plenty of new stories to tell.

And I’m already hard at work on what’s coming next.

Episode 218 will focus on one of my all-time favourite divas.

Born in Canada, she never became the superstar there, that many expected. Instead, she crossed the Atlantic and grew into one of France’s biggest stars ever, giving a voice to the hopes and disappointments of an entire generation through one unforgettable song.

We’ll explore why France embraced her so completely, why Canada didn’t, and why her career followed such a different path from another Canadian icon, Céline Dion.

That episode will also mark the beginning of a series I’ve wanted to write for quite some time: the story of the Canadian dance music scene.

I’ll admit something. When I first announced the series, I quickly realised I’d bitten off more than I could chew. The deeper I dug, the more fascinating connections I uncovered. Canada wasn’t simply producing great records, it became a vital bridge between the American and European dance scenes, helping shape the evolution of disco and dance music in ways that are often overlooked.

It’s one of my favourite countries, and musically it deserves far more attention than it usually gets.

Then, in Episode 219, we’ll return to Detroit (and Los Angeles) for the story of Marvin Gaye and Motown, another chapter in the ever-evolving story of dance music.

Until then, enjoy the summer, stay cool if you’re living through the current heatwave, and, as always…

keep dancing. 🪩

It is not just about artists, genres, musical evolutions, or the broader historical picture. It is also about the joy of discovering, or rediscovering, the records that packed dancefloors without necessarily crossing over into the pop charts.

Some stories are simply too small to justify a full A-side and B-side deep dive. Yet the records themselves still deserve their moment in the spotlight. So from time to time, instead of a regular extended episode, I’ll be taking a shorter dive into my record boxes and uncovering a handful of forgotten gems.

To provide some sort of connecting thread, each selection will revolve around a common theme.

As I write this, Western Europe is being hit by a second heatwave in just a few weeks. Meteorologists are even talking about a heat dome. Temperatures of 35°C (95°F) and higher are expected, conditions for which we are neither particularly well suited nor especially well organised. And summer hasn’t even officially begun yet.

So the theme of this week’s journey through my collection is rather obvious: hot.😁

Fortunately, not many dance records have been written about weather phenomena. There are, however, quite a few that feature the word hot in the title. And in most cases, the temperature they’re referring to has very little to do with the weather and everything to do with other, far more exciting experiences. 😁

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

During the eighties, I spent far too many hours volunteering at my local radio station, presenting several shows every weekend. It was the era when Belgium was littered with local radio stations, usually covering little more than the village or town where the studio happened to be located.

Although the equipment we worked with wasn’t exactly substandard, it was a long way from the professional studios used by the national broadcasters. We had to be creative when producing our jingles and programmes. Our examples weren’t to be found in Belgium. We listened obsessively to Dutch radio, knowing full well that they, in turn, were looking across the Atlantic for inspiration.

In the summer of 1986, I finally understood why.

One of my best friends handed me a cassette recorded from Los Angeles radio station KPWR, better known as Power 106. It contained one of their Saturday evening shows, packed with Freestyle, Synth-Funk and club music. I played that tape endlessly. It became one of my treasures.

Everything about it sounded exciting: the jingles, the presentation, the records they played, and the reports from a roaming reporter checking in from the city’s nightclubs to tell listeners what was happening on the dancefloor. To a young radio enthusiast in Belgium, it sounded like the future.

One of the records that tape introduced me to was “Hot Spot” by the Dazz Band.

I already knew the Dazz Band from their early eighties synth-funk hit “Let It Whip”. In fact, that track became something of an underground dancefloor classic in the Benelux. It never troubled the charts, but if you were DJing a local party, you’d better have a copy with you because sooner or later someone would ask for it. A few years later they scored a genuine chart hit with “Let It All Blow”, a record I’ll come back to in a future episode.

By 1985 and 1986, however, the Dazz Band had largely disappeared from the spotlight. I loved “Hot Spot” from the moment I heard it on that KPWR tape, although it took me quite a while to discover who actually recorded it. Shazam wasn’t around yet. Strange times, I know. 😁

“Hot Spot” is a perfect example of the synth-funk sound that blended seamlessly with the Freestyle records dominating American dancefloors at the time. It sits comfortably alongside the music that Power 106 was championing in 1986. Despite its quality, the record only managed to reach No. 33 on the US Dance chart.

👋 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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When the Jackson 5, soon to become the Jacksons, left Motown for Epic, one member stayed behind: Jermaine Jackson. He was married to Berry Gordy’s daughter, which may explain the decision. There may have been other reasons as well. I’m sure we’ll come back to that story in a future episode.

The thing is, Jermaine was already pursuing a solo career before his brothers left, so he could simply continue doing what he had been doing. Yet while the Jacksons at Epic increasingly embraced disco on their late seventies albums, Jermaine largely stayed away from it.

And this isn’t a case of hindsight being twenty-twenty. We can be fairly brief about the outcome: the second half of the seventies was not Jermaine Jackson’s most successful period.🤔

For a long time, the explanation seemed obvious to me. It fitted neatly into the familiar story of Motown losing touch with the market because it failed to embrace disco. Since starting this newsletter, however, I’ve discovered that the reality is far more nuanced. Motown was never the premier disco label, but it certainly wasn’t absent from the genre either.

Which makes Jermaine’s musical choices during those years seem, well… rather curious.

Everything changed in early 1980 with the release of Let’s Get Serious. The title track, produced and arranged by Stevie Wonder, who also contributed backing vocals, became Jermaine’s biggest solo hit to date. It was a pure funk record and a very good one at that.

I bought the album as soon as it was released, only to discover that the second single sounded remarkably disco. Granted, it was the sleek, funk-driven disco that bands like Kool & The Gang were making at the time, but disco it was nonetheless.

What’s more, Jermaine and Motown clearly had the dancefloor in mind when compiling the album. Both “Let’s Get Serious” and “Burnin’ Hot” were included in their full twelve-inch lengths. For a cash-strapped record buyer like me, that was very welcome news indeed.

The funny thing is that by the time Jermaine finally embraced disco, the backlash had already happened. Some artists, like Chic, were hit hard by the anti-disco mood. For others, including Jermaine Jackson, it largely passed unnoticed.

That may explain why “Burnin’ Hot” never matched the commercial impact of “Let’s Get Serious”. Not on the dancefloor, however. Together, the two tracks reached No. 2 on the US Dance chart during the summer of 1980.

Looking back, “Burnin’ Hot” feels like the perfect summer record. More importantly, it captures a fascinating moment when disco was beginning to evolve into the synth-funk sound that would dominate the early eighties.

So perhaps the story isn’t that Jermaine Jackson was late to disco.

Perhaps Jermaine Jackson was early to what came next.

I was a bit confused in the eighties when Streetwise, Arthur Baker’s label, started releasing records under the name Cuba Gooding. Then, a few years later, a Cuba Gooding was on his way to becoming a world-famous actor.

Granted, the actor had a “Jr.” attached to his name. But did that mean he had started out as a singer before moving into acting? It wouldn’t have been the first time, nor the last.

Some research was clearly required.

It didn’t take long to discover that the Cuba Gooding making records for Streetwise was not the future Hollywood star. It was his father. They could have avoided the confusion by adding “Sr.” to his name, but I understand why they didn’t. Nobody likes being called “senior”, especially not in the music business. 😂

By the time he recorded his Streetwise singles, Cuba Gooding Sr. already had a distinguished career behind him as the lead singer of The Main Ingredient. The unusual first name shared by father and son goes back another generation. Cuba Sr.’s father had fled Barbados and promised that his first son would be named after the country that had welcomed him. This was long before Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution entered the picture. Apparently the name caused no great hardship because when Cuba Jr. was born, the family simply used it again.

The solo career of Cuba Gooding Sr. never really took off. After two singles on Streetwise, it was effectively over. Yet those two records have become genuine dancefloor classics.

“Got The Hots” is a perfect example of the slower synth-funk groove that many of us were digging in the mid-eighties. Almost every funk and R&B artist seemed to have at least one track built around that laid-back tempo. The urgency of disco had given way to something smoother, more seductive and perhaps a little cooler.

And let’s be honest, when the temperatures start climbing, slowing things down isn’t necessarily a bad idea. We don’t want to work ourselves into too much of a sweat on the dancefloor, do we?

I could end with a joke about the father setting an example for the son, especially given the song’s title and lyrics and the fact the latter is being accused of sexual misconduct by at least 30 women. But that would be in very poor taste indeed, so I’ll resist the temptation.

Instead, I’ll point to another connection. Beneath the synth-funk production sits a subtle Caribbean flavour that makes “Got The Hots” a perfect soundtrack for hot summer days. In a way, it brings the story full circle. The music carries echoes of the region from which Cuba Gooding Sr.‘s family originally came, giving the record an extra layer of meaning that wasn’t obvious to me when I first heard it all those years ago.

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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Talking about a …hot potato. 😂

I know, I know, it’s a terrible joke. But La Toya started it, not me.

The Jackson family must surely be the most successful musical family in history, with an astonishing number of its members building careers in the music business. Not all of those careers were equally successful, of course.

Take La Toya’s sisters.

There’s Rebbie Jackson. She released a handful of albums on Columbia during the eighties. Most of you probably won’t remember them. If I mention the title “Centipede”, a light might come on. Though I suspect it will be a rather dim one. Even among dedicated dance music obsessives like myself, it’s hardly a staple of mid-eighties funk playlists.

Then there’s Janet Jackson. I’ve written about her not so long ago. A hugely successful career by any measure.

La Toya’s story was… somewhat different. 😂

It started promisingly enough. Her debut album arrived in 1980 and produced a respectable dancefloor hit with “If You Feel The Funk”, a record that reached the pop charts in the Benelux and climbed to No. 17 on the US Dance chart. Unfortunately, she struggled to build on that momentum. Each successive album and single seemed to perform a little less well than the previous one.

In total, La Toya has released twelve studio albums for ten different record companies. That statistic alone tells you quite a lot about her career. 😂

At first glance, it looks like a simple story of bad career decisions. Ten decisions, eleven of them wrong. But the reality turned out to be far more complicated and far stranger. Her life would eventually involve estrangement from her family, the increasing sexualisation of her public image, and even disfellowshipping from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.🫣

Along the way came allegations of a forced marriage, claims that she feared being kidnapped by her own family, accusations against her father, a topless appearance in Playboy, a contract with the Moulin Rouge… Somehow her eighties album Bad Girl almost sounds like an autobiographical release. 😂

It would make for a wonderful narrative if we could say that everything started with her final dancefloor hit, the 1984 single “Hot Potato”.

But even by Jackson family standards, that might be stretching the story just a little too far.

I’ve written before about the system of cut-outs. Back when LPs were the primary format for distributing music, record companies often ended up with large quantities of unsold stock. In the United States, these returns were marked by cutting a corner of the sleeve, punching a hole through it, or adding a notch to the spine. The records would then be sold off at heavily discounted prices through other retail channels.

It was a very American practice and one that was rarely seen elsewhere.

When the disco backlash collided with the economic troubles of the late seventies and early eighties, enormous quantities of these cut-outs found their way across the Atlantic and into Europe.

That’s how I acquired a sizeable chunk of my disco and early funk collection.

And let me be clear: I love cut-outs. 😂

Yes, there’s the minor inconvenience of having to explain to anyone browsing through my records that no, I do not have destructive tendencies, nor do I spend my weekends punching holes in record sleeves. But at the time, cut-outs allowed me to buy what was, for me, absolute prime material at prices I could actually afford.

One of those purchases was the 1980 debut album by Chuck Cissel on Arista.

I loved the lead single, “Cisselin’ Hot”.

And frankly, if you can think of a better record to end a deep dive inspired by the tropical temperatures we’re currently enduring, I’d love to hear it.

No? Thought so. 😂

Chuck Cissel’s recording career was relatively short-lived. He released just two albums for Arista before his time as a recording artist effectively came to an end in 1982.

But like so many artists who briefly crossed the dancefloor radar, there was far more to his story than those few records suggest.

Cissel earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Oklahoma, becoming one of the first African Americans to graduate from the university’s fine arts school. Later in life he would serve as CEO of the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame from 2000 to 2009 and subsequently become its Artistic Director.

Long before that, however, he had already built an impressive career on the stage.

In his early twenties, Cissel appeared on Broadway in productions such as Hello, Dolly! alongside Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway, as well as Purlie, Lost in the Stars, Via Galactica, and Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope. He was also an original cast member of A Chorus Line, at a time when Broadway was only beginning to open its doors more widely to African American performers.

While performing in A Chorus Line, he recorded his first album, Swept Away, produced by Michael Bennett, the visionary behind the musical itself.

That eventually led to his recording contract with Arista and the release of Just For You, the album that contained “Cisselin’ Hot”.

The record never turned Chuck Cissel into a household name. But forty-five years later, “Cisselin’ Hot” still sounds exactly like its title suggests: warm, sunny, infectious and impossible to dislike.

Which makes it the perfect soundtrack for a summer that currently seems determined to melt Western Europe.

There isn’t an accompanying mix for this week’s episode, but I did publish a new mix on Mixcloud.

It’s the latest volume in my second mix series, a collection of personal musical journeys that wander freely across genres and decades. The series is called Let The Beat Take Control because, more than anything else, it’s the beat that guides the listener through hip-hop, trip-hop, classical music, pop, exotica, film scores and dance music.

If my regular mixes are usually confined to the genre, period and story I’m writing about, this series is the exact opposite. There are no boundaries, no rules and no preconceived destination.

Well, perhaps there is one rule.

It all has to make musical sense.

The new mix is Episode 13. And yes, it was published on a Friday.

What else could possibly go wrong? 😂

https://www.mixcloud.com/pedupre/let-the-beat-be-your-guide-vol13/

I’d love for you to give it a try. And if you enjoy it, you’ll be pleased to know there are twelve more episodes already waiting to be discovered.

Enjoy the journey, and as always, let the beat take control.

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…

Read more

If you’ve been reading The Twelve Inch for a while, you’ve probably noticed something. The story I’m telling, the story of disco and the dance music that followed it through the eighties and early nineties, isn’t neat.

It’s messy.

And perhaps the messiest part of all is the beginning.

I often say this newsletter covers the period between 1975 and 1995. But…

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

🎛️ Inside The Look Of Love: Trevor Horn, Bowie and the Sound of Widescreen Pop

The first thing you notice when you really listen to The Lexicon Of Love is how full it sounds.

Not busy.

Full.

There is a lot happening in almost every corner of the record, drum machines, bass, strings, keyboards, guitars, backing vocals, tiny theatrical details, yet somehow nothing falls over. The vocal still sits exactly where it should. The drama is huge, but the song remains clear.

That is the magic trick of Trevor Horn at this point in his career.

He was already thinking like a film director, not just a producer. And on The Look Of Love, you can hear him discovering just how wide a pop record could become.

🥁 Building the Groove Like a Tracing Paper Trick

The road to that sound started with Poison Arrow.

When ABC first came to Horn, the early recordings were not quite landing. The songs were there. The attitude was there. The image was certainly there. But the foundation still needed tightening.

Horn’s answer was simple, clever and very early eighties:

“I proposed programming the drum track into the (Roland) TR808, then programming the bass part and have the band play over the program bits. The idea was to do it the same way you might trace a picture. You lay your tracing paper on top of the picture, trace over it, and then take the picture away. Whatever you end up with is going to be more accurate.”

That little “tracing paper” image says so much.

This was not about replacing the band with machines. It was about using machines to sharpen the band.

The TR-808 gave the track a spine. The programmed bass helped lock the movement in place. Then the musicians could play over it with more confidence, more precision, more snap.

You can hear that method all over The Lexicon Of Love. It still has human drama, but underneath it sits a machine-tooled elegance. That tension, emotion on top, architecture below, is a big part of why the record still works.

And then, while working on The Look Of Love, the studio door opened and in walked someone you really do not expect to find in this story.

David Bowie.

⚡ When Bowie Drops By the Session

The sessions were taking place at Tony Visconti’s studio when Bowie sent word asking if he could come in.

Now, imagine that for a moment.

You are making a record that already feels impossibly stylish, cinematic and ambitious. You are trying to build the future of British pop 😁. And then Bowie walks in and simply sits there, being Bowie.

Horn remembered it beautifully:

“He seemed very nice and he sat there for a while, being Bowie while we did some keyboards. As I say, there was one bit of the track that was speculative. He said, I’ve got an idea for that if you’re interested. Sure, what’s the idea? I said. He said, You could use a message from our answering machine. I said, nah, don’t fancy that. I’ve got this idea where Martin’s going to talk. He was fine with that, and it’s not like I was rude or anything, but I’ve often wondered whether turning down his idea was the reason I never got to work with him”

That is such a wonderfully human detail.

One of the most important producers of the eighties, sitting in a studio with David Bowie, and still wondering decades later if politely rejecting one idea changed the course of his career.

Read more

🎧 Some Albums Never Leave You

Like most of you, I’ve lived through several versions of the music industry. I grew up with vinyl. Embraced CDs. Followed everyone into downloads. Tried streaming. Then largely walked away from it.

The formats changed.

The albums didn’t.

And among the records that have followed me through every stage of that journey, one sits …

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

🥁 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 cultur…

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

🥁 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 …

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

🎤 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 episod…

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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…

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2 months 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?

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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 pr…

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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…

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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 ✂️

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