Sometimes it’s not easy to know where your fascination with an artist or band comes from. But in the case of the Pointer Sisters, I have a pretty good idea.

In 1979, the Pointer Sisters scored their first and only number one in the Benelux with a Bruce Springsteen song: Fire. It was the height of disco, and here was an African American group that wasn’t doing soul or disco, but something much closer to rock. And what’s more, they scored a big hit with it.

Although the follow-up, Happiness, was a dancefloor-ready gem, you wouldn’t exactly have called it part of the natural disco habitat we were used to by then. That all changed with their 1983 album Break Out and the slick, synth-driven dance-pop sound that would deliver hit after hit. The likelihood of a Pointer Sisters song playing on the radio at any given moment back then was almost a certainty.

But how did we get from pop-rock to pure dance-pop in just a few years? And why did they make that change in the early eighties, but not during the disco boom of the late seventies?

With an album like Break Out, I had plenty of possible tracks to choose from. But I specifically chose Jump (For My Love) because it’s a bit of an outlier.

By the early eighties, more African American artists were recording dance tracks at tempos above 130 BPM. Jump was one of the most obvious examples. And I always wondered what the connection was with the Hi-NRG sound that was ruling the gay dancefloors of the US and Europe.

That’s a question for the coming B-Side. But first, there’s another question worth answering.

Why did the Pointer Sisters take so long to get there?

👋 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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Four sisters, and a lot of musical influences

Every artist is shaped by the culture they grew up in, their family, their origins and the stories they heard as children. And with the Pointer Sisters, it’s worth looking at that before we get to the records.

The four sisters grew up in a conservative religious household in Oakland, California. Their parents, Elton and Sara Pointer, had migrated from Arkansas during the Second World War, and the sisters’ musical upbringing was quite a mixture.

When they visited relatives in Arkansas, they listened to country radio. That influence stayed with them, to the point where they were invited to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in 1974. The first African American vocal group to do so.

Then there was gospel, of course. Like so many African American artists, the sisters learned to sing in church. But growing up around Oakland also meant being surrounded by a musical scene that was changing rapidly. By the late sixties, the West Coast was a place where gospel traditions, James Brown’s funk, Latin rhythms and even progressive rock could all find their way into the same musical conversation.

And finally, there was jazz. Particularly the freedom of vocal jazz, where improvisation and individual expression were just as important as singing the right notes.

Put all those influences together and it’s probably no surprise that the Pointer Sisters’ 1973 debut album sounded quite different from the more conventional pop and R&B of many other girl groups of the era.

Their first three albums appeared on Blue Thumb Records, an independent label that also housed an early Sylvester. Another interesting connection, considering where this week’s story is eventually taking us.

But what made the Pointer Sisters particularly interesting was that they were determined to do things their own way.

And that included the clothes.

Everything, but not disco?

In their early years, the sisters had developed a distinctive image, dressing in vintage clothes that suited their mixture of jazz, swing, gospel and country.

It was all very original. But there was a problem.

As Anita Pointer told Rolling Stone in 1979, the thrift-store image was beginning to dictate what kind of music they could perform.

And it’s hard to be sincere with a pile of fruit on your head.

By the late seventies, the sisters were ready for a change. And then Bonnie Pointer left the group to pursue a solo career with Motown. Bonnie would do something her sisters wouldn’t: make disco records.

Anita later explained that Bonnie’s departure made them rethink everything. They wanted a new direction so people wouldn’t miss her. New clothes, a new look, new music, a new producer. Everything. You can’t help but wonder whether the decision to stay away from disco was partly influenced by Bonnie’s choice.

A bit like, “Everything, but not that...”

There’s no evidence that this was a deliberate decision, but the timing is interesting.

And then there’s Richard Perry.

The producer behind records by Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon and many others became the man responsible for the Pointer Sisters’ next chapter. He had started his own label, Planet Records, and wanted to take the sisters in a pop-rock direction.

Disco wasn’t part of the plan.

But was that what the sisters wanted?

Ruth Pointer later explained that Perry had a very definite musical direction in mind. After everything the group had been through, including the departures of June for a period and then Bonnie, their main concern was getting their career back on track. They had families and financial responsibilities. And they knew they could sing almost anything.

So they went along with Perry’s plans.

I find that quite revealing. The sisters who had once insisted on making their own musical choices were now willing to let someone else take the lead. Not because they had lost their independence, but because they wanted to make records and get back out there.

And Perry had the songs.

Fire and Happiness were the first results. Both successful, particularly Fire, which became a major international hit. But when the second Planet album, Priority, moved further into harder-edged rock, the results weren’t quite as impressive.

Something had to change again.

The missing link

This is where the story gets interesting for me.

If you listen to Fire and then jump straight to Automatic or Jump (For My Love), it sounds like an enormous musical change. But it wasn’t really a sudden pivot. The evidence is right there on their 1980 album Special Things.

Nothing is created in a vacuum. And usually, by listening to an album and placing it within its timeframe, you can hear where the inspiration was coming from.

Quite literally in this case.

The first single, He’s So Shy, sounds like a distant brother (or sister, if you prefer) of the Doobie Brothers’ What A Fool Believes. And I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to call Could I Be Dreamin’ a close relative of The Jacksons’ Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground). Then there’s We’ve Got The Power, a clear disco-funk track that did well on the dancefloor.

So much for the Pointer Sisters staying away from disco.

Those three songs also gave the sisters another appearance on the American dance charts. And He’s So Shy reached number three on the pop chart.

The new direction was working.

But what I find fascinating is that the Pointer Sisters weren’t simply abandoning their earlier influences. The gospel-infused vocals, the jazz harmonies, the rhythmic complexity of funk, they were all still there. What changed was the musical environment around them.

The early eighties brought synthesizers, keyboard programming, new production techniques and a growing connection between pop music, MTV and film soundtracks. And the Pointer Sisters were perfectly placed to take advantage of it.

The next album, Black & White, gave them another major hit with Slow Hand. Then came So Excited! in 1982, where synthesizers and electronic arrangements became more prominent.

And by the time Break Out arrived in late 1983, everything seemed to fall into place.

Breaking out, one hit at a time

Richard Perry had sold Planet Records to RCA in 1982, but the change of ownership didn’t immediately alter the Pointer Sisters’ fortunes. In fact, their biggest success was still to come.

Break Out became the album that transformed the sisters into genuine eighties pop superstars. But even here, success wasn’t quite as straightforward as it might appear.

Take Automatic.

It wasn’t originally planned as the second single. But DJs started playing it, the record company followed, and the song went to number two on the R&B chart and number five on the pop chart. A nice example of the dancefloor telling the record company what to do, rather than the other way around.

Then there’s I’m So Excited.

The song had already appeared on the previous album in 1982, but the original single hadn’t reached the pop Top 10. The sisters + Record company believed it deserved another chance, and they were right. A remixed version was released in 1984, reached the Top 10 and was added to a revised edition of Break Out.

That makes the album quite interesting from a collector’s point of view. The original 1983 edition and the revised 1984 version aren’t exactly the same record. Nightline disappeared to make room for I’m So Excited.

Then there was Neutron Dance.

Its inclusion in the soundtrack of Beverly Hills Cop gave the song an enormous additional push. The film’s success and the exposure on MTV helped turn it into another Top 10 hit.

And then we come to this week’s central song.

Jump (For My Love).

Released as a single in 1984, the year Los Angeles hosted the Olympic Games, Jump had a video filled with images of athletes doing exactly what the title suggested.

Jumping.

There was no official connection with the Olympics, but the timing couldn’t have been better.

The song reached number three on the American pop chart and became one of the biggest hits from Break Out.

And musically, it was quite a different beast from Fire.

The electronic rhythm, the tempo, the powerful vocals, the whole thing was designed to get people moving. Yet the sisters still sounded unmistakably like the Pointer Sisters.

Which brings me back to Richard Perry.

Richard Perry, Julio Iglesias and the perfect pop song

Perry was one of the major producers of his generation. A perfectionist who worked his artists hard and had a very good ear for commercially successful material.

But he also understood something important about the Pointer Sisters.

They could sing almost anything.

And he knew how to find songs that suited their voices while remaining accessible to a much wider audience. The popularity of their records rested partly on the simplicity of the melodies and lyrics, combined with rhythms that were often far more sophisticated than they first appeared.

Anyone could sing Jump (For My Love) after hearing the chorus once.

But that doesn’t mean making a record like Jump was simple.

Perry worked with a team of associate producers, arrangers, programmers and engineers who helped give Break Out its sleek, electronic sound. And that was probably the perfect combination. The sisters brought their gospel, jazz and soul backgrounds. Perry and his team brought the songs, the production expertise and an ear for what was happening in popular music.

Although Perry wasn’t infallible.

Because the funniest bit of information I came across while researching this song was that he originally considered giving Jump to Julio Iglesias.

Yes. Julio Iglesias.

Now, I have a really hard time imagining what that would have sounded like.

Perhaps somewhere in an alternative universe, Julio is singing Jump (For My Love) while the Pointer Sisters are recording To All The Girls (Boys) I’ve Loved Before.

I’m pretty sure we got the better deal 😁

The dancefloor connection

What makes Jump such an interesting record for me isn’t just that it became a big hit. It’s the way it connects to another musical world that was developing at the same time.

By the early eighties, a growing number of African American artists were recording fast, electronically driven dance tracks. Songs that could easily push beyond 130 BPM. And those tempos were also central to the Hi-NRG sound that was filling gay clubs in the US and Europe.

The Pointer Sisters weren’t specifically making music for that scene. But listen to Jump alongside records by Sylvester, Evelyn Thomas, Lime or Hazell Dean and you’ll hear how naturally they fit together. That’s exactly what I’ve tried to demonstrate in this week’s Go Dancin’ mix.

And it raises a question I’ve been asking myself for quite some time.

Were these musical worlds influencing one another? Or were they simply responding to the same changes in technology, production and dancefloor culture? It’s something I want to explore properly.

From now on, the B-Side will have its own rhythm, separate from the weekly A-Side. It will remain behind the paywall, but I’ll be using it to explore bigger subjects, much like I did with the Canadian disco series.

And this connection between Black dance music and Hi-NRG seems like a very good place to start.

Because when you listen to Jump (For My Love), the connection sounds perfectly natural.

But how did it happen?

And did you ever think of the Pointer Sisters as part of the Hi-NRG story, or were they always a pop group to you?

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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So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

One of the criticisms often thrown at disco is that it was all rather artificial. All decor, no content. And one of the arguments used to prove this is that disco never really built artist careers. Not lasting ones anyway.

Except, of course, that’s not true.

Donna Summer. Grace Jones. Gloria Gaynor… And if we include the people behind the records, Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder didn’t exactly disappear when disco supposedly died.

The more interesting question is another one.

Did disco produce more wasted careers than other genres? More artists who could have been huge, but somehow never were?

That’s much harder to answer. I’ll come back to it when we’ve studied a few more examples and perhaps we can find a common thread. But there are some obvious cases that have stuck with me for years. Artists where every time I pull out one of their records, I ask myself the same question:

Why didn’t it happen for her?

Madleen Kane is one of them.

She released five albums between 1978 and 1985 and put five records into the US dance Top 10. Her first two reached No. 3. Then, in 1981, she finally went all the way to No. 1 with “You Can”, produced by Giorgio Moroder. It even sneaked into the Billboard Hot 100.

Everything seemed to be there.

Except.. the breakthrough.

Today Madleen Kane is probably known mainly by disco aficionados. Which is strange because she made some excellent records, worked with some of the biggest names in disco and was a stunningly beautiful Swedish model.

And I mean stunningly beautiful.

She could’ve turned me into a full-blown heterosexual 🫣. That sort of beauty.

So what happened?

👋 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 Rough Diamond

Madleen Kane was born in Malmö, Sweden, in 1958 and started modelling while still very young. Modelling eventually took her to Paris, and that is where our disco story really begins.

Because one of the surprises of researching Madleen Kane was discovering that her career is essentially a French disco story. A Swedish model, singing in English, later signed to Warner Bros. in America isn’t exactly pointing you towards France.

But France is where Rough Diamond came from.

Kane became involved with producer Jean-Claude Friederich, who would play an important role in both her professional and personal life. And through Friederich we arrive at Paul and Lana Sebastian and lyricist Michaële.

Now these weren’t exactly beginners.

Paul and Lana Sebastian, together with Michaële, had written for some of the biggest names in French popular music. Among their credits was one of the great European earworms of the 1970s, Dalida’s “Gigi l’Amoroso”.

Try getting that one out of your head once you’ve heard it.

I dare you.

Like quite a few European songwriters and producers at the time, they saw what was happening with disco and decided to have a go themselves.

And suddenly a Swedish model in Paris was making disco for the American dancefloor.

That sentence alone tells you quite a lot about disco in 1978.

France to America

The resulting album was Rough Diamond, released in 1978.

And here’s a lovely little collector detail.

The album first appeared through CBS in France. In America it was picked up by Warner Bros. Contemporary reports from San Francisco were already talking about the French CBS import, before the domestic Warner release arrived.

We tend to tell the disco story as America exporting disco to Europe. But records were travelling in both directions, and European producers were already making music specifically with American clubs in mind.

Madleen Kane was right in the middle of that traffic.

And it worked.

“Rough Diamond” reached No. 3 on the US disco chart. Her second album, Cheri, followed in 1979 and “Forbidden Love/Secret Love Affair” also reached No. 3.

So we’re not talking about some obscure European disco singer who released two singles nobody noticed.

American DJs noticed.

Very much so.

But here comes our old friend.

Timing.

1979

Kane had arrived in 1978, almost exactly when you would have wanted to arrive if your ambition was to make disco records. Unfortunately, she had also arrived almost exactly when you wouldn’t want to arrive if your ambition was to build a long-term career around them.

By 1979 the backlash was underway.

And Madleen Kane had another complication. Her records weren’t being handled by one company everywhere. CBS had her in parts of Europe, Warner Bros. in North America, with RCA releasing her in South America & Japan. That’s 3 majors, at the same time 👊

This was perfectly normal in an industry built around territorial licensing.

But I do wonder whether it helped Madleen. Or the opposite.

I’ve spent enough years working inside record companies to know how important that horrible little word “priority” can be. A major can have dozens of records it likes. That’s not the same as having a record it has decided it must break.

Was there ever one company looking at Madleen Kane and saying: we’re going to turn this woman into a worldwide star?

Probably not.

What we do know is that the dancefloor remained loyal.

In 1980 came Sounds Of Love, including “Cherchez Pas” and “Boogie Talk”. Another US dance Top 10.

Three albums. Three substantial American club successes. Still no pop breakthrough. Something needed to change.

Enter Giorgio

The arrival of Giorgio Moroder looks almost too perfect when you tell the story backwards. Moroder had just spent the second half of the seventies helping turn Donna Summer into the biggest disco star in the world. Kane was beautiful, European, already successful in American clubs and looking for the next step.

But the connection wasn’t quite as miraculous as it sounds.

Look closely at Kane’s earlier records and you already find musicians from the Moroder universe. Keith Forsey, for example, had played drums, Thor Baldurson did the arrangements and Juergen Koppers, Moroder’s engineer, was also engineering the Madleen Kane recordings.

The worlds were already touching.

In 1981 they finally collided.

Moroder produced Kane’s fourth album, Don’t Wanna Lose You, and the musicians around it read like a snapshot of where sophisticated pop was heading: Keith Forsey, Harold Faltermeyer, Richie Zito, Greg Mathieson.

And then there was “You Can”.

You Can

This is the record that makes Madleen Kane’s story so frustrating. “You Can”, coupled with “Fire In My Heart” for the American dance chart, went to No. 1.

Not No. 17.

Not “a club favourite”.

No. 1.

And it crossed into the Billboard Hot 100.

Finally.

Except it stopped at No. 77.

In Belgium it reached No. 32. In Italy, No. 23.

Close.

But no cigar.

And listen to “You Can” today and you can hear something else happening.

Moroder is moving.

This isn’t quite the lush, sensual disco world of “Love To Love You Baby” anymore. But we’re not yet fully inside the enormous cinematic eighties Moroder of Flashdance either. “You Can” sits somewhere in the hallway between Bad Girls and Flashdance.

The pulse is still disco, but the machinery of eighties dance-pop is already arriving.

That’s one of the reasons I still love the record. You can actually hear dance music changing underneath Madleen Kane.

And still it wasn’t enough.

So why didn’t it happen?

There wasn’t one catastrophic mistake.

That’s probably the answer.

Kane entered disco when competition was enormous. Then disco became commercially radioactive in America just as she was establishing herself. Her recording career was spread across different companies and territories. She repeatedly conquered the dance chart without convincing pop radio to follow.

And when Giorgio Moroder finally gave her the record that looked capable of changing everything, “You Can” became a No. 1 dance record and a No. 77 pop record.

That difference between those two numbers may be the entire Madleen Kane story.

She did return once more. After several years away she released Cover Girl in 1985, and “I’m No Angel” still managed No. 21 on the US dance chart.

But by then pop and dance music had moved on at frightening speed.

And eventually Kane moved on too.

She married again, started a family and largely disappeared from showbusiness. Years later she tried reconnecting with that earlier life, publishing her memoir Rough Diamond in 2018 and appearing online again.

Which leaves me wondering whether I’ve been asking the wrong question all these years.

Maybe “Why didn’t Madleen Kane become a huge star?” assumes that becoming one was always the destination.

Perhaps it wasn’t.

Perhaps she was a model who got an extraordinary opportunity, made five albums, had a string of American dance hits, worked with Giorgio bloody Moroder and then decided that there were other things she wanted from life.

There’s nothing particularly tragic about that.

It only looks like a missed career if we assume everybody who enters the music business wants to become Madonna.

And believe me, becoming Madonna requires wanting to become Madonna very, very badly.

What Madleen Kane did leave behind is a handful of fabulous disco records.

And the best, for me, remains “You Can”.

Not only because it was her biggest hit, but because it captures a moment when disco itself was trying to work out what it was going to become next.

Which brings us neatly to another question.

If Madleen Kane’s story was largely created in France, how much disco was France actually producing while everybody was looking towards New York, Munich and Philadelphia?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

But that’s far too big a story for a B-Side.

We’ll get there.

For now, I’m curious.

Did Madleen Kane deserve a bigger career? Is there another disco artist who always makes you wonder, “Why wasn’t this person huge?” And which Madleen Kane record would you put on first?

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

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

Share

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

Conduit or footnote? The KLF’s place in UK rave history

By 1988, acid house had its own world: warehouse parties, raves and a culture that much of the British press seemed to notice only when it could run a drug scare.

The KLF took sounds from that world and made them enormous. Start with the Pure Trance singles, then put on the stadium house versions of “What Time Is Love?”, “3 a.m. Eternal” and “Last Train to Trancentral.” There are sirens, electronic beats and sampled crowds, but now they sound ready for Top of the Pops. And, eventually, the Brit Awards stage, though perhaps nobody there was quite ready for what happened on that one. 😁

I think that is where The KLF’s place in rave history gets interesting. They didn’t invent the scene, and I wouldn’t want to give them credit that belongs to the people building it. But they brought some of its sounds into living rooms far beyond the rave circuit. Those records became international hits while keeping enough of their rave character for you to hear where they had come from.

Were The KLF a bridge from the underground to pop? I think so. Were they the most important bridge? That’s a bigger claim, and I’m not entirely convinced. But it would be difficult to call them a footnote when “3 a.m. Eternal” was playing to an audience that had never set foot in a warehouse party.

🌙 The other side: Chill Out and The Orb

Read more

On 23 August 1994, KLF members Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty took roughly £1 million in £50 notes to an abandoned boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura and burned it.

Gimpo, their longtime collaborator, filmed the whole thing. It took well over an hour.

A few years earlier, the same two men had written a manual explaining how to make a number-one hit. They had made several themselves. Now they were setting the proceeds on fire.

If you have never come across The KLF before, you may reasonably assume I have skipped a few important steps. I have. But I promise we’ll get to them. 😁

I have always wondered whether Drummond and Cauty were geniuses or stark raving mad. After looking into their story again, I am less sure than ever. Our way in, is their first (hit) single under the KLF name, “What Time Is Love?”

First, though, we need to visit Sweden.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Two Men, ABBA, and a Very Bad Meeting

Bill Drummond knew his way around the music business. He had run Liverpool’s Zoo Records, managed Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, and worked as A&R for WEA. Jimmy Cauty was a graphic artist who had played in Brilliant.

In 1987, they began recording together as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, or The JAMs. They borrowed the name from The Illuminatus! Trilogy, whose fictional Justified Ancients introduce chaos into human affairs.

And they took their mission seriously!

The debut album, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), was built from samples they had not cleared. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin appeared. So did ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” chopped into a track called “The Queen and I.”

ABBA’s people were not amused. The unsold copies had to be destroyed.

If you think the next part is a legal battle.

No.

It’s a road trip.

Drummond and Cauty drove to Sweden with an NME journalist and photographer, hoping to meet Benny and Björn and talk them round. They didn’t get their meeting. Instead, outside ABBA’s studio at three in the morning, they presented a gold disc “in recognition of sales in excess of zero” to a blonde sex worker. The idea, apparently, was that the photographs might make her look like Agnetha Fältskog fallen on hard times.

It didn’t work.

On the way home, they burned copies of the album in a Swedish field. According to accounts of the trip, a farmer was sufficiently unhappy about this to fire at them. Of course there was a furious farmer. At this point, I would be disappointed if there weren’t one. 😁

They kept some copies back and later advertised them for £1,000 each.

And, ladies and gents, we are only just getting started.

A Number One, followed by Instructions

Having been burned (pun intended) by the music business once, Drummond and Cauty’s response was not to go straight (what did you think?).

No, they wanted to prove they understood the machine better than anyone in it.

In 1988, Drummond and Cauty released “Doctorin’ the Tardis” as The Timelords. It mashed up the Doctor Who theme, Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll (Part 2)” and The Sweet’s “Blockbuster!” It went to number one in the UK and became a big European hit.

And then they wrote it all down. The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is a genuinely step-by-step guide to manufacturing a hit single with no money, no talent, and no shame. The short of it: sample liberally, use a drum machine, if you have instruments, throw them away, exploit chart mechanics and be shameless about promotion. It reads partly as satire and partly as a confession, because they had, in fact, just done exactly what it describes.

It later became an underground cult text among aspiring pop chancers; Austrian duo Edelweiss reportedly followed it almost to the letter to score their own massive 1988 hit “Bring Me Edelweiss.” I’ll return to that on this week’s B-Side.

Meanwhile, Drummond and Cauty had another record on the way.

“What Time Is Love?”, Take one. And Two. And Three…

The original “What Time Is Love?” appeared in 1988 under their new name, The KLF. It was a twelve-inch in their Pure Trance series: repetitive, insistent and made for the dancefloor.

It was the year of the second Summer Of Love and Rave parties

But with these two, releasing a track was rarely the end of the matter. It was more like an invitation to see what else they could do to it.

They chased what they started calling “stadium house”, pounding, anthemic dance music built for arenas rather than clubs. By the time the definitive versions landed in 1989–90, The KLF (the acronym stood for, among other explanations they gave, the Kopyright Liberation Front) had a genuine sound: air-raid sirens, Wagnerian synth stabs, sampled crowd noise, ancient-Egyptian and Mu-mythology sleeve art, and a recurring visual motif of a horned Viking helmet that made absolutely no narrative sense and somehow worked anyway.

It became the first part of their stadium house trilogy. “3 a.m. Eternal” and “Last Train to Trancentral” followed.

And then came the single nobody could have predicted: “Justified and Ancient,” featuring Tammy Wynette, the reigning First Lady of American country music, cooing the incredible line “they’re justified and they’re ancient and they drive the Ice Cream Van” over house beats.

It was a transatlantic top-ten hit. Wynette apparently had very little idea who The KLF were or what any of it meant (and she wasn’t the only one), which, if anything, made it funnier.

Later, when I worked with artists myself, I sometimes thought about the (distribution) companies handling KLF releases. I have known artists to change their minds quite often, sometimes as often as you and I change underwear. Which, to be clear, is a lot. I hope the same goes for you. 😁

But what must have working with KLF been like? I presume, as responsible label manager it meant lots of phone calls to your better half.

“Honey, I’ll be late. They’ve changed everything again”. If you ever had an idea that working at a record company is/was all fun, think again.

I wasn’t there. If anybody reading this was, please get in touch. I would love to hear your story, and I ‘m a very good listener

The Exit: Machine Guns, a Dead Sheep, and the Vanishing Act

By early 1992, The KLF had sold millions of records and won Best British Group at the Brit Awards.

So naturally they decided to end it as violently and publicly as possible.

Invited to perform at the Brit Awards after winning Best British Group, they took the stage with the grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror and performed a thrashed-out, near-unrecognisable version of “3am Eternal.”

Drummond, on crutches in a long coat (in the style of an SS army officer), fired a machine gun loaded with blanks into the audience of the British music industry’s finest. They’d wanted to disembowel a dead sheep on stage too, with buckets of blood thrown over the front rows, but BBC lawyers vetoed the blood (how unsporty of them) and Extreme Noise Terror, committed vegetarians, refused to take part in a live disembowelling.

The dead sheep still made an appearance later that night, left at an after-party with a note saying, “I died for ewe.” As The KLF came offstage, their spokesman announced that they had left the music business.

You could be forgiven for thinking that was another joke. In May, they formally announced their retirement and withdrew their complete! back catalogue from sale.

At the height of their success, they made their records unavailable. Somewhere, somebody in distribution must have put down the phone, stared at the wall and decided it was time to go home.

They also buried their Brit Award near Stonehenge. As one does.

Could we go any further?

Of course we could.

After The KLF, Drummond and Cauty became the K Foundation and announced a £40,000 “Worst Artist of the Year” award. They offered it to sculptor Rachel Whiteread in the same year she won the Turner Prize. I suspect she had not planned to collect both.

And then came the boathouse on Jura.

They burned the money while Gimpo filmed and a journalist watched. Some notes escaped the fire. Later, when they screened the film, audiences were furious. People wanted to know why they had done it.

So do I.

So: Mad, or Visionaries?

Here’s the trouble with trying to sum up The KLF: every fact checks out, and none of it adds up to a motive. They wrote the literal manual for gaming the pop charts and then proved it worked. They made a fortune and then destroyed both the fortune and the records that made it. They turned genuine chart pop into performance art and then turned performance art into a public spectacle nobody, including apparently the two men doing it, could fully explain afterward.

Was this a coherent critique of the music industry and the fetishisation of money, executed by two people smart enough to see the machine from the inside and cynical enough to blow it up rather than keep feeding it? Or were Drummond and Cauty just two enormously talented pranksters who got in over their heads with their own mythology, the Illuminatus references, the Discordianism, the ancient Mu symbolism, until the joke and the belief became impossible to tell apart, even for them?

Or was it just the drugs?

Bill Drummond would later say : “Some people thought we had a vision. But we didn’t really. We were just winging it, making it up” “A lot of the time we didn’t decide what to do. We asked the question”what would the KLF do now”.

“We just were trying to push things a bit further. Push ourselves as far as we could go” said Jimmy. “Go All the way and not come back again”.

Stark raving mad, or the two most clear-eyed visionaries British pop produced in a generation. I genuinely don’t think you can pick one. Maybe that’s the point.

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

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

Share

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

The KLF were influential. Or were they?

They left an enormous footprint on early nineties dance music, though it can be hard to separate their musical influence from all the chaos surrounding them. On this week’s B-Side, I’m going to see just how far that footprint stretches.

I’ll take a closer look at The Manual, and at the hits made by people who followed its instructions, whether they meant to or not. I’ll explore The KLF’s connection to rave culture and the second summer of love in 1988. And, of course, there’s the saga of their illegal samples. They weren’t the first to use them, but they took “do it first, ask for forgiveness later” to rather impressive heights. 😁

Finally, I’ll follow the trail to the artists they influenced, directly and indirectly. Because once you look beyond the bonfires, the sheep and the ice cream van, The KLF start to look like a lot more than a crazy footnote to the early nineties.

Over To You

Which version of “What Time Is Love?” is yours?

And at what point in this story would you have decided The KLF had gone too far?

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

The Man Behind the Bass

If you study liner notes, chances are you’ve come across the name Nathan East. With more than 2,000 recordings to his name, he is probably one of the most important session musicians to come out of the Los Angeles scene over the past forty years.

But when he travelled with Philip Bailey to London to work on Chinese Wall, he was hardly an unknown musician waiting for his big break. East had already built quite a career.

He was born in Philadelphia but grew up in San Diego, where he initially trained on cello before switching to electric bass. The problem, if you wanted to become a session musician, was geography.

Los Angeles was where a lot of the work was.

So East would make the roughly two-hour drive from San Diego to LA to record during the day, then return home to play clubs at night.

His big entry point into the session world came through Barry White.

But the really interesting connection wasn’t White himself.

It was his arranger, Gene Page.

You’d Better Know How To Read

Page had brought East into a jingle session around 1980 and discovered something extremely useful.

Nathan East could read music.

Really well.

Page would write out every note of the bass parts and East could sit down, read them and play them accurately. That impressed Page enough to keep calling him. And Gene Page was exactly the sort of person you wanted calling you. He had worked with an enormous list of artists, which meant that once you were inside his network, one session could lead to another.

And another.

And another.

By the time Philip Bailey called East for the Chinese Wall sessions in 1984, he was already working regularly with artists including Phyllis Hyman, George Benson, Kenny Loggins, Dionne Warwick and Johnny Mathis.

What fascinated me while researching this was how important sight-reading was.

We tend to think of a great bass player in terms of chops. Groove. Feel. Sound.

But if you’re a session musician and somebody puts a page of music in front of you, starts the clock and expects you to get it right immediately, being brilliant isn’t enough.

East himself is very explicit about that:

“The ability to read music has been very important in my career as a working bassist. I’ll never forget early on working with the great arranger Gene Page (Barry White, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Madonna, The Jacksons, etc.) who wrote out every bass note. He had a very solid understanding of the role of the instrument and wrote some amazing bass parts. Gene told me many times how impressed he was with my ability to read and interpret his parts and I believe that alone generated a lot of work for me. I also recorded numerous motion picture soundtracks, jingles, and television shows, which all required extremely sharp sight reading skills. I remember one jingle session in particular with Larry Cansler where we recorded 29 spots in under an hour. The music was flying by so quickly there wasn’t even time to preview it. And you didn’t want to be the one to make a mistake and have to record it over again, so it literally had to be perfect the first time you played it. I look at sight reading as just another tool in your arsenal, if you’re serious about your profession. Sure, you can make it without reading music, but you have to be pretty lucky.”

Twenty-nine spots in under an hour. 🫣

Read more

I sometimes get asked how I select the song I write about each week.

And although it might look as if I’m working my way through twenty years of dance music history like a drunken sailor, swaying from side to side 😁, there is actually a plan behind the madness.

Sort of.

The writing is only one part of The Twelve Inch. There’s also the weekly soundtrack, the mixtape I publish on Mixcloud and, copyright gods permitting, YouTube. To avoid making the same mix two weeks in a row, I like jumping between eras.

So after Dolly Parton and 1979 last week, I wanted to venture into the eighties.

Then “Easy Lover” appeared on one of my playlists.

And from those first notes, I was back.

Music is a wonderful repository of memories that way. You can go years without hearing a song and then, within seconds, it pulls you straight back into another period of your life.

But there was another reason “Easy Lover” caught my attention.

The Crossover didn’t end with Disco

Last week, while writing about Dolly Parton, I tried to get a little closer to understanding why I’m so fascinated by pop and rock artists crossing over onto the dancefloor.

That story didn’t end when disco supposedly died.

The crossovers continued. They just became different and, in a sense, easier. By the mid-eighties, artists could move between musical worlds without necessarily facing the kind of backlash that came with “going disco” in the late seventies.

And it wasn’t a one-way street either. Black artists were moving beyond the roles the industry expected from them too. Which brings us to Philip Bailey.

One of the great voices of Earth, Wind & Fire. A singer steeped in funk, soul and R&B.

Making an album with Phil Collins.

And producing something that sounded very much like a rock record.

Except that one of its songs also reached #7 on Billboard’s dance chart and #3 on the twelve-inch sales chart.

Now we have a story.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

The Happy Accident

As music fans, we sometimes like to imagine our heroes as super-talented geniuses who walk into a studio and pull fully formed songs out of thin air. The reality is usually much more interesting. Music history is riddled with happy accidents, experiments and sonic misadventures that somehow turn out right.

“Easy Lover” is a perfect example.

Phil Collins had produced almost an entire album for Philip Bailey when they realised something was missing. According to bass player Nathan East, Bailey felt they still didn’t have that undeniable single the record company would immediately recognise as a hit.

East sat down at the piano and started playing around with a riff.

Bailey joined in.

Then Collins.

Within about twenty minutes, the bones of “Easy Lover” were there.

They recorded what they considered a demo, initially singing “choosy lover” because the proper lyrics didn’t even exist yet. The idea was to come back and make the real record afterwards.

Except they listened to the demo the next day and realised they already had it. That was the record.

I love stories like that.

But how did Philip Bailey and Phil Collins end up in a studio together in the first place?

Because on paper, it wasn’t the most obvious combination.

Enter The Phenix Horns

Philip Bailey had spent the seventies as one of the voices of Earth, Wind & Fire, one of the most successful and influential American bands of the era. A crucial part of their sound was their brass section, the Phenix Horns.

By the early eighties, Maurice White was increasingly experimenting with electronics and the band moved away from that horn-heavy sound. After 1983’s Electric Universe, Earth, Wind & Fire went on hiatus and Bailey suddenly had room to develop his solo career.

Meanwhile, Phil Collins was becoming very difficult to avoid. Genesis drummer. Genesis singer. Solo star. Producer. And, importantly for our story, a massive Earth, Wind & Fire fan.

Collins had already started working with the Phenix Horns, using them on his own records and with Genesis. That connection brought Bailey and Collins into each other’s orbit. Collins later recalled meeting Bailey through the horn players and discussing the possibility of working together when their paths crossed again in Los Angeles.

Bailey was preparing his second solo album, Chinese Wall, and initially wanted to cover a Phil Collins song. Then somebody had a better idea.

Why not ask Collins to produce the whole album?

They asked.

Phil said yes.

Considering his love for Earth, Wind & Fire, perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us too much.

But there was still an interesting tension. Collins came from British rock. Bailey came from American R&B. And Bailey wanted to make sure that distinction didn’t simply disappear.

Enter Nathan East

That is where Nathan East becomes important.

Bailey brought the bass player into the sessions, and if you’ve spent any time reading album credits from the eighties, there’s a very good chance you’ve encountered his name.

If you haven’t, don’t worry.

That’s what this week’s B-Side is for. 😁

East belongs to that fascinating world of session musicians who appear everywhere without necessarily becoming household names themselves. The Chinese Wall sessions would become an important moment in his career, and his presence also helped connect Bailey’s musical world with Collins’.

There are accounts suggesting that the Bailey-Collins collaboration wasn’t always completely straightforward. Collins himself later recalled some uncertainty early in the project about what kind of record they were actually making. Bailey, however, remembered the relationship much more warmly.

In his memoir, he described Collins as easygoing, unassuming and completely focused on the music.

And frankly, the birth of “Easy Lover” makes that easy to believe. Three musicians jamming in a studio. A bass player finds a riff. The singers jump in. Twenty minutes later, there’s a song.

Not exactly the sound of a dysfunctional recording session.

A Song That Fit Everywhere

“Easy Lover” became enormous.

It reached #1 in the UK and Canada and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, where Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” kept it from the top. It did reach #1 on the Cash Box chart.

But the really interesting bit is what happened when you look beyond the main pop chart. Billboard R&B: #3. Mainstream Rock: #5. Dance: #7. Adult Contemporary: #15.

That is quite a spread.

“Easy Lover” could sit on Top 40 radio, R&B radio, rock radio and the dancefloor without sounding entirely at home in any single one of them. And perhaps that is exactly why it sounds so mid-eighties to me.

It belongs to that period when some of the walls between rock, pop, R&B and dance music became increasingly porous.

Of course, for The Twelve Inch there is another important question.

What happens when you take a record like this and decide it needs a dance mix?

Because “Easy Lover” is not really a dance record by DNA. Yet somebody at Columbia clearly thought: give us a twelve-inch.

And thank God they did. 😁

The extended dance remix stretched the track to more than six minutes, and the record reached #7 on Billboard’s Club Play chart and #3 on the magazine’s dance singles sales chart.

I’ll come back to the man behind that remix in the B-Side, because the twelve-inch tells another part of this crossover story.

Philip Bailey Get’s His Moment

For Bailey, “Easy Lover” transformed Chinese Wall. The album reached #22 on the Billboard 200 and #10 on the R&B album chart. More importantly, it gave him something outside Earth, Wind & Fire.

His own identity.

His own hit.

His own success.

There must have been some satisfaction in that. Earth, Wind & Fire had been put on hiatus by Maurice White, leaving the other members to figure out what came next. Bailey suddenly had a massive international hit without the band.

The freedom didn’t last forever.

Changes at Columbia delayed his next album while different A&R people debated which direction Bailey should take. Pop? R&B? By the time the follow-up arrived, the momentum had gone.

“Easy Lover” would remain his last huge crossover pop hit.

Earth, Wind & Fire eventually reformed and Bailey returned. More than forty years later, he is still part of the band. But for this brief moment in the middle of the eighties, Philip Bailey stepped outside Earth, Wind & Fire and collided with another musical world.

And out of that collision came one of those records that seems almost ridiculously effortless. Bailey’s soaring falsetto. Collins’ rougher voice pushing against it. Nathan East’s riff underneath.

And, of course, that enormous Collins drum sound.

Rock?

R&B?

Pop?

Dance?

Yes. 😁

Perhaps that’s why “Easy Lover” still works so well. Nobody seems to have worried too much about what box it belonged in while they were making it.

They just made the record.

And then somebody made a twelve-inch out of it.

Which is where our story continues.

B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

We’re going behind the scenes.

First, Nathan East, the bass player whose little piano riff helped create “Easy Lover”, and whose career opens the door to the fascinating world of the Los Angeles session musician.

Who were these musicians who seemed to appear on half the records made in the eighties? How did you become one of them? And how important were the connections between studios, producers and musicians?

Then I’m pulling out the twelve-inch.

Who decided “Easy Lover” needed a dance mix? Who mixed it? And what exactly do you do with an AOR/pop-rock record when somebody asks you to make it work in a club?

Because that #7 on Billboard’s dance chart is still nagging at me.

And you know me by now.

When something starts nagging at me, I have to find out why. 😁

What about you?

Did “Easy Lover” feel like a dance record to you at the time? And which other supposedly “rock” records from the eighties do you remember becoming genuine dancefloor records?

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

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

Share

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

Why Am I So Fascinated by Artists Going Disco?

On today’s B-Side I want to go a little deeper into a subject that has fascinated me ever since I started buying and collecting twelve inches: that short-lived trip, pop and rock artists, and apparently country artists too, made to the peak disco dancefloor.

And I still don’t really know why I find these records so fascinating.

When I started looking into this again in the slipstream of this week’s Dolly Parton story, I realised that I’ve already devoted episodes to quite a few of them: KISS, The Doobie Brothers, Boz Scaggs, Barbra Streisand, Cher, Barry Manilow, Roxy Music, Blondie and Elton John.

And looking at my list for the coming months, I can tell you there are more on the way. 😁

But why?

Why do I keep buying these records and wanting to know the stories behind them?

It’s one of those lingering questions I hope we’ll gradually find an answer to as we move through time and more of these records get their story told.

Disco? Don’t touch it!

Sometimes I think part of it is that I feel the need to defend these records against the backlash some of the artists received afterwards, especially in the US.

Disco can still be a little radioactive today, but during much of the eighties you wouldn’t have touched it with a ten-foot pole. Remember the story I told about the Pet Shop Boys and how markedly different the US sales were for their first remix album, Disco, compared with the rest of the world? And much of it can be attributed to the title?

That stigma lasted.

Now, I’ll happily admit that some of these crossover attempts weren’t particularly good. Some stood out like a sore thumb in the artist’s repertoire.

Elton John’s Victim of Love immediately comes to mind. It is the only album in his enormous career from which he never performed a single song live. Not even immediately after its release. Elton later dismissed the whole thing as a mistake.

And still, I like it.

What can I say? 😁

A large part of that is probably the production, which pulls me in every time.

Or take The Beach Boys and their almost eleven-minute disco remake of Here Comes the Night. When they performed the disco version live, the reaction from parts of their audience was brutal.

I like that one too.

Although I’ll concede that it hasn’t aged particularly well, and I’ve always wondered whether choosing Bob Esty as producer was such a smart move. What worked beautifully for Cher clearly didn’t automatically work for The Beach Boys.

And that brings us to something that keeps returning in these stories.

Read more

I was never much into Dolly Parton.

Or maybe I should say I was never much into country music, which probably won’t surprise you if you’ve been following my story for a while. 😁

And yet, when I restarted collecting twelve inches a few years ago, Baby I’m Burnin’ was on my initial shortlist. I had never bought the twelve inch when it originally came out. It wasn’t a big hit in the Benelux and, back then, I certainly didn’t consider Dolly Parton a disco artist.

So why was it on that list?

Because I’ve always been fascinated by that strange moment in the late seventies when seemingly everybody decided they needed a disco record. Rock stars did it. Pop stars did it. And, as it turns out, country stars did it too.

But there was something different about Dolly.

Everybody needs a disco record

Some of the “disco excursions” ended rather badly. Rod Stewart had Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?. The Beach Boys gave us the disco remake of Here Comes the Night. There are plenty of examples where the record sounded so far removed from what the artist normally did that fans reacted as if somebody had broken into the studio and replaced their favourite band overnight. And afterwards, some of those artists weren’t exactly eager to talk about their disco period.

Dolly Parton never had that problem with Baby I’m Burnin’.

She clearly didn’t consider it some unfortunate blip in her seventies career. Quite the opposite. She continued performing the song and even used it as a concert opener long after its chart run was over. Years later, it even became part of the opening theme of her 1987 television show.

That already tells you something.

When the news of Dolly’s passing came a few weeks ago and all the retrospectives started appearing, I found myself reading more about her. Not only about Dolly Parton the artist, but about the human being behind the artist. And I kept coming back to Baby I’m Burnin’.

Not because everybody was writing about it.

No, because almost nobody was.

With a career like Dolly’s, you have Jolene, I Will Always Love You, 9 to 5 and dozens of other obvious places to start. You don’t need to zoom in on the disco record.

But you know me by now.

Of course I’m going to zoom in on the disco record. 😁

Especially because I think Baby I’m Burnin’ tells us quite a lot about Dolly Parton.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Dolly wants more

We don’t need another ten-minute biography of Dolly here. There have been plenty excellent ones being written & published this past few weeks. So, let’s jump straight to the second half of the seventies.

By then Dolly had already built a hugely successful country career. Between 1974 and 1980 she scored one country hit after another, including a remarkable string of number ones. But what do you do when you are entrepreneurial by nature and have reached the top of your field? You start looking at the field next door.

Dolly wanted the pop audience.

Her 1977 album New Harvest...First Gathering, which she produced herself, was already part of that move, but it didn’t produce the pop breakthrough she wanted. For the next album she turned to producer Gary Klein, who had already helped Glen Campbell cross from country into the mainstream.

The result was Here You Come Again.

Its title track became Dolly’s first Top 5 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

Mission accomplished….

Or rather, mission started.

Klein stayed for 1978’s Heartbreaker, and the timing of that album is important. It was recorded while disco was everywhere. Saturday Night Fever had turned a club culture into a worldwide pop phenomenon. The soundtrack and its singles dominated the charts, and suddenly the dancefloor mattered to record companies almost as much as radio.

Heartbreaker certainly isn’t a disco album.

But you can hear 1978 in it.

Moving with the times

Dolly herself was quite open about what she was doing. Country music, she said, remained her first love, but times changed and music moved on. She didn’t want to be left behind.

And that may be the key to understanding Baby I’m Burnin’.

For some rock and pop artists, making a disco record meant suddenly doing something that didn’t really fit. Dolly, on the other hand, was already changing. She was deliberately crossing into pop, so disco wasn’t a sudden U-turn. It was simply another road available to her.

And she genuinely seemed fascinated by what was happening.

Dolly even spent the occasional night at Studio 54. Not that you would necessarily have found her in the middle of the dancefloor.

“Everybody was dancing. I didn’t. I just liked watching, sitting there and being part of the whole scene. I’d just sit on the couch and talk to Andy Warhol. My friend Sandy Gallin, my gay manager, would get me out there every once in a while to dance a little with him. But I mostly just loved the commotion and the excitement and the thrill of that whole scene. It was the hottest thing going at the time.”

I love that image.

Dolly Parton and Andy Warhol sitting together at Studio 54, basically people-watching. Two people who understood better than most that creating an image doesn’t necessarily mean hiding who you really are.

Dance With Dolly

And then RCA went one step further.

They released a twelve inch.

Not merely Baby I’m Burnin’, but Dance With Dolly.

Now you have my attention 😁

The A-side contained a 4:31 disco mix of Baby I’m Burnin’. On the other side was a 5:18 disco mix of another Heartbreaker track, I Wanna Fall in Love. Both were remixed by Al Garrison and Warren Schatz, who had done some other (disco) productions for RCA like Vicky Sue Robinson

This was no longer simply Dolly making a pop record with a dance beat. RCA was packaging Dolly for DJs.

But listen to the twelve inch and something interesting happens. It isn’t some enormous transformation. The remix doesn’t suddenly turn Dolly into Donna. The basic character of the song remains intact. The intro and the break give you a little more room, and that’s basically it. At 4:31 it isn’t exactly generous either.

As a DJ, you had better get your next record ready. 😁

But perhaps that is precisely why it works. They didn’t remove Dolly from Baby I’m Burnin’ to make it acceptable to disco. They simply gave DJs enough to work with. The clubs responded. The disco mix reached No. 15 on Billboard’s dance chart.

I still wonder where it was actually played. I can easily imagine it on the more commercial dancefloors. Whether David Mancuso or Nicky Siano were desperately waiting for the new Dolly Parton twelve inch is another question. 😁

But No. 15 means somebody was playing it.

The critics versus the audience

Not everybody loved Dolly’s crossover though. Some critics were particularly hard on Heartbreaker, seeing the increasingly polished mainstream production as evidence that Dolly was moving away from what had made her special. And as you could have expected: Country purists weren’t exactly enthusiastic either.

But then you look at what the audience actually did.

Heartbreaker spent nine consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country album chart and went Gold.

The single release was particularly clever. RCA effectively had two Dollys on the same record. Baby I’m Burnin’ was aimed at pop, while I Really Got the Feeling serviced country radio. The latter reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart. Baby I’m Burnin’ reached No. 25 on the Hot 100.

And the disco mix reached No. 15 on the dance chart.

Country Dolly. Pop Dolly. Disco Dolly.

All at the same time.

In 1978 the Country Music Association named her Entertainer of the Year. So much for destroying your country career by going disco!

Why did Dolly get away with it?

That is the question that interests me most.

Maybe “get away with it” is already the wrong expression.

Dolly didn’t apologise for liking pop music. She didn’t pretend to become a disco artist. And she didn’t tell her country audience that the music they loved was suddenly beneath her.

She simply built another bridge.

There was also nothing accidental about the crossover. Dolly later talked openly about assembling the best management and publicity team she could find because she wanted people beyond country music to know who she was. And she was refreshingly straightforward about the business side too.

If crossing over allowed her to reach more people and make more money, why wouldn’t she do it?

No tortured explanation about artistic evolution. It was music, but it was also her business.

What if Dolly had been six months later?

Timing always matters. Imagine Baby I’m Burnin’ arriving six or nine months later, when the disco backlash was gathering force in America.

Would we remember it differently?

Maybe.

But I suspect Dolly would still have survived it perfectly well. Partly because Baby I’m Burnin’ never sounds like a desperate attempt to become somebody else. But mostly because Dolly understood something that many artists never do.

You don’t have to burn one bridge to build another.

She could love country and be curious about disco. She could sit at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol and still be Dolly Parton from Tennessee. One didn’t invalidate the other.

Decades later she was still doing exactly the same thing.

While researching this story I ended up watching the video for Faith, her 2019 collaboration with Galantis and Mr. Probz.

There she was again.

Dolly in electronic dance music.

Having fun.

I may never have been a Dolly Parton fan in the traditional sense, but I always respected her. And her passing touched me more than I expected.

Maybe now I understand a little better why.

Baby I’m Burnin’ is nowhere near the most important record she made. But sometimes the smaller records tell you more. And this particular twelve inch tells us about an artist who was curious enough to keep moving, clever enough to understand the business she was in and secure enough in herself not to worry too much about which box people wanted to put her in.

And that brings me to another question.

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

Was Dolly really the only country star who looked across the room at the disco dancefloor and thought: I want some of that?

Oh no.

Not even close.

That’s where we’re going on the B-Side.

And while we’re there, we might as well find out what happened to all those rock and pop stars who suddenly discovered four-on-the-floor.

Some survived the experience rather better than others. 😁

Over To You!

What do you think of Baby I’m Burnin’? Genuine Dolly classic, clever crossover, or simply Dolly’s obligatory disco record?

And which artist made the most unlikely disco record of the late seventies?

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

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

Share

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

The People Behind Canada’s Disco Machine

For the past month I’ve been telling the story of Canadian disco.

Not just the records, but the machinery behind them. How Montréal and Toronto became unexpectedly important in dance music (episode 1), how Montréal was ready when disco arrived (episode 2), and how, when disco supposedly died, nobody seemed particularly interested in attending the funeral (Episode 3).

The clubs stayed open. The studios kept working. Records kept coming.

The sound changed.

And that may be the most important part of the whole story.

Montréal wasn’t simply a disco city. It became a switchboard, somewhere between Europe and the United States, absorbing ideas from both directions and sending them back out again in a slightly different form.

But there is one thing I deliberately didn’t do too much during the series.

I didn’t spend enough time with the people behind the screen.

Sure, we spent quite a few nights at the Lime Light, and Robert Ouimet told us quite a bit in his own words. But the focus was the bigger story.

The music business, however, is a people’s business.

So before I close this first Canadian series, I want to introduce you to a few of the people who made that story happen.

Not all of them. That would become a book. 😁

Think of this as my personal selection of key players.

And to celebrate the completion of the series:

This weekend I’m opening the complete Canadian series, including the normally paywalled parts, to everyone.

Just for the weekend.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

THE BUILDERS

Before Montréal could become a disco capital, somebody had to build the roads.

George Cucuzzella & Dominique Zgarka

George Cucuzzella has one of the most impressive CVs I’ve come across while writing about dance music, and much of it happened away from the spotlight.

He was the first DJ at the Lime Light, but left early because he clearly saw that there was much more business around disco than simply standing behind the turntables. Together with Dominique Zgarka he moved into importing and exporting records. Zgarka was still at university when he left his studies to help build Downstairs Records.

As I explained earlier in the series, Montréal’s importance came partly from being a switchboard between Europe and North America. Records travelled through the city, DJs heard them, clubs tested them and the record business reacted.

Cucuzzella and Zgarka understood that machinery very early.

They also created the Canadian Record Pool and internationalised the idea by connecting DJs beyond Canada. A record no longer had to wait politely for radio to discover it. It could move through a network of DJs, clubs and dancers.

That is modern dance-music marketing before anyone called it that.

Cucuzzella then started building labels, Prism, Uniwave, Matra, and eventually Unidisc.

And here the story suddenly becomes personal.

I worked with Unidisc several times when I was putting compilations together at Universal and Warner. Decades later, I was licensing some of these records from the company Cucuzzella had built.

Yvon Lafrance

If Cucuzzella helped build the business network, Yvon Lafrance built one of its most important physical spaces.

The Lime Light opened in 1973 after Lafrance had visited New York and came back with a very clear idea. The club should be about music, atmosphere, lights and sound. Not cabaret. Not dinner. Not a band in the corner.

The record and the DJ would be the event.

Lime Light became the epicentre of Montréal disco.

And yes, people sometimes call it Montréal’s Studio 54.

Small problem.

Studio 54 opened four years later.

So maybe Studio 54 was New York’s Lime Light. 😁

Robert Ouimet

I already told Robert Ouimet’s story extensively, so I’ll resist doing it all again.

But I can’t leave him out.

Ouimet followed Cucuzzella as Lime Light’s main DJ and became one of the most celebrated DJs in North America. More importantly for me, he belonged to the generation that helped turn DJing from “playing records” into creating a night.

Long sets. Transitions. Beat matching. Programming.

If you listen to my mixes on Mixcloud, you’ll understand immediately why someone like Ouimet is a personal hero.

The record matters.

But what you do between the records matters too.

Willi Morrison & Ian Guenther

And then there was Toronto.

Willi Morrison and Ian Guenther, the team behind Three Hats Productions, really deserve their own episode, so I’m deliberately keeping this short.

THP Orchestra. Grand Tour. Southern Exposure. Skatt Bros.

That list alone should make a few disco collectors sit up.

I first encountered them through THP Orchestra in 1979, on their Atlantic album.

That is one of the pleasures of doing this series. You start with a record you bought as a teenager, then forty-something years later you finally meet the people and machinery behind it.

Michel Daigle & Dominic Sciscente

Another important producer duo. Daigle and Sciscente were behind Black Light Orchestra and worked with Martin Stevens and Alma Faye Brooks.

These weren’t isolated hits.

Producers worked across projects, musicians moved between sessions, labels released the results and DJs tested them almost immediately.

That is how scenes become industries.

THE HIT FACTORY

By the late seventies Montréal no longer needed to prove it had a disco scene. Now it was making disco for everybody else.

PAJ Disco Mix

This may be my favourite discovery of the whole series.

PAJ stood for Pierre Gagnon, Allen Vallières and Jean Barbeau.

Yes, their initials. 😁

They were cutting and reassembling reel-to-reel tapes in the mid-seventies, creating extended, dancefloor-friendly versions before the remix had really become an official part of the record business. Their edits found their way to Robert Ouimet at the Lime Light, who sometimes played the PAJ version instead of the original.

Just think about that.

Three guys with tape machines alter a record, the DJ decides their version works better, and suddenly the dancefloor is hearing something the people who made the original record never created.

That idea sits right at the heart of dance music.

Their rework of Montréal Sound’s “Music” even became a commercial release in the US. No multitracks. No laptop. No undo button. Just tape, ears and nerve.

Wonderful.

Some of their work can be found on Bandcamp. 👇

France Joli & Tony Green

France Joli was fifteen when producer Tony Green recorded her.

A year later she was standing in front of thousands of people at Fire Island after Donna Summer cancelled.

Not a bad career acceleration. 😁

“Come To Me” became a number one disco record in the US and is one of those tracks that already seems to be looking beyond disco towards Hi-NRG.

I’ve got a complete episode on that record because it deserves much more than a paragraph here.

Green also produced Freddie James and became one of Montréal’s important late-disco producers, but unlike some of the other names here he didn’t make the jump into the next era quite as visibly.

Which brings us to the people who did in part 3 The Futurists

Quality Records

Not every key player was a person.

Quality Records was a Toronto company whose importance came partly from what it allowed into Canada.

It licensed and distributed American labels, including Casablanca and Prelude, giving Canadian audiences and DJs quicker access to important dance records.

And then Quality also backed Canadian talent.

Including one musician who, for me, represents the bridge into the next chapter better than almost anybody : Gino Soccio

THE FUTURISTS

When disco “died”, Montréal’s response seems to have been:

Fine.

What comes next?

Gino Soccio

I could have put Gino Soccio in all three sections. That is precisely why I saved him for this one. He worked with Pat Deserio on Kébekélektrik in the mid-seventies, played on the Bombers and then broke internationally with “Dancer” in 1979.

But Soccio never sounded like somebody desperately trying to preserve disco.

He was already fascinated by synthesizers, Kraftwerk, Stockhausen and Wendy Carlos.

So when the dancefloor changed, he changed with it. That is what makes records like “S-Beat” so interesting. Read the rest of my explanation in the recent collab I did with Ken from 👇

Maple Mixtape

Maple Mixtape - Side 3

Side 3 is the chance for MusicStackers to add three tracks of their own to the Mixtape…

Read more

2 months ago · 26 likes · 19 comments · Maple Mixtape 🇨🇦 and The Twelve Inch (Disco/80s)

They don’t sound like the morning after disco.

They sound like the morning before something else.

Unidisc, again

Yes, this is a cunning way of getting George Cucuzzella into the article twice. 😁

But he belongs here.

While other people were treating disco catalogue as yesterday’s news, Unidisc built a business around preserving, acquiring and exploiting it. That is why so much classic Canadian, and eventually American, dance catalogue remained available.

The futurist isn’t always the person making a futuristic record.

Sometimes it’s the person who understands that the past is going to have a future.

Pierre Perpall

Pierre Perpall could also have appeared in every section. He had been recording since the sixties, moved into disco in the seventies and worked under different names as styles changed.

But the record that earns him a place here is Pluton & the Humanoids’ “World Invaders”.

When I first heard it, I would have sworn it was Italo Disco.

It isn’t.

It’s Canadian.

And that, in one record, explains why this series became so fascinating to me. Canada wasn’t simply following what Europe or America were doing. Sometimes it was standing somewhere in the middle, listening to both, then producing something that could convincingly belong to either world.

Joe La Greca

If you read my Carol Jiani episode, you already know why Joe La Greca is here.

If you didn’t, it’s not too late. 😁

Another Montréal producer who understood that the dancefloor after disco still wanted drama, electronics, hooks and, above all, records designed to move people.

Denis LePage

And finally Denis LePage, later Nini Nobless. Before Lime there was Kat Mandu and “The Break”. Then, with Denyse LePage, came Lime.

“Your Love”. “You’re My Magician”. “Guilty”.

This is where the story stops being about the survival of disco and becomes the birth of something new.

Smaller arrangements. More electronics. Bigger synth hooks. Records that still understood everything disco had taught producers about the dancefloor, but no longer felt obliged to sound like 1978.

That is probably the thread I’ll pick up when I return to Canada.

Because this first series began with a simple question about why Montréal became so important. I ended up somewhere much more interesting. The city didn’t become important because it produced a few successful disco records.

It became important because people built a network strong enough to survive the genre itself.

DJs. Clubs. Importers. Labels. Producers. Musicians. Record pools. Studios.

A switchboard.

And when disco stopped calling, Montréal simply connected another line.

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

This week there is no B-Side tomorrow.

Or maybe I should say there was no A-Side today, because this episode probably feels much more like one of my regular B-Sides. 😁

Writing this Canadian series was a lot of work. Trade magazines, interviews, old charts, obscure records, all the stuff I love digging through.

And I could do that because many of you support The Twelve Inch.

So this weekend I’m opening the complete Canadian series, including the normally paywalled parts, to everyone.

Just for the weekend.

If you joined somewhere in the middle, now is your chance to start at the beginning.

Over To You!

And then tell me something.

Who did I miss?

Which Canadian disco record should have been in this series?

And, perhaps more dangerously, where should we travel next?

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

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

Share

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

So What Exactly Was New Beat?

Before we explain what New Beat was, let’s start with where it came from.

Just like disco didn’t suddenly appear out of thin air in mid-seventies New York, New Beat didn’t fall out of the sky in late-eighties Belgium either. And to keep the image of things falling out of the sky, we can start with the first ingredient: society.

Growing up in eighties Belgium wasn’t simple.

Economically, the country was heading for disaster, not helped by the quick succession of governments and the ever-present problems between the Flemish and French-speaking parts of the country. Belgium was, together with Italy, sometimes called the sick man of Europe. The deficit was mounting at double speed.

Part of the problem was something we called “waffle-iron politics”.

Belgian waffles are the best in the world. The politics named after them were a little less successful. 😁

The idea was that whenever money was invested in the north, a similar amount had to be spent in the south, and vice versa. There are entire books, sometimes tragicomic ones, about the unnecessary public works this produced. Metro infrastructure that was built but never used, for instance, and that later became urbex landmarks.

By the early eighties, the deficit was rising so fast that Belgium had serious problems financing itself on the international money markets.

Add the very present threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union (yep, also then 😁), and early-eighties Belgium wasn’t exactly overflowing with optimism.

And those things always find their way into music.

Belgium Starts Making Its Own Noise

Synth-pop and electronic disco had ushered in a period of cheaper electronic instruments, which democratised music-making. Suddenly, you didn’t need an enormous studio budget to make electronic music.

That also meant more Belgian music made by Belgian bands.

At the same time, we had an explosion of commercial pirate radio stations. Usually very local. Also very illegal. 😁

As I explained last week when comparing Canada and Belgium, Belgian-made music was often avoided by the national radio stations. The local stations didn’t care. There was no format stress. The DJs were volunteers and pretty much played whatever they liked during their allotted few hours of the week.

And some of the electronic music coming out of Belgium was darker and rougher than what was happening elsewhere. The term that became associated with it was EBM, Electronic Body Music, with bands such as Front 242 and The Neon Judgement.

A great example and one that definitely will get it’s own episode down the line

EBM was very danceable, although not necessarily suited to every dancefloor. But it would provide part of the blueprint for New Beat. And then there was another, perhaps less obvious ingredient.

Read more

Last week, I wrote about the stereo wars raging at my parents’ house, when I battled it out musically with the neighbours’ son across the street. “Hit ’n Run Lover” by Carol Jiani was my secret weapon because of the bass that is so hot & pumping it can move houses. 😁

I got a few lovely reactions. One of my friends on Mixcloud said he laughed his head off while reading it.

It made me realise again what a strong repository of memories music really is.

You must believe me when I say (or write, to be more precise) that when I start writing about a song, I don’t have a predestined set of memories ready to tap into. In fact, I had almost entirely forgotten the story of the stereo wars.

It’s simply the way I write.

When a song is on the list, I start researching it. But I’m not only interested in the facts. I also want to get back to what that song made me feel. That’s one of the ways I try to understand its importance at the time.

I’m not going to claim that “Hit ’n Run Lover’s” importance was enlarged or diminished by my terrorising the neighbourhood with its booming beat 😁, but remembering that story brought me closer to the record itself.

And ultimately, I always want to get into the studio at the moment the record was made.

What were they thinking? Why did they make it this way? And what did they expect would happen to it?

This week, those questions become particularly interesting.

Because Saga is no dance band.

And “Take A Chance” is no dance song.

Yet somebody decided it needed a twelve-inch dance remix. And a dub.

Three years later, that same record turned up on the dancefloors of a short-lived Western European dance movement that originated in my home country.

New Beat.

I’m not even sure I can get completely to the bottom of this one. That’s how strange the story is.

It’s also, in a peculiar way (fitting for a peculiar story 😁), one final illustration of the dance-music switchboard I’ve been describing over the past few weeks in my epic Canadian disco story.

Because, yes, Saga are Canadian.

And since I’m definitely not the person to explain the intricacies of Saga’s career, I called in someone who is.

My good friend Ken from Maple Mixtape.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Saga an Introduction by Ken from Maple Mixtape 🇨🇦

The story of Saga begins in 1977 in Oakville, Ontario - part of the Greater Toronto Area. It is, in itself, a saga of its own.

Their music has the complexity you’d expect from prog, with the pop hooks you’d find in many synth and keyboard forward acts. Add often dramatic vocals and rhythmic guitars and you have a band that has plowed a unique furrow throughout five decades.

For most of their timeline, the core members of Saga are:

• Brothers Ian and Jim Crichton, guitar and bass respectively

• Steve Negus on drums

• ‘Daryl’ Gilmour on keys, and

• Michael Sadler, lead vocals and keys

The band’s comercial heyday was definitely the 80s when Saga charted 5 singles (Wind Him Up reached #22 in 1981) and 7 albums (live album In Transit peaked at #10 in ‘82) on our national charts. But their story took an interesting turn that would see them attain popularity in Germany, where their self-titled debut LP was imported to the tune of 30,000 units and… Puerto Rico, where a local stereo chain used the tune Humble Stance in an ad campaign.

My favourite thing about Saga is their idea for The Chapters.

Only a prog band would have a 16-song cycle that is released out of order and across eight studio albums. There are multiple YT versions that compile The Chapters in order for your convenience. The story follows the protagonist and time traveller Albert, as he sends himself warnings, life lessons, and secrets from the future.

Saga also have something interesting in common with INXS - a search for a new vocalist. When Sadler took a hiatus in 2007 the band recorded backing tracks for some of their tunes and invited singers to audition via the internet. The winner, Rob Moratti recorded an album - The Human Condition - with the remaining group members before Sadler announced his return in 2011.

Saga won the Most Promising Artist Juno in 1982 and are estimated to have sold about 8 million records worldwide. Their most recent record was released in 2021 and the band played some dates in Canada this year in anticipation of a 50th anniversary tour in Europe during 2027.

The Mystery Unravels... Sort Of

After Ken’s excellent introduction, let’s zoom in on the song itself. Because the more I looked into this, the stranger it became.

“Take A Chance” was released as a single in Europe only, as far as I can establish. The twelve-inch remix was done by Mark Dodson, a producer much better known for working with rock and metal acts.

And here’s the first collector detail that made me stop.

Dodson appears to have made only two remixes in his entire career.

This was the first.

Even better, he did it under the name “Dodgy Productions”. 😁

Maybe that was simply a bit of fun with his surname. Or perhaps it tells us something about how he felt about this excursion into remixing. I couldn’t find an interview in which he talked about his work on the record, so we may never know. But this is where my own years working in the record industry become useful, because I think I can reconstruct a good part of what happened.

The clue is Behaviour.

“Take A Chance” came from Saga’s sixth album, released in 1985. It did particularly well in several European countries, including Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway. In Germany, it reached number two.

And that matters.

Saga were huge in Germany during the first half of the eighties. Their albums repeatedly reached the top three, but that elusive number one kept escaping them.

Now put yourself in the record company’s office.

You have a band with a very successful album. You’re sitting at number two. You want another hit single to keep the album moving.

And this is 1985.

By then, almost everything could get a twelve-inch release. It wasn’t restricted to disco, funk or electronic music anymore. Pop acts did it. Rock acts did it. And sometimes those twelve-inches came with special mixes designed to give a song at least a chance on the dancefloor.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

“Take A Chance” was the second German single from Behaviour. The first, “What Do I Know”, reached #65 on the German singles chart and also appeared on twelve-inch, with a slightly longer version.

So “Take A Chance” wasn’t the first track from the album, or even the first Saga song, to get the twelve-inch treatment. But this time they went much further. There wasn’t just an extended version.

There was a dance mix AND a dub.

That tells us something.

So here’s what I think happened.

Someone at the label expected “Take A Chance” to be a substantial hit and, perhaps more importantly, hoped it could give Behaviour the extra push needed to reach the number one spot that Saga kept missing. I’ve sat on the record-company side of that table. It’s exactly the sort of reasoning you use. The single doesn’t only have to sell itself. It has a job to do for the album.

Why Mark Dodson was chosen to do the remix is harder to explain.

He was, to put it mildly, not exactly a remix specialist. But looking at the artists he had already produced, Dodson was certainly known within the rock world and to Portrait Records, which released the twelve-inch in the UK.

Maybe allowing someone from within Saga’s own musical world to handle the remix was the proverbial spoonful of sugar needed to make the full “dance” treatment acceptable.

I can’t prove that.

But having worked around these kinds of decisions, I can certainly imagine the conversation. 😁

And then absolutely nothing happened that could possibly have been part of the plan.

From Canada to... Belgium?

Three years later, “Take A Chance” resurfaced on New Beat dancefloors.

In Belgium.

I couldn’t find any evidence that Saga were even aware of this, let alone that they ever reacted to it. And actually, I don’t find that strange. Even if someone had told them that a three-year-old remix was being played by DJs in Belgian clubs, I’m not sure they would have considered it particularly important.

But for us, it leaves one enormous question.

Why?

Why would a Canadian rock record from 1985 suddenly work within a Belgian dance movement in 1988?

And there’s another little problem.

New Beat was built around slowness. Records were manipulated, pitched down and made to crawl along at roughly 95 to 110/115 BPM.

Saga’s “Take A Chance”?

186 BPM. 😁

Now we have a proper mystery.

And the answer has everything to do with the way DJs heard records differently from the people who made them.

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

That’s where we’re heading on this week’s B-Side.

First, I’ll try to answer the obvious question: what exactly was New Beat? Why did this strange, slow, dark dance music explode in Belgium in the late eighties? Why Belgium, of all places?

And then we get to one of my favourite parts of the story, the peculiar way New Beat DJs manipulated records. Because the important Saga record for this story isn’t really the regular version of “Take A Chance”.

It’s the dub.

And once you start listening to that 186 BPM rock record differently, something rather wonderful happens. Suddenly, Saga starts making sense on a New Beat dancefloor.

If this story seems strange now, wait until we slow it down. 😁

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It’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.

Over To You !

I actually have two questions this week.

Did you know “Take A Chance” before reading this?

And for those who were around European dancefloors in the late eighties, did you ever hear Saga played as New Beat?

Because I’d love to know how far this very peculiar second life travelled beyond Belgium.

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

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

Share

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

🇨🇦 It’s CanCon Month!

And we’ve been doing things a bit differently the past few weeks.

Instead of zooming in exclusively on the song from this week’s A-Side, the B-Sides will tell the bigger story of Disco and Canada, but also Canada and Disco. Two different, but closely connected and equally fascinating stories.

The A-Sides provided the records that gu…

Read more

There are records you remember buying. And then there are records you remember feeling.

Carol Jiani’s Hit ’N Run Lover belongs firmly in the second category.

Let me explain.

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard it, although I’m pretty sure it was at the US Import record store in Antwerp. What I do remember is my reaction: I needed that twelve-inch.

The reason was very simple.

That beat.

It was 1981 and Hit ’N Run Lover sounded enormous. It became a major dancefloor record and even crossed into the pop charts here in Belgium, reaching the Top 10. As far as I know, we were the only country where it did that.

And I promise I had nothing to do with it. 😁 Well, apart from playing my copy rather loudly.

The Battle Across the Street

I had a fairly large bedroom at my parents’ house. Actually, it was more or less two rooms combined.

When my parents built the house, they intended to have two children, so they created enough space for two bedrooms. My sister/brother never materialised, which meant I ended up with the space of two rooms. Enough to put in two massive speakers.

My room had a big window facing the street. And directly opposite lived the son of our neighbours, whose bedroom window faced mine.

We shared a love for dance music. But more importantly, we both had two turntables, a mixing panel, amplifiers and (loud) speakers.

You can probably see where this is going. 😁

Whenever our respective parents weren’t home, the windows opened and the battle commenced.

Who had the loudest system? Who had the best records? Who could make the biggest impression on the other side of the street?

Completely silly, of course. Looking back, it still makes me smile, although I suspect the rest of the neighbourhood has slightly less nostalgic memories of two would-be DJs conducting a stereo war across the street.

They probably weren’t happy when, one day, I unveiled my “secret weapon”.

Hit ’N Run Lover.

My parents’ house was solidly built. I know this because it could withstand the bass on that twelve-inch. My speakers weren’t state of the art. They were big, which obviously seemed much more important to younger me at the time, but they certainly weren’t JBLs or anything remotely audiophile.

It didn’t matter.

When Hit ’N Run Lover started, you didn’t merely hear the bass.

You felt it.

And forty-five years later, that teenage memory actually tells us something rather important about the record. Because that bass didn’t end up on the twelve-inch by accident.

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

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

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

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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Herb Powers Jr. Enters the Story

Last week I wrote about the Bombers and the Montréal production system behind Everybody Get Dancin’. I also mentioned that some Canadian disco productions could sound a little flat compared with their American counterparts.

Certainly compared with records like Hit ’N Run Lover. And the “secret” was the mastering. This record was mastered at Frankford/Wayne Mastering Labs in New York and cut by Herb Powers Jr., one of the great (dance music) mastering engineers of his generation.

Frankford/Wayne was one of the places to go if you wanted a disco record to work on a club system. Powers cut records for labels such as Prelude and West End and knew exactly what a twelve-inch needed. Hot. Punchy. Bass.

So there I was, unknowingly testing the work of one of New York’s best mastering engineers on my parents’ house.

It passed. 😁

And this is also our first clue as to why Hit ’N Run Lover is such a perfect record for the final chapter of my Can-Con series.

It was sung by a Nigerian-born singer living in Montréal, produced in Montréal, arranged by Denis LePage, mastered in New York, remixed in San Francisco and somehow sounded as if it could just as easily have come from Europe.

If Montréal really was the transatlantic switching board I’ve been describing these past few weeks, this record is almost the perfect illustration.

But first, who was Carol Jiani?

From Nigeria to Montréal

Carol Jiani wasn’t born Carol Jiani. She was born Uchenna Ikejiani in Nigeria.

Her father was a physician and, after her mother died and relations with her stepmother became difficult, she was sent to Montréal to study at Concordia University. Like most students, however, she could use some extra money. Luckily, she could sing.

Jiani began performing in piano bars while studying, and it was in one of those bars that producer Joe La Greca heard her. He asked her to sing on one of his productions.

That relationship started well before Hit ’N Run Lover. In 1979, La Greca released an album under the wonderfully imaginative project name Montréal.

Recorded in...

Wait for it...

Montréal. 😁

Salsoul picked it up for America, where, in what should by now sound very familiar to regular readers of this series, it was remixed for the US market. Jiani sang on the record under her real name, although supposedly she arrived too late for the photoshoot and someone else ended up on the cover.

Disco and album covers. There’s always an interesting story

The project didn’t do much, nor did several other studio productions to which she lent her voice. Then came Hit ’N Run Lover.

That’s when suddenly everything clicked.

Joe La Greca and the Montréal Machine

Joe La Greca is slightly more difficult to pin down.

I know he was deeply embedded in Montréal’s disco and dance industry, but I haven’t found enough reliable material about his early life to tell you whether he was Canadian-born or part of the post-war Italian immigration wave I discussed in last week’s episodes.

So I won’t pretend I know.

What I do know is much more interesting anyway. Like Pat Deserio, La Greca became involved in numerous studio projects. But two of his productions broke well beyond the specialist disco world.

Lime and Carol Jiani.

And both demonstrate what happened when Montréal disco moved into the eighties.

Hit ’N Run Lover sounds like Lime because much of the machinery behind it is the same. La Greca produced it and Denis LePage arranged it, just before Denis and Denyse LePage broke through internationally as Lime.

This is the time when the lush orchestral disco sound of the seventies was disappearing. Synthesizers and electronic rhythms were taking over. Montréal adapted remarkably quickly.

And, as we’ll explore in this week’s B-Side, while American record companies were dramatically reducing their disco output after the backlash, Montréal was already looking towards the more electronic sounds coming from Europe.

So we have the right record, coming from the right city, at the right moment.

But you still need somebody who knows what to do with it.

Enter Matra.

Matra, Moby Dick and a Slight American Mess

Matra Records was founded in Montréal in 1981 by George Cucuzzella, another familiar name from our Can-Con journey. Cucuzzella understood the club market, but he and La Greca also knew that breaking a record internationally required connections outside Canada.

And Hit ’N Run Lover certainly travelled.

It reached No. 4 on the Billboard dance chart, became a major European club hit and crossed into the pop charts in the Netherlands and, especially, Belgium.

The American release history is rather more complicated.

San Francisco Hi-NRG label Moby Dick licensed the track for a remix on Gold Standard. Ariola America then picked it up, only for that company to cease operations after making a distribution arrangement with Arista. Arista consequently became another company handling the record.

That makes three companies releasing the same song. Probably one of the reasons why the record didn’t cross into other markets.

Despite the remixing, it was the original version that everybody seemed to want. Including me. Which brings us to something very peculiar about Hit ’N Run Lover today.

Why Does Hit ’N Run Lover Sound Slightly Off?

Listen to the digital version of Hit ’N Run Lover (like on this week’s mixtape), particularly once the synths enter.

Can you hear it?

There’s a strange wavering, almost whining quality to the pitch. I’m quite sensitive to this kind of thing, but this one is noticeable. Technically it’s called wow, a slow fluctuation in pitch that can be caused by something as simple as an off-centre spindle hole.

Here’s the strange part.

My original twelve-inch doesn’t do it.

I first noticed the problem much later on a European pressing. Then, when I was working as a compilations manager at Universal and wanted to include the track on a compilation, I couldn’t find a digital source without that wavering sound.

And this is where we enter one of the less glamorous corners of the Record Industry.

Master tapes disappear. Or nobody knows where they are. Or somebody knows where they are but they contain the album version and not the twelve-inch mix you actually need.

Dance music is particularly vulnerable because remixes and alternate versions were often treated as disposable once the vinyl had been manufactured. When catalogues were digitised, the original tape wasn’t always available.

So what happened?

The used a vinyl to make a new master.

There are plenty of digital masters in circulation that were clearly sourced from vinyl. Sometimes the transfer was done beautifully. Sometimes you can still hear ticks, wow, flutter or unstable turntable speed.

Try beatmatching one of those.

I’ve seen digital files where the BPM wanders so badly that you wonder whether the turntable was sitting on a boat. My suspicion is that the currently circulating Hit ’N Run Lover master ultimately comes from vinyl, and not from a particularly good copy.

I can’t prove that without access to the master history, so let’s call it what it is, a collector’s educated suspicion. But it would explain a lot.

Jiani later re-recorded the song, presumably partly for the usual business reason of having a version she could control herself.

A Record Made Between Worlds

Hit ’N Run Lover sums up everything I’ve been trying to explain during Can-Con month. A Nigerian singer moves to Montréal. A Montréal producer discovers her in a piano bar. Denis LePage arranges the record. George Cucuzzella’s Matra releases it. Herb Powers Jr. cuts it in New York. Moby Dick gets involved from San Francisco. Europe embraces it. Belgium, for some reason, turns it into a Top 10 pop hit.

And teenage Pé uses it as heavy artillery against the neighbours across the street. 😁

You couldn’t really invent a better Montréal disco story.

Carol Jiani never had the enormous international pop breakthrough that Hit ’N Run Lover seemed to promise, but she kept making dance records, eventually working with Ian Levine and moving firmly into Hi-NRG. La Greca continued too, most famously through Lime, and remained involved in dance music for decades. He died on June 21 this year, aged 73.

But perhaps their most interesting legacy is right here, on this twelve-inch. Because Hit ’N Run Lover doesn’t sound like disco dying. It sounds like dance music figuring out what it wants to become next.

And that is exactly where we’re going in this week’s B-Side.

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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🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

We’ll look at what happened when the 1979 disco backlash reached Canada, why Montréal reacted very differently from other Canadian cities, and how the same European connections that had helped build its disco scene left it remarkably well placed for the electronic dance music of the early eighties.

Disco supposedly died.

Montréal, apparently, didn’t get the memo.

Over To You !

If you owned Hit ’N Run Lover, I’d love to know which pressing you had. Can you hear that wavering pitch on your copy?

And more importantly, surely I wasn’t the only teenager who occasionally used a twelve-inch as a weapon in a neighbourhood stereo war? 😁

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

🇨🇦 It’s CanCon Month!

And we’re going to do things a little differently this week and over the coming weeks.

Instead of zooming in exclusively on the song from this week’s A-Side, the B-Sides will tell the bigger story of Disco and Canada, but also Canada and Disco. Two different, but closely connected and equally fascinating stori…

Read more

Some records come with their own little film in my head.

I can remember where I bought them, where I first heard them, what was going on in my life and, occasionally, even what the weather was like. Music is a wonderful repository of memories. In my case it seems to have considerably more storage capacity than the part of my brain that remembers why I walked into the kitchen. 😁

The Bombers’ “(Everybody) Get Dancin’” is one of those records.

I first heard it in late 1979 on one of my favourite radio shows. The next time I went to Antwerp, I had to find the twelve-inch. Remember, this was already after the American disco backlash had started and even the Dutch music magazines I was reading were becoming increasingly negative about disco.

It didn’t stop me.

“(Everybody) Get Dancin’” became one of my all-time favourite twelve-inches.

And there is something rather funny about that because, for more than forty years, I had absolutely no idea it was Canadian.

American? Well, not quite...

To my teenage ears, the Bombers sounded American.

The record has some of the qualities I loved in those first Chic productions. It is sometimes compared to “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and you can hear why. There’s that driving bass, the guitar that immediately makes you think of Nile Rodgers and, most importantly, the same energy.

I wasn’t the only one who liked it. The Bombers reached No. 3 on the US dance chart and “(Everybody) Get Dancin’” even became a small pop hit in the UK and Benelux.

And then, essentially, they disappeared.

Only much later did I discover that the Bombers weren’t from New York, Philadelphia or anywhere else in the United States.

They were from Montreal.

That makes this record almost too perfect for the second week of our Can-Con month.

Because one of the peculiarities I kept encountering while researching Canadian disco is that Canadian producers were not always particularly interested in advertising the Canadian part. If a record had a better chance of succeeding by looking American, European, French or Italian, why make life difficult?

As a European record buyer in 1979, I knew American disco. I knew France Joli and a handful of other Canadian successes, but I certainly didn’t think of “Canadian disco” as a recognisable category.

The Bombers slipped straight through that gap.

👋 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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Who exactly were the Bombers?

On paper, the Bombers were a Montreal disco act fronted by vocalists Tamara Lorincz and Mack “BC” Jones, assembled in 1978 and gone almost as quickly as they arrived.

Two albums more or less tell the story.

The first Bombers album from 1978 is spacey and more instrumental, a project still looking for its identity. Bombers 2, released the following year, is much more song-driven and contains the record that would define them, “(Everybody) Get Dancin’.”

Like so many disco acts from the period, however, talking about a “band” is slightly misleading.

The Bombers were really a studio construction.

There’s a television clip from 1979 that I’ve included here, made for one of the Dutch chart shows. Are these actually the people who played and sang on the record?

I have no idea. 😁

And in a way that is exactly the point.

Once you stop looking at the people standing in front of the television cameras and start looking behind the mixing desk, the Bombers become much more interesting.

There you find two names: George Lagios and Pat Deserio.

And through those two men, particularly Deserio, you suddenly get a wonderful little window into how Montreal’s disco industry actually worked.

The men behind the curtain

George Lagios is the less famous half of the partnership.

On the first Bombers album he was credited as the main producer, with Pat Deserio assisting. Lagios had already been producing rock and pop before joining many of his Montreal colleagues in making disco.

Why?

Because by the late seventies that was where the opportunities were.

He also had something rather useful: a studio. It would become the home base for the productions Lagios and Deserio made together.

Pat Deserio’s story travels much further.

One of his most important achievements was helping bring Gino Soccio into disco. Soccio was then a University of Montreal philosophy student and keyboard player who apparently had no great affection for disco. Deserio heard something else.

Working on the Kébékélektrik project, Soccio effectively became a one-man band, playing across an arrangement of Ravel’s “Boléro,” a version of Space’s “Magic Fly” and two originals. Deserio supplied the vision and shared writing credits.

Then things started moving.

Tom Moulton remixed the album for its American Salsoul release, “War Dance,” a track Soccio himself apparently regarded as filler, caught fire on US dancefloors, while “Magic Fly” reached the Canadian pop chart.

That project helped open the door to Soccio’s own extraordinary run.

But what fascinates me about Deserio is what happened afterwards.

He didn’t cling to disco when disco started changing. He changed with it.

After several disco projects in 1978 and 1979, he moved directly into Montreal’s emerging synth underground, co-founding YUL Records in 1981 and becoming involved with records by Rational Youth, Monty Cantsin and Cham-pang.

That gives Deserio a rather wonderful career line: from disco into synthpop without really leaving the dancefloor.

And regular readers will know that this is exactly the sort of connection I love. Dance music rarely dies. It mutates.

But there is another connection here that immediately caught my eye.

Deserio was Italian.

Why are there Italians everywhere? 😁

Pat Deserio was born in Naples and moved to Montreal with his parents when he was very young.

Once I started digging into Canadian disco, Italian names seemed to turn up everywhere. And, of course, the same thing happens when you investigate European disco.

So why?

Montreal had, and still has, one of the largest Italian communities in Canada, second only to Toronto. Much of that community was built through two major periods of immigration, with the post-war wave between roughly 1950 and 1970 being especially important to our story.

By the disco years, there was therefore a sizeable generation of young Italian-Canadians growing up in Montreal, many still closely connected to Italian language, family and culture.

That matters more than it might initially seem.

Italian communities were concentrated geographically, which helped preserve language and cultural connections with Italy. And those connections weren’t merely sentimental. They could become commercial networks too.

Montreal was already unusually well positioned between Europe and North America, and Italian-Canadians could operate very naturally inside that network. Many were multilingual, moving between Italian, French and English.

If you’re importing European twelve-inches, dealing with American labels and working in Francophone Montreal, that isn’t a bad skill set to have.

Montreal meets Italy

There was something happening on the other side of the Atlantic too.

I’ve written before about Italy’s Years of Lead, particularly in the episode on Tantra and “Hills of Katmandu.” The 1970s were a difficult and sometimes frightening period, bookended by the Milan bombing of 1969 and Bologna in 1980.

The Twelve Inch

🚀 Hills of Katmandu: How Italy Sent Disco Back to America and Changed the Dancefloor Forever

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

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6 months ago · 12 likes · 27 comments · The Twelve Inch (Disco/80s)

And once again, dance music offered escape.

But there were practical reasons why disco suited Italian producers as well.

The music didn’t depend as heavily on English-language lyrics as traditional Anglo-American pop and rock. Melody, rhythm, instrumental passages and increasingly electronic instrumentation mattered enormously. That lowered one obvious barrier for producers working outside the English-speaking world.

Then Giorgio Moroder demonstrated what was possible.

By 1977, records such as From Here to Eternity had provided a template that would influence an entire generation of European producers. Synthesizers weren’t simply decorating disco anymore. They could be disco.

Now put these things together.

Montreal had a rapidly expanding independent music business, a huge disco market, close connections with New York and Europe, and a substantial Italian community that remained culturally connected with Italy.

Suddenly the number of Italian names in Montreal disco doesn’t look quite so accidental.

I’m not suggesting there was some secret Italian disco committee meeting every Tuesday evening over pasta. 😁

History is rarely that neat.

But the conditions were there.

And Pat Deserio is a wonderful example of somebody standing right at that intersection: Italian-born, Montreal-raised, producing disco, helping launch Gino Soccio and then moving naturally into the electronic music that followed.

Which brings us back to the Bombers.

Back to that twelve-inch

When I bought “(Everybody) Get Dancin’” in Antwerp in 1979, none of this mattered to me.

I didn’t know where it came from and I didn’t know Pat Deserio.

I certainly wasn’t thinking about Montreal’s Italian diaspora or the movement of records between Europe and North America.

I just knew it was a fantastic twelve-inch.

And perhaps that’s what makes rediscovering records you’ve owned for decades so much fun. You think you know them because you’ve played them hundreds of times, then many years later you turn the sleeve over, follow one name and discover an entirely different story hiding behind it.

In this case, that story leads directly into tomorrow’s B-Side.

Because the Bombers weren’t an isolated accident. They came out of a Montreal disco ecosystem that, by the late seventies, had become extraordinary.

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

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

Share

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

We’ll go inside the Lime Light, meet Robert Ouimet, discover why American DJs travelled to Montreal to hear records they couldn’t get in New York, and see how the twelve-inch itself helped turn the city into a switching board between European and American disco.

And eventually everybody wants disco.

But what happens when everybody wants it?

That’s where this story starts getting really interesting.

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It’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.

Over To You !

Did you know the Bombers were Canadian?

Did “(Everybody) Get Dancin’” make it onto your dancefloor or into your collection?

And for the collectors among you, which record did you own for years before discovering that it came from somewhere completely different than you had always assumed?

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

🇨🇦 It’s CanCon Month!

And we’re going to do things a little differently this week and over the coming weeks.

Instead of zooming in exclusively on the song from this week’s A-Side, the B-Sides will tell the bigger story of Disco and Canada, but also Canada and Disco. Two different, but closely connected and equally fascinating stori…

Read more

The simple answer?

Because it doesn’t work.

Whenever a platform I’m active on introduces a new tech feature, I want to try it. I want to know how it works. So when Substack introduced the Pangram AI detection feature, I was curious. Of course I wanted to see what my own “report card” would look like.

I’ve always been very open about my use of AI.

I’m not a native English speaker. AI chatbots have been a wonderful addition to my workflow because they allow me to make sure that what I publish is grammatically correct. I’ll go even further than that. The fact that these tools became available is one of the reasons I finally decided to take the leap and start writing and publishing on this platform.

Apart from grammar checks, ChatGPT or Claude will sometimes advise me on the structure of a post. Advice I sometimes follow and sometimes completely ignore. 😁

And even when I do follow it, I invariably end up changing things again because I want the text to sound and feel like me. It is, after all, my text. I have to be pleased with it, not the chatbot.

So when AI scanning became available, I tried it on the Marvin Gaye episode I had just published.

The result?

84% human. 16% AI generated.

Oumph.

I didn’t see that one coming.

But hey, the article was already published. I wasn’t going to rewrite it because an AI detector had decided that 16% of me apparently wasn’t me.

Then I scanned the B-Side.

48% human. 52% AI generated.

Now that was strange.

Because I wrote both articles exactly the same way I always do.

For the next episode, on the Pet Shop Boys, I decided to change a few details. I left out the emojis, for instance, and made some other small adjustments.

And guess what?

Hooray!

100% human.

Even the B-Side came back 100% human.

The nightmare was over. The pressure was gone.

The questions, however, remained.

How can changing a few details produce such wildly different results?

A text is either written by a human or generated by AI. And I’m pretty sure that in most cases you don’t need an AI machine to recognise AI slop anyway.

You see it.

You feel it.

But the moment you introduce a scanning system like this, something else happens. You put pressure on the writer.

Let’s try to avoid that sentence.

Maybe I shouldn’t structure it like this.

Perhaps I should change that paragraph.

In other words: let’s colour between the lines.

Because what will readers think when they see that 16% of your article has been marked as AI generated?

Let alone 52%.

Will they think I’m a fake? An imposter? Someone pretending to write something that was actually produced by a machine?

And that is where a supposedly helpful tool starts influencing the very thing it claims to protect.

Let me be clear about something.

I absolutely share the worries about AI slop and the way it is trying to take over large parts of the internet. I’ve worked in the music industry my entire professional life, so believe me, you don’t have to convince me that there is a serious problem.

But AI is not a subject that fits comfortably into a black-and-white discussion.

AI is multilayered.

You can use it as a helpful tool. You can use it to correct grammar, challenge your structure, translate something or help you think.

And yes, you can also use it to cheat.

The fact of the matter is that AI is here to stay, whatever scanning tools become available.

I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, so I’m convinced that the opportunities for people flooding platforms with AI slop will eventually become much smaller. You can already see this happening in the music industry. Uploading endless amounts of AI-generated music to DSPs is becoming more difficult. Rules are changing. AI-generated material is being treated differently by charts and platforms.

Take away the financial incentive and much of the industrial production of slop will disappear with it.

You don’t necessarily need a scanning device for that.

But there is something else about this whole discussion on Substack that sits even more uncomfortably with me.

And that is the way the platform has introduced this feature and is using it.

If you go into your settings, you have the possibility to:

“Tell AI tools not to train their models on your content.”

And there we find something interesting, because Substack also states:

“Substack never uses your content to train.”

And yet, here we are.

Because there isn’t a chatbot or AI detection system in existence that can analyse your text without first ingesting that text in some form. It has to process the content before it can tell you whether it believes that content was written by AI.

That is exactly what is happening here.

Even more importantly, my content is being passed to an external company whose service I never personally chose to use.

I don’t know that company.

I don’t know what happens to my content once it is processed.

And nobody ever asked me for permission.

The scanning option is enabled by default. I can deactivate it on a post-by-post basis, but that creates another problem.

Because what does switching it off suggest?

Why did he disable the AI scan?

Does he have something to hide?

So whichever way you turn it, Substack wins.

And then came this week’s B-Side.

When I finished writing it, I scanned it.

100% human.

As it should be.

Then I added an introduction, some pictures and a video.

I scanned it again.

Suddenly:

48% AI generated.

Wait... what?

So I removed the photos and the video and returned to the original version that Pangram had just declared 100% human.

I scanned exactly that version again.

54% AI generated.

Enough.

Seriously.

Writing is supposed to be fun.

It shouldn’t become a nerve-racking exercise in trying to satisfy an algorithm whose verdict can apparently change from one moment to the next.

And it certainly shouldn’t make writers wonder whether they need to change their own writing style simply to remain within some invisible lines drawn by another AI.

So starting with this week’s B-Side, the first episode in my Canadian disco series, I’m switching the AI scanning option off.

I realise I can’t completely stop platforms or automated systems from processing content once it is online. Sadly enough, that ship probably sailed a long time ago.

But I can stop participating in this particular game.

If a system can tell me that my own writing is 100% human, then 48% AI, then 100% human again and finally 54% AI, without me fundamentally changing the text, it isn’t providing useful information.

It’s creating noise.

Worse, it’s creating suspicion.

And I’m not going to change the way I write because an unreliable machine is trying to determine whether another machine wrote it.

I know who wrote it.

That should be enough.

So here we are.

The starting point of CanCon Month.

For the next three weeks we’re going to explore the story of Disco and Canada, but also Canada and Disco. And those really are two different stories.

I’ve mentioned it a few times over the past months, but one sentence kept coming back to me while researching this series. In 1979 a Billboard journalist described Montreal as the second most important disco market in North America.

Think about that for a second.

Not London, Philadelphia or Miami

Montreal.

Only New York ranked higher.

It’s one of those statements that immediately raises another question. How on earth did that happen? That’s exactly the story I’m about to tell.

The strange thing is that if you want to read about New York and the birth of disco, you can spend the rest of your life doing so. Books, documentaries, interviews, magazine articles... there’s an endless amount of material. Montreal is a very different story.

For a city that played such an important role in dance music history, remarkably little has been written. And I discovered fairly quickly why. Canada isn’t an easy country to understand. Being Belgian probably helped me a little 😁.

Like Canada, Belgium isn’t one cultural landscape. Living barely fifteen kilometres from the language border, I’m used to seeing two musical worlds existing side by side. They meet, they influence each other, but they don’t necessarily share the same artists or even the same conversation.

The more I researched Canada, the more familiar that felt. So, once those pieces began falling into place, something remarkable happened. I stopped reading a story about disco. And I started reading a story about identity, language, politics, clubs, producers and one country constantly looking in two directions at once, south towards America and across the Atlantic towards Europe.

That’s what makes Canadian disco so fascinating.

I’ll warn you in advance though. This has easily been the biggest research project I’ve undertaken for The Twelve Inch. Most of what you’ll read during the coming weeks comes from primary sources. Newspaper archives, trade papers, interviews and, inevitably, quite a few rabbit holes. Every time I thought I’d reached the end, another archive seemed to open another door.

Fortunately, that’s one of the joys of writing a newsletter: The story never really ends. If new information surfaces six months from now, I’ll happily revisit it. So if you have memories, records, old magazine clippings or simply grew up in this period, don’t hesitate to share them. That’s one of the nicest things about this community.

The B-Sides will tell the larger history.

This week we’ll travel back to Montreal during the 1920s and discover why the city was almost destined to become a disco capital. Next week we’ll spend an evening inside Lime Light, Montreal’s answer to Studio 54, although I’d argue it was even better. And in the final chapter we’ll explore why Canada experienced the disco backlash very differently from the United States.

The A-Sides tell that bigger story through individual records.

And there couldn’t be a better place to begin than with an artist whose career perfectly illustrates the opportunities and contradictions of Canadian music.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Who Is Patsy Gallant?

It’s actually a much less strange question than you might think. Outside Canada, most of us know exactly one Patsy Gallant record.

“From New York To L.A.”

Saying it was a “worldwide hit” might be stretching things a little. She reached the Top 10 in the UK, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. The single also became a respectable hit in Scandinavia and here in the Benelux.

But then things become rather odd.

Germany barely registers. France doesn’t appear at all, which feels strange considering Quebec’s cultural ties with France. While researching I came across the French chart website where German readers were fondly reminiscing about hearing the record on the radio. Talking about European integration... 😁

Apparently the song was remembered. Just not enough to become a chart hit. The biggest surprise, however, came when I looked at the American charts.

Nothing.

Not a trace.

C’mon...

With a title like “From New York To L.A.”? 😂

It certainly received club play and some radio support, but it must have been incredibly local. And in many ways that’s Patsy Gallant’s career in a nutshell. She always seemed one step away from something much bigger. Which is exactly why she’s such an interesting artist.

Because her story doesn’t just tell us about Patsy. It tells us an awful lot about Canada.

She was born Patricia Gallant on 15 August 1948. Not in Quebec, as many people assume, but in New Brunswick. She was Acadian.

That distinction matters.

Long before Canada existed, France established several colonies in North America. Quebec became one. Acadia became another. Even today Acadians have their own traditions and celebrate their national day every 15th of August with the Tintamarre, a wonderfully noisy parade where people bang pots, sound car horns and make as much noise as possible.

It’s their way of saying: “We’re still here.” And Patsy would spend much of her career doing exactly the same thing. 😁

And she started remarkably young. By the time her family had moved to Quebec she was only eight years old and already singing in striptease clubs with her aunt and uncle.

“I was performing with my uncle and aunt, who played the music while I sang. They paid me one dollar an hour, but since it was a striptease club, the male customers were used to throwing money onto the stage.”

Then came the quote that completely won me over.

“When I started singing between the striptease shows, they began throwing money at me too. But I refused to pick it up. When my aunt told me to collect it, I shouted, “I’m a singer, not a striptease girl!”

Now that’s an introduction.

You already know exactly what kind of person Patsy Gallant was.

At eighteen she left home and started building a career of her own. Initially she stayed close to the Quebec variété (MOR) tradition, releasing several singles before signing with CBS Canada, now Sony Music, in the early seventies. The label clearly believed in her.

Patsy was one of those rare singers who seemed comfortable singing almost anything, so CBS tried... almost everything. MOR, jazz, rock, country. Her 1974 album Power was even recorded in Nashville, which looked like a sensible move. Country was hugely popular in English-speaking Canada and it might open the door to the even larger American market. On paper it made perfect sense. But in reality it didn’t.

CBS eventually dropped her, leaving Patsy without a record company just as disco was beginning to emerge. But sometimes bad timing turns out to be perfect timing.

Dancing with a National Anthem

Around 1974 she met producer and manager Ian Robertson. “He was an English aristocrat. He didn’t speak a word of French. He was my lover, but he also taught me a great deal.” Together they came up with an idea that, depending on who you asked, was either inspired or outrageous.

They turned “Mon Pays” into a disco record.

Now, unless you’re from Quebec, that probably doesn’t sound particularly controversial. Trust me... It was.

The original was written by Gilles Vigneault, one of Quebec’s most respected singer-songwriters and a leading figure in the province’s growing nationalist movement. Mon Pays had become something close to an unofficial national anthem.

Its opening line says almost everything. “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.”(My country, it’s not a country, it’s winter)

I’ve always loved that sentence.

Without ever mentioning politics directly, it says something profoundly political. It defines Quebec not through borders but through a shared experience.

Turning that song into disco? You can imagine the reaction. Some people loved it. But others thought it bordered on blasphemy.

The original with a short introduction in Québécois

It’s one of those moments where music suddenly becomes much bigger than just music. I’ll return to that story in this week’s B-Side because understanding Quebec’s Quiet Revolution helps explain why Patsy’s version caused such a stir.

Ironically, the controversy also created her biggest opportunity. The record became such a success in Quebec that her producers suggested making an English version.

Patsy immediately objected. “They wanted me to do it as translation. I I saw two translation. It was just horrid. I said I’m not gonna sing that. If I do it in English, you gotta give me a totally different story” Fortunately, they listened.

The result became “From New York To L.A.”

A Window Opens... Then Closes Again

The record finally gave Patsy the breakthrough she’d been chasing. So why didn’t it become the start of a much bigger international career? I think several things happened at exactly the wrong moment.

The first is almost a cliché of the music business. An artist suddenly has an international hit. The following year disappears into airports, television studios and promotional tours. Exactly when you should be writing/recording the next great single.

The follow-ups simply weren’t as memorable.

The second reason was Attic Records, her new record company. It was an ambitious Toronto independent, but also a very young company. International success depended on licensing records territory by territory, and that’s much easier when every new single sounds like another hit.

Then there’s something that immediately caught my collector’s attention. There was never a proper twelve-inch club mix of From New York To L.A. That says quite a lot.

By 1976 disco producers were beginning to understand the dancefloor. Extended arrangements, longer breakdowns, more space for DJs, that language was still developing.

Ian Robertson was a perfectly competent producer. He just wasn’t one of disco’s great innovators. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if someone like Tom Moulton or Jacques Morali had been behind the mixing desk?

Would we still be talking about From New York To L.A. as one of disco’s essential records? Personally... I wouldn’t rule it out.

Caught Between Two Canadas

To be fair, Patsy’s Canadian career didn’t immediately stall. Are You Ready For Love became another Top 20 hit and Sugar Daddy even reached the Canadian Top 10. But disco itself was changing at breathtaking speed.

There’s a TopPop video of Are You Ready For Love so they expected it to be a Benelux hit also.

By 1977 Canadian producers were creating tougher, club-oriented records that were tailor-made for the dancefloors of Montreal and Toronto. Patsy’s records increasingly sat somewhere between disco and MOR. Perfectly enjoyable, but less essential on the dancefloor.

Her career also illustrates something I realised very quickly while researching this series. Canada isn’t one music market.

Quebec had developed a remarkably self-sufficient music industry. Artists could become enormous stars there without ever crossing into English-speaking Canada.

Looking from Belgium, I immediately understood that. Patsy found herself caught between those two worlds. Her English was flawless. Yet English Canada often saw her as a French artist. French Canada increasingly associated her with an English-language disco hit.

One journalist in RPM summed it up perfectly. “People from Quebec think she’s English. English Canada thinks she’s French.”

One sentence. One impossible position.

Patsy herself made exactly the same point when asked whether Quebec had embraced From New York To L.A. “There was no French Canadian reaction. How could there be? They never played it in Montreal. As far as I know, the French didn’t care at all.”

More Than One Hit

Patsy Gallant never became Canada’s Donna Summer. She never became the next Céline Dion either. But I don’t think that’s the right way to judge her career. If anything, the roads she didn’t take tell us more about Canada than the one she did.

Her story touches almost every theme we’ll encounter during CanCon Month. The relationship between French and English Canada. Montreal’s rise as a disco capital. The emergence of independent labels. The speed with which disco evolved, and how quickly opportunities could disappear again.

Looking back years later, Patsy remembered that period with obvious affection.

“The seventies were the best years because they were without worries. Montreal was the big city for Disco, together with New York”

That’s a lovely quote.

Because over the next three weeks we’re going to discover exactly why Montreal deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as New York.

And I have a feeling a few surprises still lie ahead.

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

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

Share

🎧 Next on the B-Side

This week’s B-Side starts long before disco.

We’ll travel back to Montreal in the 1920s and slowly build the city that would eventually become North America’s second disco capital. It’s a story of immigration, prohibition, nightlife, organised crime and a city that seemed destined to embrace dance music.

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It’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.

And now, it’s your turn:

Do you remember From New York To L.A. when it first came out?

Did Patsy Gallant ever have more than one hit where you lived?

And if you’re Canadian, I’d be especially interested to hear how you remember those years.

See you on the dancefloor.

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.

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

Did Domino Dancing Really End the Pet Shop Boys' Imperial Phase?

One thing kept nagging at me while researching this week’s episode. Did Domino Dancing really end the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase? Or have we all repeated that story for so long that it has simply become accepted as fact?

At first sight, Neil Tennant himself seems to settle the matter. Looking back in a 1996 documentary he recalled the moment the first chart position for Domino Dancing came through: “Domino Dancing” came in at No.9, and I thought, ‘Oh well, that’s it. That’s over.”

It’s such a wonderfully honest quote.

Neil wasn’t just a songwriter. Before the Pet Shop Boys took off he was a journalist at Smash Hits. He understood charts better than most artists ever will. He knew exactly what a lower entry could mean, not just for one single, but for the momentum of a career.

It was also when he later coined the phrase “the imperial phase”, that extraordinary run where almost everything they touched became a hit. Three UK number ones in quick succession, critically acclaimed albums, and the feeling they simply couldn’t put a foot wrong.

Then came Domino Dancing.

Number 7 in Britain.

Most bands would have celebrated. For the Pet Shop Boys it felt like the first crack in the armour. And when Left To My Own Devices followed, things became even more obvious. EMI, particularly in America, genuinely believed it could become another massive hit. Instead it stalled at No. 84 on the Billboard Hot 100. Continental Europe wasn’t particularly enthusiastic either.

Only Britain truly embraced it.

Looking back, it’s tempting to draw a straight line. Domino Dancing. Imperial phase over.

Case closed.

But…I’m not convinced.

Read more

Here’s the thing with the Pet Shop Boys.

If you’re telling the story of dance music by shining a light on one twelve-inch every week, sooner or later you’ll have to invite Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe into the conversation. There simply isn’t a way around them.

And yet, I’ve always hesitated.

Last week, while replying to excellent article on one of Rod Stewart’s early albums, I ended up telling a story about how a couple of less-than-positive stories had coloured the way I looked at Rod’s music ever since. We all carry those little prejudices around with us, don’t we? They shouldn’t matter, but somehow they do.

I’ve found myself wrestling with something similar here.

Not because I dislike the Pet Shop Boys, quite the opposite.

Actually was one of the albums that practically lived inside my CD player in 1987. If I’d kept track of listening hours back then, there’s a fair chance it would’ve finished number one. It had everything I loved. Wonderful songs, immaculate production, melodies that refused to leave your head, and beats that made it impossible to sit still.

But despite all that, I never really thought of it as a dance album.

It always felt like a brilliant pop album that happened to dance.

Maybe that’s because of what was hiding beneath the glossy surface. Unlike so many dance acts of the period, the Pet Shop Boys rarely dealt in carefree escapism. Their records were full of sharp observations, irony and melancholy.

Take King’s Cross. On the surface it’s about the London railway station where all the lines coming from the north arrive. Dig a little deeper and it becomes a portrait of a part of Britain that arguably suffered more than anywhere else during the Thatcher years. Or a place where economic decline and queer marginality met. And Rent, which sounds like a straightforward love song until you realise it’s really about dependency and power inside a relationship.

Pretty serious subjects for records I happily danced to.

Mind you, all four singles from Actually, It’s A Sin, What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Rent and Heart, came with magnificent twelve-inch versions. Every single one of them found its way into my record collection. Every single one spent plenty of time on my turntables while DJ’ing.

So perhaps I’ve been unfair all these years.

Because once I started researching this week’s episode, one thing became impossible to ignore.

Dance music wasn’t simply part of the Pet Shop Boys’ career.

It was part of their DNA.

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

More Than Just Remixes

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe met in the early eighties through a shared obsession with... dance music. That’s something I hadn’t fully appreciated before. Even if their first two albums were presented as pop records, the language they spoke was borrowed almost entirely from the dancefloor.

But at the same time they did something that, looking back, feels remarkably bold. By the mid-eighties we’d already become used to successful artists releasing remix albums. Usually they felt like a little bonus for the fans, something to keep the record company happy between studio albums.

The Pet Shop Boys approached the whole idea differently. In 1986 they released Disco, a compilation built entirely around their twelve-inch versions.

Think about that for a moment.

This wasn’t a collection aimed at DJs. It wasn’t some obscure club-only release. No, it was sold to the general public as a proper album. And because they’re the Pet Shop Boys, they added one final stroke of genius. They called it Disco.😁

This was 1986. The time when the United States was their biggest market. The United States, a country where the word “disco” was still practically radioactive after the infamous “Disco Sucks” movement.

I’ve always loved that little act of defiance.

Whether they intended it that way or not, it perfectly summed up who they were. Intelligent, mischievous and never particularly interested in following expectations. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became.

The Pet Shop Boys don’t just deserve a place in the story of dance music. They’re one of the bands that quietly changed the relationship between pop albums, twelve-inch singles and club culture.

The End Of The Imperial Phase

That’s why I’ve chosen to start not at the beginning, but at a fascinating turning point.

Neil Tennant would later describe the years of Please and Actually as the Pet Shop Boys’ “imperial phase.” Everything seemed effortless. They Scored hit after hit. They had three number ones in a row. They had critical acclaim.

And then something changed.

Their third album, Introspective, turned everything upside down. Instead of writing songs and then extending them into twelve-inch remixes, they reversed the entire process. The twelve-inch became the original. The single became the edited version.

In many ways, the idea behind Disco had quietly evolved into a full studio album. Introspective contained just six tracks, each presented in extended, club-length form. It was a remarkably brave idea. But even more remarkable is the fact that it worked.

By almost every measure, Introspective became their biggest album. It reached the Top 40 in America, performed strongly across Europe and remains one of the defining records of their career. The irony is that the singles didn’t quite follow. Which brings us to Domino Dancing.

I’ve often wondered whether choosing that particular song as the album’s introduction helped shape what happened next. A Latin Freestyle record, released just as it became clear that Freestyle wasn’t the new disco, and never really found a home in Europe.

Was it simply unfortunate timing? Or was something else going on? The deeper I dug into Domino Dancing, the more fascinating the story became.

Why On Earth Freestyle?

One thing kept nagging at me while researching this. If Introspective was built around six extended dance tracks, why open the campaign with Domino Dancing? It wasn’t the obvious choice.

The song was steeped in Latin Freestyle, a style that had become hugely popular on (some) American dance floors but was already showing signs that it might struggle to break into the mainstream. Even EMI had warned the Pet Shop Boys that it wasn’t the ideal choice if they wanted another major American hit.

And they weren’t entirely wrong.

The single still became a respectable success in Europe, reaching No. 7 in both the UK and the Benelux, but in the United States it only just scraped into the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. It would also become their final Top 40 pop hit across the Atlantic. Looking back, it’s easy to conclude they simply chose the wrong single.

Personally, I think that’s much too simplistic.

Because if you study Introspective as an album, you quickly realise the Pet Shop Boys weren’t chasing the charts as much as they were documenting what was happening on dancefloors around them.

Look at the track listing: Eurodance, House, Synth-pop & Latin Freestyle. It’s almost as if they’d built a snapshot of club culture in 1988. And suddenly Domino Dancing makes perfect sense.

The Miami Connection

The choice of Freestyle wasn’t nearly as unexpected as it first appears. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe had been following American club music closely for years. They were huge admirers of Exposé, one of the biggest Freestyle acts in America and one of the few to successfully cross over from the dance charts to mainstream pop.

Behind Exposé stood producer Lewis Martineé, one of the architects of the Miami Freestyle sound. The Pet Shop Boys wanted him. And remarkably, they got him.

Martineé later recalled that the request came completely out of the blue when Parlophone (the PSB record company) contacted him to ask if he’d be interested in producing a song for the band.

His answer?

Absolutely.

In fact, he later joked that he would’ve done it for free. 😁

There’s another detail I hadn’t fully appreciated until now. Domino Dancing wasn’t actually their first flirtation with Freestyle. Far from it. The Pet Shop Boys had been borrowing from Latin rhythms and American club music for quite some time.

Go back to Disco and you’ll hear it already. Arthur Baker’s remix of In The Night. The Latin Rascals’ spectacular reconstruction of Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money). Both are firmly rooted in the same musical vocabulary.

So travelling to Miami to work with Martineé wasn’t a sudden change of direction. It was the logical next step.

Why It Doesn’t Quite Sound Like Freestyle

This is probably the discovery that surprised me most. For years I’d wondered why Domino Dancing always sounded like Freestyle without ever completely being Freestyle. There’s something that felt different.

If you’ve spent enough evenings listening to Shannon, Exposé, Stevie B, Company B or Pretty Poison, your ears immediately notice it. The tempo.

Traditional Freestyle usually sits around 118 BPM. Domino Dancing cruises along at roughly 108 BPM. Ten beats per minute doesn’t sound like much on paper. On a dancefloor, it changes everything.

But the explanation is simple. Lewis Martineé wasn’t building a Freestyle record from scratch. By the time the Pet Shop Boys arrived in Miami, the song already existed.

They had written the melody, finished the lyrics and created the structure. So Martineé’s job wasn’t to compose a Freestyle song. He just had to add the Freestyle elements And that’s exactly why it works so beautifully.

Underneath all those Latin percussion patterns and syncopated rhythms sits an unmistakably Pet Shop Boys pop song. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. A dance record cleverly disguised as pop. And the more I listened to it, the more I realised that perfectly sums up their entire career.

What Was Domino Dancing Really About?

The song itself has generated plenty of discussion over the years. And if you spend enough time reading about the Pet Shop Boys, you’ll quickly stumble across one recurring question.

Was Domino Dancing simply a song about jealousy? Or was there something else going on beneath the surface?

Neil Tennant has always given a wonderfully down-to-earth explanation. The title, he said, came from a holiday on the Caribbean island of St Lucia. Apparently there wasn’t much to do in the evenings except play dominoes. One of their friends kept winning and every victory was celebrated with an exuberant little dance.

Hence...

Domino Dancing.

As unlikely as that sounds, it perfectly fits the Pet Shop Boys’ sense of humour. On the surface, the lyrics tell a fairly straightforward story. The main character is in a relationship with someone everyone else desires. The jealousy slowly destroys what the main character is trying to protect. Push one domino....and eventually they all fall.

Simple enough.

Except that, with the Pet Shop Boys, things are rarely quite that simple. For years people have argued that the song, and particularly its video, carried a much stronger LGBTQ subtext than many listeners recognised at the time.

The lyrics are written from a first person view and they never indicate if the main character is male or female. And then there’s the video. It certainly didn’t discourage that reading, with its lingering shots of two impossibly beautiful young men and a visual language that was quite gay for mainstream pop in 1988.

Some commentators have even suggested that Domino Dancing marked the moment America turned its back on the Pet Shop Boys. I’ve never been entirely convinced.

The first question, whether the song contains LGBTQ coding, is actually quite an interesting one. The second? I’m much more sceptical. And that’s exactly what I’d like to explore in this week’s B-Side.

Did They Really Lose America?

One statistic completely changed the way I looked at this period. For years I’d heard people describe Domino Dancing as the beginning of the Pet Shop Boys’ American decline. On paper, that sounds convincing. It was their last Top 40 pop hit in the United States.So case closed.

Or was it?

Because if you stop looking at the pop charts and start looking at the dance charts... the picture changes completely. The Pet Shop Boys didn’t disappear from America at all. They simply continued their success somewhere else.

In fact, they became one of the most successful artists the American dance charts have ever seen.

Read that again.

Ever.

Only three artists have had more US Dance Chart success than the Pet Shop Boys. And all three are female solo artists. (Can you guess who they are? Answers in the comments please. 😁)

That also means they outperformed dance heavyweights such as Depeche Mode and New Order. Not exactly the career of a band that “lost America.” Their albums kept charting. Their American tours continued. Their audience remained remarkably loyal.

What changed wasn’t the audience.

It was the charts they appeared in.

Pop Was Changing, Dance Was Too

Personally, I think the explanation is much simpler. By 1988 the Pet Shop Boys had become more unapologetically European. More club-oriented and more interested in extended arrangements than radio edits.

Ironically, the very thing that makes Introspective such a landmark album may also have made it a little less obvious for American Top 40 radio. The album wasn’t built around singles. It was the singles that were built around the album. That’s a completely different philosophy.

One small detail has always fascinated me. The first two studio albums became major American successes. But Disco, despite containing many of their strongest club mixes, only reached No. 95.

I’ve often wondered how much of that was simply down to one word. Disco. Even in 1986 it still carried baggage in America that it simply didn’t have in Europe. And that irony is almost delicious. The album that celebrated the twelve-inch format also carried the one title that many Americans still weren’t quite ready to embrace.

The Story Didn’t End There

The relationship between the Pet Shop Boys and Latin music certainly didn’t end with Domino Dancing. Eight years later they returned to those influences on Bilingual, by which time Latin rhythms had become far more accepted on both sides of the Atlantic.

Looking back, Domino Dancing almost feels like a preview. Another example of the Pet Shop Boys arriving somewhere just a little earlier than everyone else. And Lewis Martineé benefited from the collaboration too.

One of the session’s backing vocal groups, The Voice In Fashion, would later sign with the Pet Shop Boys’ label and score a sizeable club hit with Only In The Night. Years later they even recorded their own version of Domino Dancing, a lovely little reminder of where that collaboration had started.

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

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

Share

🎁 B-Side,

IThere’s another fascinating part of this story that simply wouldn’t fit into one article.

So this Saturday, on the subscriber-only B-Side, I’ll be digging into three questions that kept coming back while researching this episode.

Did Domino Dancing really bring the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase to an end, or was that simply the moment the pop charts stopped understanding what they were doing?

Why did Latin Freestyle become such a huge phenomenon in the United States while Europe largely looked the other way?

And finally, how much LGBTQ coding was really hiding inside the Pet Shop Boys’ songs, and how differently were those lyrics understood in 1988?

The B-side is where we go deeper.

It’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.

And now, it’s your turn:

Was Domino Dancing your introduction to the Pet Shop Boys?

Do you prefer the sleek pop perfection of Actually, or the club-first philosophy of Introspective?

And who do you think are the only three artists to have scored more US Dance Chart number ones than Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe?

I’m curious to read your thoughts.

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Next week we’ll start the CanCon month. The story of Disco’s second city and the records that shaped it.