Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

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

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

🎧 A Familiar Question Revisited

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

Where exactly does Yacht Rock end… and disco begin?

And more importantly for us:

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

🌊 Two Worlds, One Sound

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

That shared production world is where things start to blur.

🔍 Where They Meet

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

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

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

⚖️ Core Difference, Function vs Feel

Here is where the real distinction lies.

Read more

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

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

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

• the release of dopamine,

• your internal reference system which is, predominantly, build between the ages of 12 and 25, also triggering the age old discussion only the music of my youth was good music 😁,

• the balance between prediction and

• a connection to your emotional history, music as the repository of memories.

Also it has to align with your identity, matching your trained taste and feeling right on a sensory level.

All true, but none of it fully explains why some artists click… and others don’t.

The least I can say is that most of Prince’s repertoire is of exceptional quality. Only… apparently not for me.

And that raises the real question of this week’s episode:

Why do certain songs, or even entire genres, become part of who we are?

💃 The First Spark, Where It All Began

The same question applies to genres.

Why did I fall in love with disco early on while most of my peers leaned into rock or new wave? Part of it is personality. Playing the contrarian suited me just fine.

But there’s something deeper.

I was never a passive listener.

If something interests me, I want to understand it, take it apart, maybe even try it myself. So when I heard, for the first time, a DJ seamlessly mixing two records on my favorite radio show, something clicked.

That moment didn’t just make me love music, it made me want to participate in it.

And yet… even that doesn’t explain why I tuned into that radio show in the first place. That part remains a mystery.

🎤 Enter Boz Scaggs, A Personal Mystery

Boz Scaggs is one of those mysteries.

I hold a special love for his voice and repertoire. Why? I genuinely don’t know. In the Benelux, his chart success was limited. Three hits in 1977, that’s it. And yet, when I first listened to his Best Of album Hits, I knew almost every song.

Songs that never charted here, songs I hadn’t heard in years, but still recognized instantly.

That tells you something about how music embeds itself.

🌊 The Hidden Connection, AOR Meets Disco

Part of the explanation lies in the connection between R&B-based disco and AOR, or Yacht Rock as it’s now often called. I’ve touched on this before, and I’ll go deeper into it on this week’s B-side. But the essence is simple:

The uptempo Boz Scaggs tracks share the same groove DNA as the disco I loved.

So even without consciously knowing his songs, they felt familiar. They aligned with my taste, my identity, my internal musical compass.

📻 The Discovery, AFN & “Breakdown Dead Ahead”

When my taste broadened in the early eighties, I rediscovered him through “Breakdown Dead Ahead”. It wasn’t a hit in the Benelux. I found it on the American Top 40 on AFN with Casey Casem, a show I loved.

.Only much later did I connect it back to those earlier songs I already knew and loved.

Music sometimes connects the dots long before we consciously do.

👋 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

🎬 How It Started, From Texas to the First Break

William Royce Scaggs was born on June 8, 1944 in Canton, Ohio, but spent most of his early years in Texas. It was in a private school in Dallas that something important happened. He met Steve Miller.

Miller taught him how to play guitar at the age of 12, setting everything in motion. His nickname “Boz” also dates from that period, evolving from “Bosley”, given to him by a schoolmate.

The foundations were laid early, but the path forward was anything but straightforward.

Together with Steve Miller, he enrolled in college, but both left soon after to pursue music. That decision took Scaggs far from Texas, all the way to London and across Europe, where he busked to make ends meet. In 1965, he recorded his first solo album for a Swedish label.

Nothing came of it. No breakthrough, no momentum. Just experience.

Back in the United States in 1967, the connection with Steve Miller resurfaced. He joined the Steve Miller Band and stayed until 1968, when he decided to go solo again.

Real progress only started a few years later.

When he signed with Columbia Records in 1971, things began to shift, slowly at first. His first two albums for the label sold modestly, showing potential but not yet delivering results.

For the third album, Columbia made a decisive move. They brought in Johnny Bristol to produce and steer the sound toward something more soulful. Before that, Scaggs had approached Gamble & Huff, but they turned him down.

That decision would indirectly shape everything that followed.

The result was Slow Dancer in 1974. It reached number 81 on the Billboard Album chart, a clear step forward and his biggest success up to that point.

More importantly, it set the direction.

Because what was coming next would change everything.

🕺 The Breakthrough, Lowdown & The Dancefloor

Boz Scaggs broke through in 1976 with Silk Degrees and the song “Lowdown”. It was a n°3 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and his only entry into the dance charts.

And timing was everything.

This was just before Saturday Night Fever, when R&B-based disco was beginning to enter the mainstream. Scaggs had already been building toward this sound. As he said:

I was learning my craft and learning more about music by listening to the black side of the radio dial,“

Then came the key moment.

“Lowdown” wasn’t even the first single. It was persistent airplay on R&B stations that forced CBS to release it.

DJ’s picked it up.

Dancefloors responded.

And suddenly, a song that wasn’t disco… became part of disco culture.

🎬 The Counterfactual, The One That Got Away

Here’s where the story takes a fascinating turn. John Travolta rehearsed his Saturday Night Fever dance routines… to “Lowdown”.

But when RSO wanted to license the track, CBS said no. The song was already tied to the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

A good film, but not a cultural phenomenon.

Imagine the alternative history.

“Lowdown” on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

A completely different trajectory.

I’ll explore that counterfactual in depth on the B-side.

🎹 The Toto Connection, From Groove to Arena Rock

There’s another thread that ties into my personal taste.

Toto.

Their early work, especially “Hold The Line”, resonated with me in a similar way. Not disco, not even dance. And yet… it connected. The reason becomes clear when you look at the musicians. The core of Boz Scaggs’ band became Toto:

• Jeff Porcaro on drums

• David Paich on keyboards

And Boz himself explains how it started:

“That was the first song that I wrote with those Toto guys, with David Paich in particular. When we first met, the producer suggested we try to write a song or two together. We took off for a weekend to this getaway outside of LA where there was a piano and stayed up all night banging around ideas. We hit on “Lowdown,” and then we brought it back to the band and recorded it. We were just thrilled with that one. That was the first song that we attempted, and it had a magic to it.”

That “magic” became a blueprint.

Not just for Scaggs, but for Toto’s entire sound.

📉 The Aftermath, Success, Pressure & Silence

Following Silk Degrees, expectations were high. The follow-up didn’t match its success. Then came Middle Man in 1980, featuring my personal favorite:

“Breakdown Dead Ahead”.

After that, something changed. Scaggs stepped away, feeling music had become a “career” and that it had “left him”. In 1985, he returned out of necessity:

“something very big missing”

But the magic of the late seventies moment was gone.

🪩 Was It Disco? Or Something More Subtle

Boz Scaggs built a career out of interpreting black music for predominantly white audiences. Silk Degrees, his first gold record after five attempts, drew its appeal from a very specific blend, a distinctive white pop vocal style combined with an evocative mix of black, Philly soul rhythms.

He himself pointed directly to where that inspiration came from:

“It dawned on me that the most innovative music was coming from the Gamble & Huff / Thom Bell Philly studios.” “This was before disco happened,” he added. “I wanted to try to work with the new rhythms and the great black session players.”

And that is where things start to get interesting.

Because while he wasn’t setting out to make disco, the world around him was changing. R&B based disco was on the rise, quietly shaping what would become the dominant sound of the second half of the seventies. If you listen closely to Silk Degrees, you can hear that shift happening in real time.

Boz Scaggs was perfectly positioned for it.

His roots were firmly in Rhythm & Blues, his producer came from Philadelphia, even if not directly tied to the Philly Sound, and had worked with Earth, Wind & Fire. The ingredients were all there.

And then there is “Lowdown”.

It is not disco. Not even strictly R&B. It sits somewhere between Blue Eyed Soul, AOR and what we now call Yacht Rock.

But above all, it grooves.

And that was enough.

Because in early 1976, DJ’s were not looking for labels. They were looking for records that worked on the dancefloor.

“Lowdown” did exactly that.

A perfect example of the right song at the right time.

🎶 The Peak Moment, When Everything Clicked

Scaggs would later reflect on what Silk Degrees meant to him:

“The album “Silk Degrees” was an experience for me that I would wish for every musician or every creative person because it was really the fulfilment of a lot of work. It was arrival, finally one really got through to a lot of people and I was ready to go. I had a fine band, I had been out playing a lot and this thing finally reached an audience and struck a nerve in a big way. I got to play a lot more places and got to do a lot of things I wanted to do. Musically I discovered a whole new ground, a whole new footing for myself. I fell into a group of musicians who really understood my music and were able to lend their talents to getting it out of my head and onto the record. It was a very fulfilling experience. Of course when you have something that hits a peak like that there is always the challenge to follow it up and do it again and so forth.”

It was not just a commercial breakthrough, it was a creative alignment.

🕺 The Dancefloor Reality, Label vs Function

And yet, despite its success in clubs, Scaggs himself resisted the label:

A 1978 interview in BAM Magazine notes that he “recoils at the thought that anyone would consider him a disco artist,” even though “Lowdown” was being played in discos and clearly belonged to that late seventies crossover moment.

Later, he framed it more precisely:

“Disco was going on,” and “black music and groove music and soul stuff and contemporary R&B was coming into the mainstream,”

He wasn’t making disco. He was moving alongside it.

And that distinction matters.

🔍 Building the Sound, A Conscious Direction

This wasn’t accidental.

You can already hear him moving in this direction on Slow Dancer in 1974. Tracks like “You Make It So Hard To Say No” clearly point toward the groove-driven approach that would define Silk Degrees. And if you move forward to Down Two, Then Left from 1978, the connection becomes even clearer. The single “Hollywood” arguably leans even closer to disco than “Lowdown”.

Same ingredients, same direction, but a different moment.

Because by then, the world had shifted again, moving toward a more European sound. Timing, once more, proved everything.

🔗 The Missing Link, Why This Story Matters

Boz Scaggs is one of those essential, often overlooked links in the history of dance music.

A bridge between R&B, rock, AOR and the dancefloor.

Proof that disco was never operating in isolation.

There was always a wider ecosystem, far beyond the obvious, and often ridiculed, disco attempts from rock acts like the Beach Boys, Kiss or Rod Stewart. What makes Scaggs different is that his connection to the dancefloor was not opportunistic.

It was organic.

And that is exactly why “Lowdown” worked. The irony is that today, his music is often described as part R&B, carefully avoiding what actually happened when that track hit the dancefloor.

But history sounds different when you listen closely.

And on the dancefloor of 1976, “Lowdown” absolutely belonged.

🔓 The B-Side, Where We Go Deeper

This week’s B-side dives into three questions:

• What if “Lowdown” had been on Saturday Night Fever?

• How different would Toto have sounded if they had started earlier?

• What do AOR and disco really have in common on the dancefloor?

As always, there’s also an exclusive playlist with 10 essential Boz Scaggs tracks.

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 access to all B-side pieces, the complete archive of 150 articles, and upcoming deep dives into genre-spanning stories in the months ahead.

And since it might be unclear what qualifies as a “premium coffee”, or how to pay me in beans 😁, I’ll happily accept € or $.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

Share

💬 Let’s Talk

Music is deeply personal, but never entirely random.

So I’m curious:

• What artist do you know is great… but never clicked for you?

• Which song feels like it has always been part of your life, even if you don’t know why?

• And have you ever discovered a track years later… only to realize you already knew it?

Let me hear you.

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 :

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

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

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

🥁 Section 1 — The Beats

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

🎯 The “Dub” That Changed Everything

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

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

And yet…

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

Stay with me.

Because this is not just a detail.

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

🔍 Why Dub Matters Here

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

All true.

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

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

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

⚡ Before and After Rushent?

Let me put it like this.

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

After this moment, something shifts.

Every artist. Every label.

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

And honestly?

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

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

🧠 So Was Rushent First?

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

Read more

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

It all started with producer Martin Rushent, who wanted to explore the, then new and increasingly affordable, world of synthesizers. It was an idea he shared with Shelley. So when the sessions for the fourth Buzzcocks album failed to spark anything meaningful, the two moved operations to Rushent’s new home studio in Berkshire.

There, they began experimenting with this new gear, shaping what would arguably become the blueprint for a hugely successful synth-pop sound.

Except… not for Pete Shelley.

He was just a bit too left of centre to become the new synth-pop poster boy. That role would go to a band from Sheffield.

👉 So here’s the question that drives today’s story: if Martin Rushent and Pete Shelley created that sound, why did it work so brilliantly for The Human League?

We often think there was a clear divide between late seventies punk and early eighties post-punk. In reality, there wasn’t.

The punk ethos, anyone can create music, even without technical skill, became the foundation of early synth culture.

Many former punk musicians simply swapped guitars for synthesizers. The attitude stayed the same, the tools changed. Minimalism remained, but now it came with synth stabs instead of power chords. Out of this raw, experimental phase came new wave and synth-pop, evolving alongside new instruments hitting the market, like the Roland TR-808 drum machine in the early eighties.

There was, however, another factor, one that was more uniquely British.

It helps explain why the early eighties saw such an explosion of UK artists conquering global charts. In the US, this moment would be labelled the “second British Invasion.”

I’ll break that down fully on this week’s B-side, but the context matters.

The UK economy at the time was struggling, to put it mildly.

Prospects for young people were bleak.

And that often leads to creativity.

Music became not just an outlet, but an opportunity. Especially when the barrier to entry dropped. You didn’t need years of training anymore, you just needed an idea and a machine.

Some of those artists would go on to become global superstars.

Most wouldn’t.

Today, I’m zooming in on The Human League and their massive 1982–1983 hit Don’t You Want Me.

👉 Why did they become the face of synth-pop, and not Pete Shelley?

👉 How did Dare come together?

👉 And why couldn’t they sustain the global success that took them to number one on the Billboard Hot 100?

It’s time for the reign of the asymmetrical haircuts.

It’s time to go back to Sheffield.

The year is 1977.

👋 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

⚡ Enter Sheffield – The Long Road To Nowhere

If there’s one thing you can say about the early The Human League, it’s that their breakthrough didn’t come quickly.

They took their time, so much so that when Gary Numan scored the first synth-pop number one with Are ‘Friends’ Electric? and opened the floodgates for the genre, the tide seemed to rise everywhere… except for them.

By that point, people were already writing them off as the has-beens that never were.

And here’s the kicker.

Many of those voices came from inside their own label, Virgin Records.

👉 So how did it get to that point?

🧪 Origins – From “Musical Vomit” To The Future

It all begins in early 1977, in Sheffield.

Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware meet at a youth arts project. By day, both work as computer operators. By night, they share a deep fascination for music, from seventies glam rock to Tamla Motown and avant-garde electronica. This is also the moment when synthesizers are becoming just about affordable. So they take the plunge. They buy a Korg 700s together and teach themselves how to play it.

Before that, both had been involved in experimental, “messing about” bands around Sheffield, with names like Meatwhistle and, my personal favorite, Musical Vomit.

Their ambition is clear. Get access to more synths, push the boundaries, and follow in the footsteps of synth pioneer Brian Eno. Their first proper project is called The Future.

But when they begin searching for a singer, everything changes. They find Philip Oakey. And with him, a new identity. The band becomes The Human League, a name borrowed from a science fiction board game owned by a friend.

Oakey, at that point, is working as a hospital porter. But on the Sheffield social scene, he’s already known for his striking, unconventional style.

👉 “he already looked like a pop star”

🚫 Early Failure – When Nothing Works

In 1978, The Human League released their debut single, Being Boiled, on a small independent label. It didn’t chart.

Being Boiled would be re-released (and chart) after the success of the first singles of Dare

But something else was happening.

👉 Their live reputation started to grow.

Word spread quickly, and one particular audience member took notice. David Bowie saw them perform at the end of 1978 and famously remarked that he had “seen the future of rock.” That kind of endorsement opened doors. Major labels came calling, and the band signed with Virgin Records, led by Richard Branson.

What followed was… complicated. Despite promises of creative freedom, Virgin immediately pushed for a more commercial direction.

The band was asked to combine their electronic approach with conventional instruments and traditional vocals. Having accepted a substantial advance, Martyn Ware had little room to resist. But he insisted on one condition. If they were going to release music in this style, it wouldn’t be under The Human League name.

So in July 1979, a disco-influenced track, I Don’t Depend on You, was released under the pseudonym The Men.

It went nowhere. It barely resembled their earlier work. And yet, in hindsight, it hinted at something to come. The track featured female vocals from Lisa Strike and Katie Kissoon, a sound surprisingly close to the future version of the band that would emerge in 1981.

With that experiment failing, Virgin allowed the group to return to their original vision. In August 1979, they released their debut album Reproduction. It didn’t chart. Neither did the single Empire State Human.

Momentum stalled. Completely.

Meanwhile, the scene moved on without them. Gary Numan stormed the charts with Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, redefining electronic pop and claiming the space The Human League had helped open. By early 1980, their status had shifted dramatically. They weren’t seen as pioneers anymore. They were seen as… irrelevant.

So much so that they became the subject of a jab in a hit single by The Undertones. In My Perfect Cousin, which reached number 9 in the UK, the lyric went:

“His mother bought him a synthesiser / Got the Human League in to advise her / Now he’s making lots of noise / Playing along with the art school boys”

👉 From “the future of rock” to a punchline in less than two years.

💥 The Break – Human League vs Heaven 17

The relationship between Philip Oakey and Martyn Ware had always been fragile. They regularly clashed, both creatively and personally. And as long as success stayed out of reach, those tensions only grew stronger. The contrast with Gary Numan’s breakthrough made things worse. What had once been a shared vision now became a dividing line. Ware wanted to stay true to a pure electronic sound. Oakey wanted to move closer to accessible pop structures

👉 The band was being pulled in two opposite directions.

Eventually, something had to give. In 1980, Ware walked out. And Ian Craig Marsh followed him.

Manager Bob Last tried to bring both sides back together.

He failed.

Several solutions were discussed, including the idea of creating two separate bands under a Human League umbrella. But in the end, a clean break was made. Oakey and Adrian Wright would continue as The Human League. Ware and Marsh would form a new band, Heaven 17, with singer Glenn Gregory, ironically their original choice for The Human League back in 1977

But keeping the Human League name came at a cost.

A heavy one.

Oakey inherited all the debts and obligations tied to the band. On top of that, the contract with Virgin Records required him to pay Ware and Marsh one percent of the royalties from the next Human League album…

…which would later become Dare 😁

And as if that wasn’t enough, the timing couldn’t have been worse. A tour was about to start. The first show was just ten days away. And the press had already written the obituary.

👉 The Human League was finished, now that “the talented people had left.”

🎤 The Craziest Recruitment Story Ever

To save the tour, Philip Oakey had to rebuild the band in a matter of days. Adrian Wright stepped up by taking on more synthesizer duties, while Oakey decided he needed a female voice to replace Martyn Ware’s high backing vocals.

What happened next has become part of music history.

One Wednesday night, Oakey and his girlfriend headed into Sheffield city centre, moving from venue to venue, hoping to find someone who could join the band. They ended up at the Crazy Daisy nightclub. And that’s where everything changed.

On the dancefloor, Oakey spotted two girls dancing together: Joanne Catherall & Susan Ann Sulley. Both were 17 and out for a night with friends. Neither had any professional experience in singing or dancing. Without hesitation, Oakey approached them and asked them to join the tour as dancers and occasional vocalists.

Just like that.

Later, Oakey explained his thinking. When he realised they were teenagers, and best friends, he decided to bring them both along so they could look after each other on the road.

He also understood something else.

👉 Two female performers would add a new visual and emotional dimension to the band.

Of course, there was one small detail to sort out. They were still in school. So Oakey and Wright visited their parents to ask for permission. The answer was yes, with one condition. Oakey had to take responsibility for their safety. Sulley later recalled that both fathers even went to the school to convince them that touring could be… educational, thanks to all the travelling involved 😁

To complete the line-up, Oakey also brought in Ian Burden from the Sheffield synth band Graph for the duration of the tour.

In a matter of days, The Human League had been rebuilt.

🎚️ Meeting The Missing Piece – Martin Rushent

By January 1981, The Human League had made it through the tour. But survival wasn’t the same as success. They were still in serious trouble.

Deep in debt to Virgin Records, Philip Oakey and Adrian Wright were under intense pressure to deliver results, and fast. In February 1981, they recorded and quickly released Boys and Girls. The track reached #47 in the UK charts. Not a breakthrough, but their highest chart position so far.

That alone was enough to signal something important. Oakey realised the band needed to level up. So Ian Burden was brought in as a full-time member.

Virgin’s confidence had been partially restored. But they still saw a key weakness. The band needed proper production. So in March 1981, Oakey was introduced to Martin Rushent. A meeting followed. And Rushent would later recall Oakey opening the conversation with a blunt assessment:

“We reckon we’re writing hit songs and have been for some time, but we just can’t seem to make it work on plastic.“

At this point, the story reconnects with what I covered in the Pete Shelley episode. Rushent had previously approached Virgin to get Shelley signed. They had said no. But they did have another band in need of a producer.

👉 The Human League.

Rushent’s first move was decisive. He relocated the entire band to his Genetic Studios in Reading, Berkshire. Away from Sheffield. Away from Monumental Studios. And crucially… Away from the “unhealthy atmosphere” they were sharing with Heaven 17.

📈 The Turnaround – Hit After Hit

The first real breakthrough from the sessions at Genetic Studios came with The Sound of the Crowd. It became their first Top 40 hit, climbing to #12 in the UK.

Momentum, finally.

The next single, Love Action (I Believe in Love), pushed things even further. It reached #3 in the UK in August 1981. At that point, everything started to align. The band began shaping their demos and ideas into a full album, with Martin Rushent at the controls. In October 1981, Virgin Records released another single, Open Your Heart. Another hit.

And then came the album Dare

Released that same month, it went straight to number one in the UK. It stayed there for four weeks across 1981 and 1982, remained on the charts for 77 weeks, and ultimately achieved triple platinum status.

The band that had been written off was now at the very top.

💣 A “Filler” That Changed Everything

Virgin wants one more single. Oakey disagrees.

Strongly.

The track? 👉“Don’t You Want Me”

He calls it a filler. The weakest track. But the label insists.

🎬 The Payoff – When Everything Clicks

Supported by an expensive music video, still a rarity at the time, the single took off. It reached number one in the UK and stayed there for five weeks over the 1981 Christmas period.

Looking back in a 1995 interview, Philip Oakey was clear about the impact of visual media on the song’s success:

“I don’t think we would have had a number one if it weren’t for the video and MTV. Trying to interpret songs with video is a real problem, but at the same time, we know that we wouldn’t be here without video.”

Don’t You Want Me became the band’s defining hit. It sold nearly 1.5 million copies in the UK alone.

The inspiration came from the 1976 film A Star Is Born, the story of an ageing male star who falls in love with a young woman whose success eventually eclipses his own. Oakey later described the song in stark terms. “a nasty song about sexual power politics,” A theme that captured the mood of the early eighties, and one that still resonates today.

🧠 Why Dare Worked

The making of Dare was anything but smooth.

In fact, it was chaotic.

Not least because, initially, The Human League were still sharing Monumental Studios in Sheffield with Heaven 17. Heaven 17 recorded at night, working on Penthouse and Pavement. The Human League took the day shift, building Dare. Two rival camps, under one roof, with tensions still running high after the split.

Inevitably, a rivalry developed. Heaven 17 even took a swipe at their former bandmates in NME, referring to them as “dodgy boilers.” Martyn Ware later recalled stumbling upon an early demo of what would become The Sound of the Crowd.

His reaction was… less than flattering.

‘hopelessly funny, and with the girls childishly and consistently out of tune… My God, there were even some muffled comments on the tape between takes with Phil encouraging them to try harder’

And yet, that might have been exactly the point. That rawness became their strength. These weren’t polished, conservatory-trained performers. They were normal girls who liked to dress up, go out, and have fun, suddenly transported into the shimmering world of electronic pop.

No privilege.

No formal training.

No expectations.

Just energy.

And that energy connected.

Especially as the band embraced the emerging power of music video, becoming some of the first British acts to truly break through on MTV.

Dare worked because everything aligned.

• Visual identity – a gatefold sleeve inspired by Vogue, all dazzling white, close-ups, and bold makeup

• Sound – simple structures built around irresistibly catchy synth hooks

• Lyrics – direct, memorable, easy to sing along to

👉 There’s a reason Don’t You Want Me still resonates more than four decades later.

📉 After The Peak – Why It Didn’t Last

Success creates pressure. And pressure creates friction.The Human League’s output was reduced to little more than a trickle. Follow-ups: “Mirror Man”& “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” Both hits.

But the next album stalls. Rushent leaves. Chaos returns. Eventually Hysteria arrives, but with less impact.

🧩 The Final Piece – The Real Reason

Even in ideal circumstances the production process of writing & recording wasn’t easy. On this week’s B-Side I’ll dig deeper into the way the album was produced but also the songwriting was a problem. Phil Oakey sums it up perfectly:

“We’re really limited. We’re quite good at being the Human League, and that’s about it. If Dolly Parton came and said, ‘Can you write me a song?’ or Whitney Houston said, ‘I need a big hit’, we couldn’t do it.”

So the success wasn’t just the band. It was Martin Rushent’s production, the sound he shaped with Pete Shelley and, especially, the moment in time

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

This story is far from over.

In a future episode, we’ll pick up the thread that runs from Pete Shelley to Heaven 17… and beyond.

👉 The B-Side (Tomorrow)

On the B-side, we go deeper:

• Rushent’s production techniques, why they were revolutionary

• The second British Invasion explained

• The disco connection via Love Unlimited Orchestra

• The gear behind the sound

• A fresh weekend playlist

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

💬 Call To Action

Now I’m curious:

👉 Do you hear Don’t You Want Me as a masterpiece or as the “filler” Oakey thought it was?

👉 Do you think The Human League deserved that global success more than Pete Shelley?

👉 And which synth-pop track defines this era for you?

Let me know in the comments. I read every single one.

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

No YouTube version this week, one of the tracks in the set got blocked for some reason.

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

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

Devil’s Gun (CJ & Co)

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

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

And the first one is a perfect case in point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

Devil Woman (Fire & Ice)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

Devil’s Run (The Peter Jacques Band)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

The B-Side is now exclusive to subscribers.

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

Or The video version :

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

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

🎧 A Simple Question That Isn’t So Simple

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

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

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

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

📻 Early Positioning, The World I Grew Up In

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

Read more

When Kung-Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas ruled the summer of 1974, K-Tel jumped in with a compilation called Black Music. And yes, it was exactly that 😂

It became my first real encounter with soul music. My ten-year-old self played that record endlessly. One track stood out immediately, apart from Kung-Fu Fighting of course, That Lady by The Isley Brothers.

At the time, they didn’t register. They weren’t even one of the featured names on the cover.

That would change five years later.

In 1979, my favorite radio show, The Soul Show, started playing It’s A Disco Night. And that’s when everything clicked. This track has pure drive, the kind that makes sitting still impossible. Every single time.

But here’s the thing.

👉 It didn’t sound like disco.

No glossy Eurodisco sheen. No Giorgio Moroder pulse.

Instead, it was deeply funky. Driven by Marvin Isley’s bass, elastic, rhythmic, almost slap bass in feel. Irresistible. And that raises a much more interesting question than just “great track, right?”

👉 Why did The Isley Brothers make a “disco” record in 1979…

👉 at the exact moment disco was supposedly collapsing?

Because if you’ve followed this newsletter, you already know:

Disco didn’t just fade away.

It fractured, evolved, and, on some dancefloors, refused to die.

So when I started building the shortlist for this episode, this track went straight to the top.

Not just because it works.

But because it doesn’t quite fit the narrative we’ve been told about 1979.

Before answering that question, I always zoom out.

Where does this track sit in the Isley Brothers’ story?

It’s A Disco Night comes from the 1979 album Winner Takes All. At first glance, it feels like an outlier.

But as you’ll see… that assumption doesn’t really hold.

So let’s step into the time machine.

Destination: dancefloors of 1979.

👋 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 Are The Isley Brothers, Really?

When I mentioned the K-Tel compilation where I first heard The Isley Brothers, and how they weren’t even listed among the key artists, it feels almost unbelievable today. Because The Isley Brothers are easily one of the most important African American bands ever.

Their track record says it all.

In Joel Whitburn’s chart books, their hits fill an entire page in the Hot 100, and that’s before you even open the R&B listings, where it stretches to nearly two pages. Even the dance charts list seven of their tracks.

Secondly, their longevity is extraordinary.

Their first hit dates back to 1959, and they were still scoring hits well into this century. That’s over 40 years of relevance. Not just impressive, but monumental.

Third, and perhaps most remarkable, is how they broke through.

They scored their first pop hits three years before they had success on the R&B charts.

Think about that.

At a time, when most African American artists depended on Black radio to cross over, the Isleys did it the other way around. An exception that tells a much bigger story, one I’ll return to later. So asking who The Isley Brothers are feels almost unnecessary. It’s a bit like asking who The Jacksons are.

🎤 From Gospel Roots to Chart Mainstays

Their story begins as a gospel quartet, with brothers Kelly, Rudy, Ron and Vernon Isley. Tragedy struck early when Vernon was killed in 1955 in a bicycle accident, leaving the group as a trio.

In 1957, they moved from Ohio to New York to pursue a career in R&B.

Early attempts in doo-wop brought limited success, until everything changed with the gospel-infused “Shout” in 1959. Released on RCA Victor, it reached number 47 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went on to sell over a million copies.

Momentum followed:

• “Twist and Shout” entered the Top 20 in 1962

• “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)” became a Motown hit in 1966

Despite consistent success over all these years, a number one pop hit remained just out of reach. The closest they came was with their defining anthem “It’s Your Thing”, which peaked at number 2 in 1969.

⚡ Two Generations, One Sound

One of the secrets behind their longevity lies in their evolution.

The original trio was later joined by younger brothers Ernie and Marvin Isley, along with nephew Chris Jasper. By the time of the 3+3 album in 1973 (and now you know what that title stands for), the transformation was complete. That album marked a turning point.

One of its standout singles, “That Lady”, became an international success, including in the Benelux.

📀 The Seventies, A Golden Era

The 1970s were a peak period for The Isley Brothers.

• Four number one hits on the R&B charts

• Strong album sales throughout the decade

One of those R&B chart-toppers was “I Wanna Be With You”, the lead single from their 1979 album Winner Takes All. By then, they weren’t just surviving the changing musical landscape.

They were shaping it.

🪩 Did They “Go Disco” in 1979? Not Really

Let’s start with the most important answer first.

They didn’t “go disco” at all.

While researching this piece, one thing stood out immediately, you hardly find any mention of It’s A Disco Night, or even the album Winner Takes All, in later reflections by The Isley Brothers. That alone tells you something.

👉 They didn’t see it as a departure.

👉 They didn’t see it as “going disco”.

🎧 They Were Already On The Dancefloor

If you listen closely to their 70s catalogue, the dancefloor is already there.

Not always labelled as disco, but:

• Highly danceable

• Groove-driven

• Perfectly usable in a DJ set

Yes, the feel is more funk-oriented, but with the right build-up and curation, their tracks sit effortlessly alongside American disco and even Eurodisco.

If anything, It’s A Disco Night is not a shift, it’s a continuation.

🥁 Funk First, Disco On Top

The second reason is even more telling.

This is not really a disco track. It’s funk with a layer of disco on top.

It may sound like a subtle distinction, but in the late 70s American dance scene, it mattered. The groove, the bass, the musical DNA, it all comes from funk. The disco element is more of a surface texture. And that makes perfect sense when you look at the lyrics.

Because, quite simply:

👉 It’s A Disco Night is about… a disco night.

Going out.

Having fun.

Dancing with the person you love.

Disco was the setting, not the identity.

The lyrics are not in the same league as “Fight The Power”, but it’s also not “Let’s All Chant”.

It’s exactly what The Isley Brothers had always done,

making great music you can dance to.

🔁 Influence, Already Embedded

If you go back to earlier albums, you can hear disco influences creeping in again and again. But always translated into their own language. A perfect example is “The Pride” from Go For Your Guns (1977), which even received a dedicated disco mix on twelve inch.

So the ingredients were already there, well before 1979.

🧭 Staying In Their Lane, And Winning

Where many artists fully jumped on the disco bandwagon in the late 70s,

👉 The Isley Brothers took inspiration, but stayed in their lane.

They adapted, but never abandoned their identity. And that decision made all the difference. Because when the disco backlash hit, they were not swept away with it.

They didn’t need to defend themselves in interviews. They didn’t even need to mention it.

They didn’t need to reposition.

They simply carried on.

➡️ The Bridge to the Eighties

The clearest proof comes right after.

The title track from their 1980 album Go All The Way follows the exact same blueprint, arguably even leaning more into disco. But now something else is happening. You can already hear the early 80s.

👉 This is the moment where American R&B-based disco starts evolving into synth-funk.

And The Isley Brothers are right there, at the transition point.

Their influence would soon echo in bands like:

• Kool & The Gang

• Slave

• Atlantic Starr

• The Commodores…

💡 The Real Answer

So no, they didn’t “go disco”.

They did something far more interesting.

👉 They absorbed disco into their sound, without losing who they were.

And that is exactly why this record still works today.

📉 A Modest Hit, But Not the Full Story

The Winner Takes All album was not their biggest commercial success. The album peaked at #14 on the Billboard Album Top 200, just outside the top 10. That’s a step down compared to:

• Showdown (1978), which reached #4

• Go All The Way (1980), which climbed to #8

The singles performed better. The lead single, “I Wanna Be With You”, became one of the four R&B number ones the Isleys scored during the seventies.

That alone confirms they were still very much in control of their audience.

🪩 A Disco Title at the Wrong Moment?

It’s A Disco Night told a different story in the US.

• #90 on the Hot 100

• #27 on the R&B chart

Two main reasons explain this:

1️⃣ Timing

The song was released in the immediate aftermath of the disco backlash. Radio had turned cautious, even resistant, to anything labelled “disco”.

2️⃣ Perception

As we’ve seen, it’s not really a disco track. But the title alone, “It’s A Disco Night”, likely worked against it 😁

💃 When the Dancefloor Doesn’t Follow

What’s more surprising is the performance on the dance charts.

The track only reached #44.

👉 The dancefloor didn’t amplify the record.

No extra momentum. No second life through club play. And that’s unusual for a track with this kind of groove.

Across the Atlantic, things looked very different. In the UK, the track reached #14 on the pop chart.

🔄 Beyond 1979, A New Chapter Begins

The success story of The Isley Brothers didn’t end in 1979, far from it. The immediate follow-up, Go All The Way (1980), already showed they were still evolving and staying relevant. The albums that followed were a bit less successful commercially, but that changed again in 1983 with Between The Sheets, actually the only Isley Brothers album I owned on vinyl back then.

🌙 Quiet Storm, A Different Kind of Power

The title track, “Between The Sheets”, is now one of their most recognisable songs. It’s also a perfect example of the Quiet Storm style, a smoother, more sensual side of R&B that I’ll explore in full on this week’s B-Side.

Between The Sheets sold two million copies, marking a major late-career success. It would also be the last album recorded by the six-man line-up. After that, the younger generation, Ernie and Marvin Isley along with Chris Jasper, went their own way and formed Isley, Jasper, Isley.

They would go on to score a major international hit with “Caravan Of Love”.

🌉 Crossing Over, Without Crossing Out

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Tina Turner and how difficult it was to move from R&B radio to rock radio. Or, put more bluntly, from Black radio to White radio.

In many ways, The Isley Brothers operated in that same space. But their path was different. 👉 They didn’t try to become a rock act. 👉 They stayed firmly rooted in R&B.

But just the kind of R&B that could cross over.

📊 Built for Both Worlds

As mentioned earlier, they scored their first pop hits years before breaking through on the R&B charts. That alone is extraordinary.

Their albums tell the same story:

• 4 gold albums

• 6 platinum albums

• Sustained success from the late 60s through 1983

They never quite reached number 1 on the Hot 100, but they did hit the top with the 1975 album The Heat Is On. And its lead single, “Fight The Power”, became their biggest dance chart hit, reaching #13.

🎮 Control Through Independence

One of the key drivers behind that success was control. After a turbulent early career, moving between labels and even spending time at Motown,

👉 they decided to take matters into their own hands.

They launched their own label, T-Neck Records.

That decision gave them the freedom to:

• Develop their sound

• Build their audience

• Define their direction

Without compromise.

🎸 Expanding the Palette

That independence also allowed them to stretch beyond the expected boundaries. They could record material, others might have avoided. Like covering Stephen Stills’ “Love The One You’re With”, almost immediately after the original. It became their fifth US Top 40 hit, transformed into a rich, gospel-infused version that feels entirely their own.

🪩 The Lesson, Adapt Without Losing Yourself

The Isley Brothers are a perfect counterexample to the idea that disco ended careers.

Unlike what we saw with Chic,

👉 they never became a disco group.

They simply absorbed disco’s rhythmic vocabulary into their existing mix of funk and rock. They adapted, but never abandoned their identity.

And that’s why it sounds natural.

💡 The Bigger Picture

It’s A Disco Night is more than just a great track.

👉 It’s proof that evolution in dance music rarely happens through clean breaks.

More often, it happens through subtle shifts. Through overlap. Through what we might call… happy accidents.

Exactly the kind of story The Twelve Inch loves to tell.

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

On this week’s B-Side, I take the story a step further and dig into some fascinating questions:

• Why did we call it “soul” in the 70s, and why do we now call it R&B?

• What exactly is Quiet Storm music, and where does the term come from?

• Why are The Isley Brothers among its defining artists?

🧩 The Details Behind The Music

I’ll also explore:

• The origins of their label T-Neck Records, and the story behind the name

• + That question I’ve always had, when looking at their releases,

  👉 what’s with “Part 1 & Part 2” on almost every track? 😁

🎧 Weekend Listening, Handpicked Gems

And of course, there’s a curated playlist waiting for you.

👉 My 10 favorite Isley Brothers tracks, carefully selected

Not just the hits. Some deeper cuts as well. There are real gems in there.

🔒 Now Paywalled, But…

From this week on, the B-Side becomes paywalled.

But here’s the good news:

👉 The 20% discount is still available

You can get a full year of The Twelve Inch for 40 euro/USD, including all B-Sides and upcoming extra articles.

If you’ve been enjoying the B-Side so far, now is the moment to jump in.

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

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

Share

💬 Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

I’d love to hear your take:

• Do you hear this as disco or funk first?

• Does the title “It’s A Disco Night” help or hurt the track?

• Are there other artists who navigated the disco backlash this smoothly?

• And… what is your favorite Isley Brothers track?

Let’s talk 👇

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 :

Remember the Pete Shelley episode, and how Martin Rushent became one of the key architects of early 80s synth-pop?

So what happened next?

👉 The next chapter is the story of a song, and an album, that took that initial spark and turned it into one of the defining synth-pop hits of the era.

That’s the story I’ll tell you next week.

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

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

or the video version :

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

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

🥁 Section 1 — The Beats

Why DJs Hid Behind Aliases, The Secret Economy of One-Off Records 🎭

Not a Band, But a Moment 🎧

The name O.T. Quartet suggests a band. But like so many early nineties dance projects, it was really a studio creation. “O.T.” stood for Our Tribe, a clear nod to the communal spirit of rave culture. And as I explained on the A-side, the “Quartet” referred to the four people behind the record.

In reality, the project existed for just one track.

But what a track it was.

And more importantly, it wasn’t unusual. Using a name for a single release was standard practice in early nineties dance music.

Why One Name Was Never Enough 🔁

Most producers didn’t build a single identity. They built many.

Aliases allowed them to:

• release more music into a fast-moving DJ market

• test different sounds without risk

• stay anonymous and credible

• avoid contractual or label restrictions

In that ecosystem, having multiple identities wasn’t confusing. It was strategic.

The Underground Ethos 🕶️

There was also a deeper philosophy at play. Early techno, house and rave culture had a strong anti-star, anti-ego mindset. It wasn’t about the person. It was about the music and the dancefloor. White labels perfectly embodied that idea.

Minimal sleeves.

Sometimes handwritten information.

Often no clear artist identity at all.

The mystery was part of the appeal.

Who made it mattered less than how it worked on the floor.

Aliases as Creative Tools 🎛️

Aliases also acted as musical shorthand. Producers would use different names for different styles or moods, so DJs immediately knew what to expect. One name might signal something deep and hypnotic. Another something harder or more rave-driven. It also allowed for experimentation. A new alias meant freedom.

If a track failed, it didn’t damage your reputation.

If it worked, you simply kept going.

For a limited time, you can get 20% off—that’s a full year of The Twelve Inch for just €40 / $40.

A Scene Bigger Than It Was 🌍

There was also a practical side. Small labels wanted to look diverse and international. One producer using multiple aliases could fill a release sheet with what looked like a global roster.

At the same time, aliases allowed artists to:

• release more records than one name could sustain

• navigate label politics

• work around exclusivity deals

And in a vinyl-driven world, mystery created value. An unknown white-label could become a DJ’s secret weapon. That mattered far more than building a long-term artist narrative.

The Twelve Inch Economy 💿

Back then, the key unit wasn’t the album. It was the twelve inch single. Success wasn’t measured in fame.

It was measured in:

• club impact

• DJ support

• dancefloor reaction

The scene itself was the brand, not the individual. Labels, clubs, record shops, crews. And a rotating cast of aliases kept that ecosystem alive.

Rollo Explains It Best 🎤

Or as Rollo Armstrong put it:

“When I started, and I was making dance records, they were one off individual dance records. You made them, they got pressed onto vinyl, you made up a name for the artist after you’d made the record, you didn’t have photos of yourself or anything. You just sent out the music to DJs - or someone would - and if the DJs played it in the clubs, and it became a hit, that was that. They were one off records.”.”

Before the DJ Became the Brand 🔊

Only later did things change. With the rise of superstar DJs and, much later, social media, the pressure grew to become a recognizable, marketable identity.

But in the early nineties?

It was the opposite. The less you were seen, the more credible you often were.

When Rave Grew Up, the explosion of UK dance styles 🏗️🎹

By the mid-nineties, something fundamental was shifting on UK dancefloors.

The wild, chaotic energy of illegal raves was fading. Fields and warehouses were giving way to legal clubs, superclubs and branded events. The music had to evolve with it. Where early rave had been fast, explosive and immediate, this new environment demanded something different.

More control. More space. More story.

From Chaos to Architecture 🎛️

Between 1992 and 1994, the UK scene fragmented. Breakbeat hardcore splintered into jungle, darkcore and happy hardcore. Each went its own way, often faster, darker or more niche.

But another path emerged.

A strand of house music that slowed things down slightly and focused on tension and release rather than instant impact. DJs like Sasha and John Digweed began to rethink what a set could be. Not just a collection of tracks. But a journey.

For that, they needed different tools:

• longer intros

• evolving arrangements

• controlled emotional build

Exactly the framework “Hold That Sucker Down” was build upon.

The Perfect Sound for a New Moment 🎹

The track doesn’t belong neatly to one genre. Instead, it synthesises multiple strands of what dance music had been, and what it was becoming.

You can hear:

• the emotional piano chords of late UK and Italian house

• the long, layered builds of early progressive house

• the scale and drama inherited from rave

Structurally, it reflects a new dancefloor logic. Big breakdown. One massive release. Not the relentless rush of hardcore. Not the loop-driven minimalism of US house. Something in between.

Perfect for large rooms, for superclubs, for a crowd that wanted to feel the moment coming long before it arrived.

Right Time, Right Floor 🔊

When the record landed in 1994, it didn’t just fit the scene. It defined a moment within it. It became a staple in: London gay superclubs like Heaven, progressive house rooms and more commercial house dancefloors

It wasn’t a hardcore record.

It wasn’t underground in the strict sense either.

It lived in that new middle ground, where rave energy was being re-engineered into something more polished and more controlled. And when it dropped, it delivered exactly what that new crowd wanted.

A communal release. A shared peak. A moment.

A Bridge Between Two Worlds 🌉

So to understand the record, you have to place it between two movements.

Rave was ending.

Progressive house wasn’t fully formed yet.

The track stands right in that transition.

In the UK, by 1994, large legal events like Fantazia, Raindance and Tribal Gathering had already proven that colossal, professionalised raves were viable, so there was space for polished, emotionally bombastic records that could work in both club and festival/big‑top settings, exactly the niche this track filled.

Mainland Europe had parallel euphoric anthems, but often tilted either harder (Belgian/NL techno, early gabber) or more overtly Eurodance; “Hold That Sucker Down” represents a particularly British blend of emotional excess with prog‑house restraint.

In the US, house and techno communities were dense but comparatively subcultural; the kind of pan‑national “this is the 2am moment” anthem status that the record developed in UK/European memory would have been less common in US terms at that time, where large‑scale commercial EDM festival culture only really explodes much later

So the O.T. Quartet single is best understood as a quintessential mid‑90s UK progressive‑house anthem: rooted in post‑acid, post‑rave emotionalism, channelling that energy into a technically slick, big‑room format that influenced how later UK/European producers (including Rollo’s own Faithless work) thought about structure, breakdowns and crowd climax.

Rollo and his sister Dido. They released an album together in 2020 as R.Plus

🎤 Section 2 — The Acapella

What Studio Gear Built “Hold That Sucker Down”? Inside the Machines Behind the Anthem 🎛️🔥

One of my big questions about the early Rollo productions was: how did he do it? How did he create that “organ-like” synth sound that became so characteristic of his work, and was later copied by many other producers? So I’m going on a bit of a tangent here. It’s about to get a bit technical. 😁

Let’s dive into a mid-nineties UK setup built around samplers, drum machines and hands-on synthesis, shaped by the legacy of rave, breakbeat and early progressive house.

Rollo Armstrong and Rob Dougan were working with the tools of that moment. At the heart of the production was almost certainly an Akai sampler, like the S1000 or MPC series, used to chop and trigger vocal snippets, including the iconic “hold that sucker down” line. Drum programming would have been handled through machines such as the Akai MPC60 or E-mu SP-1200, giving that tight, punchy rhythmic foundation, possibly reinforced with classic hits from a Roland TR-909 or 808.

For the musical elements, the sound palette points toward the usual suspects of the era. Think Korg M1, with its instantly recognisable house organs and lush presets, or Roland modules like the JV-1080 or D-50, capable of delivering those rich pads and stabbing synth textures. Everything would have been processed through outboard effects, likely Lexicon or Alesis units, adding the spatial depth that gives the track its almost cinematic feel. All of it brought together on a large-format mixing desk, typically SSL or Soundcraft, where the final balance and energy of the track were shaped.

But the real magic lies in that signature sound.

Those huge, rising “organ” stabs that define the track.

What you’re hearing is essentially a hoover-style synth, a detuned, harmonically rich sound sitting somewhere between an organ and a sawtooth lead. The starting point was likely a preset from the Korg M1 or a Roland synth, something close to a drawbar organ or synth slab. From there, it was transformed.

The key was filtering.

A low-pass filter sweep with resonance would gradually open up the sound, giving that sense of tension building over time. This could have been done with dedicated hardware filters, like a Korg or Peavey unit, or through early sequencing environments such as Cubase. The sound would then be sampled, pitched slightly down for warmth, and further processed with modulation effects, chorus or phasing, using pedals or rack units to add movement.

To give it real presence, the producers likely layered in distortion or overdrive, adding bite and edge, before automating the filter to open during the breakdowns and builds.

The result is that unmistakable surge.

A sound that doesn’t just play.

It arrives.

This technique, rooted in rave and breakbeat culture, is what gives the track its emotional power. The tension, the anticipation, the release, all driven by a handful of machines, carefully pushed to their limits. And that’s perhaps the most fascinating part.

Behind one of the most iconic club records of the era, there wasn’t a complex digital system.

Just samplers, synths, filters, and a deep understanding of how to make a dancefloor wait.

The 12-Inch Mixes: Why DJs Loved This Record 🎉

The original 12-inch of Hold That Sucker Down came with several mixes, each tailored for different dancefloor situations. This was typical of early-90s UK house releases, where producers understood that DJs needed different tools depending on the moment in the night.

The most famous version is:

The “Builds Like a Skyscraper Mix”

This is the definitive club version and the one that made the record famous.

The title describes the production concept perfectly. The track is built almost architecturally: layers of piano, pads and vocal fragments gradually rise over a steady house groove until the full anthem finally arrives.

For DJs, this structure was gold.

It meant the record could be used to build tension in a set rather than simply provide another groove. In the early progressive house era, this kind of dramatic structure became a hallmark of the style.

Many DJs used it as a peak-time builder, often mixing it out right after the main piano drop.

The “Brutal Mix”

Where the Skyscraper mix emphasises drama and melody, the Brutal mix strips the track back to its rhythmic core.

Less orchestration. More drums. A tougher groove.

This version worked better in harder house or early trance-leaning sets, especially in European clubs where DJs often preferred more driving rhythms.

The “Happy Daze Vocal Mix”

This is my favorite. It’s probably the one that comes closest to the classic twelve inch of the single. Same build-up and with the full vocal line as on the single. It was probably the one used on the commercial dancefloors instead of the skyscraper mix.It’s the one I used in this week’s mixes!

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

🎧 Section 3 — The Dub - This Week’s Listening Crate

1️⃣ Companion Mix

This week’s mix is an action-packed affair: 19 tracks packed into a one-hour set. Seven of them are Rollo productions or (re)mixes, so the Rollo sound runs right through the mix. In fact, it’s his productions that do most of the heavy lifting at both the opening and the finale.

I kick things off with the central track of the week, followed by the Pet Shop Boys remix he did for the theme of the wonderful TV series Absolutely Fabulous. The opening stretch is completed by Sphinx’s “What Hope Have I,” Gloworn’s “Carry Me Home,” and the wonderfully playful “Oh What A World” by Sister Bliss, who would soon become Rollo’s songwriting and production partner in Faithless.

The mid-section dives deeper into the high-energy dancefloor sounds of the era. Highlights include Escrima, The Klubbheads, and Lionrock’s “Packet of Peace.” I’ve also included three productions or remixes by another key producer-DJ of the time: Paul Oakenfold — New Order, Grace, and that superb dub remix of The Rolling Stones’ “You Got Me Rocking.” The Stones aren’t the only legacy act showing up here either: David Bowie’s “Hello Spaceboy” (Pet Shop Boys remix) also makes an appearance.

The finale returns to Rollo, with a run of classic productions: Kristine W’s “Feel What You Want,” Livin’ Joy’s “Dreamer,” and, of course, Faithless’ “Insomnia.”

Enjoy. 🎶

Listen to it on Mixcloud

or Youtube :

2️⃣ Discovery Crate

🎧 This Week’s B-Side Playlist: Exploring Tina Turner’s dancefloor moments across the decades

Every week on the B-Side I’ll prepare a special playlist hosted on my YouTube page. It is only accessible through the link here, which means it is exclusively for you, the B-Side reader.

This week I wanted to bring together my favourite Rollo productions and remixes. And boy, was that difficult 😁 As a fan, I could easily pick more than ten outstanding tracks.

In the section where I discussed the evolution of the UK dancefloor, and the influences that shaped Hold That Sucker Down, I highlighted three key elements: the emotional piano chords of late UK and Italian house, the long, layered builds of early progressive house, and the scale and drama inherited from rave.

You’ll hear all three in this playlist.

The first half leans into those piano house influences. There’s the Rollo and Sister Bliss remix of Fairground by Simply Red, the gospel house energy of Gloworm’s Carry Me Home, and tracks by Huff & Herb and Pauline Taylor. And of course, the ultimate example: Love Love Love, released under Rollo’s alias Rollo Goes Mystic.

The second half moves into that early progressive house territory, where the focus shifts to structure and build. You’ll find his first big breakthrough with Felix’s Don’t You Want Me, as well as the incredible Rollo Big Mix of Dreamer by Livin’ Joy. And it all leads to what is, for me, the defining moment: Salva Mea by Faithless.

Some records stop you in your tracks the first time you hear them. You drop everything, run to the radio, turn the volume all the way up, and grab something to write down the title and artist. Because you need that record. Your life depends on it. Salva Mea was exactly that for me. It sounded otherworldly. Like the beginning of a new chapter in dance music.

Right in the middle of the playlist, I’ve included one track that has nothing to do with Rollo, but everything to do with his O.T. Quartet partner, Rob Dougan. The one track everyone knows: Clubbed To Death. The original is already impressive, but it’s the Hybrid mix that turns it into a true anthem. I’ve always loved breakbeats, especially when they blend seamlessly with orchestral arrangements, something Hybrid mastered like no one else. Powerful stuff.

One track I haven’t mentioned yet is number nine: the intriguingly titled Always Respect And Honour Your Mother by Dusted. The mix is fantastic. Like the “Builds Like a Skyscraper” mix of Hold That Sucker Down, it rises steadily to a full-blown crescendo. But the real reason I highlight it goes beyond the track itself.

Look up the full Dusted album, When We Were Young. Rollo produced the entire record, and it’s timeless. Much more laid-back, leaning into lounge and downtempo textures, with echoes of some of the more reflective moments in Faithless.

Great stuff.

I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed curating it.

Listen to it HERE

• Fairground (Rollo & Sister Bliss Remix) (Simply Red)

• Carry Me Home (Rollo’s Rushin’ Mix) (Gloworm)

• Feeling Good (Epic Mix) (Huff & Herb)

• Constantly Waiting (Rollo & Sister Bliss Epic Mix) (Pauline Taylor)

• Love Love Love, Here I Come (Big Mix) (Rollo Goes Mystic)

• Clubbed To Death (Hybrid Mix) (Rob Dougan)

• Don’t You Want Me (Extended Version) (Felix)

• Dreamer (Rollo’s Big Mix) (Living’ Joy)

• Always Respect And Honour Your Mother (Rollo’s Mix) (Dusted)

• Salva Mea (Epic Mix) (Faithless)

Next Friday a new record spins on The Twelve Inch A-Side :

“It’s A Disco Night” may sound like one of the cheesiest disco titles ever, but in reality it’s one of the finest disco-funk records of 1979,

driven by a killer bassline and created by a band of three brothers whose career had begun many years earlier.

The full story comes in next week’s episode.

Subscribers get the full crate every weekend.

By the early nineties I had stopped buying twelve inches.

The vinyl to CD transition of the late eighties had been a slightly traumatic affair for me. I wasn’t DJ-ing frequently anymore, so I didn’t feel the need to keep up with every new release. Instead, I could simply focus on the music I loved.

Marketing was doing its job extremely well. We were told that vinyl meant problems, and CD meant perfect sound forever. No more wow and flutter, no more dreaded ticks in the groove.

There was only one small issue for people like me.

They made CD versions of almost every vinyl format… except the twelve inch.

Yes, I see you raising an eyebrow and saying:

“But Pé, what about the CD single?”

Indeed, they existed. In fact there were two versions at first, the CD single and the CD maxi.

But there was one big problem.

There was no CD player that could replace the DJ workhorse turntable, the Technics SL-1200. Or rather, there were attempts, but they were unusable for DJs.

Why?

Two simple reasons.

1. They were extremely expensive

2. The pitch control was poor, and you had none of the creative possibilities of vinyl, scratching, manual beat matching, or manipulating the groove.

The technology simply wasn’t ready yet.

The infamous and very Expensive Technics SL P 1200

It would take until 2001, when Pioneer finally released a CD player that could properly rival the Technics turntable. Technics tried to enter the market later, but by then Pioneer had already won the field.

So by the early nineties I found myself in something like dance music purgatory.

I still loved club music, but I didn’t want to invest in vinyl anymore. So I began buying CD maxis instead.

And when you stop DJ-ing actively, dance music starts playing a different role in your life.

It becomes less about the dancefloor and more about listening, atmosphere, and discovery. It might also have something to do with age. But you certainly wouldn’t have heard me say that at the time. 😁

Around that moment I became fascinated by a British producer named Rollo Armstrong.

The name might not immediately ring a bell.

But if I say Faithless, you immediately know what I mean.

Rollo, together with Sister Bliss, created the unmistakable Faithless sound and produced their biggest hits. He also worked extensively with his sister Dido, producing several of her records.

But before all that, there was an earlier track.

One that, to this day, still gives me goosebumps.

The track was Hold That Sucker Down by O.T. Quartet.

An absolute energy bomb.

The record sits in a fascinating stylistic moment. You could call it Hi-NRG, but it isn’t quite that. You could call it progressive house, but it isn’t fully that either. It arrived at the moment when the UK club scene was moving beyond rave music, experimenting with longer builds and deeper emotional tension.

Later, when Faithless became huge, people began calling this kind of sound “stadium house.”

But that label doesn’t quite fit the O.T. Quartet either.

And that mystery only deepens when you try to research the man behind it. Because Rollo Armstrong is probably the most elusive producer in dance music history.

Almost no interviews.

Hardly any photos.

Very little documentation.

Try writing about someone like that.

I dare you.

Yet the questions remained. Where did this peculiar sound come from? What exactly did the song mean? And what on earth did they mean by “sucker” in this song? I even wondered if it had a slightly naughty meaning. A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste. 😁

But don’t worry.

This week’s story remains firmly within family-friendly territory.

So it’s time for our weekly journey.

Time travel destination, early nineties England.

Ready?

Let’s go.

👋 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 Rollo Armstrong? 🎹

Rollo Armstrong was born in 1966 to an Irish publisher and a French-English poet. Music played a huge role in his upbringing. Partly because something else didn’t.

Television.

It was banned in the Armstrong household.

As Rollo once explained:

“I’ve been a lover of music from time immemorial: TV had been banned from my house when I was growing up, so it was the radio and music that I spent my time listening to and enjoying. And then in my school days, I became a DJ. I had a big record collection, all my money went on music, so I used to DJ for my friends, and then started charging for it. So I had this love and interest and knowledge of music from an early age. But without the technology, I would never have been able to go from listening to actually creating.”

He later studied at the University of York, where he became active at the student radio station URY.

Another intriguing detail about Rollo : He has synaesthesia.

He literally sees music as colours.

A Studio Night That Changed Everything 🎚️

Rollo’s first steps into the music business happened almost by accident. While travelling in Australia he met a future collaborator: Rob Dougan.

Rollo later explained:

“I had met a guy called Rob Dougan. We met in Australia at a party and started making music in his bedroom - and we got a deal. That’s a story in itself, how we got the deal. But, anyway, we got a deal and were invited by a producer into a real studio to turn our demos ‘into gold”

The studio session quickly turned surreal.

“Well, we’re in the studio and the mixing desk is just huge. And on this huge, incredibly modern looking desk, there were some cut-up straws. I was laughing with the producer. I said, “what are those cut-up straws for? Why would you need straws in this place that looks like a spaceship?” And the producer got out a large wrap of cocaine and told us all to take a line. That’s what the straws were for. And we stayed up all night, making music and I just thought we were geniuses: the world would not be able to get enough of the stuff we were doing , you know, chariots were coming out of the speakers,God on our shoulders as the music was playing. So it was a fantastic night.”

But the morning after was less glorious.

”But the next day when I woke up and I listened to what we’d done, it was just terrible. Two things happened from that. One, we got rid of the producer. And secondly, I’ve never taken cocaine again”

A Lucky Break 🎧

Rollo kept the advance money and returned to the UK. With it he bought a sampler, a machine that would become central to his sound.

Soon afterwards a friend offered him £300 to produce a single for a singer called Felix. The result was Don’t You Want Me.

The record became a European No.1 hit and launched Armstrong’s career.

Rollo later summed it up with disarming honesty:

“It was just luck, pure luck,”

Following the success he founded the Cheeky Records label in 1992.

Hold That Sucker Down would become the fourth release on that label.

Enter the O.T. Quartet 🎤

The O.T. in O.T. Quartet stands for Our Tribe, one of several project names used by Rollo and Rob Dougan during the early nineties.

Why “Quartet”?

Most likely because four people worked on the record.

• Rollo Armstrong

• Rob Dougan

• London singer Colette Van Sertima

• Lyricist Percival Trollope

Van Sertima’s powerful voice became one of the defining elements of the track. Despite that, she remained largely anonymous. She later appeared on Sister Bliss club hits like:

• Can’t Get a Man, Can’t Get A Job (Life’s A Bitch)

• Oh What A World

And there is even a surprising connection to last week’s story. She wrote a song recorded by Tina Turner called Open Arms.

So What Does “Hold That Sucker Down” Mean? 💬

The phrase comes from Black American colloquial speech. It simply means keeping your partner committed and grounded.

In the song Van Sertima sings:

“You can lift your man up, give him more than he want, it don’t mean a thing if you can’t hold him down.”

And later:

“You got to hold that sucker down.”

Here “sucker” simply means “guy” or “man”, said with a slightly teasing tone.

So despite my earlier suspicions, the title is not some hidden rave code. It’s simply relationship advice wrapped in a house anthem.

Why The Record Worked So Well 🏗️

The main mix carries a perfect title.

“The Builds Like a Skyscraper Mix.”

And it really does.

The track:

• starts minimal

• slowly adds layers

• builds tension through long breakdowns

• finally releases into huge piano and synth stabs

The vocal style also plays a key role.

Van Sertima sings with a preacher-like intensity, clearly influenced by the great house vocalists such as Loleatta Holloway. But unlike many gospel-trained singers she keeps the delivery clean, direct and rhythmic. That precision works perfectly with the long architectural build of the track.

Another ingredient is the cinematic sound design, largely influenced by Rob Dougan’s love of film scores and classical composition.

Rollo later explained the philosophy behind his productions:

“I love music that’s euphoric but a little yearning. You get that through using soft sounds in a big way. I just find that gets closer to some kind of emotional truth. The second thing is that it was all about tension and release. The breakdown is the payoff for getting really lost in the beats”

A Crossroads in Dance Music 🚦

Looking back, the record sits at a fascinating moment. It still carries the DNA of rave culture, but it also points toward the epic emotional club anthems that would dominate European dancefloors later in the decade. And like many great twelve inches, it proves something important.

Sometimes the most powerful moment on the dancefloor isn’t when the beat drops.

It’s the long climb before it does.

Soon afterwards both producers moved on. Rollo formed Faithless, one of the biggest dance acts of the decade. Rob Dougan released the cinematic masterpiece Clubbed to Death, later featured in The Matrix.

The cover of Rob Dougan’s later solo album.

Dougan would later say about his early dance productions:

“I’m associated with dance music, with electronica, which makes me feel ill. I only learnt all the boring computer crap as a means to an end”

The Record That Kept Growing 🔁

As the record became a club classic, new versions kept appearing. Remixes and reissues followed through the late nineties and early 2000s, adapting the track to evolving dancefloor styles:

• harder progressive

• trance-influenced house

• large festival club sounds

But for many DJs the original mix remained the definitive version, precisely because of its slow architectural build. And that brings us back to the central thread that runs through this entire series.

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

Tomorrow On The B-Side 🎚️

Tomorrow we go deeper.

On the B-side I’ll explore:

• the explosion of UK dance styles after rave

• why so many DJs released one-off projects under temporary names

• the original twelve-inch and CD-maxi editions

• the studio gear likely used to build the track

• and of course, a fresh weekend playlist

Don’t miss it.

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

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

Share

Let’s Talk 💬

Now I’m curious about your memories.

Do you remember the first time you heard Hold That Sucker Down?

Did it feel like progressive house to you, or something different?

And what other early-90s tracks gave you that same slow-building goosebumps moment?

Tell me in the comments.

Because after all,

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

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 A Disco Night” may sound like one of the cheesiest disco titles ever, but in reality it’s one of the finest disco-funk records of 1979,

driven by a killer bassline and created by a band of three brothers whose career had begun many years earlier.

The full story comes in next week’s episode.

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

This is the B-Side of this week’s episode, where we dig a little deeper into the story behind the record. You can read it all in one go, or explore the different sections at your own pace. The choice is yours.

If you missed the A-Side sto…

Read more

Read more

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

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 s…

Read more

I’ve never really been the star-struck type.

Even when I worked in the music industry, seeing artists live or getting backstage never felt like one of the great perks of the job. Sure, meeting someone you admire is nice. But there was always a small fear in the back of my mind that the magic might disappear. What if the artist turned out to be rude, arrogant, or simply disappointing?

Being a fan is partly about the mystery we build ourselves. Sometimes it is better not to pull back the curtain.

There were artists I would have loved to meet. Sometimes the chance never came, like with the Eagles. Other times I deliberately stayed away. In the case of Siouxsie Sioux, something she said on stage made me hesitate before going backstage.

But there is one exception, and I’m glad I took that chance.

In the early 2000s I met Nile Rodgers, after a Chic concert. At the time I was running Warner Music Belgium’s “strategic department”, I’ll explain the mysterious meaning of strategic on the B-side of this week’s post. I had a request from one of the national radio stations for a radio interview and happened to be the only person from our department at the show.

So I went backstage.

What followed surprised me. Nile Rodgers was incredibly friendly, relaxed, and generous with his time. We even shared a beer together. During that conversation he told me the story behind “Le Freak”, long before I later read it in books and interviews.

That meeting left me with a simple thought.

Maybe the truly great artists are simply… nice people.

The song he told me about would become one of the most important records in the history of dance music.

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

And “Le Freak” is one of those moments.

👋 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.

To celebrate this new Side A / Side B structure, I’m offering:

🎉 20% off all paid subscriptions during March

Subscribe now

🎸 Two Musicians, One Telepathic Groove

The story of Chic begins with Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards.

Ironically, their first meeting did not go well at all. When Rodgers enthusiastically explained his avant-garde jazz-rock fusion ideas, Edwards was unimpressed and basically told him to lose his number.

A few months later they met again on the “Chitlin’ Circuit”, a touring network of clubs and venues for Black musicians, I’ll explain the term more fully on the B-side.

This time something magical happened.

When they started playing together, it felt almost telepathic. Each instinctively knew where the other was going musically. From that moment on they became inseparable. If one was hired for a session, he tried to bring the other along.

Their big early break came in 1973, when Edwards became musical director of a group called New York City. Despite the name, the band had a strong Philadelphia soul sound and scored a hit with “I’m Doing Fine Now.”

Touring with the band gave Rodgers and Edwards time to experiment and refine their musical ideas.

One crucial discovery happened almost by accident. During a concert another band used Rodgers’ guitar amp before their set. The guitarist produced a rhythm sound Rodgers had never achieved himself.

Rodgers switched guitars and began imitating the style, gradually developing it into his own technique.

He later called it “chucking.”

It would become one of the most recognizable guitar sounds in dance music history. (more on this on the B-side)

🧬 The Secret Formula, DHM

While touring and playing sessions, Rodgers and Edwards also developed a concept that would guide everything they created.

They called it DHM, Deep Hidden Meaning.

The idea was simple but powerful. A song has a musical DNA. If you truly understand that DNA, you can express it in many different musical disguises without losing its essence.

That approach would later define the Chic sound.

At the same time, the band New York City was beginning to fall apart. During their final shows in London Rodgers lost his passport and had to stay behind while waiting for a replacement.

And that delay changed everything.

✨ Glamour, Roxy Music and the Birth of Chic

While stranded in London, Rodgers went to see Roxy Music perform in a club. The experience blew him away. He later said:

“Their Glamorous fans looked like a cross between fashion, music, art and sex industries. The combination of crowd, setting and music blew me away”.

Rodgers immediately bought their albums Stranded and For Your Pleasure. The glamorous women on the covers, Marilyn Cole and Amanda Lear, fascinated him.

Suddenly he had a vision. He called Bernard Edwards and said:

“I Got It!”

“Got What?” Bernard answered.

“The concept for our next band”.

The final ingredient came from another unexpected source, KISS. Like Roxy Music, they understood that visual identity could be as important as the music itself. Rodgers and Edwards decided their new band would combine several ideas:

• anonymous mystique like KISS

• sleek elegance inspired by Roxy Music

• strong visual art direction

• a groove built from jazz, soul and funk, but with European-style melodies.

Chic’s first album : anonymous mystique, sleek elegance and strong visual art direction

Their first band name idea, The Big Apple, had to be dropped after Walter Murphy scored a hit with A Fifth of Beethoven, credited to Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band.

Their second choice suddenly became perfect : Chic.

💃 The Rise of the Chic Organization

Chic’s first song was “Everybody Dance.” But the breakthrough came with “Dance, Dance, Dance.” The success of the record secured them a deal with Atlantic Records.

Rodgers and Edwards also perfected their visual concept. Instead of flashy outfits like most R&B artists at the time, they appeared in elegant designer suits, understated but sophisticated.

.

They placed glamorous women on album covers, echoing the Roxy Music aesthetic.

Behind the scenes they built something even bigger.

The Chic Organization Ltd.

It was not just a band. It was a musical production empire. And soon it would produce one of the biggest hits of the disco era.

🚪 “Fuck Off” and the Birth of Le Freak

Ironically, the inspiration for “Le Freak” came from rejection.

Rodgers had already visited Studio 54 before. His girlfriend, a graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology, knew how to get him past the velvet rope. But on New Year’s Eve 1977, Rodgers and Edwards tried entering the club without her. They had been invited by Grace Jones.

The doorman had a different idea.

His response was simple.

“Fuck Off.”

Rodgers and Edwards returned home frustrated and started jamming on their instruments. The phrase stuck in their heads. They turned it into a chant. Of course, a song called Fuck Off would never get radio airplay. So they changed the words.

“Freak Out.”

Rodgers later explained that the phrase did not even make complete sense at first. But it captured the spirit of losing yourself on the dancefloor. Bernard Edwards had another insight.

“They have that new dance called the Freak, that could be the DHM of the song. It would be our version of Come on Baby, Let’s Do The Twist”.

The result was “Le Freak.” A global explosion. The single went triple platinum in the United States, meaning over six million copies sold. At the time platinum meant two million units. It remains the biggest single Atlantic Records ever released.

And yes, it was my first encounter with Chic as well. In Belgium and the Netherlands the record reached number two. The number one that blocked it? YMCA by the Village People. Let’s just say… musical taste sometimes comes and goes.

🌍 Chic Conquers the World

The success of Le Freak opened the floodgates. Soon the hits kept coming:

• I Want Your Love

• Chic Cheer

• He’s The Greatest Dancer

• We Are Family

• Lost In Music

• My Forbidden Lover

• My Feet Keep Dancing

• Good Times

Many of the singles and albums went gold, platinum, or multi-platinum. Ironically, the club that inspired their biggest hit also became Rodgers’ favorite hangout.

Studio 54.

He became part of its inner circle, alongside celebrities like David Geffen and Truman Capote. But success can also create enemies.

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

💥 Disco Sucks and the Fall of Chic

By 1979, a powerful anti-disco movement had emerged. Rock bands like The Knack were celebrated as saviors of rock music, while disco artists were treated as the enemy. Chic became a prime target. Rodgers explained:

“We didn’t realise this war was industry-wide until a party one night in 1979, organised by Music Trade paper “Cashbox”. The party was in full swing and everybody was packed into the restaurant side of the establishment, no one was in the nightclub room. This was our first Cashbox party so Bernard and I thought that people wanted to stay in the restaurant side to talk business. But after an hour or so when the restaurant became really crowded and very hot, we couldn’t understand why no one was going to the nightclub. Let’s be first I said to Bernard but no one followed. After a little while we understood. The door to the nightclub had a neon sign above with 5 letters : DISCO”.

The band responded with the single “Rebels We Are.”

They had once promised never to use their music as direct protest. Yet anger over the backlash shaped the entire album. The smooth Chic sound changed. Commercial success faded. It seemed like the end.

🎛 The Producers Who Changed Pop

But the story did not end there. Rodgers and Edwards simply shifted roles. Instead of making hits as Chic, they began producing hits for everyone else.

Through the Chic Organization they helped create classics for numerous artists. We have already encountered some of them in earlier Twelve Inch stories:

• Robert Palmer – “I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On” (Bernard Edwards)

• Sheila B Devotion – “Spacer” (Bernard Edwards & Nile Rodgers)

• Duran Duran – “Notorious” (Nile Rodgers)

And there are many more. Rodgers and Edwards would become two of the most influential producers in music history.

🎧 The Sound That Built Modern Dance Music

The impact of Chic went far beyond their own records. Their sound changed dance music in several ways.

First, they shifted disco from orchestral drama to groove-based rhythm.. Three musical elements defined the Chic blueprint:

• Nile Rodgers’ precise percussive guitar

• Bernard Edwards’ melodic driving basslines

• a minimal but powerful rhythm section

This approach directly influenced:

• late-70s boogie

• early-80s post-disco

• electro-funk

• house music

Even the disco revival of the late 1990s followed this blueprint rather than the earlier orchestral disco style.

Chic also fused disco with the discipline of James Brown-style funk, creating a tighter and more rhythmic groove.

In many ways they became the bridge between disco and 1980s funk.

And then there is Bernard Edwards’ bassline on “Good Times.”

Few grooves in music history have been sampled more often. If Edwards had received a writing share on every track inspired by it, he and his heirs might indeed have become some of the richest people on the planet. We will dive deeper into that story in a future Twelve Inch episode.

🪩 When Failure Creates a Legacy

Chic did not survive the disco backlash of 1979.

Studio 54 eventually closed.

But their influence never disappeared.

“Le Freak” became the soundtrack of the Studio 54 era, and the club itself even appears in the lyrics. Quite ironic when you remember how the song started. Two musicians refused entry. One rude doorman. A spontaneous jam session. And suddenly dance music had a new anthem. By (initially) not getting what they wanted, they got much more than they imagined. And once again it proves the central thread running through this entire series.

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

💬 Over to You

Now I’m curious to hear from you.

• What is your favorite Chic track?

• Do you think “Le Freak” is the ultimate Chic anthem, or does another song beat it?

• Where did you first hear Chic, on the radio, in a club, or on vinyl?

• And which Nile Rodgers production still blows your mind today?

Jump into the comments and share your memories. I love to hear from you

The dancefloor is open. 🕺

Tomorrow I’ll publish the B-Side of this week’s episode for subscribers.

It includes the Beats (extra context), the Acapella (personal stories), and the Dub: a curated listening crate expanding the world around this record with a personal playlist.

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 (although this week is a bit of a special edition so there’s only a Mixcloud version). 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

So looking forward beyond the B-Side…What’s in store for next week?

Tina Turner is today seen as a rock artist, one of the few Afro American artists to successfully claim that label. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t have her dance music moments. Next week we’ll highlight one of her mid eighties gems.

I was going to start this Friday’s episode with a bit of housekeeping.

But, in true Twelve Inch fashion, it got too long. 😂

Which is ironic, because length is exactly what I want to talk about.

If you read last week’s Polnareff piece (especially the transatlantic collaboration with ), you’ll know what I mean. I was incredibly happy with how that one turned out. The Europe–America connection. The cross-perspective storytelling. The way the history of dance music felt truly interwoven.

Judging by your reactions, it resonated.

But it was… long.

And while I love going deep, you know that, I also want these stories to be a pleasure to read. Dance music is joy. It shouldn’t feel like homework.

🎚 Why I’m Changing the Structure

Over the past few months, I’ve experimented.

Splitting episodes in two. Publishing the same weekend. Spacing them a week apart. Trimming harder. Restructuring.

But the real answer was staring me in the face all along.

This newsletter is called The Twelve Inch for a reason.

Two years ago, at the start, I explained that the lifespan of the 12-inch single mirrors the 1975–1995 era I’m writing about. The format wasn’t just a container for music, it shaped the culture. It gave us the extended mix, the dub, the instrumental, the acapella.

So why not let the newsletter reflect that?

💿 From Now On: Side A & Side B

Starting next episode, The Twelve Inch will officially have two sides.

▶️

Side A — The Extended Mix

This is the main story.

Published every Friday.

Free, as always.

It’s the narrative arc. The history. The context. The deep dive.

Yes, my writing will remain prolific. Don’t worry. 😁 (it’s an “Extended” mix after all)

But by creating a natural “flip side,” I can keep it sharper and more readable.

🔁

Side B — Beats, Acapella & Dub

Published on Saturday.

This is where things get extra.

Side B will include:

• The Beats – spillover details, additional context, extra explanations

• The Acapella – behind-the-scenes research, personal connections, collector insights

• The Dub – Every week I build a full soundtrack to accompany the story. That DJ set is one of the real joys of this adventure. It deserves its own space.

  • tracks that didn’t make the mix

  • personal top 10s of tracks I want you to (re)discover

  • forgotten gems

  • crate-digging stories

  • notes on the weekly YouTube & Mixcloud soundtrack

Side B is where we go deeper. Where I take you into my archive. Into my collection. Into my search for the obscure.

Side B will become paywalled once I’ve found the right rhythm.

Share

🎼 What’s Not Changing

Longer industry deep dives, like the Casablanca Records story, aren’t disappearing. They are less frequent and only published when fully ready.

As you know, I approach this as both fan and historian. I enjoy the thrill of discovery, but I also believe in checking sources, double-checking facts, and building on solid ground.

One day, maybe, we’ll venture into “what if…” alternative dance-music history.

But not yet. 😉

🤝 Building This Together

More than anything, I want this to become:

• A trusted database of dance music history

• A living archive of the 12-inch era

• A community of people reconnecting with the sounds that shaped them

If you’ve been enjoying the ride, now is a great moment to consider becoming a paid subscriber.

To celebrate this new Side A / Side B structure, I’m offering:

🎉 20% off all paid subscriptions during March

Your support makes this sustainable. It allows me to keep researching, writing, mixing, and building this into something lasting.

Flip the record with me.

Click here to claim your discount

I’m very curious to hear what you think, about the new structure, about Side B, and about where I could best host curated playlists (I’m still searching for a platform that feels right).

As always:

Thank you for reading.

Thank you for listening.

And thank you for being part of this. 💛

One of my regular readers told me this weekend that he had trouble accessing the episode because it was flagged with an age-verification warning. To avoid future issues, I’ve removed the visual of Polnareff’s bare behind from this version. No worries, it’s still in the video 😁 and you still have the original version of the post.

Read more

Read more

Welcome to part two of the story of Pete Shelley, Martin Rushent and the birth of synth-pop as we know it.

In part one, I set the scene: who Pete Shelley was, who Martin Rushent was, and how the two began working together. What started as early demo sessions for a fourth Buzzcocks album gradually shifted into something else entirely, Pete’s first solo record. Along the way, they stumbled onto a new electronic sound that would define the early eighties. Part 1 👇

The twist? That sound would become hugely successful, just not for Pete Shelley, but for The Human League.

At the centre of this week’s episode is “Homosapien”, the track often blamed (or credited) for how things unfolded. But was that really the whole story?

That’s what we’ll unravel in part two.

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

This is The Twelve Inch, my newsletter 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.

Subscribe now

Homosapien, Birth of a Sound 🧬🎧

When Martin Rushent brought Pete Shelley to his new Genetic studio in February 1981, the two began cutting tracks using Fairlight, Roland Microcomposer and drum machines, with Shelley handling all guitars and vocals himself.

Pete Shelley:

“This was the challenge. Electronic music was thought of as a cold sound, like Bowie in his Berlin period – there was lots of electronic music done like that, like Kraftwerk’s ‘We Are The Robots’. But it didn’t have to be like that – you could make ‘music’ and sing songs, that was what excited me. It wasn’t made to be dance music. It was other people who heard it and thought we can play this in our clubs.”

What started out as “demos” very quickly evolved into fully realised recordings. Shelley later recalled that, after just a few months, three tracks already sounded ready for release.

Pete Shelley:

“‘Homosapien’ was originally supposed to be a demo for a Buzzcocks track, but when we’d done it, Martin sat there listening to it on repeat, as he often did, then suddenly he swung round in his chair and said, ‘That’s finished, that is. You could release this, as it is, if you wanted.’ So we went to Andrew Lauder, who’d been our A&R guy at United Artists and who was now at Island Records, to see whether we were mad or not. Because it was just two of us in a studio messing round with machines and stuff. It was really flying by the seat of your pants – and we didn’t know if we were just fooling ourselves. But Andrew Lauder heard it and said, ‘Wow – are you doing any more of these?”

Through this process of experimentation, Rushent and Shelley not only found the ideal sound for Pete’s first solo album, they also laid down the blueprint for the sound that would define much of Martin Rushent’s production work in the early eighties, exerting a huge influence on what we now know as synth-pop.

And yet, when asked which album best represents this new sound, most people would answer The Human League’s Dare, not Pete Shelley’s Homosapien. In other words, while Rushent’s synth-pop method may have been born on Homosapien, the public first encountered it ,fully formed, via Dare.

Several overlapping factors explain why Dare, rather than Homosapien, became the headline launch of Rushent’s synth phase. Much of it revolves around Pete Shelley’s first single, the title track “Homosapien,” and the alleged homosexual nature of its lyrics, which resulted in a ban by BBC Radio 1.

Pete Shelley was signed to Island Records via Rushent’s Genetic label, while The Human League were signed to Virgin. When Shelley’s first single hit a brick wall in the UK, Island chose to delay the album, hoping another single might fare better. But because the track did gain traction in a few territories, they couldn’t immediately abandon it. As a result, Pete Shelley’s album was quietly put on the back burner. The fact that the material originated as Buzzcocks demos, that now had to be repositioned as a solo album, only complicated matters further.

Virgin, by contrast, faced no such hesitation with The Human League. “The Sound Of The Crowd,” “Open Your Heart,” and “Love Action” became major hits, paving the way for the ultimate UK number one, “Don’t You Want Me.” The momentum behind Dare was enormous, and the sense that it represented a bold new sound only amplified its impact.

Crucially, The Human League offered Rushent a young, image-driven group that could confidently front a polished pop record on television and in music videos, something Shelley, coming from punk and with a far more explicitly queer lyrical stance, could not do as easily in the UK mainstream media of 1981.

So while Homosapien technically came first in the studio, Dare was the safer, more obviously bankable pop vehicle, and therefore the one a major label could rush to market, as the flagship of Rushent’s “new sound.”

What makes the story even more striking is that Martin Rushent and Pete Shelley had, in a sense, set the “Human League competition” in motion themselves. They initially offered the Shelley recordings to Virgin, who had no interest in signing Pete Shelley but loved the sound. At the time, Virgin were actively looking for a new producer for The Human League.

The Ban, The Shift, The Consequences 🚫📻

The song Homosapien was banned by the BBC, for its alleged “explicit reference to gay sex.” The objection centred on the lyric in which Pete Shelley sings “homo superior / in my interior.” Shelley later explained that the line was never meant as innuendo, telling The Advocate:

“In my naivete...I neverthought it would be taken for a description of sex. I try not to make my lyrics obscene.”

A close reading of the lyrics reveals, far more than in earlier Pete Shelley songs, clear homosexual undertones. Yet, these are directed less toward sexual provocation than toward questions of society, expectation, and acceptance. In that sense, Homosapien serves as a poignant reminder of where gay rights and visibility stood in the early eighties, before the onslaught of AIDS would once again reshape public perception.

Take a verse like:

“And the worlds built of age are a stage where we act out our lives
And the words in the script seem to fit ‘cept we have some surprise
I just want this to last or my future is past and all gone
And if this is the case then I’ll lose in life’s race from now on”

It captures, with remarkable grace, the inner conflict of loving someone of the same sex: on the one hand, the relationship feels right, natural, and affirming, while on the other, there is the painful awareness that society is not yet ready to accept it.

At the same time, the song holds on to a quiet but powerful hope, the belief that things might change, that acceptance will grow, and that one day it simply won’t matter anymore.

“And I just hope and pray that the day of our love is at hand
You and I, me and you, we will be one from two, understand?
And the world is so wrong that I hope that we’ll be strong enough
For we are on our own and the only thing known is our love
I don’t wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo
But it seems good to me to know that you’re homosapien too”

The song is at least as much, if not more, about human tenderness than about who you are shagging. At its core, it is a plea for acceptance. In the case of Frankie’s Relax, I can understand why the BBC chose to ban the song, not that it was the right decision, but the reasoning is at least clear. If there was any doubt about the lyrics of that song, the video spelled everything out very plainly.

With Homosapien, however, we can safely say that the decision was a far stranger one. Having lived through that period, I can understand the broader climate in which it happened, but I’m also convinced that many of those loudly defending the BBC’s stance, hadn’t actually read the lyrics, or didn’t fully understand what they were reacting to.

Lyrics, Longing & Acceptance 💬💞

So what, then, separates Homosapien from the earlier Buzzcocks songs, written by Pete Shelley? The most obvious point of comparison is the band’s biggest hit, “Ever Fallen In Love.”

That song distilled the universal ache of unrequited longing into a spiky, irresistibly melodic pop form. Although Pete Shelley wrote it about a relationship with another man, the song itself is deliberately gender-neutral. It captures the state of someone deeply confused, confused about sexuality, confused about love, confused about desire.

“I tried to be as gender neutral as possible in writing songs, because for me I could use the same song for either sex,” said Shelley

And yet, if you’re part of the LGBTQ+ community, “Ever Fallen In Love” can read as even more overtly gay than “Homosapien.” That is the quiet genius of Pete Shelley’s songwriting: his songs offer solace to everyone without ever losing their specificity or emotional truth.

Understanding how Shelley grew up musically within the Manchester punk scene, and how his own bisexuality was never treated as an issue there, helps explain why he felt free to write the way he did, and why he hoped punk’s liberating ethos might extend into wider society. From that perspective, it also becomes clear why Homosapien moves a step further, becoming slightly less neutral and more explicit than his earlier work.

Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien” didn’t single-handedly rewrite the rules around sex and homosexuality in pop, but it did emerge as a strikingly early synth-era template for openly queer-coded desire, within an otherwise hetero-dominated mainstream.

“Homosapien” functions as a kind of bridge: a former punk frontman, now fully immersed in synth-pop, singing a first-person love and sex song that is unmistakably boy-to-boy — “I’m the shy boy, you’re the coy boy” — while still retaining gender-neutral phrasing elsewhere. Its mix of club-ready electronics and unambiguous queer charge, ensured heavy rotation in gay discos and on MTV, even as it remained banned by the BBC.

Rather than inventing queer pop from scratch, the song crystallised a direction that new wave and post-punk were already moving toward: sex and desire voiced from a queer perspective but framed as a universal “you and me” romance. There is a defiant insistence that “the world is so wrong,” and that love between “you and me” must stand firm in the face of hostility — a stance later critics would read as an act of solidarity against homophobia. Central to this is the idea of “homosapien” itself: a shared category that simultaneously rejects and reclaims identity labels.

In terms of influence, “Homosapien” is best understood not as a direct blueprint for later hits, but as part of a broader lineage that made explicitly queer club records viable in the mainstream.

Here, is an openly gay artist singing a song with blunt, if technically deniable, gay overtones. That ambiguity wasn’t unusual on MTV, but Shelley pushes it further than most. “Homosapien” nudges right up against the boundary without quite crossing it. It teases the listener, dares them to consider that this might indeed be a gay love song, and leaves that possibility hanging in plain sight.

Crucially, this provocation resides in the song itself, not the video. The video was designed to soften the song’s bluntness, offering a kind of visual alibi. Ultimately, it’s a masking job, but a mask that was always meant to be seen through.

Legacy, Influence & Aftermath 🌍✨

Strangely enough, neither the single nor the album, charted in the UK at all. Considering that Pete Shelley came from one of the most successful punk bands of the era, and that Homosapien effectively laid the groundwork for the hugely successful Human League album Dare, this is nothing short of astonishing.

At the time, the record industry, as it so often did, used the UK as the primary yardstick. European Island Records subsidiaries and distributors typically waited to see domestic UK results before committing to support a release in their own territories. As a result, faltering on the home market had severe consequences for continental Europe. In practical terms, that means Homosapien failed to chart in any European country. There is, admittedly, that strange, long-tail success attached to another track, “Witness The Change,” but that is a story for another episode.

The only places where Homosapien did chart were English-speaking territories outside the UK. It became a Top 10 hit in Canada and Australia, and narrowly missed the Top 10 in New Zealand. Meanwhile, the song’s excellent dub version found its natural home on, presumably, gay dancefloors in the US, pushing the track to number 14 on the US dance charts. So there was definitely a potential.

And here’s the real kicker: with a story like this, you might expect plenty of bad blood and unresolved conflict, among the people involved. Yet I found nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Martin Rushent and Pete Shelley continued working together, reuniting for Shelley’s next solo album, XL1. Both were genuinely proud of what they had achieved with Homosapien. They understood that the BBC ban set the course the record ultimately followed, and that this outcome was largely beyond their control.

The clearest proof that Pete Shelley himself still believed deeply in the song came in 1989, when he re-released it as Homosapien II, remixed and retooled for the late-eighties, early house sound, yet every bit as potent as the original.

A Perfect Storm, Not a Failure 🌪️🎛️

So, could Pete Shelley ever have been as big as The Human League’s Dare? Maybe. Possibly. Had the BBC ban not happened, the odds would certainly have been better. But at the same time, we shouldn’t overstate the ban’s importance. Yes, it was frustrating, and it was the key reason why Island Records hesitated while Virgin seized the initiative, but it wasn’t the only factor at play.

Shelley was emerging from a punk background, and his move toward danceable electronic music required a complete reinvention. That, more than anything else, is likely why Homosapien failed to chart and why he didn’t benefit from the same kind of “protest momentum” that Frankie Goes To Hollywood would ride to massive success just a few years later.

In short, Pete Shelley’s Homosapien was caught in a perfect storm and never had the chance to realise its full commercial potential. His solo career, however, was far from a failure, something I’ll return to in future posts. And he felt the same way. In what was probably his final interview in June 2018, an audience member asked: “I really like your solo albums and at the time I was really annoyed that they weren’t bigger and that more people didn’t really seem to get them. Did it frustrate you too?” Pete replied, “Probably not as much as the record company.”

Nor were all bridges burned with his former Buzzcocks bandmates. They reunited toward the end of the eighties and went on to enjoy a successful second chapter.

Shelley’s influence is unmistakable in artists as iconic as Morrissey, whose songwriting clearly echoes the Buzzcocks’ blend of sardonic self-deprecation and the delicate untangling of sexuality and loneliness through language that is simple on the surface, yet brilliantly evasive underneath.

I’ll return to several topics we touched on in this episode — The Human League and Heaven 17, the curious yet enduring success of the non-single “Witness the Change,” and Pete’s later career.

But what about Pete Shelley today?

In the same June 2018 interview, someone in the audience asked whether he had a song he’d like played at his own funeral. He said he didn’t — and joked he wasn’t planning on dying anytime soon. Sadly, just six months later he passed away from a suspected heart attack while living in Tallinn with his second wife.

Thanks for reading The Twelve Inch! This post is public so help us grow the community by sharing it. Thanks for the support!

Share

💬 Over to you, dear reader…

• Did you know Homosapien before this story, and if so, how did you first encounter it, radio, club, record shop?

• Do you hear it more as a synth-pop record, a queer statement, or simply a love song?

• Do you think the BBC ban stopped the record in its tracks, or was the real issue Pete Shelley’s leap from punk to electronics?

• And finally: which Pete Shelley or Buzzcocks song means the most to you, and why?

I’d love to read your thoughts, drop them in the comments and let’s continue the conversation.

Further reading (or should I say watching)

There are a number of interesting video’s/links :

1. The promo video

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 :

So what’s in this week’s mix ?

This week’s set is a real early-eighties dancefloor gem, packed with synth-pop, alongside touches of post-punk and early new wave. I kick things off with three Martin Rushent productions: a mix of the single and dub versions of Homosapien, followed by the dub of The Human League’s “Seconds”, and Rushent’s excellent twelve-inch mix of Altered Images’ “I Could Be Happy.”

Along the way, you’ll find strong club cuts from Thomas Dolby, Visage, Soft Cell, and Heaven 17, paired with deeper selections by Paul Young, Shriekback, The B-52’s, and The Associates. There’s also a Belgian connection, with two tracks that once ruled the early dancefloors in my sets: “The Fashion Party” by The Neon Judgement and the uplifting “Allez Allez” by Allez Allez.

I close the set with two absolute blockbusters: Duran Duran’s “Hold Back The Rain” and Gary Numan’s “Cars.”

Enjoy! 🎶

Share

Next week, we’re going very obscure, at least for American and English-language readers. I’ll be telling the remarkable and little-known story of one of France’s biggest artists, who went on to sign with Atlantic Records in the US, recorded three albums in English, and saw one of them, a soundtrack, turn into an unexpected club hit in 1976.

The great thing about writing this newsletter is that you get the opportunity to, via the research, get much closer to the artists you like & write about than ever before. Usually, it ends up with a lot more respect for the person behind the artist and what they’ve achieved, often in times that were anything but easy.

Occasionally, the opposite happens, or I end up loving the artist a lot more than when I started the research.

This week is clearly one of the latter.

I knew Pete Shelley mainly from one of those early-eighties records I kept playing in my sets, even many years after its original release. “Witness The Change” is probably known by all of my peers, but strangely enough mostly in the Dub version (and I even doubt if many know that the original is a sung version 😂). That’s a story for another time.

Today, I go deeper into Pete Shelley’s first solo single: Homosapien. It’s the one that was blacklisted by BBC Radio 1 in the UK, a decision not unlike what would happen to Frankie Goes To Hollywood a few years later.

But where the ban helped Frankie break through and become one of the most popular UK acts of the eighties, it had the opposite effect on Pete Shelley.

Homosapien was destined to be a hit. A big hit. Instead, it went nowhere and made his solo career start with a whimper. The consequences were huge: the new sound Pete Shelley helped develop was instead used for The Human League’s Dare album, propelling them to world fame rather than Shelley.

Based on this introduction, you might expect a story full of fighting and bad blood. Strangely enough, that is not the case.

That, perhaps, is the most important reason why my love for Pete Shelley grew considerably, while researching and writing this piece. I’m sure he wasn’t fun all the time, but I do think he was fun most of the time. His quotes and interviews point to a genuinely warm, kind human being, on top of being a very talented artist and songwriter.

The second reason I came to admire him so much is his sexuality. Pete Shelley was bisexual. He was married twice, yet wrote beautiful songs about homosexual love.

And here’s the beauty: they weren’t in your face. That subtlety makes them even stronger today. The first example is the biggest hit of his band The Buzzcocks, “Ever Fallen In Love (with Someone You Shouldn’t Have)”, which many people know best through The Fine Young Cannibals’ version.

The reason I love this song so much is that you can apply the lyrics to your own life, whatever your sexual preference. We know Shelley wrote it during a male-male relationship, and even know who it was for. But he deliberately left the gender open, allowing everyone to project their own experience.

The second example is Homosapien. It’s a bit more explicit, but compared to Relax, it’s practically Wiener Sängerknaben repertoire. Which makes the Radio 1 ban even more incredible.

So why was Homosapien banned?

What did that ban do to Pete Shelley’s career prospects?

Why did The Human League, and not Shelley, benefit from the new sound developed in producer Martin Rushent’s studio?

And how important is Homosapien for queer emancipation?

Fasten your seatbelts. We’re off on a Time Machine ride to 1981, to the industrial heartland of the UK.

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

This is The Twelve Inch, my newsletter 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.

Subscribe now

Punk, Disco & Personal Paths ⚡🪩

I wasn’t into punk when I was young. Obviously, if you’re writing every week about disco or eighties dance music 😂. But I did love the energy.

Last week, I wrote about not really knowing what tipped me into becoming a disco fan instead of following what my peers listened to (which wasn’t punk either, more classical or prog rock). What’s true is that musical preference develops in stages, and even under the same circumstances, reliving the period wouldn’t guarantee the same outcome.

I thought about this when reading Shelley’s quotes on punk and its “entente cordiale” with the gay scene. Disco played a role in my own coming out. It could just as easily have been punk.

Buzzcocks, Manchester & Liberation 🎸🏭

Pete Shelley was the singer of one of the UK’s top punk bands: The Buzzcocks. Their story is intertwined with The Sex Pistols, and they were central to the development of the Manchester scene in the late seventies and early eighties.

Though punk is often seen as macho, Shelley never felt the need to hide his sexuality. Manchester punk was about new ideas and attitudes, and embraced everyone.

“It didn’t really matter what you were, what sexual persuasion you were from or what gender you were,” Pete Shelley said.

“It didn’t really matter, it didn’t raise eyebrows if someone was gay.”

Another revelation for me was that punk was fundamentally about liberty. Not about being stereotypically rock ’n’ roll.

“The important thing about punk was that it was an idea. You don’t need to go to a special school and learn how to do it. You just need the determination to know that was what you were going to do.”

And the aggression?

“Somebody telling the audience to fuck off was revolutionary in those days. It was also hilarious – the comedy part of punk always got lost in the translation

From Lancashire to Spiral Scratch 🏭📀

Pete Shelley was born Peter McNeish in Leigh, Lancashire, to Margaret and John McNeish. His mother was an ex-mill worker, his father a fitter. They didn’t have much, but they shared.

In 1976, Shelley met Howard Devoto, and together they formed The Buzzcocks. Both adopted stage names; Pete’s was inspired by his favourite poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

They helped to change music history by releasing one of the first DIY singles, Spiral Scratch (1977), effectively inventing indie. And by organising two Sex Pistols concerts in Manchester early on, they have inspired bands like Joy Division and Smiths

The Buzzcocks stood at the very heart of the emerging UK punk and indie scene, but where contemporaries like the Sex Pistols and the Clash directed their fury at a decaying dominant culture, Pete Shelley turned inward. His songs were less about confrontation and more about true human connection. He wrote about love, which may well have been the most radical, and therefore punk, thing he could do at the time.

With “Ever Fallen In Love”, a punk singer, for the first time, admitted vulnerability openly and without irony. It was a song about being hurt, plain and simple. And if you’ve ever nursed a broken heart, and you have, the Buzzcocks had already written a song for you.

After a short but brilliant run, the band hit a wall after their third album in 1979. The enthusiasm was gone.

Enter Martin Rushent 🎛️🧠

Our second key figure is producer Martin Rushent. He began as a tape operator alongside Tony Visconti, working with Fleetwood Mac, T. Rex, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Petula Clark, Jerry Lee Lewis and Osibisa. After rising through the ranks to head engineer, he began working freelance. It was during this period that he was engaged by United Artists. The Buzzcocks were also signed to United Artists, which is how Martin Rushent came to produce their albums.

By the end of the seventies, however, tired of the constant commute to London and of producing guitar bands almost exclusively, Rushent began setting up his own studio, “Genetic,” in Berkshire. At that point, he “started investigating new synthesizer and sequencer technologies,” bought a Roland Micro Composer (MC-8) after seeing it advertised, and “bought a Roland Jupiter synth to go with it and started experimenting.”

In parallel, he soon added a Linn LM-1 drum machine and other high-end digital instruments, including the Synclavier and Fairlight, as Genetic took shape around 1980. He was drawn to what electronics newly made possible. It was the logical next step once he had his own studio and no longer had to cater to label expectations.

The precision and control of programmable gear were exactly what he felt guitar sessions lacked.

Shelley, for his part, had already experimented with electronics, even recording a full electronic album (Sky Yen) before the Buzzcocks, though it remained unreleased at the time.

A Creative Symbiosis 🔮🎶

Pete Shelley and Martin Rushent loved working together.

“There’s an empathy between us. He’ll try anything once, twice if he likes it. It’s a condition where we almost read each other’s minds. It’s a strange thing, it’s almost going into witchcraft!”

In 1980, work was due to begin on the fourth Buzzcocks album, once again with Martin Rushent producing. Rushent quickly realised that, one way or another, nothing releasable under the Buzzcocks name would happen unless Pete Shelley felt inspired to work. At that point, Pete had little enthusiasm for his own songs, and even less for Steve Diggle’s.

Rushent’s drastic solution was to halt recording altogether, supposedly to give Pete time to demo some new material. This pause was presented to the rest of the band as a two-week break.

Shelley and Rushent then decamped to Genetic Studios to work. While there is disagreement among those involved about exactly when the shift occurred, what is beyond dispute is that the sessions quickly stopped being about demos for a new Buzzcocks album and became the foundation of Pete Shelley’s solo career. Shelley clearly found the new set-up liberating, although at first he had no idea he was working toward finished recordings rather than rough demos.

Steve Diggle (Buzzcocks’ guitarist):

“Rushent wasn’t happy with that situation. He didn’t want to produce a rock album and Pete didn’t want to make one. His crafty solution was to whisk Pete off to his own little studio in the country. He was basically telling Pete he didn’t need the Buzzcocks: he was better off as a solo artist. The pair of them fucked off to Rushent’s place out in Henley. The rest of us downed tools”

The rest of the band only discovered that the Buzzcocks no longer effectively existed when they received solicitors’ letters on 4th March. By then, Pete Shelley had already recorded a full album and signed a solo deal with Rushent’s Genetic label.

The stage is set for next week’s action. We’ll zoom in on how the recordings became the blueprint for Human Leagues “Dare” album and why Pete Shelley helped create that new sound but didn’t enjoy in any of its benefits. I’ll explain why the BBC banned the song and if they had reason to. And I’ll zoom in on the importance of Homosapien for the eighties synth-pop music and queer emancipation. Part 2👇

Thanks for reading The Twelve Inch! This post is public so help us grow the community by sharing it. Thanks for the support!

Share

💬 Over to you, dear reader…

• Did you know Homosapien before this story, and if so, how did you first encounter it, radio, club, record shop?

• Do you hear it more as a synth-pop record, a queer statement, or simply a love song?

• Do you think the BBC ban stopped the record in its tracks, or was the real issue Pete Shelley’s leap from punk to electronics?

• And finally: which Pete Shelley or Buzzcocks song means the most to you, and why?

I’d love to read your thoughts, drop them in the comments and let’s continue the conversation.

Further reading (or should I say watching)

There are a number of interesting video’s/links :

1. The promo video

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 Soundcloud. 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 :

So what’s in this week’s mix ?

This week’s set is a real early-eighties dancefloor gem, packed with synth-pop, alongside touches of post-punk and early new wave. I kick things off with three Martin Rushent productions: a mix of the single and dub versions of Homosapien, followed by the dub of The Human League’s “Seconds”, and Rushent’s excellent twelve-inch mix of Altered Images’ “I Could Be Happy.”

Along the way, you’ll find strong club cuts from Thomas Dolby, Visage, Soft Cell, and Heaven 17, paired with deeper selections by Paul Young, Shriekback, The B-52’s, and The Associates. There’s also a Belgian connection, with two tracks that once ruled the early dancefloors in my sets: “The Fashion Party” by The Neon Judgement and the uplifting “Allez Allez” by Allez Allez.

I close the set with two absolute blockbusters: Duran Duran’s “Hold Back The Rain” and Gary Numan’s “Cars.”

Enjoy! 🎶

Share

Next week, I’ll publish part 2 of the story of Pete Shelley’s Homosapien

Part 1:

By the time we left Part 1, Donna Summer was a star, Giorgio Moroder had assembled a formidable Munich team, and disco was booming, yet boxed in by expectations and stereotypes.

“I Feel Love” would break all of that.

Not because anyone involved believed they were making history. Quite the opposite. It was meant as an album track, a conceptual afterthought, and initially even a B-side.

What followed was one of the most consequential chain reactions in dance music history.

Get your dancing shoes ready because you are in the finale!

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

This is The Twelve Inch, my newsletter 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.

📚 Casablanca, Concepts & The Future Track

It is entirely possible that Giorgio Moroder’s, latent, interest in electronic music might never have fully blossomed into “I Feel Love”, without Pete Bellotte. Bellotte, responsible for lyrics, was deeply passionate about literature and preferred albums built around overarching ideas.

One such idea was an album in which each track represented a different decade of the twentieth century. Almost as an afterthought, Moroder and Bellotte decided the album, eventually titled I Remember Yesterday, should end with a song representing the future.

That song became “I Feel Love”.

The album itself was inspired by A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve-volume novel cycle by Anthony Powell. For Bellotte and Moroder, the future could only be expressed through synthesizers and machine-based rhythm.

⚙️ Building the Future in Munich

To realise this vision, they enlisted Robbie Wedel, an electronics wizard who had worked with composer Eberhard Schoener, and his Moog synthesizer. The Moog, together with Wedel, was rented and brought into the studio.

They began not with melody, but with rhythm, reversing Moroder’s usual working method. First the rhythm track, then the melody, and only then did Donna arrive to record vocals

The Moog was monophonic, capable of producing only one note at a time. Every sound had to be recorded separately. This was pre-MIDI. Synchronising parts was extremely difficult.

Wedel discovered a way to lock the Moog’s timing, something so unexpected that even Bob Moog himself, was unaware it was possible. In that sense, Robbie Wedel can rightly be called the true architect of the sound of “I Feel Love”.

🔊 Stereo Tricks & Relentless Pulse

Another defining feature was the delayed bassline, split across stereo channels. One channel carried the dry bassline, the other its reverberated counterpart, a technique devised by Jürgen Koppers.

In clubs this caused issues depending on where you stood on the dancefloor, but it didn’t stop the track from becoming a sensation.

The hi-hat was created using clipped white noise, another Wedel innovation. The Moog couldn’t produce a convincing kick drum, so that fell to Keith Forsey.

Moroder recorded each drum element separately, no overheads, no room sound. So Forsey would find himself playing the kick or snare for fifteen minutes solid. He recalled, “The other guys would leave the studio and go and make a cup of tea and leave me to it”

That metronomic relentlessness made it feel like the song came from the future

👼 Donna’s Voice From Another Place

Donna Summer’s vocal took the song even further from anything she had recorded before. Where “Love To Love You Baby” was physical, “I Feel Love” was almost unearthly.

She sang in a breathy head voice, giving the track the feeling of an out-of-body experience rather than “hot between-the-sheets action”. Vince Aletti wrote, “It’s like she’s coming from some other place” Her approach owed more to musical theater than African-American soul traditions.

Donna Summer wrote the lyrics on the night her astrologer told her that the man she had fallen in love with, Bruce Sudano, was the man she should marry. They did marry and stayed together for the rest of Donna’s life. So when Donna flew back from Los Angeles to Munich to record the song, it was that feeling she brought into the studio. Bruce Sudano would later explain, “I remember Donna telling me they kept on writing all these lyrics and at some point she was like, no, this song has to be really really simple. The lyrics have to float over the track and that’s when she wrote the beautiful but simple lines that became I Feel Love”

⏱️ Three Hours That Changed Everything

And here comes the kicker: The primary recording took no more than three hours. Mixing took longer, but singing it was difficult. Moroder explained:

“It turned out at the end, when it was mixed, it was a little too numerical. And by singing, Donna and I came up with the melody. But it was quite difficult to keep time because if you sing it, you have to count [the bars]. And there are some sections where I still think now there are two bars too many. One day I asked Donna, how were you ever able to sing and count the bars? And she said that her husband, who was playing piano at the time, would count for her in the headphones. Otherwise, for whoever sings that song live, it’s really difficult.”

Non of its creators, thought much of I Feel Love. It was intended as an album track, nothing more. Bellotte later admitted, “It didn’t mean anything to us, in terms of us thinking we had done something special”

The irony is that Moroder and Bellotte not only failed to recognize the importance of the song, they also completely missed the frenzy it unleashed on dancefloors. Neither of them went to nightclubs. They kept regular, almost office-like studio hours, didn’t smoke, drink, or take drugs, and treated fine dining as their only indulgence. By the time clubgoers were getting ready for the night, both men were already in bed.

💿 From B-Side to Global Phenomenon

Casablanca initially chose the ballad, “Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over)”, as the single, with “I Feel Love” on the B-side.

Bruce Sudano recalled, “The ballad was doing ok but it was the b-side that got the attention. Casablanca jumped on it and changed I Feel Love to be the single”

By the end of May, clubs in cities as far apart as New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were reporting overwhelming demand for “I Feel Love.” By mid-June, there was scarcely a discotheque in the country where you could avoid hearing the record, and not just the edited 3.45-minute B-side version. DJs were playing the full, nearly six-minute album track, and writing in Record World, Vince Aletti could barely contain his enthusiasm. ““A brilliant combination of whipped-up synthesizer and . . . dreamy, ecstatic vocals. The pace is fierce and utterly gripping with the synthesizer effects particularly aggressive and emotionally charged.”

Faced with a record that even the influential Aletti confirmed was “unlike anything” the Summer, Moroder, Bellotte team had produced, something that was “nearly as innovative as ‘Love to Love You Baby,’” Casablanca had little choice. “I Feel Love” was elevated to the A-side of the single.

🌍 Reaction & Aftershock

“I Feel Love” was the precursor to almost everything that followed, but it was certainly the direct precursor of electronic Eurodisco. One often-heard critique was that electronic disco was “machine music”, meaning that the machines supposedly played themselves, a criticism not unlike today’s frequently voiced concerns about AI. In a 1978 interview, Giorgio Moroder responded: “Even if you use synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines, you have to set them up, to choose exactly what you are going to make them do. It is nonsense to say that we make all our music automatically”. Sometimes it was easier to get the sound you were looking for with the new technology, but as often as not, it is at least ten times more difficult to get a good synthesiser sound, than on an acoustic instrument”

The impact of “I Feel Love” on disco was immediate and immense. A wave of electronic disco hits followed, Magic Fly by Space, Supernature by Cerrone, and Automatic Lover by Dee D. Jackson, to name just a few. There was an especially strong response in the gay community.

And then there were Brian Eno and David Bowie, recording in Berlin, where Bowie was living at the time. They were famously searching for the “sound of the future”, and when Brian Eno heard “I Feel Love” for the first time, he took the record into the studio and played it for Bowie, saying, “Search no more I just found the sound of the future.”“I Feel Love” said Eno to Bowie “is going to change the club music for the next 15 years” He was right about the first part, but underestimated the reach.

Moroder later revealed that “I Feel Love” made Bowie feel depressed. When Giorgio Moroder worked with David Bowie on the 1982 soundtrack of Cat People, he explained what happened after the moment Eno played him “I Feel Love”: “David said they were depressed for a few days, because weeks and weeks they were trying to find that famous new sound which every artist wants, and especially Brian and David in Berlin, so it was definitely an acknowledgement that it is something new,”

📊 Charts, Contrast & Beauty and the Beast

Top of the charts in the UK, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Italy and on the Billboard Disco Action Top 40; number 2 in New Zealand and Switzerland; Top 5 in Canada, Germany, Spain, Sweden; number 6 in South Africa and on the Billboard Top 100 . . . incredibly and still inexplicably, the record even registered on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart,

When later asked why he thought people liked the song so much, Giorgio replied : '“I think it was the contrast between the metallic, drum machine, and then the beautiful romantic voice of Donna. Based upon the music, you would expect a robot to be singing, not Donna! It was a “Beauty and the Beast” type of thing. It was a whole new dimension that you wouldn’t expect”

🧬 Influence, Genres & Legacy

Donna Summer’s singing on this technologically supercharged track has an almost woman-machine quality. It prefigures the looped diva samples that would later define house and rave music. Listen to a track like Orbital’s Halcyon and you can clearly hear where that inspiration came from.

I’ve mentioned before the idea of seeing the seventies and the first three or four years of the eighties as a single era. But “I Feel Love” allows us to flip that perspective and argue that 1977 was, in many ways, the real beginning of the eighties. What is certain is that the eighties didn’t begin neatly on the 1st of January 1980. It was far messier than that.

“I Feel Love” blazed a path for genres such as Hi-NRG, Italo, Techno, Trance, and House. The reverberations of “I Feel Love” reached far beyond the disco floor. In the wake of “I Feel Love”, Giorgio Moroder became a top-tier producer.

There have been numerous remakes of the song. One of the most important is the version by Marc Almond and Bronski Beat, which they coupled with another cover, “Johnny Remember Me”. That release would enshrine the song’s status as a gay anthem. Giorgio Moroder later recalled, “Jimmy Somerville told me he became a singer because of “I Feel Love”. He heard that “ooooh” at the start of the song by Donna Summer and he said: That’s My Career”

Another gay musician whose path was decisively shaped by “I Feel Love” was Patrick Cowley, often described as the American Giorgio Moroder. He began his career by creating a fifteen-minute remix of the song, circulating it on acetate among DJ friends. It was finally officially released in 1982 and once again carried “I Feel Love” into the UK Top 30.

The song also served as the direct starting point for The Human League. In 1977, Martyn Ware arrived at Phil Oakey’s flat with “I Feel Love” in hand and said to him, “we can make this”. And they did. The Human League track “Dance Like A Star”, from their The Golden Hour Of The Future album, bears more than a passing resemblance to “I Feel Love”, beginning with Phil Oakey openly declaring his love for disco.

Sparks, Debbie Harry and Blondie, along with many synthpop and post-punk UK acts such as New Order, Visage, Eurythmics, and The Simple Minds, all felt the aftershock of “I Feel Love”. The first two would soon go on to work directly with Giorgio Moroder on their own projects.

❓ What If “I Feel Love” Never Existed?

Revolutionary records like “I Feel Love” carry a retrospective aura of inevitability, as if they were somehow ordained to exist. Yet, given the direction technology was taking, a track along the lines of “I Feel Love” would almost certainly have been made by someone around that time. The precise shape the song took, however, was the result of circumstance and accident. Moroder’s interest in synthesizers, Bellotte’s literary obsessions, and Donna Summer’s heightened emotional state combined to make “I Feel Love” exactly what it is.

What is striking is that Moroder only made half a dozen electronic disco tracks with Donna Summer. They never recorded a fully electronic album together. He would do that for another act, which I’ll return to in a separate episode, Suzi Lane. And of course there was his soundtrack work, as well as productions for Sparks and Blondie. But there was no sustained overload of electronic tracks.

When Giorgio Moroder was later asked whether “I Feel Love” created a roadmap for his subsequent productions, he answered: “Yes and no. I had worked with the Moog way before, back in 1971. I did it, I stopped it and then I started again. You know the soundtrack to the movie “Midnight Express” was based upon “I Feel Love.” The director Alan Parker loved the song and he wanted me to record something in that style for a very dramatic scene in the movie—the chase scene. He wanted it to have that driving bass line. So that film really opened up the idea of electronic music in movies. I think it was the first to all be done with electronics”

When the disco backlash hit the United States, Giorgio Moroder’s electro-disco phase came to an end. In total, it lasted little more than two years. In Europe, however, space disco continued to be produced without interruption.

Moroder had a fine ear for commercial music and little interest in experimentation for its own sake. Giorgio Moroder and Pete Belotte remained intent on forging a singular Musicland sound, a musical signature that could belong to no one else. But they were never devoted to electronics as an ideology. Synthesizers were simply one more weapon in the arsenal.

That, ultimately, was central to Moroder’s pursuit of a distinctive musical signature. Not just to make great records that sounded unlike anyone else’s, but records that were successful. Very successful. He did want critical acclaim, but he didn’t want critical acclaim alone. He wanted major hit records, and he wanted them on his own terms.

If truth be told, it was Donna Summer and the electronic disco sound of Giorgio Moroder that unequivocally ruled the airwaves. Disco may have been anathema to punk, but “I Feel Love” would arguably be the true soundtrack of 1977.

In reality, the song may have been a happy accident, but the team of Moroder, Bellotte, Summer, and Casablanca was probably the best possible group to have created that accident in the first place. They were creative, fast-moving, and responsive to what was happening in the market, with an open mind toward anything interesting or new. As Bruce Sudano remembers: “Donna, Giorgio & Pete were always looking to push the envelop. They weren’t complacent in doing the things they had just done. Donna was always excited to see what is next and what new gadget could be incorporated. That was how their minds worked”

So what if? What if “I Feel Love” had never been written or recorded, would the trajectory of dance music really have been different? By now, you’ll understand that the only honest answer is a resounding no. Given the way electronic instruments and recording techniques were evolving, it was only a matter of time before someone pushed them to their logical conclusion.

I’m convinced it would always have been a European team, simply because Europeans and Eurodisco producers were consciously aiming for the dancefloor, with the primary drive being to score hits rather than to make “serious” or canonical music. In theory, it could have been any number of European producers. What makes the combination of Giorgio, Donna, and Pete so unique, however, is that they brought together the best elements of all the traditions that had made dance music succesfull.

In that sense, it was inevitable that it would be them rather than someone else. But that inevitability does nothing to diminish the remarkable achievement of the song, the producers, or Donna Summer herself.

I’ll close with Bruce Sudano’s response when he was asked how he and his family feel about the way Donna Summer is seen today: “It Is gratifying. For all Donna’s psyches there was always an underlying struggle for a recognition that she honestly deserved”

I will return to “I Feel Love” and its connection to the disco subgenre of space disco one last time in a bonus episode, focusing on the synthesizers used in early dance music production and the genres they helped create.

💬 Call to Action

Do you hear “I Feel Love” as disco, electronic music, or something entirely outside genre?

Which artist or style do you most strongly connect back to?

And do you believe dance music history would truly look the same without it?

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

Further reading (or should I say watching)

There are a number of interesting video’s/links :

1. The promo video

2. Live in 1977

3. The Vh1 version

4. And let’s not forget the SoulTrain dance routines!

   ⭐ Paid subscribers get more: bonus deep dives, label histories, and the research that doesn’t make it into the free posts.

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 Soundcloud. 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 :

So what’s in this week’s mix ?

This week’s mix goes almost full electro and space disco, with a heavy dose of Donna Summer and more than a few Giorgio Moroder productions. We open, inevitably, with “I Feel Love”, before moving seamlessly into the Midnight Express theme, “Chase” by Giorgio Moroder. Alan Parker wanted his own version of “I Feel Love” for the soundtrack, and you can clearly hear that Moroder delivered in a big way. Another Moroder track, “Utopia (Me Giorgio)”, alongside Donna Summer’s “Our Love”, completes the opening four of the mix.

And that’s not all. I’ve also included the Sparks sperm song “Tryouts For The Human Race”, one of Moroder’s finest productions, as well as his other electro diva, Suzi Lane, with “Ooh La La”.

Electrodisco takes the lead with “Magic Fly” by Space, “Ultimate Warlord” by The Immortals, and Cerrone’s “Supernature”. I close the mix with two deeper space disco cuts, The Black Devil Disco Club and Sylvia Love’s “Instant Love”.

Enjoy! 🎶

Share

Remember the Buzzcocks? A brilliant band with a short career. Next week I’ll tell the story of what happened after the split, focusing on lead singer Pete Shelley and one of the remarkable songs he made with one of my favourite early eighties producers, Martin Rushent.

The audio only version:

I have always been a Donna Summer fan. She was the first artist I followed religiously, like only a teenager can follow his or her favorite artist. I wanted to know everything, listened to all her records, and even kept all the articles and photos I found of her in magazines and newspapers in a scrapbook. From an early age I was reading the liner notes on the albums, so I knew her producer’s name, Giorgio Moroder, and he was, for me, a genius.

I often wondered how I became so hooked on disco at the end of the seventies. And frankly I don’t really know what tipped me over. But it could very well have been Donna Summer.

Today we see Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder as the talented artists they are or were, but at the time that certainly wasn’t the case. Saying to your friends that you were a fan of Donna Summer was setting yourself up for ridicule. Disco wasn’t taken seriously by my peers, and Donna Summer was the personification of everything that was supposedly wrong with disco, superficial, plastic, effeminate, and plainly wrong.

Now I’ve never been one to back down in the face of a little adversity. In fact it usually emboldens me more, which might be one of the reasons I loved Donna so much, but that’s a story for another time. But I did get angry every time I read in a newspaper or magazine, or heard on the radio, how Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer by extension were nothing more than frauds. It was the “machines” that created the music, therefore it wasn’t worth being called good music.

I remember we had to do a speech about a chosen subject in Dutch class, and I chose Giorgio and Donna. The point I tried to make was to convince everybody of the errors of their viewpoint. I even brought my cassette recorder and presented them with “proof” in the form of small excerpts of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer productions. Suffice to say, I didn’t convince anybody that afternoon. But it felt good.

You really can’t do better than Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” if you’re looking for a song that had the most influence on the evolution of dance music. Not only does it sound as current today as it did 49 years ago, but “I Feel Love” influenced or even kickstarted almost everything that came after it.

There’s a clear distinction to be made between the period before “I Feel Love” and the one after. Pretty strong stuff for a song that the producer and record company originally considered only good enough to be the B-side to another song nobody even remembers today.

When Brian Eno heard the song for the first time, he was recording an album with David Bowie in Berlin and told him that “he had heard the future”. And he was right.

“I Feel Love” was the brainchild of Giorgio Moroder and his team in their basement studio in Munich. It would be the final push that catapulted Donna Summer to superstardom and disco queen extraordinaire.

So episode 200 will be devoted to this phenomenon and the questions I wanted answered. Where did it come from? Was Giorgio a brilliant inventor or a keen observer? Why did “I Feel Love” reverberate so strongly and have such lasting influence? And let’s indulge in a bit of alternative history and try to answer the question, suppose “I Feel Love” hadn’t been written and recorded, would dance music have evolved differently?

We’ve got a lot to cover. Too much for one episode. So episode 200 is a two-parter. Today, part 1 and on Sunday I’ll drop the second part.

Let’s dive in.

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

This is The Twelve Inch, my newsletter 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.

🎹 Was Electronic Dance Music Invented by Giorgio?

A lot of people assume that synthesizers first entered dance music through disco, and that “I Feel Love” started it all. But synthesizers weren’t exactly new by 1977. By then we were already familiar with Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis.

Their tradition, however, was steeped in prog rock, with album-side-filling compositions, serious music for serious people. Music that was made after taking drugs to become the soundtrack for taking more drugs... Not really pop chart material. Jarre came close to pop, but most of the rest leaned toward ambient mood music and electronic space music.

At the same time in the US, synthesizers were already being used in jazz fusion by artists like Herbie Hancock and in R&B by Stevie Wonder, stories we’ll return to in future episodes.

🇪🇺 Europe, Electronics & a Blank Page

Pop music in the 1970s was an Anglo-American hegemony, but electronic space music was dominated by Europeans. The main reason was simple, most of the music was instrumental, so working in English as a second language, or singing in a native tongue, was no disadvantage at all. It was a level playing field and the Europeans took the advantage.

In Germany, Krautrock went even further by starting from a blank page instead of starting from the Anglo-American blues tradition. Various theories exist as to why West Germany became such an early trailblazer, but many converge on the idea that with their musical heritage tainted by associations with the Nazi era, and with American and British imports filling the void, young German musicians had little choice but to start again from scratch.

Krautrock’s common elements included hypnotic 4/4 rhythms, extended improvisation, and early synthesizers.

Out of this electronic strain grew both Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder. Writers have long noted that Moroder’s extended disco pieces for Donna Summer translated Krautrock’s hypnotic, motorik, long-form qualities into a club context, a steady machine-like pulse, gradual textural shifts, and a sense of endless forward motion reminiscent of Can and Neu!.

🎯 Hits vs Purism

But while Kraftwerk went fully electronic to escape the morose contemplations of Tangerine Dream or the pompous pounding of Keith Emerson, Giorgio Moroder went in another direction. He wanted to score hits.

Kraftwerk were looking for new applications, new purposes, new pop. It’s probably no surprise that the two camps didn’t quite like what the other was doing.

Giorgio’s love for synthesizers wasn’t a given. Like many others, he was intrigued by Wendy Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach” electronic remake of classical melodies, which led to his writing & producing “Son Of My Father”, a massive hit for Chicory Tip and the first number one single with a Moog synth in a prominent role. And there was “Popcorn”, one of the most infuriatingly catchy novelty hits ever created.

Strangely enough, none of this led to a massive adoption of synthesizers. Early Moogs were complicated and extremely expensive.

💃 Munich, Disco & Ambition

Moroder’s real interest lay in what was happening stateside, the first signs of disco. His goal wasn’t just to make records that didn’t sound like anyone else’s. They had to be successful. Very successful.

What Krautrock purists had thrown out, pop and Philadelphia-style R&B, Giorgio added back in. His emphasis was international. By calling it disco, he confirmed it.

He would say, “The disco sound is not an art or anything so serious. Disco music is made for dancing”

And there was a lot happening in Germany, as Giorgio later explained: “A good friend of mine, Michael Kunze, had a big hit with the group Silver Convention? ‘Fly Robin Fly’, which was a German group at number one in America, which is extraordinary. All those dance songs coming out of Munich, they were all played by the same guys. The strings were all German, the Munich Philharmonic, the brass was Munich guys. Then there was Frank Farian who was in Frankfurt and he’d just get the Munich guys to come and play for him. Keith Forsey was happy to go there because they had a lot of girls there! He told me he always enjoyed going to Frankfurt and working with Farian. Then Harold Faltermeyer came a little later. He played with several groups. And we all used similar sounds, the keyboards, and especially the strings.”

👤 Giorgio Moroder, The Team Builder

Giorgio Moroder isn’t German by birth. He’s Italian, raised in the Alpine valleys of South Tyrol. He began pursuing his own career but soon shifted toward writing and producing for others.

After time in Berlin, he settled in Munich, where he set up Musicland Studios in the basement of an apartment block. Inside was a remarkable team.

Most significant was Pete Bellotte, an English expatriate, who had toured the German nightclub circuit as a guitarist of a band that never enjoyed a breakthrough. Pete created song concepts and contributed heavily to musical and production ideas. He was the one who spotted Donna Summer’s vocal gifts.

There was man-machine drummer Keith Forsey, keyboardists Thor Baldursson and Harold Faltermeyer, engineer Jürgen Koppers, and Robbie Wedel, who understood the inner workings of the Moog synthesizer and was instrumental in shaping the sound palette of “I Feel Love”.

Keith Forsey later said, “Giorgio Moroder was great at delegating and finding talents that were compatible. But he was the leader and you had to follow”

🎤 Donna Summer, The Perfect Hybrid

Giorgio later explained how he first met Donna Summer:

“One day we needed a singer with no German accent, because we did some demos for an American group. And so she came to the studio and, you know, Donna, all happy and enthusiastic, and she sang beautifully. We noticed immediately that she had a great voice. So we told her, if we ever have a song or an idea, we’ll call you”

That call came only months later.

You might not expect it, but Boston-born LaDonna Gaines, started her career fronting a rock group, Crow, before moving to Europe for musical work. She lived, initially, in Vienna and married an Austrian actor named Sommer, adapting the name as her artist identity.

What’s fascinating is why she chose Germany and Austria rather than London. The answer lies in her upbringing. Her father was stationed in Germany with the US military. She spent much of her youth there and spoke fluent German.

Crucially, Donna was raised outside the R&B tradition. She sang in church, yes, but her roots were as much European as American. This explains her work in rock and musical theater. So she wasn’t your typical afro American artist.

“I don’t think people understand that I’m not an artist that tries to establish a style. I’m an actress who sings. Whoever the character is in the song, that’s who I try to become”

She was the ideal hybrid to front Eurodisco. I believe this is the most important element in her destined success.

💿 Early Success & A Dangerous Image

Through session work, Donna arrived at Musicland Studios and formed a partnership with Giorgio and Pete. Early releases were modest European successes.

Then came “Love To Love You Baby” in late 1975. It was huge, but it boxed Donna into the role of “queen of sex rock”, not an ideal foundation for a lasting career. The follow-ups did okay, but they were conventional. But then came the song that would set her on another trajectory…

👊The End Of Part 1

In Part 2, we go down into the Munich basement where “I Feel Love” was actually built, step by step, gadget by gadget, human by human. We’ll follow the chain reaction from Pete Bellotte’s literary concept and Robbie Wedel’s Moog wizardry to Keith Forsey’s man-machine precision, and then the moment Donna arrives and turns cold circuitry into something intimate, weightless, almost unearthly.

We’ll also track how a track that “didn’t mean anything” to its creators became a full-on dancefloor emergency, how Casablanca flipped it from B-side to A-side, and why clubland heard the future before radio did. And then, the aftershock: the “machine music” backlash, the gay dancefloor embrace, Brian Eno walking into the studio with it and telling Bowie, “Search no more I just found the sound of the future”, and the long shadow it casts over Hi-NRG, Italo, house, techno, trance, and everything that came after.

So if Part 1 was about the people and the setup, Part 2 is about the moment it all ignites, and why we’re still living in the world “I Feel Love” predicted.

Part 2 :

💬 Call to Action

When did you first hear “I Feel Love”, and did you realise at the time that it was something entirely new?

Do you remember disco being ridiculed, or defended, in your own circle?

And was Donna Summer already more than “just disco” for you at this point?

Let me know in the comments, and on Sunday we’ll continue with Part 2, where everything truly changes.

Further reading (or should I say watching)

There are a number of interesting video’s/links :

1. The promo video

2. live in 1977

3. the VH1 version

4. And let’s not forget the Soul Train dance routines 😁

   ⭐ Paid subscribers get more: bonus deep dives, label histories, and the research that doesn’t make it into the free posts.

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 Soundcloud. 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 :

So what’s in this week’s mix ?

This week’s mix goes almost full electro and space disco, with a heavy dose of Donna Summer and more than a few Giorgio Moroder productions. We open, inevitably, with “I Feel Love”, before moving seamlessly into the Midnight Express theme, “Chase” by Giorgio Moroder. Alan Parker wanted his own version of “I Feel Love” for the soundtrack, and you can clearly hear that Moroder delivered in a big way. Another Moroder track, “Utopia (Me Giorgio)”, alongside Donna Summer’s “Our Love”, completes the opening four of the mix.

And that’s not all. I’ve also included the Sparks sperm song “Tryouts For The Human Race”, one of Moroder’s finest productions, as well as his other electro diva, Suzi Lane, with “Ooh La La”.

Electrodisco takes the lead with “Magic Fly” by Space, “Ultimate Warlord” by The Immortals, and Cerrone’s “Supernature”. I close the mix with two deeper space disco cuts, The Black Devil Disco Club and Sylvia Love’s “Instant Love”.

Enjoy! 🎶

Share

Sunday I’ll drop the second part of this story. The stage is set. It’s time the action unfolds