Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

So What Exactly Was New Beat?

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

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

Growing up in eighties Belgium wasn’t simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And those things always find their way into music.

Belgium Starts Making Its Own Noise

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

That also meant more Belgian music made by Belgian bands.

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

It’s simply the way I write.

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

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

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

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

This week, those questions become particularly interesting.

Because Saga is no dance band.

And “Take A Chance” is no dance song.

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

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

New Beat.

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

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

Because, yes, Saga are Canadian.

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

My good friend Ken from Maple Mixtape.

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

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

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

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

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Saga an Introduction by Ken from Maple Mixtape 🇨🇦

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

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

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

• Brothers Ian and Jim Crichton, guitar and bass respectively

• Steve Negus on drums

• ‘Daryl’ Gilmour on keys, and

• Michael Sadler, lead vocals and keys

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

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

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

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

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

The Mystery Unravels... Sort Of

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

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

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

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

This was the first.

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

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

The clue is Behaviour.

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

And that matters.

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

Now put yourself in the record company’s office.

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

And this is 1985.

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

Here’s where it gets interesting.

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

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

There was a dance mix AND a dub.

That tells us something.

So here’s what I think happened.

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

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

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

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

I can’t prove that.

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

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

From Canada to... Belgium?

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

In Belgium.

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

But for us, it leaves one enormous question.

Why?

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

And there’s another little problem.

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

Saga’s “Take A Chance”?

186 BPM. 😁

Now we have a proper mystery.

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

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

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

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

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

It’s the dub.

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

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

The B-side is where we go deeper.

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

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

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

Over To You !

I actually have two questions this week.

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

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

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

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

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

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So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

🇨🇦 It’s CanCon Month!

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

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

The A-Sides provided the records that guided us through that history. Each week’s featured song illustrates something happening in the bigger story we’re exploring here.

In other words, the A-Side gives us the record.

The B-Side takes us down the rabbit hole. 😁

But before we continue, if you wonder why I deactivate the AI scanning tool? Click here

Last week we left Montréal at the absolute peak of disco.

The clubs were packed. The twelve-inch economy was booming. Record pools had become part of the machinery. American DJs were travelling north to hear records they couldn’t find in New York. And then came Saturday Night Fever.By August 1978 it had sold a million copies in Canada.

Everybody wanted disco.

Which, as I hinted last week, was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened. Something changes when a subculture suddenly becomes everybody’s culture.

Our central guest in this series, Lime Light dj Robert Ouimet had one very simple way of describing that change.

Everybody bought a white suit.

Everybody Owns a White Suit

One of the fun details I encountered in my research was that before Saturday Night Fever, people already dressed up to go to the Lime Light. Actually, “dressed up” may be putting it mildly.

Ouimet remembers:

Way before Saturday Night Fever, people used to dress up only for to come to the Limelight either Friday and Saturday. It was kind of a parade of people. I remember a guy with a sheet of plastic, transparent plastic, naked under it with a bird cage on top of his head and all kind of people like that, kind of weird stuff, but fun stuff.”

Transparent plastic, naked underneath, bird cage on the head.

Your move, John Travolta. 😁

What I love about that image is how individual it is. People weren’t dressing according to some established disco uniform because there wasn’t one yet. The nightclub was theatre. You invented yourself for the evening.

And then Saturday Night Fever happened.

Read more

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

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

Let me explain.

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

The reason was very simple.

That beat.

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

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

The Battle Across the Street

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

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

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

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

You can probably see where this is going. 😁

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

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

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

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

Hit ’N Run Lover.

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

It didn’t matter.

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

You felt it.

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

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

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

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

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

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Herb Powers Jr. Enters the Story

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

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

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

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

It passed. 😁

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

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

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

But first, who was Carol Jiani?

From Nigeria to Montréal

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

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

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

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

Recorded in...

Wait for it...

Montréal. 😁

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

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

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

That’s when suddenly everything clicked.

Joe La Greca and the Montréal Machine

Joe La Greca is slightly more difficult to pin down.

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

So I won’t pretend I know.

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

Lime and Carol Jiani.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Matra.

Matra, Moby Dick and a Slight American Mess

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

And Hit ’N Run Lover certainly travelled.

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

The American release history is rather more complicated.

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

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

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

Why Does Hit ’N Run Lover Sound Slightly Off?

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

Can you hear it?

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

Here’s the strange part.

My original twelve-inch doesn’t do it.

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

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

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

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

So what happened?

The used a vinyl to make a new master.

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

Try beatmatching one of those.

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

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

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

A Record Made Between Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

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

Disco supposedly died.

Montréal, apparently, didn’t get the memo.

Over To You !

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

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

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

🇨🇦 It’s CanCon Month!

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

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

The A-Sides will provide the records that guide us through that history. Each week’s featured song illustrates something happening in the bigger story we’re exploring here.

So if you’ve read this week’s A-Side about the Bombers and (Everybody) Get Dancin’, you’ll recognise quite a few themes. The machine behind Montreal’s disco production and the Italian connection.

In other words, the A-Side gives us the record.

The B-Side takes us down the rabbit hole. 😁

But before we continue, if you wonder why I deactivate the AI scanning tool? Click here

🇨🇦 Montréal Takes the Dancefloor: How a City Became Disco’s Second Capital

Last week we left Montréal standing on the doorstep of disco.

The city had spent the sixties almost rehearsing for what was about to happen. It had imported the European idea of the discothèque, the Quiet Revolution had transformed Quebec society, Expo 67 had brought millions of visitors and a blast of modernism, and underneath all of that there was already a thriving soul and R&B culture.

So when disco arrived, Montréal didn’t exactly need an invitation.

And this is where our story really starts.

The Bastard Child of Soul

There are roughly two phases in the history of Montréal’s discothèque culture, and they divide rather neatly between the sixties and seventies. In the sixties, the discothèque still felt European. By the middle of the seventies, it increasingly looked towards New York.

The clubs themselves hadn’t necessarily moved. They still occupied much of the same downtown territory and attracted a familiar mixture of socialites, young club kids, Francophones and Anglophones.

What changed was the music.

In the sixties, Montréal DJs had relied heavily on seven-inches from elsewhere, particularly France. There simply wasn’t much of a Canadian recording industry supplying them. By the middle of the seventies, that was changing too. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution had helped create its own star system, and increasingly its own records.

And at almost exactly the same moment, something else was happening. The DJ was becoming more important, the twelve-inch was arriving together with the remix.

And the music itself was changing.

One of the people we’ll spend a lot of time with in this and the next episode is Robert Ouimet, resident DJ at the Lime Light and one of the central characters in Montréal’s disco story.

Ouimet remembered the city’s R&B roots very clearly:

“During Expo 67, there was a big party every Saturday or Sunday and the only thing they played there was soul music, anything on Motown, James Brown.. etc.. Everybody was there. It was packed, 5000 people everytime.”

What happened next wasn’t really a break with that music. It was an evolution.

Or, as Ouimet puts it rather more colourfully:

“I used to write for a magazine in the 70s. We used to take the bus to come to Montreal and listen to the latest soul stuff. At that time I was not yet (beat)mixing. It was the in and out stuff. One record was finishing, the other one was beginning. Disco started the same way. It was a continuation of all the the the R&B stuff from late 60s to early 70s. It’s like their child, their bastard child.”

I love that description.

Disco as the bastard child of R&B.

And it explains why Montréal was so ready for it. Disco wasn’t some strange American invention suddenly dropped onto an unsuspecting city. The clubs, dancers, DJs and record buyers were already there.

They simply moved with the music.

But there was one rather important problem.

Read more

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

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

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

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

It didn’t stop me.

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

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

American? Well, not quite...

To my teenage ears, the Bombers sounded American.

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

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

And then, essentially, they disappeared.

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

They were from Montreal.

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

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

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

The Bombers slipped straight through that gap.

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

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

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

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Who exactly were the Bombers?

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

Two albums more or less tell the story.

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

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

The Bombers were really a studio construction.

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

I have no idea. 😁

And in a way that is exactly the point.

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

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

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

The men behind the curtain

George Lagios is the less famous half of the partnership.

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

Why?

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

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

Pat Deserio’s story travels much further.

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

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

Then things started moving.

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

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

But what fascinates me about Deserio is what happened afterwards.

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

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

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

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

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

Deserio was Italian.

Why are there Italians everywhere? 😁

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

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

So why?

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

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

That matters more than it might initially seem.

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

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

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

Montreal meets Italy

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

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

The Twelve Inch

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

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

Read more

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

And once again, dance music offered escape.

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

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

Then Giorgio Moroder demonstrated what was possible.

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

Now put these things together.

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

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

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

History is rarely that neat.

But the conditions were there.

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

Which brings us back to the Bombers.

Back to that twelve-inch

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

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

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

I just knew it was a fantastic twelve-inch.

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

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

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

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

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

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🎁 B-Side, Going Deeper Into The Groove

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

And eventually everybody wants disco.

But what happens when everybody wants it?

That’s where this story starts getting really interesting.

The B-side is where we go deeper.

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

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

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

Over To You !

Did you know the Bombers were Canadian?

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

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

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

🇨🇦 It’s CanCon Month!

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

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

The A-Sides will provide the records that guide us through that history. Each week’s featured song illustrates something happening in the bigger story we’re exploring here.

So if you’ve read this week’s A-Side about Patsy Gallant and From New York To L.A., you’ll recognise quite a few themes. Quebec’s unique cultural identity, the divide between Francophone and Anglophone Canada, Montreal’s nightlife and its connections with Europe all come into much sharper focus here.

In other words, the A-Side gives us the record.

The B-Side takes us down the rabbit hole. 😁

But before we continue, and in case you wonder why I deactivate the AI scanning tool. 👇

How Montreal Was Almost Built for Disco

So here we are.

This is a story I’ve wanted to write almost since I started The Twelve Inch. And before we go any further, let me get something out of the way.

I love Canada.

Apart from my honeymoon, our trip through western Canada was probably the best holiday I’ve ever had. But I’m not going to turn into a sycophantic toad and spend the next few weeks telling you how wonderful everything Canadian is. 😁

When I feel particularly at home somewhere, I usually start wondering why. And while researching this series I realised that Canada sometimes feels like a gigantic version of my own little country.

In other words...

It’s complicated. 🙃

Different languages, different cultural zones, different identities living alongside each other, sometimes connecting beautifully and sometimes barely understanding what is happening on the other side. As a Belgian, none of this feels particularly exotic.

I also have a weakness for dialects and accents, and Québécois is definitely in my Top 5. The French may laugh their heads off when they hear undiluted Québécois, but I love it.

If you love Québécois you’ll love the video’s of Denyzee 😁

We have something comparable here with Walloon, sadly disappearing, but still spoken by some of my in-laws when they forget I’m around. It isn’t simply French with a funny accent, it’s recognised as a separate language with its own vocabulary.

These things fascinate me.

And in Quebec, language takes us straight back to disco.

Because Québécois famously contains a whole arsenal of religious words that became swear words.

Tabarnak!

Calisse!

Ostie!

Why? Because religion once controlled an enormous part of Quebec society. And the collapse of that control would change Montreal completely.

Before Disco Came the Quiet Revolution

Read more

The simple answer?

Because it doesn’t work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The result?

84% human. 16% AI generated.

Oumph.

I didn’t see that one coming.

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

Then I scanned the B-Side.

48% human. 52% AI generated.

Now that was strange.

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

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

And guess what?

Hooray!

100% human.

Even the B-Side came back 100% human.

The nightmare was over. The pressure was gone.

The questions, however, remained.

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

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

You see it.

You feel it.

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

Let’s try to avoid that sentence.

Maybe I shouldn’t structure it like this.

Perhaps I should change that paragraph.

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

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

Let alone 52%.

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

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

Let me be clear about something.

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

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

AI is multilayered.

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

And yes, you can also use it to cheat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Substack never uses your content to train.”

And yet, here we are.

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

That is exactly what is happening here.

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

I don’t know that company.

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

And nobody ever asked me for permission.

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

Because what does switching it off suggest?

Why did he disable the AI scan?

Does he have something to hide?

So whichever way you turn it, Substack wins.

And then came this week’s B-Side.

When I finished writing it, I scanned it.

100% human.

As it should be.

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

I scanned it again.

Suddenly:

48% AI generated.

Wait... what?

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

I scanned exactly that version again.

54% AI generated.

Enough.

Seriously.

Writing is supposed to be fun.

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

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

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

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

But I can stop participating in this particular game.

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

It’s creating noise.

Worse, it’s creating suspicion.

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

I know who wrote it.

That should be enough.

So here we are.

The starting point of CanCon Month.

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

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

Think about that for a second.

Not London, Philadelphia or Miami

Montreal.

Only New York ranked higher.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what makes Canadian disco so fascinating.

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

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

The B-Sides will tell the larger history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Who Is Patsy Gallant?

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

“From New York To L.A.”

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

But then things become rather odd.

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

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

Nothing.

Not a trace.

C’mon...

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

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

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

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

That distinction matters.

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

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

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

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

Then came the quote that completely won me over.

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

Now that’s an introduction.

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

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

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

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

Dancing with a National Anthem

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

They turned “Mon Pays” into a disco record.

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

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

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

I’ve always loved that sentence.

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

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

The original with a short introduction in Québécois

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

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

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

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

A Window Opens... Then Closes Again

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

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

The follow-ups simply weren’t as memorable.

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

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

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

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

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

Caught Between Two Canadas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One sentence. One impossible position.

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

More Than One Hit

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

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

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

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

That’s a lovely quote.

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

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

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

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

Share

🎧 Next on the B-Side

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

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

The B-side is where we go deeper.

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

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

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

And now, it’s your turn:

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

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

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

See you on the dancefloor.

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Youtube. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre.

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

Or on Youtube :

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

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

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

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

It’s such a wonderfully honest quote.

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

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

Then came Domino Dancing.

Number 7 in Britain.

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

Only Britain truly embraced it.

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

Case closed.

But…I’m not convinced.

Read more

Here’s the thing with the Pet Shop Boys.

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

And yet, I’ve always hesitated.

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

I’ve found myself wrestling with something similar here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty serious subjects for records I happily danced to.

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

So perhaps I’ve been unfair all these years.

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

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

It was part of their DNA.

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

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

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

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

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More Than Just Remixes

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

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

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

Think about that for a moment.

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

This was 1986. The time when the United States was their biggest market. The United States, a country where the word “disco” was still practically radioactive after the infamous “Disco Sucks” movement.

I’ve always loved that little act of defiance.

Whether they intended it that way or not, it perfectly summed up who they were. Intelligent, mischievous and never particularly interested in following expectations. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became.

The Pet Shop Boys don’t just deserve a place in the story of dance music. They’re one of the bands that quietly changed the relationship between pop albums, twelve-inch singles and club culture.

The End Of The Imperial Phase

That’s why I’ve chosen to start not at the beginning, but at a fascinating turning point.

Neil Tennant would later describe the years of Please and Actually as the Pet Shop Boys’ “imperial phase.” Everything seemed effortless. They Scored hit after hit. They had three number ones in a row. They had critical acclaim.

And then something changed.

Their third album, Introspective, turned everything upside down. Instead of writing songs and then extending them into twelve-inch remixes, they reversed the entire process. The twelve-inch became the original. The single became the edited version.

In many ways, the idea behind Disco had quietly evolved into a full studio album. Introspective contained just six tracks, each presented in extended, club-length form. It was a remarkably brave idea. But even more remarkable is the fact that it worked.

By almost every measure, Introspective became their biggest album. It reached the Top 40 in America, performed strongly across Europe and remains one of the defining records of their career. The irony is that the singles didn’t quite follow. Which brings us to Domino Dancing.

I’ve often wondered whether choosing that particular song as the album’s introduction helped shape what happened next. A Latin Freestyle record, released just as it became clear that Freestyle wasn’t the new disco, and never really found a home in Europe.

Was it simply unfortunate timing? Or was something else going on? The deeper I dug into Domino Dancing, the more fascinating the story became.

Why On Earth Freestyle?

One thing kept nagging at me while researching this. If Introspective was built around six extended dance tracks, why open the campaign with Domino Dancing? It wasn’t the obvious choice.

The song was steeped in Latin Freestyle, a style that had become hugely popular on (some) American dance floors but was already showing signs that it might struggle to break into the mainstream. Even EMI had warned the Pet Shop Boys that it wasn’t the ideal choice if they wanted another major American hit.

And they weren’t entirely wrong.

The single still became a respectable success in Europe, reaching No. 7 in both the UK and the Benelux, but in the United States it only just scraped into the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. It would also become their final Top 40 pop hit across the Atlantic. Looking back, it’s easy to conclude they simply chose the wrong single.

Personally, I think that’s much too simplistic.

Because if you study Introspective as an album, you quickly realise the Pet Shop Boys weren’t chasing the charts as much as they were documenting what was happening on dancefloors around them.

Look at the track listing: Eurodance, House, Synth-pop & Latin Freestyle. It’s almost as if they’d built a snapshot of club culture in 1988. And suddenly Domino Dancing makes perfect sense.

The Miami Connection

The choice of Freestyle wasn’t nearly as unexpected as it first appears. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe had been following American club music closely for years. They were huge admirers of Exposé, one of the biggest Freestyle acts in America and one of the few to successfully cross over from the dance charts to mainstream pop.

Behind Exposé stood producer Lewis Martineé, one of the architects of the Miami Freestyle sound. The Pet Shop Boys wanted him. And remarkably, they got him.

Martineé later recalled that the request came completely out of the blue when Parlophone (the PSB record company) contacted him to ask if he’d be interested in producing a song for the band.

His answer?

Absolutely.

In fact, he later joked that he would’ve done it for free. 😁

There’s another detail I hadn’t fully appreciated until now. Domino Dancing wasn’t actually their first flirtation with Freestyle. Far from it. The Pet Shop Boys had been borrowing from Latin rhythms and American club music for quite some time.

Go back to Disco and you’ll hear it already. Arthur Baker’s remix of In The Night. The Latin Rascals’ spectacular reconstruction of Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money). Both are firmly rooted in the same musical vocabulary.

So travelling to Miami to work with Martineé wasn’t a sudden change of direction. It was the logical next step.

Why It Doesn’t Quite Sound Like Freestyle

This is probably the discovery that surprised me most. For years I’d wondered why Domino Dancing always sounded like Freestyle without ever completely being Freestyle. There’s something that felt different.

If you’ve spent enough evenings listening to Shannon, Exposé, Stevie B, Company B or Pretty Poison, your ears immediately notice it. The tempo.

Traditional Freestyle usually sits around 118 BPM. Domino Dancing cruises along at roughly 108 BPM. Ten beats per minute doesn’t sound like much on paper. On a dancefloor, it changes everything.

But the explanation is simple. Lewis Martineé wasn’t building a Freestyle record from scratch. By the time the Pet Shop Boys arrived in Miami, the song already existed.

They had written the melody, finished the lyrics and created the structure. So Martineé’s job wasn’t to compose a Freestyle song. He just had to add the Freestyle elements And that’s exactly why it works so beautifully.

Underneath all those Latin percussion patterns and syncopated rhythms sits an unmistakably Pet Shop Boys pop song. Or perhaps it’s the other way round. A dance record cleverly disguised as pop. And the more I listened to it, the more I realised that perfectly sums up their entire career.

What Was Domino Dancing Really About?

The song itself has generated plenty of discussion over the years. And if you spend enough time reading about the Pet Shop Boys, you’ll quickly stumble across one recurring question.

Was Domino Dancing simply a song about jealousy? Or was there something else going on beneath the surface?

Neil Tennant has always given a wonderfully down-to-earth explanation. The title, he said, came from a holiday on the Caribbean island of St Lucia. Apparently there wasn’t much to do in the evenings except play dominoes. One of their friends kept winning and every victory was celebrated with an exuberant little dance.

Hence...

Domino Dancing.

As unlikely as that sounds, it perfectly fits the Pet Shop Boys’ sense of humour. On the surface, the lyrics tell a fairly straightforward story. The main character is in a relationship with someone everyone else desires. The jealousy slowly destroys what the main character is trying to protect. Push one domino....and eventually they all fall.

Simple enough.

Except that, with the Pet Shop Boys, things are rarely quite that simple. For years people have argued that the song, and particularly its video, carried a much stronger LGBTQ subtext than many listeners recognised at the time.

The lyrics are written from a first person view and they never indicate if the main character is male or female. And then there’s the video. It certainly didn’t discourage that reading, with its lingering shots of two impossibly beautiful young men and a visual language that was quite gay for mainstream pop in 1988.

Some commentators have even suggested that Domino Dancing marked the moment America turned its back on the Pet Shop Boys. I’ve never been entirely convinced.

The first question, whether the song contains LGBTQ coding, is actually quite an interesting one. The second? I’m much more sceptical. And that’s exactly what I’d like to explore in this week’s B-Side.

Did They Really Lose America?

One statistic completely changed the way I looked at this period. For years I’d heard people describe Domino Dancing as the beginning of the Pet Shop Boys’ American decline. On paper, that sounds convincing. It was their last Top 40 pop hit in the United States.So case closed.

Or was it?

Because if you stop looking at the pop charts and start looking at the dance charts... the picture changes completely. The Pet Shop Boys didn’t disappear from America at all. They simply continued their success somewhere else.

In fact, they became one of the most successful artists the American dance charts have ever seen.

Read that again.

Ever.

Only three artists have had more US Dance Chart success than the Pet Shop Boys. And all three are female solo artists. (Can you guess who they are? Answers in the comments please. 😁)

That also means they outperformed dance heavyweights such as Depeche Mode and New Order. Not exactly the career of a band that “lost America.” Their albums kept charting. Their American tours continued. Their audience remained remarkably loyal.

What changed wasn’t the audience.

It was the charts they appeared in.

Pop Was Changing, Dance Was Too

Personally, I think the explanation is much simpler. By 1988 the Pet Shop Boys had become more unapologetically European. More club-oriented and more interested in extended arrangements than radio edits.

Ironically, the very thing that makes Introspective such a landmark album may also have made it a little less obvious for American Top 40 radio. The album wasn’t built around singles. It was the singles that were built around the album. That’s a completely different philosophy.

One small detail has always fascinated me. The first two studio albums became major American successes. But Disco, despite containing many of their strongest club mixes, only reached No. 95.

I’ve often wondered how much of that was simply down to one word. Disco. Even in 1986 it still carried baggage in America that it simply didn’t have in Europe. And that irony is almost delicious. The album that celebrated the twelve-inch format also carried the one title that many Americans still weren’t quite ready to embrace.

The Story Didn’t End There

The relationship between the Pet Shop Boys and Latin music certainly didn’t end with Domino Dancing. Eight years later they returned to those influences on Bilingual, by which time Latin rhythms had become far more accepted on both sides of the Atlantic.

Looking back, Domino Dancing almost feels like a preview. Another example of the Pet Shop Boys arriving somewhere just a little earlier than everyone else. And Lewis Martineé benefited from the collaboration too.

One of the session’s backing vocal groups, The Voice In Fashion, would later sign with the Pet Shop Boys’ label and score a sizeable club hit with Only In The Night. Years later they even recorded their own version of Domino Dancing, a lovely little reminder of where that collaboration had started.

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

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

Share

🎁 B-Side,

IThere’s another fascinating part of this story that simply wouldn’t fit into one article.

So this Saturday, on the subscriber-only B-Side, I’ll be digging into three questions that kept coming back while researching this episode.

Did Domino Dancing really bring the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase to an end, or was that simply the moment the pop charts stopped understanding what they were doing?

Why did Latin Freestyle become such a huge phenomenon in the United States while Europe largely looked the other way?

And finally, how much LGBTQ coding was really hiding inside the Pet Shop Boys’ songs, and how differently were those lyrics understood in 1988?

The B-side is where we go deeper.

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

• a full year of B-sides

• access to 150+ deep dives

• future stories across genres

And yes, payment in beans is still impractical 😁

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

And now, it’s your turn:

Was Domino Dancing your introduction to the Pet Shop Boys?

Do you prefer the sleek pop perfection of Actually, or the club-first philosophy of Introspective?

And who do you think are the only three artists to have scored more US Dance Chart number ones than Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe?

I’m curious to read your thoughts.

So You Wanna Hear More ?

I thought you would !

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

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

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

Or on Youtube :

Next week we’ll start the CanCon month. The story of Disco’s second city and the records that shaped it.

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

Mix 1 — The Beats

Why Wasn’t Motown A Disco Label?

Confession time. Until I started researching this episode, I'd never actually asked myself this question. I'd accepted Motown wasn't a disco label in much the same way I'd accepted Belgium has terrible weather. It was just... true. Except, when you start looking at the catalogue, it suddenly isn't that simple.

Because if Motown made some of disco’s greatest records... why don’t we think of Motown as a disco label?

Mention disco labels and most collectors immediately reply with names like Salsoul, Casablanca, Prelude, West End or Philadelphia International. Motown rarely enters the conversation. Yet we’re talking about the label that gave us Love Hangover, Love Machine, Don’t Leave Me This Way and, of course, Got To Give It Up.

So what happened?

The simple answer is that Motown made disco records but it never really became a disco label.

Built for Hits

The difference might sound subtle, but I think it’s important. Berry Gordy had spent the 1960s building what was probably the greatest hit factory in popular music. Everything at Motown revolved around one objective: making records that could cross over to everybody. Black audiences, white audiences, radio, television, teenagers, even parents. If a song could conquer all of them, it was perfect for Motown.

And let’s not forget, Motown had always been dance music. Long before anyone had heard the word “disco”, people were dancing to Baby Love, I Can’t Help Myself and Stop! In The Name Of Love. Listen to those records today and you can already hear some of the ingredients disco would later adopt: the relentless beat, the strings, the tambourines, the hooks that refuse to leave your head.

Disco didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1975. It grew out of the legacy of what came before, and Motown was certainly part of it.

Then the Rules Changed

The problem was that disco wasn’t simply another musical style, it changed the business. Nightclubs suddenly mattered just as much as radio stations and DJs wanted six or eight minutes instead of three.

The twelve-inch single appeared. Tom Moulton started extending records, not because listeners asked for it, but because DJs did. That required labels to think differently.

Philadelphia International understood almost immediately what was happening. Salsoul practically built its entire identity around club culture. Casablanca threw itself at disco with all the subtlety of someone diving into a swimming pool.

Motown...didn’t. It simply carried on making excellent records And sometimes those records became disco classics almost by accident. It’s the story of a lot of R&B based disco.

Berry Gordy Had Other Plans

Read more

Sometimes you witness history without realising it!

One evening in the early eighties, me and a friend were sitting in Brussels’ biggest concert hall, watching Diana Ross perform. It wasn’t exactly a disco concert. More Las Vegas than Studio 54. The kind of show where you could happily bring your mum. Literally in our case, because both our mothers had j…

Read more

Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

🇨🇦 CanCon Month Begins, The Canadian Puzzle That Wouldn’t Leave Me Alone

One of the things I love most about writing The Twelve Inch is that every episode usually answers one question... and immediately raises three new ones. That’s exactly what happened here.

While researching Mylène Farmer, I kept coming back to the same thought.

How did ideas travel across the Atlantic before the internet?

Today a producer uploads a track and, minutes later, DJs on another continent can play it. Back then, it wasn’t remotely that simple. Yet somehow disco, Hi-NRG, synth-pop and countless production ideas kept bouncing between Europe and North America with remarkable speed.

The more I studied the history of dance music, the more I realised something fascinating. We often tell the story as if Europe and the United States were talking directly to each other. But what if there was a third player quietly helping that conversation along?

That’s where Canada enters the picture.

Or, more precisely...

Quebec and Montreal.

🌍 The Missing Bridge Across the Atlantic

To understand why Montreal became so important, we need to go back much further than disco. Back to the eighteenth century. After Britain defeated France in North America, political control changed hands.

Culture didn’t.

French never disappeared from Canada. Quite the opposite. Quebec developed into something unique. Not French. Not American.

Something in between.

You hear it immediately in the language.

Anyone from France will instantly recognise Québécois as French... but equally quickly realise it has evolved in its own direction. We understand each other perfectly well, but centuries of separate development have left their mark.

Culturally, though, Quebec never stopped looking east. Even after becoming part of Canada, it continued thinking of itself as belonging to the wider French-speaking world. That became even more pronounced after the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Instead of becoming more American, Quebec deliberately strengthened its cultural ties with France and Europe.

For someone researching dance music, that immediately rang alarm bells. Because if Europe and North America were exchanging musical ideas...

Quebec suddenly looked like a very convenient bridge.

💃 Then Add the Italians...

Another piece of the puzzle appeared when I started looking at immigration. Both Montreal and Toronto attracted large Italian communities after the Second World War. If you’ve been reading The Twelve Inch for a while, you’ll already know why that made me smile.

Italy.

France.

Canada.

New York.

Those four places keep appearing in disco history, almost as if someone secretly connected them with invisible string. And the deeper I dug, the less accidental those connections became.

No, Canada wasn’t the reason Eurodisco exploded after Saturday Night Fever. But I’m becoming increasingly convinced it was one of the most important gateways through which European music entered North America, and, just as importantly, American ideas travelled back across the Atlantic. Exactly the kind of two-way traffic that fascinates me.

Because dance music has always evolved through exchange rather than isolation.

📻 One Law That Changed Everything

Then I stumbled onto another piece of the puzzle.

Canada introduced regulations requiring radio stations to broadcast a significant percentage of Canadian music, the famous CanCon rules. At first glance it sounds like broadcasting policy. In reality, it became rocket fuel.

Once disco exploded, broadcasters suddenly needed Canadian dance records.

Lots of them.

The result?

Canada produced far more disco than most people realise.

Some records became international classics. Others barely travelled beyond provincial borders. Those forgotten releases are often the ones I enjoy discovering most. Which also raised another question.

What was happening outside Montreal?

What about Saskatchewan?

Manitoba?

Alberta?

British Columbia?

Finding reliable sources hasn’t been easy. Researching New York or London is almost luxurious by comparison. Researching seventies Canadian disco sometimes feels like archaeological fieldwork.

But that’s also part of the fun.

And I think we’ve uncovered enough to tell a story that, surprisingly, hasn’t really been told before.

🎧 Welcome to CanCon Month

So here’s what we’ll be exploring throughout August.

Episode One lays the foundations.

Why Montreal became such fertile ground for disco and why the Quiet Revolution matters far more than you might think.

Episode Two jumps into disco’s explosive growth around Saturday Night Fever.

Although Canada sat right next door to New York, its story unfolded very differently.

Episode Three looks at what happened after Disco Demolition Night.

Again, Canada’s experience turns out to be very different from that of its southern neighbour.

And then, on the final Friday of the month, we’ll jump forward in time.

Because while researching all of this, I discovered a wonderful connection between a Canadian band and a uniquely Belgian dance movement that would eventually conquer Europe.

I can’t wait to tell you that story.

I genuinely believe this series will change the way many of us look at dance music history.

At least...

It certainly changed mine.

🚪 Join Me for the Journey

This series has become far bigger than I originally imagined.

The deeper I dug, the more I realised that Canada isn’t a footnote in dance music history. It’s one of its missing chapters.

Over the coming weeks we’ll travel from Montreal to Toronto and far beyond, discovering forgotten labels, DJs, producers, clubs and records that helped shape dance music on both sides of the Atlantic.

Every Friday, the A-Side will spotlight a classic Canadian twelve-inch.

Every B-Side will continue the larger story, connecting the dots that rarely appear in the history books.

Because this is months of original research, the Canadian series will be available exclusively to paid subscribers.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is probably the perfect moment. I genuinely believe this will become one of the most rewarding series I’ve published on The Twelve Inch, and I’d love to have you along for the ride.

After all...

The best crate digs are always more fun when you discover them together.

🌍 Why Mylène Farmer Never Conquered the World, Not Even Canada

Here is the paradox at the heart of Mylène Farmer’s career.

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You know the type. The people whose knees go weak the moment they’re anywhere near a celebrity. Some of them get nervous just imagining it.

Bless them.

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

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

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

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

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

First things first.

My sincere apologies to everyone reading this somewhere in Europe.

I know.

It’s hot.🥵

I’m experiencing it myself as I write this.

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

And yet…

…here we are. 😁

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

I could easily have made a Top 50.

Probably a Top 100.

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

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

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

Let’s drop the needle…

💋 It All Starts With Donna

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

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

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

The seventies really were… different. 😁

❤️ Barry White Didn’t Need To Shout

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

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

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

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

😏 Some People Didn’t Need To Pretend

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

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

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

🔥 Ben Liebrand Turned Up The Temperature

Track four is another familiar friend to regular readers.

Poussez!’s Come On And Do It.

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

An understandable production decision, obviously… 😁

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

Whoever she was…

She fully understood the assignment.

🧴 Unlimited Supplies

One of my personal favourites comes next.

Slick’s Sexy Cream.

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

As for the cream…

Well…

It isn’t something you buy at the chemist.

Nor does it come in a handy tube.

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

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

😂 Barbara Markay Doesn’t Believe In Euphemisms

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

Barbara Markay clearly had no patience for any of that.

No beating around the bush”.

Or indeed “in the bush”.

As she sings:

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

Well…

Fair point. 😁

🙈 Beyond Hope

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

I know.

Difficult to understand. 🤔

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

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

🌈 Cruising After Dark

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

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

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

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

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

🤭 Arthur Russell Wasn’t Exactly Being Subtle

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

When your lyrics include:

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

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

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

Thank goodness.

🚗 We All Know What Grace Was Talking About…

We finish where elegance meets innuendo.

Grace Jones.

Pull Up To The Bumper.

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

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

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

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

🪩 Enjoy… Responsibly

So there you have it.

Ten records that demonstrate just how enthusiastically disco pushed boundaries.

Or perhaps…

…how enthusiastically disco pushed, full stop. 😁

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

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

I was brought up not to ask awkward questions.

And I’m certainly not going to start now.

Whatever your plans…

Enjoy.

Listen to it HERE

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

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

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

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

• Sexy Cream (Slick)

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

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

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

• Groove Me (Fern Kinney)

• Pull Up To The Bumper (Grace Jones)

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

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

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Welcome to the B-side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musique simply opens the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Mix 1 — The Beats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🥁 Sex Was Already Everywhere

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

It didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

So disco didn’t invent musical sexuality.

It changed where that sexuality lived.

And that’s a much bigger story.

🌈 The Dancefloor Became A Liberated Zone

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the world disco was born into.

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

And yes… Of sex.

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

💊 Music, Drugs and Freedom

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

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

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

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

It was creating a better one.

💃 It Wasn’t Just A Gay Revolution

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

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

By 1978, disco had become much more than music. It was a cultural phenomenon, a way of life, and according to its critics, everything that was supposedly wrong with modern society. It …

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

Some stories are simply too small to justi…

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Welcome to the B-side.

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

The parts of the story that don’t always make it into the main piece. The details behind the sound. The personal notes. And the versions that…

Read more