⚡️High Energy: How Evelyn Thomas & Ian Levine Created the Anthem That Defined Hi-NRG — Without Fully Being Hi-NRG Themselves (Part 2)
The Twelve Inch 193 : High Energy (Evelyn Thomas) part 2
1983–1984 was a pivotal period in my life. It was when I came out, something I had always considered “late” at 20 or 21, the result of years of quiet building in my personal life. That was certainly part of it, but I only realised much later that the music of that era also played a huge role in pushing me forward.
1983 was the year friends took me to my first gay bar in Antwerp. Very quickly, the weekend nightlife became my natural habitat. Whatever secrecy I’d held onto at home dissolved almost instantly. Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” became my daytime soundtrack. But at night, the soundtrack shifted: Evelyn Thomas’s “High Energy” was everywhere.
I was never a huge fan of the track itself. I understood its power, and I danced to it, but it always felt a bit too plasticky, too loud, too abrasive for my taste. That pretty much sums up my lifelong “relationship” with the genre it helped usher in: Hi-NRG. I liked the energy of it, and some of my favourite ’80s dance tracks are often labelled Hi-NRG classics. But I never loved it the way I loved disco.
Still, Hi-NRG is crucial to the story of dance music.
⚡️High Energy: Evelyn Thomas, Ian Levine & the Birth of Hi-NRG — Part 1
You’d think a song called “High Energy” would be easy to label. But it really isn’t. At roughly 120 BPM, it barely meets the usual definition of Hi-NRG. I know that’s a minority opinion, but it’s true. Still, the track became one of the biggest and most influential dance records of the mid-eighties. It was part of the remarkable year
In Part 1, I introduced the key players, broke down the genre’s characteristics, and traced its surprising origins, not in New York, but in San Francisco. That’s where we left the story, right as AIDS began devastating the scene and taking away many of its brightest innovators.
Today, I’ll pick up from there and explain why I believe “High Energy” isn’t necessarily a Hi-NRG track at all. I’ll also explore why it sounds so much like Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” and how the UK and Italy became the next major hubs for Hi-NRG and early-80s electronic dance music.
Let’s dive in.
👋 Welcome, I’m Pe Dupre, thanks for stopping by.
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🇬🇧 How It Crossed to the UK
The devastation of AIDS in San Francisco didn’t just reshape lives, it also shifted where the music would grow next. As the crisis reshaped daily life for those who were ill or dying, the evolution of the San Francisco sound was carried forward and expanded by musicians in Europe, especially in Britain and Italy, where infection rates wouldn’t peak until years later.
Europe became the new incubator. Producers in Britain and Italy absorbed the foundations of the San Francisco sound and reshaped it. This was the perfect opening for entrepreneurial figures like Ian Levine, and later Stock Aitken Waterman. When Hi-NRG crossed the Atlantic, it became sleeker, more theatrical, and more pop-driven.
Levine himself struggled to pin down a precise definition. He famously said Hi-NRG was “...very hard to define. As long as it has a fairly fast rhythm - something between 120 and 140 beats per minute - it has the potential. But it’s also the consistency of the beat, and what I call the concept of light and shade; to be exciting the record has to build up to peaks where everything is playing at once, and then drop down to areas where it’s not, as if the floor had suddenly dropped away from under you.”
He also described his evolution as a producer in vivid detail:
“I went through two phases as a producer” explains Levine, “one in the ‘70s where I was producing a lot of orchestral disco records with big string sections, and then, after a four-year gap in 1983 I made ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’ which sold two million. My idea for this in 1983 was to use the best technology available at the time to create an authentic disco record, using electronics, but not to sound like Giorgio Moroder”
The UK effectively built the second wave of Hi-NRG, and one of its turning points was the huge success of Evelyn Thomas and the track that would permanently name the genre. But there’s a twist: Thomas wasn’t originally meant to sing it. She later recalled, “High Energy was a leftover song. It was offered to a number of singers and nobody wanted it. That’s why I got It”
⚡️High Energy: The Not-Actually-Hi-NRG Hi-NRG Anthem
“High Energy” is a relentless record, pounding, mechanical, and built for the backroom at full tilt. It drives forward with a single, machine-like momentum, almost like a musical production line. The effect is immediate and physical, echoing that familiar rush when the amyl hits just as Evelyn Thomas lifts into her highest notes. For a moment, Evelyn is your inner voice, your encouragement pushing you onward.
And here’s the twist most people forget:
“High Energy” runs at about 120 BPM, slow for Hi-NRG.
So why is it considered one of the genre’s defining records?
Critics usually point to how the track is built, not its tempo: the relentless octave-jumping bassline, the laser-focused synth arpeggios (a young Hans Zimmer programmed them), the voltage-like melodic stabs, the wall-of-sound vocals, and the tense, rising arrangement that keeps tightening the emotional screws.
Hi-NRG was never just about speed. It was about emotional intensity, the sense that the dancefloor could lift off at any moment. “High Energy” delivered that feeling in full.
That said, I still see a distinction between Italo disco, the slower, electronic European sound of the early eighties, and Hi-NRG proper, which for me usually starts at 125 BPM and above. Italo tends to run slower, even though many of its artists and tracks appear on Hi-NRG lists because they share similar elements or were staples of early-eighties dancefloors.
You’ll hear the difference in this week’s mixtape, which leans heavily toward Italo—even if many of those tracks often get labelled Hi-NRG for exactly the reasons above.
🎛 Why It Feels Like “Relax” — And Why That Matters
And then there are the similarities between “High Energy” (1984) and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” (1983). Both sit in a comparable tempo range, both lean on a relentless four-on-the-floor kick, and both are built around a heavily compressed, syncopated synth-bass line, the kind of sound that was becoming standard in 1983, 84 club productions. They share that unmistakable sense of forward thrust.
None of this was accidental.
Studios across Europe were working with the same tools: LinnDrum presets, early digital sequencers, and the new generation of polyphonic synths. The results often overlapped.
In other words, Hi-NRG, synthpop, and Italo were all drawing from the same DNA.
There’s another connection that rarely gets mentioned:
“Relax” had become a staple in gay clubs worldwide just before “High Energy” arrived. Hi-NRG was growing out of that same nightlife ecosystem. Both tracks appealed to dancers craving tension, release, theatricality, and sheer power.
If “Relax” was the flirtation, “High Energy” was the full voltage. And its timing, landing just after the global success of Frankie’s hit, was almost certainly a major inspiration for the Evelyn Thomas track.
🚦The Massive success and Why Their Collaboration Ended
“High Energy” became a massive international success. It dominated dancefloors everywhere, spending 11 weeks at number one on the Record Mirror Hi-NRG Club Chart. In June, it reached number five in the UK, in the very same week that “Two Tribes” entered at number one and “Smalltown Boy” surged into the top five, a remarkable moment for queer-coded dance music. Across Europe it hit the Top 10, including a multi-week run at number one in Germany (the Germans clearly didn’t get the gay-connection memo 😂). In the US it topped the Billboard Dance Chart, though it didn’t cross over to the mainstream Billboard charts, no surprise there.
In total, seven million copies were sold.
For Ian Levine, it was his second major Hi-NRG breakthrough, following the two million copies sold of Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time.” He kept the momentum going with a relentless stream of Hi-NRG productions. Some crossed into the charts; most lived primarily in the clubs. As Levine later put it, “My sound is a fusion of ‘60s Motown, ‘70s Philly, late ‘70s disco in a Donna Summer vein and ‘80s electronics all rolled into one, always relying on strong backing vocals and a good strong hook. It’s down to formula and sound - the sound has certainly worked for me”
Evelyn Thomas, meanwhile, wanted broader opportunities and a chance at mainstream visibility. That meant new collaborators, and her path began to diverge from Levine’s.
And then comes the hard part. In several interviews, Thomas claimed she never received her share of the record’s success. “That’s Ian Levine, making all the deals. Nobody knows anything. I’m going to be honest with you here. I never got paid for ‘High Energy’.”
She explained that she only earned from performing the song live.
She never again reached the chart heights of “High Energy,” but she remained a club icon, especially within LGBTQ+ nightlife, where the song has never left rotation.
🌈 Disco’s Revenge, Pop’s Future
The importance of “High Energy” cannot be overstated. When the disco backlash hit, almost overnight, disco became a dirty word, something dismissed as shallow, hedonistic, and tied to identities that mainstream culture was eager to marginalise: gay men, Black audiences, women, and anyone seen as “less authentic” than the posturing of rock. The fallout was swift and brutal. Chic went from being the biggest act in America to struggling for relevance. TK Records, home to KC & the Sunshine Band, collapsed into bankruptcy. And the Bee Gees, who had dominated the charts on the back of Saturday Night Fever, were suddenly treated as cultural relics.
The irony is sharp: by trying to kill disco because of its queer associations, the backlash created the perfect vacuum for tracks like “I Feel Love” and “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” to escape the disco label entirely and lay the foundations for a new phenomenon: Hi-NRG.
As the 1980s unfolded, disco’s roots in gay nightlife became even more visible. The culture mutated, and the music evolved with it. Increasingly, records were made for gay audiences rather than simply borrowed from the mainstream. Early club charts were filled with Yazoo, Yello, Kid Creole, and a flood of Euro-disco imports. Hi-NRG became disco’s revenge, but also the future of pop, as the rise of Stock Aitken Waterman and the Pet Shop Boys would soon prove.
And the spirit of disco? It absolutely had the last laugh.
Hi-NRG wasn’t just disco reborn. It was even queerer.
Songs like “High Energy,” Hazell Dean’s “Searchin’,” Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time,” Divine’s “You Think You’re a Man,” and Earlene Bentley’s “Caught in the Act” all offered the same thing: escape. They created a world of fantasy, drama, desire, resilience, and humour, a way of imagining a bigger life when the world outside was hostile or unwelcoming.
By the mid-1980s, hi-NRG had jumped the club walls and stormed the pop charts. What began as a hybrid of disco, Northern Soul, Euro-disco, futurism, and pop became the soundtrack of nightclubs across the world. It was also the raw material that Stock Aitken Waterman lifted from the underground and transformed into chart-topping hits. You can hear its pulse in the productions of Shep Pettibone, John Luongo, Phil Harding, and many others.
Hi-NRG is the direct ancestor of acid house, rave, and everything that has lit up dancefloors for the last forty years, the peaks, the builds, and the rushes that keep people coming back.
And then came 1984: a year when subversion hit the mainstream with remarkable force. Some of the brightest queer artists, closeted pop stars, and global acts brought LGBTQ+ culture straight into the charts, sometimes openly, sometimes coded, always unmistakably present. You had Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bronski Beat as the era’s tentpoles, but also moments like Eartha Kitt’s “Where Is My Man?” and Gloria Gaynor’s “I Am What I Am” landing on Top of the Pops.
Suddenly, it all began to cohere: a hovering, rising visibility of gay culture, woven through the pop moment. Until then, artists like Boy George and Marc Almond played coy in interviews, “I just haven’t met the right girl yet”, but Bronski Beat and Frankie arrived with a new kind of clarity. Bronski Beat, especially, were out and unapologetic.
For many listeners, pop offered a three-minute window into another world, a place where difference wasn’t dangerous but liberating. And 1984 was overflowing with those windows.
Hi-NRG wasn’t just a genre.
It was a lifeline, a signpost, a revolt, a release.
📣 Call to Action
Now it’s your turn.
Where were you when you first heard High Energy?
Did it blast from a club speaker, a mixtape, a 12-inch, a TV performance?
Do you hear the connection to Relax?
Were you part of the Hi-NRG wave—or did you discover it years later?
Share your memories, your stories, your dancefloor anecdotes.
Let’s plug back into the voltage together. ⚡💿
Further reading (or should I say watching)
There are a number of interesting video’s/links :
So You Wanna Hear More ?
I thought you would !
It’s fun to write about music but let’s be honest. Music is made to listen to.
Every week, together with this newsletter, I release a 1 hour beatmix on Mixcloud and Soundcloud. I start with the discussed twelve inch and follow up with 10/15 songs from the same timeframe/genre. The ideal soundtrack for…. Well whatever you like to do when you listen to dance music.
Listen to the Soundtrack of this week’s post on MIXCLOUD
Or on Youtube :
So what’s in this week’s mix ?
You’d think a track called “High Energy” would launch me straight into an hour of pure mid-eighties Hi-NRG, but Evelyn Thomas’s song sits a little outside the norm with its lower-than-expected BPM. So after an opening stretch of mid-80s dance-pop, Kim Wilde, the Pet Shop Boys, even Chris Rea, we dive headfirst into a pure Italo set.
I start with some deeper cuts, but the second half turns into a parade of era-defining anthems: My Mine’s “Hypnotic Tango”, Klein & MBO’s “Dirty Talk”, Fun Fun’s “Happy Station”, and the Moses classic “We Just.”
Enjoy! 🎶
Next week I’ll be shining a light on a 1979 deep cut: “Que Tal America” by Two Man Sound. It’s a wonderfully odd track with a strong South American vibe, despite the fact that it actually comes from my home country.
Thanks for clarifying the High Energy/Relax connection. Both are great songs that are definitely steeped in the vibes produced during that era (when we were both going to gay bars at the same time, albeit in different countries!)
"Too plasticky, too loud, too abrasive", that sounds a bit like Levine himself! Like you, I like a good bit of Hi NRG, without being a massive fan of the genre. However, I've never been keen on Levine's productions. In a previous post, your advice to writers was write what you want, not what the audience expects. In contrast, Levine seemed incapable of giving the dancefloor anything other than what it expected to hear, which would have been tolerable if his productions hadn't all sounded like they were recorded in a toy shop, even when he was using top-end studios. I'm not surprised High Energy was rejected by a number of singers, the backing track sounds so thin and gimmick laden; Moroder it ain't, more's the pity. The fact the vocalists were treated with such lack of respect, at least financially, whilst not uncommon at the time only adds insult to injury. Hate to be so negative, but just telling it as I hear it. Right, I'm off to listen to Dead or Alive instead!