Disco Fever

This is a companion piece to a similarly-themed article on Pete’s site which, all things being equal, should be published at roughly the same time.

I like a good boogie as much as the next nearly-40-year-old, although it is quite some time since I have so much as considered the idea of stepping on to a dance floor. I am handicapped by a bit of an inability to dance, made worse by the fact that Pete is a really very good dancer, so I look like a wooden scarecrow beside him. I usually try to make myself very small so that people don’t notice me and only look at him. I am a very self-conscious dancer.

Except when I’m drunk. And preferably also at least 15 years younger than I am now. And not wearing ridiculous shoes, although actually it’s a very long time since that has happened, too. This blog is not what it used to be, is it? In fact, when I first started going to discos (not counting school discos, which didn’t count), I always danced barefoot. Then I realised that dancefloors are both sticky and covered with broken glass, and other people’s feet really hurt when you have no shoes on, so I put that pretension aside.

As far as disco music is concerned, there are phases of my life that can be briefly categorised by the songs that would get me on to the dance floor. As a teenager, it would have been The Timewarp. I am not ashamed to admit it. There were other songs with actions, too, but I am ashamed to admit to those. In later years, when my tastes became more mature and sophisticated, it was Loveshack or Dancing Queen.

Which brings me, eventually, to mentioning one of the songs on the Disco Playlist: I Will Survive. When I first looked at this week’s playlist, I assumed that this one would be my favourite. Unfortunately the version provided by Pete was a long live version with too much blah at the end, and I didn’t enjoy it much, which is a shame because we surely have the original on file. Shiny Tight Stuff covered it, for goodness sake. This song was of course one of the anthems of my youth, for what student in her early twenties has not been convinced at some point that she could never live without him by her side, when of course she’s actually much better off. Anyway. I quite like to sing it, very loud.

For the most part, though, ten disco songs back to back is just too much. They are not sufficiently varied to hold my interest, although I don’t dislike listening to them. They don’t seem to go anywhere, and I like a song with a destination of some sort.

The one exception, and I fully expect Pete to bang on about this one too (we do talk, you know), is Don’t Leave Me This Way, in its original form, by Thelma Houston. Of course I didn’t know it wasn’t original to The Communards, but I was pleasantly pleased to hear another version of a song I already liked, and find it to be better. This is certainly this week’s winner.

Next week: Natalie Merchant and the 10,000 Maniacs. Whoever she is.