Four on the floor
Disco's engine is a bass drum on every single beat, four to the bar, as steady as a heartbeat, with the hi-hat opening up in the gaps between. Over the top go strings, brass, a soaring FALSETTO and a BASSLINE that walks up and down instead of sitting still. It was music engineered for one job: keeping a DANCEFLOOR full.
The records grew to match the dancing. In the mid-1970s engineers began cutting singles onto twelve-inch VINYL, the size used for albums, which gave each song room for a longer, louder groove — so a three-minute radio song became an eight-minute mix that a DJ could stretch out.
That thump outlived the fashion. It is the same pulse under house, techno and a great deal of the pop playing in shops today.
The night they blew up the records
In July 1979 a Chicago radio DJ ran an anti-disco stunt at a baseball stadium: bring a disco record, get in for 98 cents, and watch the records be blown up in a crate between the two games. Tens of thousands turned up, the explosion tore a hole in the pitch, thousands of people ran onto the field and the second game had to be abandoned.
It was presented as a joke about a musical style, though plenty of people then and since have pointed out whose music was in that crate. Disco had grown out of clubs where Black, Latino and gay dancers were welcome at a time when many places would not have them. The word 'disco' vanished from record labels almost overnight; the records themselves carried on, relabelled as dance music.
Turned away at the door
The band Chic wrote their biggest hit after being refused entry to Studio 54 on New Year's Eve in 1977, despite having been invited. They went back to an apartment, played furiously, and turned the phrase they had been muttering about the doormen into a chorus. Tidied up for radio, it became 'Le Freak' and sold in millions.
The clubs were half the appeal: the SEQUIN, the PLATFORM shoes, the FLARES and the SHIMMER thrown around the room by a MIRROR BALL. Those spinning balls were not a seventies invention either — ballrooms were hanging them half a century earlier. The dancing had its own hits, too: 'The Hustle', named after the partner dance everyone was learning, went to number one in 1975.
The record that pointed at the future
In 1977 Donna Summer and the producer Giorgio Moroder released 'I Feel Love', a disco track with no band on it at all: the entire backing was made on a synthesiser. Musicians heard it and realised dance music would not always need drummers and string sections. Brian Eno reportedly ran into a studio to tell David Bowie he had just heard the sound of the future, and he was not far wrong — our electronic puzzle picks up the story.
Disco's other legacy is the DJ. Mixing one record into the next so the dancing never stops was worked out on these dancefloors, and every club night since has been built on it.