In the mid-70s, Alan Jones was performing a particularly exquisite balancing act. A habitué both of Vivienne Westwood’s London boutique Sex and the gay clubs, he was on the frontline of two seemingly opposed cultures: punk and disco. Each camp might have thought the other completely incomprehensible – tuneless noise or vacuous hedonism – but for him it was quite natural: as he says, “They blended together in my mind. It was all about going out and having a good time; the music was interchangeable. And once Vivienne began her fetish clothing lines, it fitted both arenas.”
Nevertheless, there were pinch points. In April 1976, Jones DJed for the Sex Pistols when they played a Soho strip club, El Paradise. Arriving with his “new best friend” John Paul Getty III – fresh from his kidnapping in Italy – Jones decided on a disco set.
When this “cleared the scruffy dancefloor”, he tried another tack – kitsch: Julie Andrews singing Thoroughly Modern Millie. When Johnny Rotten reached over and tore the record off the deck, Jones retaliated with the Tubes’ White Punks on Dope, played four times in succession. He was not asked back.
These and other subcultural adventures are explored in Jones’s new large-format book, Discomania: Fantastic Beats and Where to Find Them. It’s a thoroughgoing pictorial compendium of the disco aesthetic centred around disco movies: Jones has worked as a film critic since the late 70s. For those seeking an education in this fabulous but much maligned form, look no further: Jones interweaves discussions of disco labels, disco divas, disco books (including Andrew Holleran’s peerless Dancer from the Dance), disco clubs and disco producers, from Giorgio Moroder to Alec Costandinos and Boris Midney.
As well as the history of a much maligned but still highly relevant musical form, Jones reveals under-explored elements of the period’s gay lifestyle: out singers such as Chris Robison (who toured with the New York Dolls), cheap flights to New York, the relationship between the Gay Liberation Front and disco drugs, and the London club merry-go-round: Bang on Monday, the Sombrero on Tuesday, Glades on Wednesday, Napoleon’s on Thursday, Adam’s on Friday and The Embassy on the weekend.
Above all, Discomania is the story of a courageous, outrageous gay man who found himself at the centre of a fascinating moment in pop culture. It’s a fan’s book, and the enthusiasm is generous and contagious. As Jones writes, “The 1970s was one long party for me. It was an era of discovery, of becoming visible for the very first time, of devil-may-care pleasure-seeking and of the most memorable music moment of my life. The disco boom arrived on the club scene just as I did and the two of us fused together as one.”
Jones moved from Portsmouth to London as a teenager in 1969. He quickly found work in retail: a stint in the Great Gear Trading Company was followed by a revelation when he found Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop at 430 Kings Road, then called Let It Rock. “I first went there in late 1971; Let It Rock had only been open a few months. If you were a fashion victim, Kings Road was the place to be on a Saturday, and I would trawl all the shops endlessly. Many didn’t go round the sudden bend of the road into World’s End, but I did and never looked back.”
By 1974, Jones was working in Let It Rock as it changed into Sex. As a fearless broadcaster of the shop’s designs, he was involved in memorable incidents such as his August 1975 arrest for wearing Westwood’s infamous cowboy T-shirt – featuring two half-naked cowboys with penises almost touching – in Piccadilly Circus, and a notorious June 1976 fashion shoot for Forum, the sex magazine, which included the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, Danielle Lewis, Chrissie Hynde, Jordan and Westwood. Jones wore a T-shirt which proclaimed PERV in chicken bones.
At the same time, Jones was working in the Portobello Hotel, which he calls “a mega-celebrity watering hole: I partied with everyone from Abba and David Bowie to Queen and Jack Nicholson.” He also met the science fiction author Harlan Ellison, who encouraged him on his long career as a cult and mainstream film reviewer. “I did a lot of night shifts,” Jones remembers, “and seemingly needed no sleep – I juggled it with Sex and pulled in two salaries. I was never home. I was either working, clubbing or out on either scene.”
Beyond the early stirrings of punk, Jones’s big revelation was hearing Love’s Theme by Love Unlimited Orchestra on a visit to Los Angeles in late 1973. In his narrative, this coincides with a very early disco film, the blaxploitation gangster film The Mack, with an excellent soundtrack – released on Motown – by Willie Mack. Combined with the music that he heard in Earl’s Court gay clubs such as the Masquerade and the Catacombs, Jones had discovered his tribe and his lifelong obsession.
“Disco is so important to me because it was emerging as a musical form just as I was surfacing into an exciting new world,” Jones writes, and Discomania follows the incredible, inexorable rise of the genre. It originated in underground New York gay, black and Latino clubs such as David Mancuso’s The Loft and Nicky Siano’s The Gallery. After Rolling Stone writer Vince Aletti caught the rising tide with an article headlined Discotheque Rock ’72: Paaaaarty!, the wave broke in 1974 and early 1975, as US No 1s by Love Unlimited Orchestra, MFSB, George McCrae, the Hues Corporation, Barry White and Labelle attracted mainstream music industry acknowledgement and defined the form as disco.
As Jones makes clear, LGBTQ+ people were “one of the minority forces” behind the early days of disco. By 1975 and 1976, the sound was finding its place in UK gay clubs, reflecting the purchasing power of the “pink pound” and providing the soundtrack to an era of greater gay exposure. Jones depicts a whirligig of pleasure: “Every night meant a different location, but usually the same crowd – friends who only existed as such in the smoke-filled haze under the kaleidoscopic light show.”
High summer 1977 saw disco’s full flourishing, with euro and electronic disco combining in the era’s outstanding record, I Feel Love by Donna Summer. Its gay appeal is summed up by Jones as “the fantasy element of it all, the diva/goddess appeal of the artists. Swap Judy, Shirley and Liza in concert for Donna, Gloria and Grace in the more accessible nightclub and you can easily signal your devotion on the dancefloor. The pretty, singalong melodies, the opportunity to add your own chants and the communal show-off element – always a gay thing.”
LGBTQ+ people were also involved in the early days of punk – with fans such as Berlin Bromley, who hung out with Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol, and venues like the lesbian club Louise. And yet they stayed away from disco and the associated gay clubs.
“Punks never thought disco was relevant in the same way their preferred genre was,” Jones suggests. “Not that I ever got into any arguments over it or anything.” His habit of straddling the two cultures ended with the June 1977 Sex Pistols boat trip, which descended into fights and multiple arrests: “That was the turning point for me. It was getting really violent. Disco was more me, and I just moved straight into that.”
For Jones, the high point of his disco experience came in late 1977, when he attended the Star Wars preview – “followed by the celebrity afterparty, and then dancing all night to the Meco disco version of the soundtrack on the day my first features were published in Cinefantastique magazine. The confluence of all my lives merging was just so incredible and thrilling. I can remember every second of that night!”
In 1978, disco became a full-blown cultural monolith in the US thanks to Saturday Night Fever. By this time the music had become completely codified but, at its hypnotic best, it offered a synthesis of hedonism, fantasy, otherworldliness (all those records about space), movement and sex (tracks like Joe Thomas’s Plato’s Retreat and Paul Jabara’s Pleasure Island, an ode to the gay village on New York’s Fire Island). It also, with the success of totally out LGTBQ+ performers such as Sylvester, brought a new visibility to gay people and gay culture.
Jones makes a good case for the persistence of the genre after the 1979 crash – the year of the infamous Disco Demolition Night, in which a crate of disco records was blown up on a baseball field in Illinois. It might have shed its terminology, but the form continued in the new wave crossover and what would be called hi-energy and Italo-disco, and then house in the late 80s. As Jones says, “If you can dance to it, it’s disco.” The book traces disco’s long tail right into the 21st century, with films such as Milk (the biopic of the gay politician from San Francisco whose rise paralleled that of disco and marked a high point of gay visibility), camp comedies like Poltergay and 2018’s Studio 54 documentary.
Why does Jones think it endures? “Because it can sum up a time and place so quickly,” he says. “Look at all the current movies and commercials using Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, I Feel Love, Born to Be Alive. I always knew disco would endure, and 50 years on it shows no sign of disappearing, because for the most part the songs and singers were top quality.”
• Discomania: Fantastic Beats and Where to Find Them is published by Fab Press
