This brief opening chapter offers an overview of disco’s place among the many musical styles that have, over the last 300 years, provided music for dancing and entertainment in Britain’s cities, town and villages. It will establish definitions of ‘disco’ – as a place, as an event, as a musical genre – and will outline its creation, rise, fall and eventual resurrection. Finally, it will discuss my own disco music credentials, such as they are, and my experience of the early days of this highly entertaining musical movement.

The ‘discotheque’ didn’t arrive in Britain until the early 1960s, but nights out to the accompaniment of music for dancing have a much longer history. This chapter covers the period from the mid-eighteenth century until the arrival of the gramophone in the 1890s and begins with two popular venues that are the recognisable precursors of the disco: the Assembly Room and the Pleasure Garden. Both of these thrived in the eighteenth century, as the recently-formed Great Britain welcomed in the Georgian era, and offered entertainments to the middle- and upper-classes of society: the Assembly Rooms offered a formalised, well-chaperoned, environment while the Pleasure Gardens promised a more risqué night of fun. This chapter also explores the entertainments offered to members of the working class: the rural workers whose nights out in the back rooms of pubs offered song and dance by and for the local communities, and the customers of the less desirable ‘penny gaffes’ in the poorest areas of the industrial towns. The music was live, but in many other ways elements of these early musical entertainments are readily recognisable in the rise of the discotheque.

The gramophone, a machine for playing pre-recorded shellac discs, came to Britain in the 1890s and started to revolutionise the way in which people listened to and enjoyed music. At first, these machines were expensive and the range of available records was limited. Despite this, Daniel Moore was earning part of his living by dragging his gramophone from pub to pub and playing records for money in 1893, making him a possible contender for the title of Britain’s First Disc Jockey. This chapter charts the progress of the gramophone as it became Britain’s pre-eminent ‘musical instrument,’ bringing stars such as Caruso, Dame Nellie Melba and Harry Champion to homes across the land and, by the early years of the twentieth century, bringing gramophone concerts to the Royal Albert Hall, Madame Tussauds and the rooftops of Belfast. It ends during the Great War, when the portable gramophone known as the ‘Trench Decca’ brought music to the front-line troops on both sides and inspired a young army officer to eventually become the BBC’s first radio DJ.

The twentieth century emerged in a mood of misplaced optimism and brought with it new dances and new musics, including the Cake-walk and ragtime thanks to the sensational all-Black musical In Dahomey. Soon after, the Tango became both fashionable and scandalous, its seductive moves seen as inappropriate by many while loved by many others. Then jazz appeared, helping to lift post-war spirits alongside new dance crazes including the Tickle Toe. The new-fangled wireless brought top dance bands from glamorous London hotels into living rooms across the country and dancers filled the 11,000 nightclubs and dancehalls offering live music.

The end of the Great War saw the beginning of a great musical era – the Jazz Age. Jazz began to infiltrate the British social scene as the war drew to its end, but the arrival of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in April 1919 was the catalyst for the explosion of interest in this new, exciting, musical genre. Jazz was a music for dancing like no other and new dances such as the Charleston soon arrived in its wake. Gramophone and disc technology was improving year on year and the arrival of electrical recording in 1926 brought immediate improvements to sound quality, and forward-looking music lovers began holding “gramophone dances,” with recorded music at the heart of the fun, but for much of the 1920s live bands still ruled as jazz and swing came to dominate popular music for dancing. City nightclubs could be both glamorous and dangerous, with clienteles drawn from the nobility, big business, the arts and the criminal underworld, but they offered regular and well-paid work for the top bands of the day. Small town venues couldn’t compete for the big names, so they made the best of things with second-class combos and amateur ensembles, as long as they played music for dancing.

In 1922 the BBC began to broadcast on the wireless. At first, it used only live performances, but soon it was also broadcasting music from gramophone records and developing a mutually beneficial relationship with the gramophone industry. Early broadcasts of recorded music were staid and boring, until the BBC began to employ presenters who made their own choice of records and spoke about them enthusiastically on air. The first of these was Christopher Stone. By the mid-1920s Stone was presenting his own selection of musical recordings and some years later he would gain the title of The First Disc Jockey – a term imported from the USA in the late 1940s. Despite accusations that he was being bribed by record companies, Stone broadcast for many years and at the height of his fame he performed at the London Palladium, using a gramophone to show, among other things, how to play a disc backwards, making him an early example of the turntablist. Such a radical new approach to the machine was far from universally loved, however, and Stone’s stage career was short-lived. Christopher Stone was not immediately followed by a host of ‘personality presenters,’ so the first pirate radio broadcasters appeared, with the entertainment of their listeners high on their lists of priorities even if those listeners could be counted in dozens rather than hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, new commercial radio stations in mainland Europe broadcast dance music across the continent and the Dance Marathon came to Britain thanks to an Ashington dancehall manager.

The BBC’s wireless broadcasts may have made little effort to attract the nation’s youth, but there were plenty of other new media eager to do the job. Gramophone records let British fans hear what their musical heroes sounded like, but the movies let them see their favourites as well. Once those movies talked, a whole new world of dance and song opened up. Away from Britain’s biggest cities, it was the talking pictures that showed eager youngsters just how glamorous life could be, through movies starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or choreographed by Busby Berkley. If anyone needed reminding of how grey and drab life in Britain could be there were the films of George Formby and Gracie Fields, filled with dance and song on a different scale and far removed from the glamour of the American silver screen. New dance music stars arrived from the Caribbean, bandleaders made starring roles in British movies, lesser-known musicians struggled to find work or entered dance band contests. “Rock and Roll” arrived from an unlikely source, but once again, war loomed on the horizon.

The 1930s and 1940s saw another coming together of social, cultural and technological factors that would lead to the emergence of disco. As the Nazis took power, German teenagers danced in cellars to American music on gramophone records in defiance of Hitler, calling themselves the Swingjugend, growing their hair long and wearing clothes that aped the styles of their British counterparts. A year or two later French youth did the same in defiance of the Nazi occupation, the Zazous taking to suburban cellar bars to dance to their own favourite jazz and swing bands on record and calling themselves after the nonsense hipster language of performers like Cab Calloway. In Britain, the government recognised the benefits of music for people’s morale in factories and air-raid shelters and favoured the use of gramophones to deliver this music to the people as they huddled down to rest, or got up and danced. Musicians joined up and formed new dance combos, American forces entered the war and stars such as Glen Miller arrived in Britain.

After the USA entered the war, the US government produced V-discs, specially-recorded for circulation to American forces overseas. American troops in Britain were visited by young women with portable gramophones, travelling around in converted buses known as Clubmobiles. They organised dances to boost morale, partnering the troops and often playing V-Discs which were helpfully labelled with information about style and tempo. The Jitterbug craze scandalized some dancers, just as the Tango had a few decades earlier. The first star disc jockeys emerged in the USA and by the mid-1940s Britain’s first modern disc jockeys were gigging in clubs and pubs.

New groups of young people, new technology and cultural and social developments appeared in Britain in the period from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, a period that saw a shift from Establishment figures as fashion and cultural leaders to the rise of the young working class, who would become leaders in fashion and music once the discotheque arrived in Britain. Swing bands and live music still led the way at the beginning of the 1950s, but ‘Disc Jockey’ was one of the Words of the Year for 1951, ‘Teenagers’ was a word in common use by 1952, rationing ended in 1954 and at the same time Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls were combining a love of music and a love of Edwardian fashion to create one of Britain’s first recognisable youth sub-groups. As heavy, 10- or 12-inch shellac 78s gave way to light, easily transportable 7-inch vinyl discs the Dansette company started to produce a plastic-cased, easily transportable record player. Youth clubs and coffee bars gave youngsters places to meet and dance, often to music played on someone’s Dansette, or perhaps from a selection on a juke box. The music press introduced the Top Twenty to British fans, just as new pop music took over from the dance bands, and new TV shows gave viewers the chance to see as well as hear these new musicians.

The social and cultural upheavals of 1950s Britain were huge and irreversible, but at first the idea of the ‘discotheque’ was not part of them. They were on their way, however, thanks to developments in post-war France, where people built up collections of records and called them ‘discothèques.’ Within a few years the word ‘discothèque’ changed its meaning from a collection of gramophone records to a nightclub for dancing to recorded music. In Paris, the Whisky a Go Go and Chez Regine were two early examples of such nightclubs: a few years later, they would act as the model for Britain’s own discotheques. In New York, the Peppermint Lounge became high society’s favourite hangout and something called the Twist became its favourite dance. US armed forces personnel brought their favourite records to bases in far-flung corners of Britain, while in ports such as Liverpool sailors on transatlantic routes came home with their own selections of American discs.

The 1960s heralded a promise of a better life for people in Britain, thanks to the white heat of technology. Rock and roll lost much of its impetus but there was plenty of new music for dancing. The nightclubs of London’s West End seemed impossibly glamorous, but teenaged workers and schoolkids began to look elsewhere for inspiration about what to wear, what to listen to and how to dance. Much of this inspiration came from the USA. Rock and Roll may have faded, but American pop, soul and rhythm and blues records began to hit the British charts. Chubby Checker, an American singer, extolled the virtues of ‘twisting’ and suggested that teenagers twist again, but most British teens would be twisting for the first time. No partner was necessary before stepping on the dance floor, no complicated moves need be mastered. By 1962, a new London nightspot was called La Discotheque. La Discotheque was just the beginning. Two or three years later, London boasted discotheques such as Dolly’s, Scotch of St James’s and the Cromwellian Club and provincial cities and towns soon followed suit with clubs like Samson and Delilah’s, Club America – established to attract US service personnel on their days off – and the Blue Nile. Discos, at first promoted as exclusive new places for the nation’s hippest and most glamorous crowd, soon lost that sheen of faux-glamour and opened up to teens and twenty-somethings of all classes as they spread across Britain. TV and the movies struggled to keep up with these new musical trends, but soon scored hits with Ready, Steady, Go!, Top of the Pops and A Hard Day’s Night.

American artists could still draw a crowd in Britain, but soon much of the most fashionable and exciting pop music was heading in the other direction, from Britain to the States. As British pop music exploded across the world, back home the new breed of clubs for dancing drew not only on home-produced music but also on the latest soul, R&B and Motown from the USA. The post-war ‘Baby Boom’ led to a rise in the number of young people desperate for new entertainment, the growing economy gave them the money to spend, the entertainment industry was happy to open venues where they could spend it. DJs took up residence in venues across the country, while others carved out careers as mobile DJs, bringing the disco experience to temporary venues in small towns and villages. Live music remained popular, but the best DJs could draw bigger crowds than the covers bands that were playing their own versions of the hits. The BBC established Radio One, more new music publications appeared and in Ireland the Showbands took over the live dance music scene.

These new entertainment venues soon drew the attention of the authorities and the mainstream press. Soon after it opened, La Discotheque was accused of being the centre of London’s trade in amphetamines and a haven for runaways and other undesirable types. Perceptions of La Discotheque were soon being applied by a ‘shocked’ press to any other venue that offered the nation’s youth a place to dance to the new style of music: discos had barely arrived on British streets before they were being seen by some as a debauched threat to the moral and physical well-being of Britain’s youth, just like the Pleasure Gardens and Penny Gaffes before them. On the other hand, the fashionable set, including members of the Royal Family and the aristocracy, took the discotheque scene to its heart and mobile DJ setups arrived in their thousands, some run by minor aristocracy, others by apprentice electricians, all devoted to music for dancing.

Discos flourished for years before disco music arrived and even after disco music was on the scene other genres of music continued to be popular in the discos. It’s a confusing situation. Northern Soul’s adherents danced to a carefully-selected playlist of lost or obscure soul classics, but in the discotheques, soul, Motown, rhythm and blues and mainstream pop songs could all get people onto the dance floor. So, too, could the occasional glam rock track, novelty record and singalong song. A record that could fill the dancefloor of one club could empty the floor of another disco just a few miles away. DJs quickly learned how to ‘work the crowd’ to ensure that paying customers kept coming. Those customers in turn were conscious of what to wear for a night out, as looking right involved wearing the right clothes as well as demonstrating your dancing ability.

Discos flourished for years before disco music arrived and even after disco music was on the scene other genres of music continued to be popular in the discos. It’s a confusing situation. Northern Soul’s adherents danced to a carefully-selected playlist of lost or obscure soul classics, but in the discotheques, soul, Motown, rhythm and blues and mainstream pop songs could all get people onto the dance floor. So, too, could the occasional glam rock track, novelty record and singalong song. A record that could fill the dancefloor of one club could empty the floor of another disco just a few miles away. DJs quickly learned how to ‘work the crowd’ to ensure that paying customers kept coming. Then the idea of “disco music” as a new genre of dance music began to appear.

Disco music, a discrete genre of music drawing inspiration from soul, funk, R&B, pop and more, arrived in the early to mid-1970s when there were a claimed 35,000 DJs working in Britain. The debate about the first disco record – as a discernible genre of music, not merely as a record popular in discos – still rages, with one of the only points of agreement being that it came from the United States. Identifying the first disco record to come from the British scene is equally contentious, but it’s clear that producers, songwriters and performers based in the UK brought home-grown disco music to the clubs and turned British disco music into a globally-successful business. They include Biddu, Tina Charles, The Real Thing, Heatwave and others: some who carved long-term careers out of the disco scene, others who shot to fame with one dancefloor hit before disappearing once more.

Once the disco scene became popular, music publications started to publish disco music charts and columns aimed at fans of the new craze. Specialist trade publications appeared, targeting DJs and other disco professionals with news of the latest equipment, techniques and business deals. Often, the general Top 40 and the disco charts looked similar, at other times songs making it big on the disco charts failed to make the Top 40. There could be regional variations, too, with some songs proving to be smash hits in parts of the country, even in individual clubs, but making little impact elsewhere. The specialist press, and the disco columns of the more general interest music papers aimed at fans, show how varied the disco scene was across Britain, where Jimmy Shand and His Band or the Hokey Cokey could be disco hits, an experience at odds with the image of the disco scene in London and other big cities. Disc jockeys took inspiration from the American scene, as Beats Per Minute and complex segues became part and parcel of the DJ’s techniques.

At first, disco music was music for the younger generation, music for nights of dancing in discos and at parties, but it soon crossed over to the mainstream: to TV variety shows, movies, guest spots on daytime chat shows and articles in glossy, mass circulation, magazines and tabloid newspapers. It was, generally, family-friendly music that seemingly made no attempt to challenge the social status quo, played by performers who rarely demonstrated strong political views: a strong contrast to the parent-worrying prog rockers, glam rockers and punks that preceded or appeared alongside disco. Then, in1977, Saturday Night Fever became the ultimate disco showcase, bringing further popularity, along with controversy, to the British disco scene. Disco music was a hit across the generations, and the World Disco Dancing Championships took over prime-time TV.

Disco’s pre-eminence among music fans was relatively short-lived. In the USA, an aggressive ‘anti-disco’ movement grew up at the end of the 1970s, particularly among rock fans, effectively killing off the music as a major force in entertainment. There was no British equivalent of this movement, but in the UK disco’s acceptance by the mainstream did much to diminish its cultural credence and it was openly disdained by many of its early fans as songs such as ‘Disco Duck’ became dancefloor, and chart, hits, while popular entertainers such as The Two Ronnies, the Hee Bee Gee Bees and the ‘musical’ duo of Hylda Baker and Arthur Mullard satirised the scene. Economic and social problems caused their own difficulties as the 1970s progressed: disco music may have been a diversion from these problems, but unemployment and crime kept people away from the venues. Disco fell from the pop charts, making way for new dance-oriented musics with a cooler reputation.

You can’t keep a good music down. Disco may have lost its cool, but not its popularity. Forty-five years after Saturday Night Fever, ageing and balding men still bring their inner John Travolta to party dancefloors; the greatest hits of Abba, Chic and Sister Sledge still get people dancing (as do “The Birdie Song” and, from time to time, “Disco Duck”); and even modern teenagers know the actions to perform when the DJ puts on The Hues Corporation’s disco smash, ‘Rock the Boat.’ Disco is very much alive in 2020s Britain, as interviews with those involved in the current scene as fans, DJs and performers will testify.