Saturday Night Forever: Story of Disco Book

With Saturday Night Fever installed at the London Palladium, disco is now officially kitsch: a tired mélange of wide collars, wider flares, rote line-dancing and Bee Gee falsetto. Wrong, say Jones and Kantonen. For them, disco was the expression of the 1970s oppressed people: the gays, Latinos, blacks and working-class women and men who saw in it a brief moment of weekend escapism, or a route to personal success and wealth. Thankfully they don¹t push the sociology too far. Saturday Night Forever is a book of passionate memories which summons up an almost-forgotten world of real disco-- not the anaemic populist version. Jones and Kantonen are men who spent half their lives in discotheques, the other half in specialist record shops, and who know their 12-inchers and their obscure labels inside out. Their classic discs are epics of overblown, faux-orchestral, high-BPM melodrama, entire LPs given over to one or two tracks. One regret is that there is no discography to encourage newly converted disco trainspotters to track down these mouthwatering morsels. But, for all their expertise, Jones and Kantonen never lose sight of the fact that disco's strength lay in its knowing, mischievous and fabulous camp. These are men who believe in mirrorballs. --Alan StewartRead More