Also, for some reason I've never been able to decide upon my local commercial station (there was a total of one, TNQ7) showed avant-fare like John Cassavettes' Husbands, Antonioni's Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, Five Easy Pieces with all the swearing and a host of other pawnshop films as the midweek movie on prime time. It made the end of year's Star Wars look like a tray of soggy lamingtons.
We had it easy then, though, in that the battlelines were clearly discernable. By the end of the year it was impossible to ignore allegiances to punk and its diasporic waves and the big fat sleepy mainstream. The enemy of all who lined up with the anti-ranks of punk was disco, declaimed as the mindless Mammon of culture as sharply definable as a 10 year old defines the other sex as anathema. It was us against disco.
We were wrong about that, though. While punk was good in small nervous groups where its might felt like pure energy, disco wasn't just mainstream it was the leader of the mating dance. All the yobs we sniggered at with their John Travolta white flares and medallions were getting it in both senses. We had to make do with the everlasting warmth of cultural superiority. Such delights as I was able to glean in begrudging emulation of the disco alphas came to me later when my elder sib dragged me away from school parties to the university bashes they went to. Even in my studied disdain, though, I never suspected that there might be just as horrifying a pecking order at the disco as there was in the oval or any other scene of human commerce. Nevertheless...
Disco was easily identified on the street. It wore glitter and green feather boas, flares wider than Ross River Road and walked a big bouncing strut to a stiff and steady four on the floor drummer and overgrown bassline. All the harmony seemed to be in the major but when minor chords came in they seemed somehow gutted of their darkness. That was the thing about disco. It had no darkness to it. The suggestion that all ills and the sins of the world could be erased through hard perfected boogie had the feel of a cold and mindless Orwellian nightmare but it was as fluorescently bright as Room 101. There was no redemptive filth to Disco as there sill seemed to be with rock, certainly punk. But then there was this.
I heard it as I heard most new music at night on the radio. Maybe it was the spirit of the time but the local commercial radio had started getting a little more adventurous and it wasn't strange to hear a long Led Zeppelin track like When the Levee Breaks next to Kraftwerk after about eight at night.
I don't remember what came before or after this but I do remember that its entry into the light of my yellow walled room seemed to bring with it a kind of coloured darkness. My radio was leaking a void into my room. This carried no dread but still bore a kind of threat in its weirdness.
I knew about synthesiser music from various things in the air anyway, and then there were Dad's stereo demonstration records and there was always Switched on Bach. Well, I can't just dismiss that one in a mention. I remember a sizeable group of family gathered around the stereo when I was still young enough to play on the floor. I might have had the cover of the record to play with as the sounds came out. Some of us were in wonder, partly because of the claimed travesty of the old master's music but others in awe of the sheer joy of invention they were hearing. I remember bright sound filling the room and didn't know to care if Old Father Bach was being assaulted. There seemed a chase to the music, a pursuit through cartoon coloured hills and valleys.
At thirteen, still clinging to the sanctity of eighteenth century music that I'd constructed in the previous two years, I chose two records for my birthday, both in CBS' Greatest Hits of various composers. Mozart's Greatest Hits was rich but routine with a lot of partial symphonies and concertos etc. Bach's Greatest Hits on the other hand was far more adventurous, presenting the great Tocatta and Fugue in D minor (already fatigued by too many appearances in film soundtracks) as a gigantic orchestral piece, and several of Walter (later Wendy) Carlos' pieces from Switched on Bach. The general modernisation of the four sides of vinyl baroque were a revelation. Carlos' realisations of Bach, far from cheapening them, brought the scarcely credible invention of them. I was far too young to have seen A Clockwork Orange but that would have provided an easy extension. Before I let guitar and drumkit rock music into my ears I was enchanted by synthesisers.
By the two years until the release of I Feel Love I was ready for something like this, a pop song made entirely of synthesis and human voice. But nothing had quite prepared me for the sheer onslaught of it.
A brief brassy fifth rises from silence before the machine bursts in and takes over, busy, pistoning, chunky and hissing all at once. But this isn't a steam or petrol powered thing. It's Tesla from the ground up, a plug in autodance that teases with brassy sideswipes from major to minor while the ground of fifth seventh to tonic, the whole thing coursing forward on its own momentum, too advanced for the most audacious sci fi.
But then there's Donna herself lighting on to the spiky bed of rhythm as though made of aural feathers. Her voice at first dry and falsetto descends through a modal almost Gregorian figure down to a major third when a slightly tailing reverb coats her voice and hangs a little. Then again, same thing. But then at the end of this with a fifth and a seventh she soars into the chorus and the bass swells and bulges filling to a tide of huge sound that rises in the breath and sweat to press the light and air of the room with a drunkening crave for more and more and more of the same, unstoppable. Guess what, synthesisers, long the territory of the mountainous bores of prog rock, were sexy, sexier than the hardest nutted powerchord there ever was.
But this is not a knee trembler out the back of the club, this is a night's abandon. It rises and falls, gathers speed and passion and relaxes, breaks down and builds again, Donna's fleshly angel returning to soar over the writhing crowd of the senses. This goes charging and energising for five very long radio minutes finally pusling and thumping on in auto, stripped to bass but still in high charge on to the fade.
This did not convert me to the disco team. After this all disco sounded like a bunch of cruddy old session hacks pumping away until payday. Disco? This brought me to the point of tears with its intensity and comprehension of my (and everyone else's) throbbing biology. I wondered what the floor and the lights and big human storm felt like to be inside when this was first played on the world's dj consoles. I was fifteen and had to imagine. But holy burning christ did I imagine.
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