1979: Monkey Magic

Disco demolition and deification in the late '70s

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

1979

I bought my first single in 1979, and it was not a disco record. I did not like disco in 1979.  If I had heard about the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago in July of that year I would probably have approved (but I suspect John Craven did not mention it). Organised by shock jock Steve Dahl, the night - supposedly a promotion for the White Sox baseball team - involved disco records being thrown onto the pitch and blown up with actual explosives. The audience later had to be dispersed by riot police.

Dahl had been a DJ at a station that had fired him when it decided to veer away from rock towards disco, and he consequently held a grudge against the whole genre. I can see the event now for what it largely was - an adolescent, vindictive spasm with nasty undertones of racism and misogyny - but at 10 years old, I was not the target audience for disco. I was not down Studio 54 with a head full of cocaine and trousers full of urge, strutting to a 4/4 beat with the Manhattan demi-monde. I lived in the Home Counties, and was usually to be found in the school library arguing about how many hit points a goblin had. I liked precisely Dahl’s kind of music: that first single I bought was Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, a pristine piece of middle-of-the-road album-oriented rock. Although also, to be fair, a banger.

Another thing I liked in 1979 was a Japanese TV adaptation of the sixteenth century Chinese novel Journey to the West. Which sounds terribly erudite until you realise I am describing Monkey, a goofy adventure show featuring a monkey-man with Noddy Holder sideburns, dubbed into English by a cast including Manuel from Fawlty Towers. Monkey was blessed with one of the all-time great theme tunes, a piece of disco-rock (by the Japanese band Godiego) that summarises the myth of Sun Wukong - Monkey King and spirit of anarchy - in inventive broken English:

​​Born from an egg on a mountain top
The punkiest monkey that ever popped
He knew every magic trick under the sun
To tease the Gods
And everyone and have some fun

Monkey magic, Monkey magic 

(repeat 4 times)

What a cocky saucy monkey this one is
All the Gods were angered
And they punished him
Until he was saved by a kindly priest
And that was the start
Of their pilgrimage west

(It's hard to describe how happy the end of the second verse makes me. It’s the incredibly awkward addition of the word ‘west’ at the end of the line: the lyrics and tune make the ‘kindly priest’ and ‘pilgrimage’ a perfectly scannable and almost acceptable rhyme, but then ‘west’ is squeezed in an tremendous hurry before the chorus crashes upon us, causing the whole thing to jolt and stumble before it takes off again. Amazing work.) 

So here we have a small boy who thought he didn’t like disco while loving the disco-inflected Monkey theme. This apparent paradox is explained by one critical fact: disco was everywhere in 1979, and I was already internalising the hipster imperative of sneering in the presence of the popular. (For the same reason, I would shortly ditch Rainbow and AC/DC for Adam and The Ants and The Tubeway Army.) 

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Disco was simply too ubiquitous, too popular to be liked. In 1979 it was the global standard for pop music, the world’s default soundtrack in background muzak that no one was actually listening to. It was everywhere, and consequently felt as though it was from nowhere: international and interchangeable, an indistinguishable parade of floor-filling one-hit wonders.

It grew over other music like syncopated knotweed. It was the pulsing undergrowth in Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ and Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’: punk and hip-hop, new genres that (like disco) emerged in the late ‘70s from the developmentally moribund, financially bankrupt and culturally febrile New York City. The big hit of 1978 had been Grease, a musical about ‘50s rocker culture that inexplicably sported a disco-inflected theme tune. In 1979 the art-pop outfit that was about to become my favourite band ever - Japan - teamed up with disco legend Giorgio Moroder to make the throbbing ‘Life in Tokyo’. 

The utility of disco - that it is available and useful to everyone, from mainstream musical theatre to hipster synth tweakers - is one of the things that is so loveable about it: at core it’s musically pretty simple, and inherently democratic. Almost anyone with access to a drum machine can make it, and almost everyone enjoys it. Andy Warhol described Studio 54 as ‘dictatorship on the door, democracy on the dancefloor’ and that mixture of exclusive nightlife and communal celebration is key. Punk and hip-hop might have better articulated the difficulty and pressure of urban life, but disco was release, a few sweaty hours of bliss. It insists that anyone can have a good time, and that everyone deserves one.

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Meanwhile, the way disco spread internationally, like a novel virus (resulting in an inferno temperature and a severe Saturday Night Fever), gave it a sense of exoticism; it was the music of New York, of Mediterranean islands and European discotheques, and of Japanese kung-fu TV shows. By the mid-’70s Benidorm had the largest number of skyscrapers per head in the world, and all of them full of bright pink British tourists with digestive issues and Aimii Stewart’s disco version of ‘Light My Fire’ going round and round their heads. Disco gave everyone symbolic access to the glamour of the jetset, gently frugging to Chic in the fur-lined bar of a custom 747 on their way to Macau. It is the sound of the smoked glass and velour ‘70s, a music composed of orange nylon and glitter balls, dark brown sports cars, cigarettes on aeroplanes and LED watches with multiple time zones, all those cheesy little geegaws that seemed to promise a peculiarly ‘70s kind of sophistication.

This ubiquity - not the Demolition Night - killed disco. Punk claimed the ‘80s and hip-hop claimed the future; disco didn’t survive the ‘70s. But that is also why ‘70s punk and hip-hop don’t spark nostalgia in the way that disco does. Album-oriented rock (like Queen) was long ago sanctified by Q magazine; Grandmaster Flash still sounds startling and I’ve never stopped listening to Talking Heads. But Chic. Chic and the Bee Gees and Gloria Gaynor: that is the sound of the ‘70s, the sound of my childhood, a sound the nature of which is irrepressible, the sound of… Monkey.

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From the coked up ‘70s to the gloomed down ‘90s: