…young and sweet only 17… that was me. In 1973. I was… the Dancing Queen! And I revisited 1973 last night for a friend’s 60th birthday party. It (thank fucking Christ) wasn’t fancy dress, but musically it was as as 1970s as a pair of ‘loon pants’, platform shoes and LSD. And thus was nostalgic. Even though a lot of what was played was what I’d have then (and, possibly now) described as ‘shit’. The DJ, obviously given parameters way too flexible for my own rather selective taste, went just a touch too far down the pop trail with T-Rex, crossed the line with Sheena fucking Easton and went way into the red zone with ‘I’m in the mood for dancing’. The worst song ever made. Because its banal, repetitive, stupid, screechy and you can’t not dance to it. If you’re in such a mood. Therefore you have to hate the song for its cynically commercialised awfulness, whilst you try not to move to its rhythms.

And thereby hangs my own personal crisis. Well it was ‘back in the day’, now I don’t give a shit what people think. Which you’d know if you’d seen me dance. But back then my world was divided into the music I LISTEN to, which had to be of certain types, had to show musical integrity, had to be unusual, obscure and so far beyond ‘not commercial’ as to be almost unlistenable to. Sort of like Pink Floyd. Except I didn’t like them very much. And I liked rock. Hard, heavy, proper rock. Not glam rock, not hair rock, not bunches of American pretty boy pretenders, I wanted rock like wot they made in Birmingham. And even folk wot they made in Newcastle. But I also loved Bowie and Lou Reed and Talking Heads and pretty much anything that came out of New York.

But the other side of the great divide was what I liked to dance to. Because that was so different. I didn’t want to take acid and spend 4 hours shaking my head around to music that was otherwise beyond bodily expression. I wanted funk music. Not pseudo funk, not ‘pop with a funky beat’, I wanted the real deal. I wanted… ‘imports!!!’ No such thing now, music is totally internationalised and available to eat before Taylor Swift has strummed the last chord in the studio. But back then music was very much defined along national lines and only came in… hard copy. Called ‘records’. That you had to buy (download). And lots of records deemed unlikely to sell in vast numbers simply didn’t arrive on these shores. So you had to go to specialist record stores or proper nightclubs (even if you were just a few years shy of legal entry) to hear them. And to dance to them. So I went to a place called ‘Countdown’, a little club in the West End, and ‘Funky Nassau’ (then an import, only released in Britain about 3 years later) changed my life. Forever!! Ish. Hardcore dance tracks that had the added kudos of being unheard of by most people. The music snob’s dream.

I’m still a terrible music snob but I’ll dance to almost anything. With sufficient volume and sufficient alcohol.

Happy nostalgia

A xxxx