From ‘13 reflections upon the beauty of disco’

Lipps Inc:‘Funkytown’ — the 1980 record that sealed electronica’s hold on the future, as was entirely proper of course. The energy that crackles around the periphery of this hideous but brilliant cold assemblage of micro-hooks was the future and the end of disco in a blizzard of stiffly repetitive squits — and my God, people dance to it. The first time I stuck this on at RarelyGroove, which I did with no little trepidation, ordinarily sensible people were literally running away from their drinks at the side-tables where they’d been coddling their bunions on the varnished chairs and … and … they started doing robot dancing. And if you’ve never witnessed from a high angle 230 middle-aged north London media professionals, yoga practitioners, charity workers, novelists. plumbers, cake shop owners, homemakers, sportsmen, professional dancers, postmen, teachers, filmmakers, academics, landlords, photo agency owners, electricians, nurses, GPs, florists, butchers, social workers, IT people and a bloke who’s something in the City, all of them frugging in a dark ocean of human-robot herky-jerks … if you have never seen that ocean from a lofty perch with a twinkly backdrop and a pair of Technics decks to keep you frowning, then you can keep your attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.