THE RHYTHM DIVINE

By the late 70s it ostensibly sucked, but by the early 80s it was enjoying renewed and rude health. It was the dance music that could never die: here, we look at what disco did next after Comiskey Park.Boogie wander: Kris Needs

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As the 70s came to an end it was widely reported that disco was dead, but many thought otherwise. The idea that such gloriously life-affirming music could be snuffed out by a racist, homophobic lynch-mob blowing up 10,000 disco records at a Chicago baseball game was ridiculous to anyone familiar with its history.

Maybe the term ceased to exist for major record companies axing their disco departments but the underground that spawned it was built of stronger stuff. Led by New York City, the dance music community simply carried on regardless, defiantly retooling its next incarnation for the 80s with the mirror ball beaming brighter than ever.

Embracing the drum machines and synths concurrently rewiring hip-hop - NYC's next sociocultural movement to take the world - disco morphed into electro-boogie, boogie or just post-disco, according to Tim Lawrence's definitive book, Life & Death On The New York Dancefloor 1980-1983, feeding “one of the most creatively vibrant and socially dynamic periods in the history of New York”. This was born out by revelatory cassettes, filtering into London, of the city’s black music radio stations that revealed disco’s next step in all its glory.

Visiting New York for the first time in 1983, this writer found the city that never slept at full throttle as the radio broadcast audacious mastermixes created on KISS FM by Shep Pettibone and Tony Humphries, or Timmy Regisford on WBLS, tangibly hotwiring templates for dance music's future, reshaping songs and redefining remix culture by extending grooves and adding samples. Disco had shed one skin to reveal another, sporting gleaming boogie body armour, ready to start its next revolution.