---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Strut label returns, celebrating its re-launch in January 2008 through !K7 with a brand new edition of one of the imprint’s most in demand series, Disco Not Disco, exploring original anthems and rarities from the world of 1970s and 80’s post-punk and leftfield disco.

Originally released at the turn of the decade as a new wave of bands like The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem drew on the music’s influence, Disco Not Disco has since been adopted in its own right as a term to describe a whole genre. The compilation is more timely than ever in 2008 as a reference point for a burgeoning mainstream scene.

The new edition moves from New York classics by Konk and Bill Laswell’s Material to early Detroit machine music, Belgian New Beat and a healthy dose of UK originals from Shriekback, Quando Quango and more on seminal labels like Y and Factory. Watch out too for rare gems from unexpected sources including ‘70s prog collective Isotope and Japan’s electronic pioneers, Yellow Magic Orchestra. Disco Not Disco is packaged in a deluxe digipak with full booklet featuring sleeve notes by Bill Brewster, author of “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life,” extensive track by track notes and rare photos.

01. Vivien Goldman – Launderette
02. Delta 5 – Mind Your Own Business
03. Shriekback – My Spine Is The Bassline
04. Konk – Your Life
05. Isotope – Crunch Cake
06. James White & The Blacks – Contort Yourself
07. Quando Quango – Love Tempo
08. Yellow Magic Orchestra – Seoul Music
09. Material – Don’t Lose Control (Dance Version)
10. Kazino – Binary
11. Liaisons Dangereuses – Los Niños Del Parque
12. A Number Of Names – Sharevari
13. Six Sed Red – Bang ‘Em Right
14. Maximum Joy – Silent Street/Silent Dub

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Vivien Goldman – Launderette
‘Launderette’ is a tribute to the creative energy that existed in Ladbroke Grove in the early eighties, before toffs and horrific French bankers finally breached it. Vivien Goldman owned a property on the Grove, a place that was, in her words, “known as a party house”. Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis was her flatmate for a time (Travis helped distribute the record) and Goldman, then largely known as a music journalist, was extremely well connected. She’d hung out with Bob Marley, reported from the Wigan Casino, dated (briefly) Mark Stewart from The Pop Group and was also a member of New Age Steppers.
Launderette contained a stellar array of guests, from avant-gardist Flying Lizard Steve Beresford to Robert Wyatt, two members of PiL (John Lydon and Keith Levine) and On-U-Sound’s Adrian Sherwood. It was, says Vivien, “A testament to friendship”. Goldman explains its genesis, “I did a lot of stuff with George Oban who was the original bass player from Aswad; one day George had this bassline that was so fabulous and he played it to me and I improvised the ‘Launderette’ song to it. So we had it on a cassette and I played it to John [Lydon]. He liked it and said he would help us get it made. We made it using studio downtime from what came to be PiL’s ‘Flowers Of Romance’ album”. The bassline is the glue that holds the song together as the other instruments skitter about inattentively; the percussion flutters delicately around the bassline rather reinforcing its motion – in fact, it sounds like it was recorded next door in the pantry. “It definitely had a Flying Lizards slightly rackety feeling,” agrees Goldman, “but a lot of it was improvised. I don’t think we had a drum kit, I think we just had Robert on percussion. I liked that sort of shifting sound, like Ornette Coleman – I don’t mean to put myself in the same league as him, I’m not an idiot – with the music flowing but not confined by the prison bars of the 4/4. It’s one of the factors that made the music that women made slightly different.”
It was released on Goldman’s own label Window (it was the only release) and, after Goldman had played a tape of it to Ed Bahlmann at 99 Records in New York, he also released it on a 12-inch (“I slightly bottled out and put it on 7-inch,” laughs Vivien). It did very little commercially at the time, though it did gain a lot of press (possibly due to one of the journalistic community being involved) but has since grown in stature, not to mention price.

2. Delta 5 – Mind Your Own Business
Incestuous little scene in Yorkshire, it was. Many of the people who made up the Gang Of Four, The Mekons and Delta 5 were all on the same Fine Art course together in Leeds. Several of them even went to the same school. The original Delta 5 members were girlfriends of the Mekons - they’d help each other get gigs and the Gang Of Four ended up on the Fast label after the Mekons secured a deal for ‘Where Were You’, one the great punk records of the era.
I remember seeing them all together on a four-band bill at the Lyceum in London. Gang Of Four headlined and a then largely unknown bunch of rapscallions from Coventry called the Specials blew them all off stage. Truth be told, the Delta 5 probably never improved on their debut single, ‘Mind Your Own Business’, but the tune rocks hard with two basses well arranged rather than jostling for the same low frequencies. The Gang Of Four patently influenced the song. The doubled-up vocals are lifted from their ‘Love Like Anthrax’ while the metallic thrash on the guitar is pure Andy Gill. There were worse people to nick ideas off in 1979. “Everything just gelled so well on ‘Mind Your Own Business’. Great bassline, good lyrics, blinding guitar and a cool cover,” commented Ros Allen, one of the bass players, in fanzine Caught In Flux in 1996. She’s not wrong. Can I interfere in your crisis? Oh go on, then.

3. Shriekback – My Spine Is The Bassline
My Spine Is The Bassline is that rare beast: an early ‘80s leftfield dance tune that people other than raincoat-wearing students could actually dance to. It sounded like a classic when it was released back in 1982 and today it sounds just as limber. XTC refugee Barry Andrews, departing Gang Of Four bassist Dave Allen and vocalist/guitarist Carl Marsh formed Shriekback at an interesting intersection in British indie music when a new flowering of black-influenced rock music began to emerge. Keyboard player Andrews remembers the period well. “Both Dave and I wanted to avoid the styles of our previous bands and I had already been out of XTC a year when I met him. We were both (as was Carl who wrote the lion’s share of ‘Spine…’) excited by funk and reggae and such contemporaries as Cabaret Voltaire, This Heat and Scritti Politti. We were part of a general movement of middle class white boys who had discovered the joys of – mostly black – dance music and of dancing. This was something of a revolution at the time, which is often forgotten.”
When it lodged itself near the top of the indie charts in 1982, it stayed there for some months and was as likely to get played in black discos in New York as it was at the local student hop in Preston; it was a genuine boundary-jumper. Andrews claims its effortless swing came from the female drummer they used. “It’s remarkable for being the one and only time we worked with Stephanie Nuttall. The simplicity of her rhythm took us into a groove which was actually, rather than theoretically, danceable. It’s a song with few moving parts: all the complicated stuff lives in Carl’s lyrics. The “solo” is me breaking the bridge on a viola: you can hear it snap. As I recall, we were all pretty damned pleased with ‘Spine…’ at the time but, a classic? Aww come on.”

4. Konk – Your Life
The month in which ‘Your Life’ was recorded was one of movement within the interchangeable Konk camp (Rafa Benitez would have been proud of their squad system). Jonny Sender briefly departed the band to begin rehearsals with a new singer called Madonna before returning a month later. According to Sender, Konk and Madonna had some shared history. “We rehearsed around the corner from my apartment in her loft on Broome Street,” he recounts. “My girlfriend at the time, Erika Bell, was one of her dancers and that's how I came to know her. Madonna was one of the people in the club sequence for the video of ‘Konk Party’ shot at The Loft on Prince Street.” Sadly, it also meant that Sender was not present for the recording of ‘Your Life’. “Because Jonny wasn’t there, there’s no electric bass,” remembers Konk’s Geordie Gillespie. “There were some riffs that were done on it, but it wasn’t a bassline. The interesting thing was this was the first record we did with sequencers, because ‘Konk Party’ and ‘Soka-Loka-Moki’ were pretty organic. The kick drum and the snare drum were machine, but the hi-hats, triangles and congas made it sound very live and feel very live. The bass was done with the Voyetra, a keyboard sequencer, which was at Unique where we recorded it. Chris Lord-Alge was our engineer and his brother was pluggin’ in the mics and stuff for him.”
Konk was originally formed by Dana Vlcek along with Geordie who attended college in Santa Cruz together, before relocating to New York. Heavily associated with the downtown art-rock scene, they were one of the few bands to play both The Loft and the Paradise Garage mainly because their records always seemed to be about dancing first and art second. “Our thing was to record dance records, not pop records that had extended versions, which is what Bruce Springsteen or Duran Duran did,” affirms Gillespie. “We were like, ‘OK, what’s gonna work at Danceteria?’”

5. Isotope – Crunch Cake
Gary Boyle’s lengthy career spans five decades and includes stints at the Hamburg Star Club in the early 1960s, as well as backing singers like Millie and Dusty Springfield. He had two stretches in Brian Auger’s band playing on three albums (‘Open’, ‘Definitely What!’ and ‘Befour’) before Jim Mullen replaced him. Boyle largely confined himself to session work over the next years, working in particular with Mike Gibbs, Stomu Yamashta and Mike Westbrook before forming Isotope. “I surprised myself forming a band, because I wasn’t a band leader,” says the softly spoken guitarist. “I had to learn to run things.” Despite this modesty he was regularly voted in Melody Maker as one of the best jazz guitarists and the original line-up included Jeff Clyne from Ian Carr’s Nucleus.
They wore their influences on their sleeve. “All of us were all influenced by the Miles Davis stuff going on at the end of the 1960s and early ‘70s but also Weather Report. Weather Report were my favourite fusion band. And of course Frank [Roberts] the piano player was heavily into Herbie Hancock’s electric stuff.” They were signed to Gull Records, an independent label run by industry veterans Derek Everett and Dave Howells that had some success with Judas Priest.
They released three albums for Gull; ‘Crunch Cake’ is taken from their final album, ‘Deep End’. Composed by keyboard player Frank Roberts, the Rhodes touches show clear signs of exposure to Herbie Hancock but it’s the grouchy guitar figures and spongy bass that give it an edgy dancefloor appeal. A fat lot of good it did them, though. The band split up soon after when British Lion Films, who employed their manager Ed Bicknell (soon to find substantial success as manager of Dire Straits), closed down their music division. Boyle recorded two more solo albums for Gull and three further sets for other indies. These days he combines playing with teaching in
the North West.

6. James White & The Blacks – Contort Yourself
James White, aka James Chance, aka James Siegfried was a demonically talented sax player who released a series of very intense and occasionally brilliant albums for the Ze imprint before heroin addiction (temporarily) killed his career. Although James Brown noticeably influenced him, his playing has most often been compared to the atonal squawks and squeaks of Ornette Coleman (of whom Dizzy Gillespie once said, “I don’t know what it is, but it ain’t jazz”). Siegfried came to prominence through the No Wave scene of Manhattan’s Lower East Side (he was an early member of the wonderful Teenage Jesus & The Jerks) and was signed to Ze to provide two albums for the label, one under his commonly-used name James Chance & The Contortions, while the other project was meant to be his disco offshoot, although there is little that is obviously disco apart from the remix of ‘Contort Yourself ’ by August Darnell aka Kid Creole.
Bob Blank, who worked extensively with Siegfried, engineered both albums at Blank Studios. “James was always a gentleman,” remembers Blank. “He was always focused. He was real easy to work with. The problem with people on heroin is they can sometimes be a little unreliable. But the frantic craziness of the music that happened in the studio; it was all very controlled and he was very professional. One day he said to me, ‘You know I can play really legit saxophone’. He never had to tell me that, you could tell by his
playing that he'd had training.”

7. Quando Quango – Love Tempo
Terschelling is more famously known as the location of the Lutine shipwreck (whose bell now hangs in Lloyds of London). It is also, somewhat more modestly, where Gonnie Rietveld and Mike Pickering first met on a holiday romance that morphed into one of the most influential groups on Factory. The pair initially worked out of Rietveld’s hometown of Rotterdam (along with sibling drummer Reinier) where occasional parties were thrown under the name Rotterdam Must Dance – Pickering also brought New Order to Holland for their second gig after Ian Curtis’ death (he and New Order manager Rob Gretton were friends). “We rehearsed in a cold arched room underneath the main bridge at the Maas River and toured our local gigs in my Mum's overloaded 2CV,” recalls Gonnie Rietveld.
When Pickering was offered a job at the Haçienda (Gretton had also invited them to record for Factory Records), they relocated to Manchester. But shortly after they moved there Reinier decided his main priority was his other band Spasmodique and so he returned to Rotterdam, his place taken by former A Certain Ratio player Simon Topping. Topping’s first live performance as a member of QQ was to play at the Paradise Garage in New York. (continues on next page)‘Love Tempo’ was recorded in early 1983 in Stockport, Greater Manchester and produced by Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson (respectively the Be Music and DoJo in the credits) and remixed in New York at a session attended by the band. “We mixed ‘Love Tempo’ with each person present taking care of a certain set of channels: Mark Kamins, Mike Pickering, Simon Topping and me,” remembers Rietveld. “Every time we had mixed a section to satisfaction, the engineer cut the audio tape and edited it in place. In the end we were wading knee deep in tape excerpts.” ‘Love Tempo’ became a galvanising factor in the early Chicago house scene and, like other Factory releases (though they did release an awful lot of tosh), often received more club play in the United States where the records were colour-blind compared to the import-obsessed UK jocks.

8. Yellow Magic Orchestra – Seoul Music
Like fellow electronic pioneers Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra found unexpected fame among the black youth of American inner cities through tunes like ‘Computer Games’ (later sampled by J-Lo for ‘I’m Real’) and became one of the few white groups – and probably the only
Japanese one at that – ever to appear on Soul Train.
The trio was originally formed by Haruomi Hosono, who recruited Sadistic Mike Band drummer Yukihiro Takahashi and keyboard genius Ryuichi Sakamoto for a session that somehow turned into an album and then a band. Somewhat prolific, they released nine albums between their formation in 1978 and dissolution in 1984 with ‘Seoul Music’ appearing on 1981’s ‘Technodelic’ long player.
YMO’s music is the perfect merging of form and function, embracing the new technologies emerging out of their mother country but using them in a way that had more in common with Krautrock than R&B. Sakamoto once told The Face that, “my starting and the genesis of my
music have been deeply influenced by occidental, European culture. More precisely, French culture.” He went on to cite Debussy, Messiaen and Boulez.
As a solo artist, Sakamoto also had an accidental club hit with ‘Riot In Lagos’, a prescient slice of electro that was largely passed by upon release but later, when music had caught up with it, became a club hit.

9. Material – Don’t Lose Control (Dance Version)
File Under Egghead Dance. Bass player Bill Laswell’s Material, formed at the end of the Seventies with Michael Beinhorn, was an incredibly influential (and prolific) group on the 1980s New York dance scene. Working with Nona Hendryx they produced (for them) more orthodox dance music, but employing the Material moniker they fashioned occasionally brilliant flights of bass-heavy fancy. We could have selected any one of a number of their cuts – ‘Ciguri’, ‘Reduction’, ‘Square Dance’ etc – but opted for this wobbly slice of cyber-funk. ‘Don’t Lose Control’ features the voice of French industry veteran Jean Karakos, whose work as a producer in the ‘60s took in Don Cherry, Archie Shepp and Sun Ra before forming the Celluloid label on which this tune first appeared (he later started the French deep house label Distance). Holding down the rhythm is the sadly departed Chic drum legend Tony Thompson aided and abetted by Latin percussionist Daniel Ponce.
As a featured artist, Laswell also brought that distinctive Material sound to one of the groundbreaking songs of the 1980s, Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’, and he has since worked on a impenetrable array of styles from ambient to (controversially) remixing Miles Davis albums.

10. Kazino – Binary
The influence of the New Romantic movement on Europe cannot be underestimated. Many of the Italo-disco and Europop tunes that flooded out of France, Belgium, Germany and Italy had the indelible stamp of futurism about them. European pop in the mid-‘80s was as much about Rimmel as it was Roland. Kazino are no exception. Although it was Belgians Nicolas Finn and Pierre-Henri Steyt who formed the band and wrote the songs, it was Yves Roze who put the package together, the duo answering an ad from the industry veteran looking for new talent. As well as having a substantial singing career under the pseudonym Jean-François Michael, producer Yves Roze was also responsible for nurturing the career of Princess Stephanie of Monaco (also on Kazino’s label Carrere).
‘Around My Dream’, their debut single, sold well over a million singles and was a huge hit in France. Its flipside was ‘Binary’ and there could hardly be a greater contrast between the two. ‘Binary’, a darkly portentous pop tune delivered with a threat rather than a smile, sounds like the sort of thing Fat Ronny might have played at the Anciennes Belgique. ‘Around My Dream’, by contrast, sounds like the kind of song Dave Lee Travis might have introduced on Top Of The Pops while placing a pink pork pie hat on his head and shouting, “Woo!” in the ear of a hapless teenager.
Most DJs discovered the track when it was bootlegged on the controversial Automan series back in 2005. “Binary was the first Kazino track I wrote and it’s obviously new wave, although it’s also imbued with my punk heritage,” claims writer Pierre-Henri. “The bassline has the spirit of jazz-rock about it; I added a few simple harmonies and then Nick threw in some typically delirious touches on piano and guitar.” Kazino reformed a few years ago and have recently been touring France to sold out theatres.
“I’m so happy that you’ve selected this tune for the compilation because it gives us the opportunity to redo a full album with the real sound of Kazino,” enthuses Yves Roze.

11. Liaisons Dangereuses – Los Niños Del Parque
Bizarrely leftfield, quasi-industrial and with coruscating rhythms, Los Niños Del Parque was a big hit in almost any country and scene you care to name: Cosmic in Italy, Bacalau in Spain, New Beat in Belgium, Chicago house… the list is endless.
A German group with a French name who sang in Spanish, English and French, Liaisons Dangereuses were an offshoot of Neue Deutsche Welle bands DAF and Einsturzende Neubaten. Their self-titled debut album, recorded in Conny Plank’s Cologne studio, had a huge impact on both the emerging Electronic Body Music movement, but also particularly on clubland. The two killer cuts on the album were ‘Los Ninõs Del Parque’ and ‘Peut Etre… Pas’, the former being cited endlessly as a formative influence on various musical genres. DJ Alfredo, who first heard the tune in the Bacalau clubs of Valencia, brought it over to Ibiza where its lyrics found a curious resonance with the hordes. “It was like a house record but it wasn’t a house record,” he explains. “But what made it so special for the Amnesia crowd were the lyrics, which are about some kids in the park who love to eat sweets. The sweets obviously were quite suggestive for our crowd!”

12. A Number Of Names – Sharevari
Early ‘80s Detroit had a fantastically competitive club scene, mainly driven by high school parties with aspirational names that reflected their obsession with English New Romantic music, Italian clothes and Italo-disco: Plush, Cacharel, Ciabattino, Funtime Society, Schiaparelli, Gables. One of the most successful of these parties was called Charivari (the name came from a chain of stores), from where A Number Of Names drew inspiration – they changed the spelling slightly to avoid potential conflict.
“The high school scene was amazing,” recounts Derrick May, excitedly. “All the young high school kids would dress really nice, you had guys wearing Polo and Versace and all this kind of ridiculous stuff in high school. It was amazing how much money these parties were making. People were charging $25 to get into them. They were highfalutin’.”
A Number of Names were also inspired – as Dan Sicko notes in his excellent Techno Rebels book – by Kano’s ‘Holly Dolly’, on which ‘Sharevari’ is obviously based. Although Cybotron’s ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’ was released first, it’s believed that ‘Sharevari’ was around for longer, thus putting it right at the genesis of techno. It’s in these few records and those which inspired them – mainly Italian, German or British – that you can clearly hear something extraordinary that makes this strand of African-America music almost entirely separate from all others.
If you want to get a sense of what this period looked like, you could do worse than go to Youtube and type in ‘The Scene Sharevari’ (The Scene was a local dance TV show) and watch the kids grooving to A Number Of Names. Check out the V-necked sweaters tucked into their
trousers. Nice touch.

13. Six Sed Red – Bang ‘Em Right
Rick Holliday was an original member of Mansfield futurists B-Movie who had a big club hit with ‘Remembrance Day’, but never managed to have the commercial success their songs probably merited (another B-Movie member Paul Statham has since gone on to much success as a songwriter with Dido and Kylie). Rick left the band in 1983 to concentrate on Six Sed Red with his then girlfriend Cindy Ecstasy.
It was an oddball project, produced by the Cabs’ Stephen Mallinder, whose skewed efforts elevate it above much of the electropop coming out of Europe in the mid-‘80s. While it was largely ignored in the UK, it was a dancefloor staple in Chicago and also popular at David Mancuso’s Loft.
The mysterious Cindy Ecstasy emerged on Soft Cell’s debut album where she contributed a rap on ‘Memorabilia’ and was frequently described rather disparagingly as an E dealer. Yet she continued to pop up on various recordings for Soft Cell and was still contributing vocals as late as 1997 on Marc & The Mambas’ ‘Untitled’. Originally from New York, Cindy has been MIA for some years now, although Soft Cell producer Mike Thorne says he saw her in Ladbroke Grove some years ago.
This is the only release as Six Sed Red, though they also produced ‘Buggin’ Out’ under the name MCX and wrote ‘Dream Baby’ for Bananarama’s second album. These days, Holliday runs a music company in Nottingham.

14. Maximum Joy – Silent Street/Silent Dub
In the late ‘70s, Bristol’s motherlode was The Pop Group, a ramshackle group of deconstructionists whose performances were mesmeric, miasmic, spellbinding, occasionally catastrophic but were always interesting (I once saw them play at the Empire Leicester Square and, in place of a solo, one of them jumped on a trick cycle and rampaged around the stage). From their ample hips sprung many groups, including Glaxo Babies, Rip Rig & Panic, Pigbag, Float Up CP, Mark Stewart & The Mafia and most of the New Age Steppers. Oh, and Maximum Joy. ‘Silent Street / Silent Dub’ was – along with its more vaunted A-side ‘Stretch’ – Maximum Joy’s debut single. If The Pop Group were confrontational – and by God, they were – then Maximum Joy were conciliatory, but with an edge. Bassist Dan Catsis and guitarist John Waddington were, after all, both former Pop Groupers. “The Pop Group were my contemporaries,” recalls singer Janine Rainforth. “Mark Stewart used to come to my Mum’s ice cream parlour; and we were on the same scene, as it were. At the time, I lived outside Bristol in my
Dad’s big house and we used to do lots of jamming there. Sean Oliver, Ollie Moore and Pop Group bass player Simon Underwood (later with Pigbag) all used to come and jam, but the group was mine and Tony Wrafter’s idea.”
Their debut single was something of a shoo-in, given that label boss Dick O’Dell had already signed Pigbag and The Pop Group to his roster. ‘Silent Street / Silent Dub’ is more understated than its rowdier brother on the flipside but perhaps best reflects the direction which
Maximum Joy pursued over the ensuing years which incorporated funk and dub in particular – the Dugout club, which eventually begat the Wild Bunch, was a huge influence on this generation of Bristolians. Rainforth’s distinctive and understated voice took Maximum Joy in a different direction to most of their Avon contemporaries, though always with an eye for the dancefloor. In their dying days towards the mid-‘80s, they also recruited Nellee Hooper on percussion and recorded a final single, the Dennis Bovell-produced ‘Why Can’t We Live
Together’.

Bill Brewster is the author Of ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’ and the man behind the djhistory.com website