![]() Two weeks later, the same tipsheet trashed Bronski Beat’s album, ‘The Age Of Consent’, in decidedly homophobic terms: “This English trio of limp-wristed boys are among the leading gay wavers in their home country. That December, a radio tipsheet said that the London synth-pop trio Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ – singer Jimmy Somerville’s autobiographical tale of a young gay man’s coming out to, and subsequent rejection from, his family and city – “weaves a touching tale”. Reactions to this stuff in big, macho America were decidedly mixed. would dominate the rest of the 80s: 13 No 1s, 35 million records sold. ![]() When the gothy-trashy Liverpool quartet Dead Or Alive approached S.A.W., Pete Waterman recalled, “Pete Burns actually said, ‘Make me sound like Divine!’” The result, ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’, reached No 1 in the UK in March 1985 and remains a dancefloor go-to – not to mention a karaoke standard. Their first salvo of ’84 was a taunt: ‘You Think You’re A Man’, a British Top 20 for Divine, the American drag star of John Waters’ underground films. ![]() Mike Stock, the trio’s ideas man, wanted to make “technologically brilliant” records, modeled on Motown, and when he heard Hi-NRG, he recalls, “I knew I could give them exactly what they wanted, with quality.” Soon after ‘High Energy’ made its impact, the production team of Stock, Aitken & Waterman upped the ante. One bizzer insisted to Smash Hits that Hi-NRG “is not gay music,” since its plaints about unreliable men were sung by women: “If it was a man singing I’d see your point.” The magazine noted: “As he speaks, a coy smile spreads slowly across his face.” Not everybody was ready to come out and admit this. ![]() “It was gay initially – that’s what built the dance music business.” And Hi-NRG was a specifically gay style. “By ’84, the music industry was being ravaged by AIDS, especially the core of the dance music industry,” says Tommy Boy Records founder Tom Silverman. Sadly, Cowley didn’t live to see his pioneering work gain traction: he died in November 1982 of what one writer termed “cancer”. This iconic gay club anthem would reach the US Hot 100’s lower reaches in September 1984. The name came from Evelyn Thomas’s ‘High Energy’, a record that “brought the over-mixed thump back with a vengeance,” as Billboard noted. The big new club sound of ’84 was Hi-NRG, which pointed straight back to disco – essentially an update on the synth-led sound of Patrick Cowley’s production work for Sylvester – and ahead to proudly artificial sounds in house, techno, r’n’b and pop. Not to mention that hip hop blew up harder than ever in ’84, thanks to a raft of breakdancing films and the first Run-DMC album – but hip hop was largely considered just another aspect of dance music back then. In 1984, club playlists were intertwined with the US pop charts in a way that they’ve seldom been since, thanks to Arthur Baker, François Kevorkian, Shep Pettibone, Jellybean Benitez and Larry Levan giving 12” mixes to tons of major-label pop, r’n’b and rock acts. Soon the sound would be called ‘house’ – and Sherman would be issuing it on his new label, Trax Records.īut the revolution those styles portended would have to wait a little while. ![]() In Chicago, Larry Sherman opened Precision Record Labs Ltd, promising fast delivery on the records a number of local kids were making with cheap synths and drum machines. It was the year Detroit’s Cybotron released their first album, ‘Enter’, and the single ‘Techno City’ gave their post- electro sound a new name and attitude. The advent of dance music as a culture unto itself pivots on the year 1984. ![]()
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