retrodisco

Used to love this single by Coati Mundi and really rooted for it to go UK Top 30 - despite Radio One's heavy support it inched agonisingly slowly in the right direction, then ran out of puff just outside the thirty.



Bought the first two Kid Creole & The Coconuts albums - Off the Coast of Me, Fresh Fruit From Foreign Places, and totally bought into the NME / Face-world buzz about all things Darnellian and ZE-related ....  Then a year or so after the event, decided that the Nuts stuff was fairly wack and got rid of the LPs. But this is the one tune on Fresh Fruit that still strikes me as pretty nifty.  Its dark svelte urgency is superior in the recorded version, though.





Oh yeah, I did buy this single too - the combo of joyous rhythm and cynical lyric stands up well.





Dennis Bovell told me that the rhythm on "Annie" is actually spouge -  from Barbados.

Never had the album (Tropical Gangsters?) with "Stool Pigeon" and "Wonderful  Thing" etc on though....

All in all, a strange episode in the history of pop. And pop criticism.

Now August D's first group Dr Buzzard's Original Savannah Band was retro-disco, wasn't it?

Meaning, not retrodisco as in flashing back / reenacting the golden days of disco (like all that inspid now-deservedly forgotten house-not-house of the late 90s/early 2000s). But retrodisco as in real-time 1970s disco with a retro element, harking back to Broadway and Hollywood musicals, the 1940s, the Cotton Club etc etc.



Check the old-fashioned bulky microphones etc.







Retro-ism and homage-to-golden-age-of-showbiz was in fact a strain running through disco.... as with this fellow



Or the nostalgia thematics of I Remember Yesterday by Giorgio and Donna, songs dedicated to different decades, the 40s, 50s, 60s, ... and the future ("I Feel Love")




And the image of the Pointer Sisters




And the sound of the Pointer Sisters too





Chic went in for it a bit too, image-wise - and lyrical nods like "stomping at the Savoy"

Or indeed the allusion to They Shoot Horses Don't They with "yowsah yowsah yowsah"