Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco Read Online Free Page B

tightened his grip on the-king-of-disco-porn crown with records like the follow-up to “Love in ‘C’ Minor,” the not quite as lewd but equally orchestral “Cerrone’s Paradise,” the quiet storm “Time for Love,” and “Rocket in the Pocket,” which undercut its tale of masterful cocksmanship with half-man/half-machine vocals that would make Gary Numan proud. Cerrone’s flirtation with electronics was perhaps inspired by the French love for cheesy robot music: Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, the Peppers’ “Pepper Box,” Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” Space’s “Magic Fly,” Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygène,” Lilo’s “The Banana Split,” and Jacno’s “Rectangle” have all been hits in France. Maybe with this in mind, Cerrone’s best record saw him briefly change from directing aural skin flicks to becoming a sonic John Carpenter. “Supernature” turned the old “the freaks come out at night” tale into a bizarre sci-fi parable where laboratory mutants destroy the humans that created them. In other words, through the transformative power of disco (and especially that oscillating synth line that was largely ripped off from Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”), the freaks shall inherit the Earth.
    Cerrone 3: Supernature was not the only disco concept album to emerge from Trident Studios. When a spoiler cover of “Love in ‘C’ Minor” (by the Heart and Soul Orchestra) came out in the United States before Cerrone’s version could get decent distribution, Costandinos (who was also being pushed into the background by a limelight-hogging Cerrone) complained to Casablanca and was promptly offered a production deal to keep him sweet. Costandinos (who had previously produced records for Andy Williams, Paul Anka, and Demis Roussos) responded by following the blueprint of “Love in ‘C’ Minor” and creating disco’s most opulent fantasies for the groups Love and Kisses, Sphinx, and the Syncophonic Orchestra (essentially aggregations of London session musicians including Alan Hawkshaw, Don Ray, Katie Kissoon, Madeline Bell, and Sue Glover). Costandinos’s most opulent production was undoubtedly Love and Kisses’ staging of Romeo & Juliet, which was one of the first albums to be recorded using forty-eight-track technology.
    Costandinos was born Alexandre Kouyoumdjiam in Cairo, Egypt, in 1944 to a Greek mother and Armenian father, spent his adolescence in Australia, and moved to Paris when he was twenty-two. Like Cerrone (whose father was an Italian who fled to France to escape Mussolini) and the biggest Eurodisco group of them all (at least on their home continent), Boney M, which was made up of four West Indian session singers under the direction of über-producer Frank Farian, Costandinos had a hybrid heritage that was the perfect background for Eurodisco success. His schlocky epics where the singers were more wooden than the inflexible rhythms, where the string section never stopped zinging, where the melodies bored into your skull with more determination than an Andrew Lloyd Webber tune epitomized the feeling of enforced joy that Eurodisco promoted. Of the seemingly hundreds of producers who followed Costandinos’s blueprint, the most original was probably Russian-born Boris Midney. Instead of Shakespeare, Midney plundered Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (complete with song titles like “Don’t Leave Me Hanging” and “I Am Attached to You”) and instead of trying to out-irritate Lloyd Webber, he remade his Evita as the dance floor schmaltz it begged to be. Midney’s one moment of utter transcendence was Beautiful Bend’s “Boogie Motion,” perhaps the only time Eurodisco managed to incorporate a bit of sass into the vacant vocalists who were the subgenre’s raison d’être (plus perhaps the goofiest bass line ever).
    If there was a pied piper of Eurodisco leading the blankly grinning masses over the cliffs, though, it was probably Simon Soussan. Ironically, most of his