The call of the disco ball

My life's soundtrack

Hello, and thank you for reading The Honesty Box. Today, I’m writing about some of the tunes that make my heart sing.

Music has accompanied my life’s highest highs and some of its lowest lows. It’s one of the few things that can tip me over the edge – providing a feeling of explosive joy, or occasionally plunge me deep into the clouds that can sometimes linger in my head. Certain songs take me right back to almost exactly how I felt at a particular moment, however long ago it was: the combination of the melody, the lyrics, what I’m wearing, the lighting, the smell of the place, how it felt to move my body and who else was there is such a heady mix.

I’ve written about how I hit a low autumn 2020, in between lockdowns, and how my doctor prescribed 30 minutes of exercise a day. It was a couple of months after Michaela Coel’s TV drama I May Destroy You had aired, a show that got rave reviews and one I found electrifying. The soundtrack is excellent, and while Coel is having a revelation during one of the episodes, a gospel song I’d never heard plays, and a line stood out to me: “There’s a brand new feeling in the air”.

Often, I’ll have a vague feeling that I’ve heard a song before the big moment when it hits me like a train.

Turns out it’s from a song called It’s Gonna Rain, by Reverend Milton Brunson and The Thompson Community Singers, and I added it to my playlist. It gave me hope and highs when I went running during those dark days, and kind of made me feel invincible. (You can read about the inspired soundtrack to I May Destroy You in this New York Times piece.)

I get a sense of “when I know, I know” about songs I think I’m going to love. I remember hearing the first few beats of Wham’s Everything She Wants when I was in my 20s at a bar in Birmingham and rushing up to the DJ to ask what it was. Then one New Year’s Eve a few years back, I was in Brighton and walked into a pub where they were playing Loleatta Holloway’s 1980 song Love Sensation (which was later sampled by Black Box in Ride On Time), and had to write down the lyrics in my phone so I could look the song up later.

Then there is Dance (Disco Heat) by Sylvester from 1978, which I first became properly aware of when I sang it during a term at Some Voices, a choir anyone can join. It became another lockdown classic, this time when I put it on my headphones and danced like no-one was watching in a park in March 2020.

Often, I’ll have a vague feeling that I’ve heard a song before the big moment when it hits me like a train. This has often happened during transformational times, such as with The Pointer Sisters’ Automatic. The group’s better-known songs are I’m So Excited and Jump (For My Love), but Automatic fully uses singer Ruth Pointer’s deep voice to convey the lust in the song. “My hands perspire and shake like a leaf, up and down goes my temperature. I summon doctors to get some relief, but they tell me there is no cure,” she sings.

The big moment for Automatic was at Morning Gloryville, a “sober rave” event, this one held in a bar somewhere under the Westway motorway in London’s Notting Hill. Sweating as I danced at 10am one Saturday in 2017, I was telling a friend about a flat I’d viewed the day before that I really wanted to make an offer on, when Automatic kicked in. Flat-hunting had been a painful and years-long slog, and as we moved to the beat, I got the tingles and the feeling that this could finally be the one. Three months later, as I pulled up outside the estate agency to pick up the keys to the place, Automatic started playing on the radio.

“Sunny, thank you for the gleam that shows its grace” - Bobby Hebb

Then there are the songs that I’ve more recently come to love. Last weekend, I went to a friend’s 30th birthday party where the theme was disco – a dream for me as I love 1970s music and fashion, and I went in a black and red sequinned top that belonged to my mother, which I used to wear to fancy dress parties 20 years ago.

My memories of the night are a little hazy, but I woke up with the 1976 version of the song Sunny by Boney M. going round in my head and a recollection of a friend whirling me around the dancefloor. I heard the lyrics first as a woman’s love for a new partner, but walking down the street listening to it again this week I decided that they could be about my love and gratitude towards other people, or even for myself.

“Sunny, thank you for the sunshine bouquet,

Sunny, thank you for the love you brought my way,

You gave to me your all and all,

Now I feel ten feet tall,

Sunny one so true, I love you.”

It’s too early to say how Sunny might permeate in my future mind, but I’m looking forward to looking back.

What’s on the soundtrack to your life?

Things I like

The story of Sunny

Sunny is originally a soul-jazz song written by musician Bobby Hebb in 1963, and has a tragic story attached to it. Bobby’s brother Harold was stabbed to death outside a nightclub in Nashville, and he wrote the song after the event. “Sunny” apparently refers to having a positive disposition and hoping for happier times, and if you listen to the lyrics, they are all about gratitude. What an amazing feat for Bobby to be able to write a song like this at a time like that. “Sunny, thank you for the gleam that shows its grace” is my favourite line.

How disco became house

I’ve always loved a disco beat and I’ve also danced to my fair share of house music over the years, and I knew the two were linked but I wasn’t sure how. Anyway, a piece on the music website Complex on the history of house explains everything, from how teenagers Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan started out playing New York clubs to the cities and DJs that keep the sound going now.

Thanks to Isiah Jackman and Unsplash for the image that appears with this post on The Honesty Box desktop homepage.