Hi-NRG

In the fall of 1981 the No. 1 record on Billboard’s dance chart was an eight-minute hymn to the back rooms of gay nightlife, cut in a San Francisco studio and released on a small label called Fusion. “Menergy” got its title when the studio got high — “I added an ‘M’ in front of title track called ‘Energy,’ and we came up with all these completely gay lyrics for it,” Marty Blecman remembered.¹ Hi-NRG is the music that record announced: electro-disco’s machines run faster and harder for the gay dance floors of San Francisco, New York, and London — 120 to 140 beats per minute, a synthesizer bassline pumping octaves in sixteenth notes, four-on-the-floor with the funk deliberately removed. “The nonfunkiness was crucial. Slamming rather than swinging, hi-NRG’s white European feel was accentuated by butt-bumping bass twangs at the end of each bar,” Simon Reynolds wrote.² For most of its life the music barely touched pop radio, and it never needed to: it had its own rooms and charts, and eventually a name of its own.

The founding records and the name

“I Feel Love” (1977) gave the floors the sequenced pulse, and the year after, Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” answered with a voice, a falsetto testifying over the machinery.³ The name is usually traced to Donna Summer herself, who reportedly explained her hit’s success by its “high-energy vibe” — a line that survives only as a disco history reports it, its original interview unlocated.⁴ The phrase hardened into a genre name in the London trade press. Record Mirror had been running a club chart called Boystown Disco since July 1982, compiled by James Hamilton and Alan Jones from the gay clubs’ playlists; during 1983 the chart’s name became Hi-NRG, the spelling in print before the anthem existed.⁵ The anthem arrived in April 1984: Evelyn Thomas’s “High Energy,” cut at Trident Studios for the producer Ian Levine, went to No. 5 in Britain and to No. 1 on Billboard’s dance chart that September.⁶ The genre was saluting its own name on the way up the charts.

The lab and the lights

The San Francisco sound had a faculty adviser. In the spring of 1972 a City College of San Francisco instructor named Gerald Mueller talked a dean into an electronic-music lab built around a single EMS VCS3 synthesizer, and Patrick Cowley, newly arrived from Buffalo, was one of his first students. “Patrick didn’t think of the synthesizer in the way that normal people do,” Mueller remembered. “He just kind of remembered what happened when you plugged things in.” And: “he had a damned good ear.”⁷ The ear got its floor education at City Disco, where Cowley ran the light show, and where in 1978 he met Sylvester; his synthesizer lines, threaded through the singer’s records, put the partnership on the charts.⁸ What Cowley built alone he built the slow way — no sequencers, the pulses played by hand onto eight-track tape, on equipment from the lab and gear he assembled himself.⁹

The records came in a two-year rush. In the summer of 1981 Cowley and Blecman founded Megatone Records, named for Cowley’s “Megatron Man,” and the label became the San Francisco sound’s pressing plant.¹⁰ In 1982 Cowley wrote and produced Paul Parker’s “Right on Target”, another dance No. 1, and cut “Do You Wanna Funk” with Sylvester, the partnership’s last hit and its biggest.¹¹

The one-man band

New York’s version of the genre was one man in a studio. Bobby Orlando — Bobby O — wrote the songs, played the instruments, produced the tapes, and released them on his own labels under invented act names, fronted by revolving rosters of session singers and models. His Discogs ledger runs to nearly a thousand credits; one profile counts that as maybe half to three-quarters of the actual output.¹² “In those days, in order for you to be a producer, you had to be a musician,” he told an interviewer.¹³ The Flirts, his most successful invention, were a trio of hired faces whose “Passion” (1982) reached the top five in Germany and Switzerland; Divine, the drag star, became a continental hitmaker under his production, “Native Love (Step by Step)” and then “Shoot Your Shot” going gold in the Netherlands.¹⁴ Orlando’s method ran on borrowed hooks: Divine’s “Love Reaction” openly cloned New Order’s “Blue Monday” — a record that had itself lifted its drums from a Donna Summer B-side. The hook was coming home.¹⁵

His strangest legacy arrived by magazine assignment. In August 1983 a Smash Hits journalist named Neil Tennant, in New York to interview the Police, sought Orlando out and played him demos; Orlando produced the original “West End Girls” at Unique Studios, released it in April 1984 on his Bobcat imprint, and watched it become a club hit in Los Angeles and San Francisco while stalling at No. 133 in Britain. The Pet Shop Boys bought themselves out of his contract in March 1985 and re-cut the song into a No. 1; Orlando kept a royalty stake in what followed.¹⁶

The floors

The Saint, the circuit’s cathedral, opened in September 1980 inside the former Fillmore East: a members-only club built by the bathhouse owner Bruce Mailman for $4.6 million, its 4,800-square-foot dance floor under an aluminum dome seventy-six feet across, lit from within by a planetarium projector.¹⁷ Its reputation crossed the Atlantic intact. Levine, the northern soul DJ turned producer, had been Heaven’s first resident when the London club opened under the Charing Cross arches in December 1979, and he measured his own room against the New York one. “There never was a club like The Saint. There never could be again. It was unique in the history of disco music. The best ever,” he said. “At Heaven, all we could even vaguely hope to do was aspire to be a tenth of what The Saint achieved.”¹⁸ Levine wrote records for his own room: Miquel Brown’s “So Many Men, So Little Time” (1983), a No. 2 American dance hit commissioned, in effect, by Heaven’s dance floor.¹⁹ San Francisco ran the after-hours end: the Trocadero Transfer, open until six in the morning from December 1977, and the EndUp, where the “Menergy” parties were held.²⁰ The circuit had its own economics — a record that broke at the Saint sold in London as an import, and the Record Mirror chart tracked exactly that traffic.²¹

The epidemic

Roy Thode, one of the Saint’s core DJs, died in May 1982. Cowley died that November, at thirty-two, having composed his last album, Mind Warp, while the illness advanced — a record one retrospective calls one of the artistic achievements of the AIDS crisis.²² Sylvester announced his own diagnosis by riding in San Francisco’s 1988 Pride parade in a wheelchair, with the People With AIDS contingent, and died that December at forty-one.²³ The rooms followed the people. The Saint opened its Fridays to straight crowds in its last two years and closed on April 30, 1988, with a final party that ran without stopping until noon on May 2; Blecman, who had run Megatone after his partner’s death, died of AIDS in 1991.²⁴ Megatone’s two founders died at either end of the plague’s first decade.

The second life

Pete Waterman had learned the market years before he industrialized it, at a Coventry club open only on Sunday nights. “A mate of mine said, ‘There’s a DJ there who plays some fantastic music that I know you’ve never heard, so why don’t we go down?’ It was a gay club, or a queer’s club as it was known then. I loved it. Oh, I loved it,” he remembered, and the education eventually became a business plan: “We just knew the major record companies were not focused on a market I knew well and loved — the gay dance market.”²⁵ In 1984 the new team of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Waterman took its first hits from Hi-NRG: Divine’s “You Think You’re a Man” reached the UK top twenty, Hazell Dean’s “Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)” the top five.²⁶ Stock stated the renovation plainly: “Most examples of Hi-NRG were short on song. I was keen to bring structured songs into the style.”²⁷ The crossover proof was Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”, released in November 1984 and at No. 1 in Britain by the following March — the first chart-topper for both the band and the producers, and the seed of the hit factory whose story is Pop’s.²⁸ Waterman had his own name for what the team did: “It was Techno Disco – that’s how we saw ourselves. What we were basically doing was playing Motown songs on the latest technology.”²⁹

By the late eighties the original strain had dispersed. In the London clubs the working term slid to Eurobeat — Record Mirror’s own chart renamed itself again — and on the American floors house replaced Hi-NRG as the ruling sound.³⁰ The afterlife was archival: the Dark Entries label spent the 2010s excavating Cowley’s unreleased tapes, including the soundtracks he had cut for gay adult films. “How I keep food on the table is I make music for porn, and that’s my extra income,” he had told a friend.³¹

Borders

Electro-disco is the parent: the same machines with the tempo raised and the last funk bred out, told from the Munich side at its own note. Italo-disco is the European twin, the parallel machine strain whose records filled these same charts as imports. Boogie is the opposite adjacency — it kept the funk and dropped the tempo, and the two genres split disco’s afterlife between them. Eurobeat is a renaming as much as a descendant, the term the London charts slid to in the late eighties; freestyle is a neighbor, an electro-descended New York strain that shared floors and record-store bins without sharing parentage. And house is the successor: the sound that took over the floors this genre built.

Foundational records

“You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” (1978, Sylvester) — the voice arrives: gospel falsetto over the sequenced pulse
“Menergy” (1981, Patrick Cowley) — the scene sings about itself, and Billboard puts it at No. 1
“Megatron Man” (1981, Patrick Cowley) — the record that named the label that pressed the sound
“Passion” (1982, the Flirts) — the New York assembly line’s flagship: hired faces, one author
“Do You Wanna Funk” (1982, Patrick Cowley & Sylvester) — the partnership’s last and biggest hit
“So Many Men, So Little Time” (1983, Miquel Brown) — the London commission: a record written for one room’s floor
“High Energy” (1984, Evelyn Thomas) — the name, sealed in a title, at No. 1 on the American dance chart
“You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” (1984, Dead or Alive) — the crossover: the gay clubs’ beat at UK No. 1

Key artists

Patrick Cowley — the San Francisco architect: a city-college lab training and hand-played pulses, then a label of his own
Sylvester — the voice: the gospel falsetto that made the machines sound alive
Bobby Orlando — the New York assembly line: invented acts and auditioned faces, a thousand credits deep
Divine — the drag star as continental hitmaker, from Bobby O’s studio to the PWL factory
Ian Levine — the London wing: Heaven’s first resident, and the producer of the record that sealed the name
Dead or Alive — the crossover act: the genre’s beat carried to No. 1 and into the pop factory

rhapsode

Explorer

Hi-NRG

The founding records and the name

The lab and the lights

The one-man band

The floors

The epidemic

The second life

Borders

Foundational records

Key artists

Further reading

Sources drawn on

rhapsode

Explorer

Hi-NRG

The founding records and the name

The lab and the lights

The one-man band

The floors

The epidemic

The second life

Borders

Foundational records

Key artists

Further reading

Footnotes

Sources drawn on