Have you heard about the new dance craze?
Continuing my trip back through the 1979 album charts.
26/08/79 : The Best Disco Album In The World - Various Artists
Yes, I know we don't do compilation albums except under exceptional circumstances - and what could possibly be exceptional about a selection of disco tracks under a corny title which just screams overselling? Well, there's two exceptional things - there's a good argument it's not overselling things and this week it's finishing a six week run at #1. So it gets a listen!
Except that, of course, it doesn't because it's not on any of the streaming services, but it was easy to get hold of the tracklist online and recreate - and what a tracklist it is! It includes Chic's "Le Freak" and "I Want Your Love", Amii Stewart's "Knock On Wood", Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman", Sister Sledge's "He's The Greatest Dancer" and "We Are Family", Candi Staton's "Young Hearts Run Free", Rose Royce's "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Wishing on a Star" and Eruption's ""I Can't Stand the Rain" - which I think covers most disco bases.
There was only one act on the album I'd never heard and that was Mick Jackson, who is probably better known as the co-writer of "Blame It On The Boogie". He was also the first to record it and his version charted at #15 in the UK, with The Jackson Five's version getting to #8 - but the most successful version in the UK comes from Big Fun, which got to #4 in '89. On this album though, Mick's singing 'Weekend", which is perfectly fine but certainly no BIOTB. My only complaint about the album would be that I could have done without the Boney M numbers, but there's no denying they were indeed disco! And disco's something I can take or leave generally, but there's a load of class tracks on here so I'm certainly happy to declare it to be the best disco album in the world that I'm aware of.
We're at #1 in the charts this week on its seventh week of a twelve week run, at the end of a six week run at the top - it's weird how it dropped out of the chart so quickly. It did manage four more weeks in the chart later in the year, but there can't be too many albums from this time that spent 40% of their time in the chart at the top. The rest of the top five were Electric Light Orchestra, Supertramp, ABBA and Earth, Wind & Fire (that's a very prog/pop/disco top five) and the highest new entry was XTC, all the way down at #43 - I wonder if we'll ever get to meet them? ('82 looks to be our best bet).
Wikipedia does have an entry for the album but all it says is that it did very well in the UK, which I guess we already know. To pad things out, I followed some of the links to the songs and learned that Amii Stewart's "Knock On Wood" was written by Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper who I know as members of The Blues Brothers band, but they were very big at Stax records in the 60s and 70s - I'd also completely forgotten there's a David Bowie version of the song. I was also surprised to The Pointer Sisters' "Fire" was written by Bruce Springsteen - there's a name you don't expect to be popping up on a disco album.
I'm not expecting any massively expensive versions of this out there and discogs.com tells us the absolute maximum you can spend is a tenner, but a couple of quid is probably going to see you right if you're desperate for a copy. Or you can just ask Alexa to play you the best disco in the world and I reckon she's gonna come up with quite a few of these tracks, so fair play to them in pulling this together.
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