Big Disco Movie Hits: Geoff Love's Big Disco Sound - Music For Pleasure 1978

One truism I've come to appreciate from my travels through charity shop vinyl is that where there's a bandwagon, there's a budget record label waiting to jump on it. Geoff Love has had his fingers in more pies than most and it would appear that, sometime in the mid seventies, 'Geoff Love and his Orchestra' mutated into 'Geoff Love's Big Disco Sound'.  Fair enough that the folk behind the label wanted a slice of the disco pie I suppose, but that title is more than slightly disingenuous - these are not all 'disco movie hits' by any stretch.

 

Rather, they're songs from films that, to a greater or lesser degree (and sometimes much lesser) have a disco-ish connection ('Thank God It's Friday', 'Saturday Night Fever'), if only via their soundtracks (e.g. 'The Stud', 'Car Wash'.). Except for 'FM' that is, which is a film about seventies AOR that has no connection to disco at all and comes with a Steely Dan title track that, with true Steely Dan cynicism, actually cocks a snook at that whole FM scene. Geoff's band has a crack at it in any case, which means this album at least in part could have been called 'Geoff Love Plays Steely Dan'. And that's something that has to be heard.

 

And in listening to it I can say that the title is not the only disingenuous thing about this - 'Geoff Love's Big Disco Sound' isn't particularly 'big' and it's not particularly 'disco' either; unless my ears are deceiving me, the orchestra of old has been well and truly ditched and the music on this is almost entirely electronically created - if there are any live musicians on here then I can't pick them out anyway. But that's ok, there was plenty of fine, electronic dance music around in the seventies....it's just that none of it is on this record.  You can forget the high energy throb of Giorgio Moroder or Cerrone; this disco sounds like it's been recorded underwater. All the snap and fizz is sucked out of hitherto indestructable disco standards like 'Stayin' Alive' and 'Night Fever' to leave a tired wooze that slops around the dancefloor with all the grace of a barrel half filled with water.

 

As you can probably guess, these tracks are not copies of the originals and they make precious little attempt to be. Love's arrangements of 'Grease', 'Native New Yorker' and 'Every 1s A Winner' have all the vitality of a week old corpse while others could be the very dictionary definition of 'misguided'; I mentioned above that Love has a crack at Steely Dan and in so doing comes up with a version of 'FM' that's to the hipster smart and sardonic cool of the Dan as that main painting on the cover (with the too short arm) is to using an actual photograph of John Travolta - that is, something just about recognisable but a piss poor substitute. I genuinely have no idea what they were thinking.

 

And to that little sub genre you can add 'disco' versions of Joe Walsh's 'Life's Been Good' and The Beatles' 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', neither of which (like 'FM') were ever remotely 'disco' and which leave that 'Big Disco Sound' whistling in the dark for a dead dog in its efforts to make them so. What doesn't help either is that apart from the occasional repetition of the chorus line on some of the songs (like 'You're The One That I Want'), this album is largely instrumental, meaning that most of these lyric based songs are rendered...well....meaningless.... and so are forced to rely on the music to provide the focal point. And that music is not good - even the most hardcore of crate digging DJs would struggle to find a worthwhile sample in any of this, even an ironic one. This is not the album I'd reach for if I were organising a 70's retro disco night. I wonder if there's a 'Geoff Love's Big Punk Sound' album doing the rounds somewhere?