This wonderful series documents the passion and idealism of the 70s music scene. It’s an immaculately soundtracked history lesson – and so much more besides
After the tumult of the last few years, UK nightlife is in a perilous position, battered by rising costs for venues, a lack of staff, cash-strapped clubbers and changing habits ushered in by the pandemic. But if anything can get people in the mood to go out and dance again, it’s Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. This three-part documentary, a co-production with PBS, is the sort of top-quality music doc the BBC just casually and quietly releases, as if it does this sort of thing all the time. But this one really is a feast. It’s a history lesson with an immaculate soundtrack and it is about so much more than disco.
The first episode covers the boom in gay clubs in New York City during the early 1970s, and the arrival of a new sound, and wraps it all up in a thrilling social history. It begins not with sequins and glitter balls, but with protests and activism, as the 1960s marched forwards into a tough new decade. There was, as the radio presenter Mark Riley (not that one) says, “a fuck-you attitude among a lot of people, younger people generally”. There were mass marches for peace and women’s rights, young men were burning their draft cards for the Vietnam war, and LGBTQ+ people were rioting at the Stonewall Inn.
Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution is on BBC Two and iPlayer.
