In a new exhibition, the city’s more well-known breakout artists are celebrated alongside a richer, and lesser reported, strain of experimental music
In Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ irrepressible 1980 song Darrio, a klatch of female backup singers bouncingly plead with the titular gentleman to get them into Studio 54. The otherwise obliging Darrio enumerates why he cannot (“That’s the only thing that money can’t buy”), before finally admitting “my kind of heaven is Club 57,” the late-70s/early-80s East Village hangout that was the antithesis of a disco. The New York Times in 1980 described the band as “the Marx Brothers meeting Carmen Miranda in Bob Marley’s Kingston”.
Related: Clearing the dancefloor: how club culture became a museum piece
