“So let’s dance through all our fears, war is over for a bit,” Kylie Minogue sang on her call-to-arms gay anthem, Your Disco Needs You, 20 years ago.
Neither Kylie – nor anyone else – could have imagined just how poignant those lyrics would become in 2020.
While the war is far from over, and heaving dance floors still seem a long way off from becoming a reality again, it doesn’t mean we can’t create our own and throw some shapes like nobody’s watching (because they really aren’t).
And if anyone is going to distract us from the hell hole that is 2020 by providing the playlist, it’s Kylie. Disco Kylie to be precise.
Kylie and disco have history. Much of her output from the last three decades has been rooted in the genre, from hits like Step Back In Time and Spinning Around, to deep cuts like Disco Down and So Now Goodbye.
And many of the greatest disco tracks share Kylie’s unique brand of musical melancholy too. Never Can Say Goodbye, On The Radio, I Will Survive… I’m-sad-but-I’ll-dance-through-the-tears is her sweet spot. Kylie herself has acknowledged that some of the best disco is “really sad”. “And it’s dressed in sequins and it’s lit with coloured lights,” she said recently.
And while there are tinges of that here, her 15th studio album is more concerned with having as much fun as possible. Kylie’s read the room and delivered after digging out her Earth Wind And Fire, Donna Summer and ABBA albums. The Swedish foursome were famed for their melancholy pop too, and also dabbled with disco on their 1979 album Voulez-Vous.
Apparently, Kylie re-watched ABBA The Movie during the recording of DISCO, and it shows. Their influence is there in the lyrics of the album’s first single Say Something, as well as the chorus of Last Chance – one of the album’s highlights.
Elsewhere, Real Groove sounds like it could have been lifted straight off Dua Lipa’s recent disco-tinged Future Nostalgia, while Supernova sounds exactly like a song called Supernova should sound: vocoder vocals, intergalactic lyrics and a huge hands-in-the-air chorus. It’s basically poppers in musical form.
Miss A Thing is Magic’s cooler, slinkier, grown-up cousin and one of the more straight-up disco songs on the album, but it still sounds thoroughly 21st century, which is the DNA of this album: it’s an homage to disco – a celebration of the genre, but brought bang up to date. In less experienced hands it could have all veered into cheesy pastiche territory.
It’s also distinctly “Kylie” and yet still manages to sound unlike anything like she’s ever done before.
Where Does The DJ Go? Kylie asks on one of the most fun tracks, with the Aussie star channeling her inner Gloria Gaynor on the intro and name-checking her biggest hit, I Will Survive. Dance Floor Darling is a mid-tempo bop until it drifts gloriously into Chromeo territory and suddenly speeds up. It’s a theme that runs through the album: just when you think you can have a breather, you’re dragged back to Kylie’s shiny dance floor.
“We’re a million miles apart, in a thousand ways… Can we all be as one again?” she asks on Say Something.
Let’s hope sooner rather than later, but in the meantime DISCO is just the tonic 2020 needs.
We’ll see you on the dance floor… eventually.