Becoming a legend from humble beginnings, ‘Stand on the Word’ is a track that demonstrates the crate-digging mindset shared by NYC’s club legends. Regardless, ‘Stand On The Word’ became a staple record for everyone from Humphries at the nightclub Zanzibar (“It’s like church, you know what I mean?” he told Red Bull, “Especially on Sunday mornings”) to influential New York producer Walter Gibbons and even Manchester’s Hacienda. The Larry Levan association came later on, when an untitled white label released in 2003 credited a ‘LARRY 02’. In reality, the track was discovered by a motley crew of other DJs – DJ Tony Humphries, George Rodriguez, and Eddie O’Loughlin of Next Plateau Records – and nobody’s really sure how they stumbled upon the recording of ‘Stand on the Word’ in the first place. As luck would have it, the grandmother of the legendary Larry Levan – resident DJ at NYC’s disco institution and infamous night club Paradise Garage – went to the very same church, and Levan happened to attend the recording session for the choir’s privately released album ‘ Somebody Prayed For This’. The story goes like this: Phyliss McKoy Joubert and her celestial choir recorded the original vocal hook at First Baptist Church in Crown Heights, New York. Like all classics, ‘Stand on the Word’ comes with its own tall tale. The Joubert Singers – ‘ Stand on the Word’
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This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years. “Eno came running in, and said ‘I have heard the sound of the future’” recalled Bowie. While recording in Berlin with David Bowie, Brian Eno happened upon the song, by German-speaker Summer, and ran into the studio waving a copy. Similarly to Kraftwerk’s game-changing ‘ Trans-Europe Express ’, t he influence of ‘I Feel Love’ was immediate. For that, Moroder called on the services of drummer Keith Forsey. “We managed to create a snare and a hi-hat, but we couldn’t find a punchy enough bass drum,” he tells Tim Lawrence in the seminal disco book Love Saves the Day. Borrowing “the second ever Moog” from a classical composer based in Munich, Moroder began to construct the brutally precise heartbeat of ‘I Feel Love’, laying down the propulsive rhythms and synth arpeggios piece by piece. Produced by Italodisco giant Giorgio Moroder, the track appeared as the closer of Donna Summer’s ‘I Remember Yesterday’ album, a release that journeyed through the history of dance music.Īs a whole, the concept album touched on swing band bombast, the girl groups of ’60s, and Motown – but ‘I Feel Love’ looked towards the future, and influenced electronic music for decades to come, inspiring everyone from Blondie to The Human League.Īs a producer, Moroder had been mucking about with Moog synthesisers – at that time, a cutting edge new tool.
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Released in 1977, ‘I Feel Love’ was the pivotal disco record that bridged the Atlantic ocean-sized gap between compressed, synthy Eurodisco, and the spiralling orchestral heart of the US variety. Join us on the dancefloor for the 20 greatest disco tracks of all time. Manusco’s underground club soon birthed a genre that went on to eat the decade, and still offers a sanctuary for outsiders to party. Disco was born in New York in 1970 – according to folklore, anyway – when a disc jockey named David Manusco threw a Valentine’s Day party at his invite-only destination The Loft, which didn’t sell booze and could thus dodge NYC’s licensing laws.