Pure Disco

Many long years I have sought in vain for the very pinnacle of disco. I knew that it must be out there somewhere, like some sort of Questing Beast roaming the Forest Sauvage, languishing in some dark, forgotten recess - perhaps re-imagined as some stripped-down arcade midi or on-hold switchboard track. For a disco song, little can eclipse (in my mind anyway) Gloria Gaynor's Never Can Say Goodbye, which manages to be at once sad, beautiful, nostalgic and totally groovy. But I could never find an instrumental piece to match it. The Hustle comes close, as does Love's Theme or Rise, but the Holy Grail was still missing, until one day there it was - a number called "Manhattan Skyline" by David Shire in what was in retrospect the most obvious place of all: the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. And it's a piece within a piece; it starts with a typical so-so 70s-sounding intro, and then erupts from nowhere into this exquisite instrumental refrain/bridge/whatever (I don't know the term). It's one of those transcendental song moments, like the keyboard bit in "Clouds Across the Moon" or the chorus in "Shout to the Top" or a couple of far-too-short bits of Boogie Wonderland ("All the love in the world can't be gone...") and Disco Inferno ("Up above my head...").

No song is perfect from start to finish, but occasionally one has a seminal twenty seconds or so that is an order of magnitude sweeter than the rest. It's as if the composer was jamming oneday and happened upon it, but couldn't stretch it to 3 minutes, so just wrapped a normal song around it. Maybe I should put together a collection of these segments and try to explain why I think each is so great. I would also be curious to know if it's just me.