Roy Thode and Friends

Let’s kick-off 2012 with a bit of New Year’s magic from the early 1980′s, courtesy of the magnificent Roy Thode (pictured above left, with Ann-Margret and Bobby Viteritti).

There’s probably not much more to say about New York’s legendary palace of gay excess, The Saint, that wasn’t covered in our Jim Burgess post last January, other than perhaps to puzzle over it’s continuing fascination for *cough* straight, middle-aged Yorkshiremen. There’s actually some debate among disco-anaraks as to the exact vintage of this recording – the “official” date is NYE 1980/81, but some say it’s actually from the 81/82 celebrations, which would make it exactly 30 years ago to this very day, so 500MH is tempted to go with the latter scenario.

Musically we are in the Disco sub-genre known as morning music….or sometimes sleaze (though there are purists who can draw distinctions even between these two close bedfellows). All the general listener needs to know is that this is the music that was played at the very end of the night (i.e. in the morning), mid-tempo in pace but off-the-scale in terms of emotional drama. Largely a phenomena of the gay scene, this was a musical world where the likes of Sharon Ridley’s Changin’ (a classic of the genre) could rub shoulders with…er…Cliff Richard.

As usual, thanks go out to some of the old-timers on DJHistory for the help pulling this together, including the almost-complete track listing hidden in the lyrics tab of each file:

Download: Roy Thode – Morning Set at The Saint – Part 1 (right click)

Download: Roy Thode – Morning Set at The Saint – Part 2 (right click)

Download: Roy Thode – Morning Set at The Saint – Part 3 (right click)

Download: Roy Thode – Morning Set at The Saint – Part 4 (right click)

As a footnote, Roy was also a participant in one of the odder remix projects of the disco era – along with Larry Levan he reworked C is for Cookie by Sesame Street’s very own Cookie Monster. Perhaps 500MH can dig that out later in 2012…

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