Hadn’t realised this was a Biddu production, but I guess there’s something in the string arrangement which points towards his particular brand of treble-heavy bargain-basement Brit disco - and it arguably has trace elements of the sort of string arrangements which later cropped up in Bollywood-does-disco tracks. But at the time, Biddu was just another pop hack churning out flops by the barrel load - believe me, I’ve heard a lot of his 1972-73 productions (it’s a long story) and there are no hidden gems to be found there at all. So it sounds like arranger Gerry Shury might well be the unsung hero here.

I’ll put in a good word for Carl Douglas’s other hit, though: “Run Back”, from late 77/early 78. It’s a cute little string-driven, wonky-synthed Brit-disco stomper, with Motowny inflections; the midpoint between Billy Ocean and “Tragedy” (some notable similarities with the latter in certain places, curiously enough).

One thing about the song’s lyrics is that it suggests these kung fu fighters are actually just putting on a display rather than laying into each other - there are no references to injuries or broken bones.

Being a girl meant I thankfully was spared any high kicks or pebble-snatching activities. I think Robyn Hitchcock covered this back before it was ever called a ‘guilty pleasure’.

Of course KFF ticked another cultural box with a football reference – “Little Sammy Chung” being a nod to the then assistant manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers, who had won the League Cup the previous season. (Wasn’t it?)

Is the b-side an instrumental?

If there was ever a stone-bonker chart topper, it was this thing. The kung fu craze swept this country and stateside like wildfire a year after the passing of the iconoclast who was The Bruce. This soon after that sad basket case, David Carradine had debuted with the tv series. In a few short months, the world had gone potty. At my alma meta enormous black boys were kicking ass quite literally in the war zone which was the playground, whilst the more studious of us (those few of us who could spell “cat”) stayed in class, trying to snatch pebbles out of each other’s hands. The thing we all had in common, though, was that we were paying homage to the same show, although to be fair had video recorders been around then, many of us would have fast-forwarded through most of it. Caine, having been abused by redneck cowboys, who flobbed in his beans and coffee as he worked on the railroad or tripped him up and called him “Chinaman” and whatever else, finally loses his rag and kicks the Mother of God out of all of them in slow mo (especially that guy who was the spit of Roy Kinnear, who got shot by McCloud, Cannon, Rockford, Starsky, Kojak and uncle Tom Cobbly an’ all). Basically, all the philosophy and enlightenment theory which the old bloke with ping pong balls for eyes had tried to instil in Caine has gone up the pictures big style. End of.

And then Carl Douglas, a smiling moon-faced Jamaican steps in and boy, does he scoop the pot! KFF is, of course, pure gold. The chorus, it is said, quotes verbatim from Douglas’ own comments having just seen a martial arts picture. A light bulb flashed above his head and that was it. Marvellous stuff. Alas, Carl then got greedy and came up with a follow up, which was identical and quite frankly risible. He very deservedly fell on his arse over this. The subsequent “Run Back” was a lot better.

Meanwhile, things Oriental continued to thrive and peaked, for me at least, with the wonderful “Water Margin”, a Japanese production narrated inevitably by Burt Kwouk, one of Manchester’s finest.

(so that’s a THIRD meaning of establishment!)

(uk) punk was explicitly “grown-up” political (as opposed to implicitly “escapist-sensualist” political, which disco was), and bcz punk was avowedly nihilistic, it seemed socially threatening in a very fractured and frightened time; there was eg an actual political war for control of venue-licensing and such (which rock lost, hence the fkn awful state of live music in london to this day)

disco by contrast was MUCH more of a threat to established music-industry structures* — and middlebrow aesthetic values — than punk turned out to be, tho it’s sometimes quite hard (as here) to distinguish from this distance which bits of disco are the rising destabilising force and which the fightback (and the transformation of the structures didn’t begin in earnest till the late 80s and dance culture as a pretty-much distinct leisure-industry entity, with very difft protocols and processes of self-generation and exchange)**

*bcz quality in dance-culture depends on a much more distributed and social nexus of judgement, which entirely bypasses the usual print systems of commentary and winnowing and proto-historicist second-guessing (<— poncy way of saying “the rock press”, which barely existed in the uk in 1974 anyway)
**this analysis slightly depends on reading hiphop as an extension of disco — which of course it is — and fuzzies up the issue of “fear” even more (ie Disco “caused” the fear rap generates, by “causing” rap, but this isn’t quite what you meant i suspect)

shorter the above: the established music industry adapted to the exploitation of punk much quicker than it adapted to the exploitation of “dance”, and the panic and confusion of the mainstream over the latter was a lot longer-lasting

As Marcello has written elsewhere, the use of the song in City of God as the cue for a dance floor massacre is unforgettable, and reflects the glee in violence that underlies its immense likeablity.

Another piece of era-defining combat at around that time – while Carl Douglas was number one we were just building up to the Rumble in the Jungle a few weeks later!