Here’s what I noticed at the wedding disco I was at this Saturday: nobody knows how to dance to The Darkness but everybody wants to. Obviously the standard of dancing at wedding discos is not too high anyway, and there’s a lot of coming and going, but the floor was packed for The Darkness with people just, well, shuffling basically. Some people essayed an air guitar solo and were applauded.
Recent weddings I’d been to had made me wonder if the hegemony of THE SEVENTIES as dancefloor unifier was on the wane, thanks to Skool Disco etc., and now the Eighties (or that subset of them that gets played at wedding discos) would rule. I was wrong though. There’s something about classic disco music that seems to bring out the dancer in anyone – we all know that it’s difficult to do well but everyone thinks they can do it to a rudimentary standard. I don’t much like dancing to disco – I become very aware of my lack of rhythm, much more so than with more complicated musics where nobody else is doing it properly either – and singing along or striking poses is less fun too. Is it the ‘easiest’ music to dance to, though? And if not what is?
(It’s also interesting that at weddings older people love disco music too, the concept of disco has transmitted successfully up the agegroups as well as down, in a way that more recent dance musics just haven’t (yet). At my own wedding my Mum’s family decided to have a go at dancing to Missy Elliot. They didn’t precisely know what to do so settled – marvellously – on an eightsome reel!)