It turns out it's quite hard to compile an RR playlist, let alone write about these choices, when 50% of the recommendations make you want to leap out of the desk chair and dance your socks off. Such was the admittedly pleasurable difficulty of working through last week's nightclub theme. Still, at least I have nicely toned calf and foot muscles now from all the tapping along. I promise I won't allow this week's theme, violence and fighting, to have such a visceral effect on me.
It says a lot about me – an indie freak at the height of rave, an incompetent lindy-hopper and a 1960s soul enthusiast – that I almost didn't acknowledge the past 20 years of dance music in the nightclub top 10. I've tried not to be too partisan with this week's B-list, although I suspect many will think I haven't tried hard enough. I'll begin with Amos Milburn's irrepressible Chicken Shack Boogie and Danny and the Juniors' twitchy At the Hop, add in the High Hatters' excellent version of Ten Cents a Dance (I'd only heard Ruth Etting's take before, but think I prefer this), pause a moment to mourn the absence of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie et al, and move swiftly on: to Jonathan Richman's I Was Dancing in a Lesbian Bar, Grace Jones's Nightclubbing, Steel Pulse's Sound System, Bonobo's Nightlife, Shirley and Company's wonderful Shame Shame Shame, and Roxy Music's Dance Away, the last song to fall off the playlist. To close: it's got to be Chic's Le Freak. Ultimately, it seemed to me that the story behind the song made this fit the theme, rather than the lyrics. And that didn't seem quite right for the column.
If I thanked everyone individually for their sterling efforts to expand my list of irresistible dancing songs, we'd be here until Christmas. So I'll just give a quick nod to webcore again for the joy that is Sugar Pie de Santo's Soulful Dress, and also for the reminder that it's time to invest in some music by Koko Taylor. And, on another tack, thanks to ejaydee for the introduction to I'm a Flirt: who'd have thought that R Kelly and Broken Social Scene would complement each other so beautifully?
And so to this week's theme, violence and fighting. It's another from Dorian Lynskey's theme mega-list; chiefly, though, it attracted my attention because of last week's involving blog discussion about bullying, boxing and martial arts. I don't think we want songs about the organised violence of war here (in any case, war has already been a theme), although mass outbreaks of fighting in a riot would work well. And a murder ballad will need more than a single shot being fired to count.
Deadline is midday Monday; please don't post more than one-third of a song's lyrics. Thankfully, the A-Z, RR archive and Overspill blog are too polite for fisticuffs: they're just muttering invective at each other instead.
