The PopCulteer
May 1, 2026
Time flies when you’re having fun! It’s a big day for fans of Disco Music today on The AIR.
Mel’s show, MIRRORBALL, has now lasted pretty much as long as the classic era of Disco music did. Six years ago today, my wife, Mel Larch’s showcase of Disco Music, MIRRORBALL, made its debut on The AIR (PopCult’s sister internet radio station), and our listeners have been dancing like crazy ever since.
It’s been an amazing journey getting here with what we thought was just a throwaway music special that nobody would listen to. We were wrong, and here we are celebrating with thousands of listeners and a worldwide audience. It was during the late summer of 2019 when Mr. and Mrs. PopCulteer were careening through Eastern Pennsylvania eating chocolate and listening to The Rialto Report podcast about Andrea True, that my lovely wife, Mel, remarked on how much she loved classic Disco music, and we began to talk about doing a Disco show for The AIR. The show didn’t happen until the pandemic shut everything down and gave us more free time, and the first MIRRORBALL debuted as an AIR Music Special on May 1, 2020.
This is the first time that the anniversary also landed on Friday, so we’re doing it up big. To mark the occasion of this sixth anniverary, The AIR will run a marathon of Mel’s hand-picked favorite episodes beginning Friday at 3 PM. That’s right after a very “special” episode of the show premiere’s in the show’s regular timeslot. The marathon will run until Midnight, Saturday night, and our normal Saturday marathon of the week’s new music specialty shows on The AIR will move to Sunday, for one week only.
You can celebrate May Day with a bang Friday afternoon as our radio station brings you classic Disco perofrmed live in concert on The AIR. Tune in as we serve up a new episode of MIRRORBALL right before we launch into a 33-hour marathon. The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear these shows on The AIR website, or just click on the embedded player found elsewhere on this page.
Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch devotes a full hour to major Disco artists performing live on Burt Sugarman’s late-night NBC program, The Midnight Special. While the Midnight Special was not soley devoted to Disco Music, they certainly had more than their fair share. In fact, while assembling this show, I noticed that could easily revisit this topic again in the future.
You will hear unique performances by The Ohio Players, The Bee Gees, KC & The Sunshine Band, Thelma Houston, Labelle, Barry White and more. The show wraps up with an epic, nine-minute live performance by Donna Summer, with a wild arrangement of “Love To Love You Baby.” If you were around in the 1970s, this will punch a lot of nostalgia buttons. If you won’t, well kids, this is how things were back when the entire entertainment industry was doing cocaine.
Just check out this playlist…
MIRRORBALL 126
The Midnight Special Special
The Ohio Players “Love Rollercoaster”
KC & The Sunshine Band “Get Down Tonight”
Thelma Houston “Don’t Leave Me This Way”
The Bee Gees “Jive Talkin'”
Kool and the Gang “Spirit of the Boogie”
George McCrae “Rock Your Baby”
ABBA “Dancing Queen”
Earth Wind and Fire “Shining Star”
Labelle “Lady Marmalade”
Barry White “You Are The First, The Last, My Everything”
Disco Tex and the Sex O Lettes “Get Dancin'”
Donna Summer “Love To Love You Baby”
My Melanie
When we launched MIRRORBALL, Mel was concerned that we’d run out of classic Disco-era music, but the truth is, after digging in the club vaults for five years, there is no end to the countless grooves that we can bring you. For a show that was inspired by a podcast about vintage porn and was never intended to be an ongoing series, to be still going strong after six years is quite an achievement.
You will still be able to tune in to The AIR for new episodes of MIRRORBALL, Fridays at 2 PM for the foreseeable future.
The really wild, or ironic, or just remarkably amusing, thing about MIRRORBALL is that I’m producing the show. It’s Mel’s baby, and she directs the themes and tone, but I’m the one who has to pick the music, handle the segues and write Mel’s script. She’s got some kind of day job or something that gets in the way.
Had you told me in the late 1970s that I would realize my dream of being a radio deejay, I would have been thrilled. But if you informed me that among my duties I’d be producing a Disco music show, and producing and hosting a Swing Music show, I would’ve thought you were high.
That was right when I was just getting into music, and my musical tastes were in their infancy. I was devouring a steady diet of Beatles, Zappa, Prog and New Wave, and held Jazz and Disco in utter contempt. It took a few years for my ears to mature and my tastes to evolve to the point where, by the mid 1980s I was a Big Band Music nerd, and a few years after that, working as an oldies deejay at WVNS, I realized how well-crafted a lot of the Disco hits were.
I’m sort of proof that you can have room in your musical diet for John Lennon, Keith Emerson and Mark Motherbaugh, and also appreciate Nigel Rodgers, Arif Mardin and Jellybean Benetiz.
Six years in, and The MIRRORBALL is still spinning.
You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays Sunday night at 11 PM and throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM plus there’s a four-hour mini-marathon on Friday nights most weeks.
And that is our very danceable PopCulteer for this week. Check back for fresh content every day, plus all our regular features. Don’t forget, you can listen to MIRRORBALL all night Friday and all day Saturday this week.
Comments