The PopCulteer
April 19, 2024

Bring your dancing shoes! The AIR is going four decades in the past for a dance party on our music specialty shows Friday afternoon.

When the world looks bleak, that’s when it’s time to dance, so this week’s PopCulteer will fire up the lighted dancefloor as we bring you the playlists for today’s beat-filled new episodes of MIRRORBALL and Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, on The AIR. The AIR is PopCult‘s sister radio station. You can hear our 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 intricately curated classics of the late Disco era, post-1980.

Every song on this week’s show is making its MIRRORBALL debut, which is getting really tricky to pull off as Mel prepares to hit her 100th episode, which will coincide with her fourth anniversary in just a couple of weeks. The show this week revisits the big club hits from the very early 1980s, when Disco had hit it’s commercial peak, but still had way more life in it than anybody seems to remember.Rumors of its demise had been greatly exagerrated.

It’s a cool collection of dance classics from the end of the Golden Age of Disco, and it’s part of three hours of 1980s Dance music debuting on The AIR Friday

Check out the playlist…

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Richie Havens “Going Back To My Roots”
Rose Royce “R.R Express”
Womack & Womack “Love Wars”
Hot Chocolate “Are You Getting Enough of What Makes You Happy”
Mass Production “Shanté”
Dee Dee Bridgewater “Lonely Disco Dancer”
Kleer “Get Tough”
Al Jarreau “Boogie Down”
Slave “Feel My Love”
Chic “Rebels Are We”

You can hear MIRRORBALL every Friday at 2 PM, with replays throughout the following week Monday at 9 AM and Tuesday at 1 PM and a mini-marathon Saturday nights at 9 PM

At 3 PM, Sydney Fileen graces us with a terrific new episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat that coincidentally turned out to be the seventh Big Electric Cat mixtape of New Wave 12″ extended remixes.

Combined with MIRRORBALL, that makes three solid hours of 1980s dance music, so if you see folks approaching retirement age getting their boogie down, you know why.

This time Sydney decided to dig out some more bizarre mixes from some of the bigger names in New Wave, so you might recognize some of the songs, but not the way you’ll hear them here.

Check out the playlist (all extended remixes)…

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Billy Idol “Cradle of Love”
Pretenders “Room Full of Mirrors”
The Alarm “Strength”
Timelords “Doctorin’ The Tardis”
Simple Minds “Sanctify Yourself”
Cyndi Lauper “Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough”
Killing Joke “Wardance”
Big Audio Dynamite “Medicine Show”
The The “Infected”
The Vapors “Turning Japanese”
The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated”
Elvis Costello & The Attractions “Pump It Up”
Go-Go’s “Head Over Heels”
Fun Boy Three “Our Lips Are Sealed”
Style Council “My Ever Changing Moods”
Pete Shelley “Homosapien”
The Police “Walking On The Moon”

Sydney’s Big Electric Cat is produced at Haversham Recording Institute in London, and can be heard every Friday at 3 PM, with replays Saturday afternoon,  Monday at 7 AM, Tuesday at 8 PM, Wednesday at Noon and Thursday at 10 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Classic episodes can be heard Sunday morning at 10 AM.

That’s what’s new on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features every day.