The PopCulteer
January 12, 2024

With your humble blogger coughing his way through a quick trip to New York City, all we have for you this week is notes on our Friday radio programming on The AIR.

Friday at 2 PM on The AIR, Mel Larch does a 180 from the previous episode of MIRRORBALL and devotes a full hour to intricately curated classics of the very early, some would say “prehistoric” Disco era, in 1975, when “Disco” was just beginning to become recognizable as a musical style.  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.

Just like last time, every song on this week’s show is making its MIRROBALL debut, which is getting really tricky to pull off as Mel prepares to hit her 100th episode sometime in the new year. The focus this week is on the big club hits from very early in the Disco era, before Donna Summer, The Bee Gees or KC and the Sunshine Band had their first chart-toppers, when Disco was just another word for “danceclub” and nobody had time to be threatened by it yet.

It’s a cool collection of dance classics from the beginning of the Golden Age of Disco, when funk and soul mixed with Latin and techno and gelled into what became a dancefloor sensation. This is a big slab of fossilized funk that shows you just a hint of what was yet to come.

Check out the playlist…

MIRRORBALL 088

Archie Bell & The Drells “Dance Your Troubles Away”
Astor & The Potentials “Give Me What I Want”
Black Stash “Mighty Love Man”
Brass Construction “Movin'”
Brooklyn People “Boogie Man (Parts One and Two)”
Citizen Samuel Cain “Burnin’ Cab”
Mahattan Express “Bad Girl”
Loleatta Holloway “Only A Fool”
Pino Presti “Smile”
The Duprees “Delicious”
Eddie drennon & B.B.S. “Let’s Do The Latin Hustle”

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 we bring you an encore of a claasic episode of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat from 2017, loaded with crunchy New Wave Goodness.

Check out the playlist…

BEC 020
Oingo Boingo  “Private Life”
Missing Persons  “Hello, I Love You”
INXS  “Need You Tonight”
Vivabeat  “Man From China”
Go West  “We Close Our Eyes”
Fad Gadget  “Back To Nature”
Erasure  “The Circus”
The Clash  “Straight To Hell”
Toyah  “Blue Meaning”
Ultravox  “Rockwrock”
Fear  “Let’s Have A War”
Biizarre Leidenschnatt  “Plasticpuppen”
The Nerves  “TV Adverts”
Stiff Little Fingers  “Nobody’s Heroes (Live)”
Blitz  “Youth” Mi Sex  “21-20”
Yoko Ono  “Move On Fast”
The Cure  “10:15 Saturday Night”
The Distributors  “T.V. Me”
Kraftwerk  “Tour De France”
Simple Minds  “Someone Somewhere In Summertime”
Ian Dury and the Blockheads  “What A Waste”
The Saints  “Know Your Product”
Aerial  “Cold War Love”
Siouxsie and the Banshees  “Suburban Relapse”
Berlin  “Sex (I’m A)” (extended version)
Blue Me  “Berlin”
The Jam  “Going Underground”
Generation X  “King Rocker
Yellow Magic Orchestra  “Cosmic Surfin’”

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.

For New Year’s Eve this year, The AIR will play our usual overnight marathon of The Swing Shift, but rather than bring you our episodes in order, for this week we’ll cherry-pick the very best for youso you can dance into the new year in style. That begins Sunday at Midnight, immediately following an encore of today’s new MIRRORBALL!

That’s what’s new on The AIR Friday, and that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for our regular features every day, and try not to blow up Charleston while I’m out of town.