Murder on the dance floor: The clash between punk rock and disco

Thump, burble, squawk, bleep: "I Feel Love." Even if its sonic vision of a shiny tomorrow - all those chattering synths and drum machines - nowadays gets confused with car-chase music from Miami Vice, back in 1977 Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" sounded like the future.

It also sounded German, which was more or less the same thing. As with David Bowie's albums Low and Heroes, recorded partly in Berlin and released at either end of 1977, the Munich-based trio of vocalist Summer and producers/co-writers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte helped to create a new European aesthetic of cool, disassociated sensuality. Sort of disco Kraftwerk does android sex in space.

And if the musical consequence of this, "I Feel Love", came across as science fiction, that was exactly what it had been designed to do. "'I Feel Love' was the last track on the concept album I Remember Yesterday, on which Donna sang the first track in a 1940s style, going through various other genres until the final song was intended to represent the future," explains Pete Bellotte. "We used a Moog synthesizer to give the song this futuristic feel, and discovered a new way to layer level upon level of sound on to the track in perfect sync. We had no idea it was going to sound so special... Donna was one of those phenomenal one-take artists - she could just come in, sing the song and go. She was always spot on."

The song became the UK's No 1 single on 9 July 1977, but the Summer/Moroder/ Bellotte team failed to get the critical respect their innovation deserved. This could have been because the latter two had earlier written the bubblegum pop hit "Son of My Father", covered by Chicory Tip (and also featuring a Moog). But it's more likely because they were perceived as shady Svengali fluff-meisters, while their singer was clearly a disco babe. At the time, the inkies - the authenticity-obsessed British music press - were understandably preoccupied by punk, which, despite having only just started, in retrospect may have already begun its decline.

In the same week that "I Feel Love" made No 1, the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" reached No 6. But "Pretty Vacant" - perhaps the Pistols' best performance on record - sounds as much like the past as "I Feel Love" does the future. If electronic disco represented a clean, compliant service industry staffed by smiling robots, punk was a last gob of steam from the heavy industry of Fifties rock'n' roll, all Chuck Berry riffs, Gene Vincent snarls and workwear grown ripped and dirty through hard labour.

But the future - shiny or not - was won by "I Feel Love", the cue for synth-pop, house and techno, while disco went on to provide the breaks for hip-hop (the first rap track appeared on an album by Kool & the Gang). There was also the weird offspring of both punk and disco; a self-consciously avant-garde industrial art-pop that partnered punk's sneer with the techno-futurism of "I Feel Love". You may not have heard many of the records, but this secret history of mutant disco is worth investigating (see sidebar).

It's also a myth that punk was all good; that it served the purpose of reinvigorating a scene long gone limp. If, like me, you were a student at the time, listening not to Yes or chart music but to the best soul and reggae ever produced, to Blood on the Tracks, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Tom Waits and Graham Parker, things were pretty good already. Punk's drug of choice, amphetamine sulphate, hardly lent itself to aesthetic contemplation either (which is probably why a million dope-smoking white men became Rastafarians by proxy). Yes, punk was exciting, and it revived an ailing singles market, making you want to get down the record shop on a Friday to buy the latest sounds. But, honestly, once you got them home the records were mostly horrible and the gigs were even worse. By contrast, disco became the last refuge of craft in an age that no longer valued it. Listen to "Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel" by the Tavares, or "Native New Yorker" by Odyssey and marvel at that tongue-and-groove work.

By mid-1977, punk was already in crisis, although you could argue that crisis was what it was all about. The problem was how to keep the momentum going, both for the music press - which needed something new to write about every week - and for the old--fart music industry, which needed to sell albums to make money (rather than loss-leading picture-bag singles). The New Musical Express put all of its eggs in the leaking baskets of its favourite bands, The Clash and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. When the bands' 1978 albums, The Clash's Give 'Em Enough Rope and the Heartbreakers' LAMF, proved artistic and commercial failures, the punk centre failed to hold.

But by then NME writers were already in revolt from punk orthodoxy. Julie Burchill championed Evelyn "Champagne" King's "Shame", one of the very best disco records ever, while Paul Morley sniffed out Joy Division in Manchester and Ian Penman - the resident sage - theorised at length about a new post-punk, post-disco aesthetic that somehow linked ex-disco queen Grace Jones to the confrontational performance art of New York's James Chance and Lydia Lunch. A generation of suburban synth warriors emerged from their bedrooms in Sheffield, Leeds and Basildon to answer the call to arms.

And the dark, twisted disco of Suicide was already there. A primitive synth and vocals duo formed by New Yorkers Martin Rev and Alan Vega, Suicide had supported The Clash on a notorious British tour - they were bottled and spat on every night. With Suicide's second album and the divine single "Dream Baby Dream" - a fave of Bruce Springsteen, who has performed it live - mutant disco had truly arrived. Few people bought the records that followed, sadly, but the drip-drip-drip influence of the sound was unstoppable.

By 1980, disco proper was dead. And if you ask Gloria Gaynor - whose "I Will Survive" was a dancefloor anthem of 1979 - it was killed by a conspiracy of white record-and-radio industry bigwigs anxious to get straight rock fans who were angry at gay disco culture back on the consumer bus. "In New York I remember seeing graffiti everywhere saying 'disco sucks'," remembers Pete Bellotte. "I knew it was the end of an era. 'Disco' became a dirty word for a long time." Punk died too, murdered by the skinny-tie rock of new wave.

Who back then knew what the future held: kids on the bus playing electronic dance music on their mobile phones. Thump, burble, squawk, bleep: "I Feel Love"...

The beat generation: six dark disco classics

Mutant Disco Vol 2, Various artists, 2001

Was (Not Was), Kid Creole et al from the influential Manhattan snob-punk label

Cherchez la Femme, Dr Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, 1977

August Darnell's terrific mix of disco smooch and Art Deco fantasy

Warm Leatherette, Grace Jones, 1980

Title track invokes J G Ballard car-crash chic; check the disco-reggae version of Chrissie Hynde's "Private Life"

The Original Sound of Sheffield, Cabaret Voltaire, 2001

Ay up! Industrial electronica, South Yorkshire style (cf The Human League)

The Second Album, Suicide, 1980

Includes Bruce Springsteen's fave "Dream Baby Dream", the high point of NYC junkie-disco

Thermonuclear Sweat Defunkt, 1982

Disco/free-jazz fusion from trombonist Joseph Bowie, brother of Lester