French flares back on the dancefloor as disco makes a comeback

PARIS - Many of them are of an age that qualifies for a senior citizen's bus pass, and when the word "hip" is usually followed by "replacement" rather than a comment on fashion. Most have not had a hit for a quarter century at least.But no matter.Around France, stars of the 1970s - Village People, Boney M, Anita (Ring My Bell) Ward, Ottawan (D. I. S. C. O.), the Weather Girls (It's Raining Men) and five other 1970s star acts are being welcomed with packed concert halls as part of a massive attempt to revive disco.Seventy thousand tickets have already been sold in 13 cities for the "RTL Disco Show", hosted by the country's most popular radio station, and 10 more dates have been added for the autumn. Plans are afoot to haul the pointy-dancing spectacle around Europe next year."The people who rush to the front are aged between 20 and 40 and wear Afro wigs and want to see a live performance of the songs they dance to in the discotheque," says promoter Olivier Kaefer. "The ones at the back of the hall are people in their fifties or pensioners, people of every socio-economic background, who were in their twenties when disco was in its heyday." Gay icons Village People, who had their biggest hit YMCA back in 1977, are topping the bill - the group includes only two founding members but the band's original style is unchanged - followed by Boney M, who had a whole string of successes - Daddy Cool, Rivers of Babylon and Rasputin - which spanned disco's zenith in the late 1970s.




None of those on stage is less than 50 years old, and the most senior is 72, making a lineup described unkindly as Jurassic by Amanda Lear, a 1970s French celebrity. Village People last recorded in 1985 - the song was entitled Sex Over the Phone but it failed to get a grip, so to speak, on public taste. The tour's master of ceremonies is someone called Plastic Bertrand, who had a single hit, Ca Plane Pour Moi (Everything's Great for Me) in 1977. Plastic is known to his mum as Roger."If this is the type of concert that unites all walks of life, then there is only one conclusion ... no more electro music, and just get Village People to perform at our Joan of Arc concert," said one fan after the Orleans concert .All this makes disco an easy target for France's intellectual elite, who - as elsewhere - flay it as embodying the worst of a decade that hardly distinguished itself for good taste.In their view, disco is condemned as cheesy listening and a style that can only be described as Travolting: glitter balls, open shirts and bouffant hair, macho chatup lines and, after a strut to the Bee Gees, a grope to the music of Barry White, aka The Walrus of Lurv.The general public, though, have always held disco in cheery regard, placing it in the same category of endearing naffness and uncomplicated fun as ageing rocker Johnny Hallyday - "the French Elvis" is how baffled foreign journalists usually describe him - and a chain of corny Western-style diners called Le Buffalo Grill.To many of those aged fifty-plus, disco is an instant nostalgia bath, recalling evenings with the mates and the era of heady sexual freedom that came after the advent of the Pill and before Aids.Youngsters, though, seize on disco for its pantomime elements - a chance to wear wigs, chest hair and Elvis-in-Vegas sunglasses - and an evening of grooving to the beat that fathered modern R and B and techno.Against this background, France is a natural choice for this disco revival. A major Paris night spot, Queen Club, on the Champs-Elysees, now has a disco night once a week. Whether France's disco revival has legs - presumably flared-trousered ones - is unclear.