DVDs
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They missed key tunes, they dialled down the sex and drugs in favour of a yawnful Jersey boy bartender’s coming-of-age tale, and they left much of writer-director Mark Christopher’s vision in the editing bin, but somehow there’s a decent film left, thanks mainly to great styling, accurate sets and Mike Myers pitch-perfect turn as Studio 54 co-owner and door-whore legend Steve Rubell.Buy
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The glitterballsiest musical ever, the fabulous lost link between Logan’s Run and Imagination’s shoulder pads. Back in 1980 the future was a vast cosmic disco barn filled with smiling teens dressed in xenon, singing terrible stadium rock; the devil runs the music biz and once you sign a deal he gets your soul and uses your record to hypnotise the world. Oh shit, it’s happening right now.Buy
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Movie buffs know Klute as the brilliant paranoid thriller that heralded American directors’ adoption of European ambiguities; we know it for a five-second appearance of DJing godfather Francis Grasso. The film’s verité style – real locations, real hookers – leaves New York looking wonderfully frayed, as lonely detective Donald Sutherland meets tart-with-the-smarts Jane Fonda.Buy
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1979 and they’re murdering fags in New York’s leather bars; better call PC Pacino. Endure daft dialogue and lurking homophobia for priceless club scenes in the city’s sordid pre-AIDS free-for-all. Pacino dances in a bad vest, sniffs amyl, watches a greasy fist-fucking. When a shopkeeper asks him which colour hankie he wants for his back pocket, big Al goes home to think about it.Buy
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Well-meaning but sloppy tribute to New York DJing’s founding fathers, with Mancuso et al interviewed, a little archive footage and a bunch of Garage-heads reminiscing endlessly about ‘the underground’. Noteworthy for the only filmed interview of Francis Grasso and Steve D’Acquisto, both of whom died soon after, though the sound and lighting is so bad they might as well have not bothered.Buy
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Not the sappy Macaulay Culkin flop, this is Fenton Bailey’s unmissable documentary on Michael Alig, clown prince of New York’s ‘Club Kids’, who, on a drug-stretched lost weekend in 1996, dispatched his dealer with a hammer, heroin and some drain-cleaner. “I’m getting away with murder and you’re just jealous,” he told a friend. The freaks all speak, including Alig’s ex, DJ Keoki.Buy
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When he pressed a key Dr Bob Moog could feel the electrons dancing in their circuits. A portrait of the man and his machine – the first synthesiser smaller than a house – with Bernie Worrell, Rick Wakeman, Luke Vibert and Stereolab giving praise. Less than brilliant, but very touching and further proof that the pioneers of electronic music were all a few Hertz short of a waveform.Buy
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