Music: New York in the 1970s was no place for the faint-hearted.
Race rows punctured the city's fabric, gangs roamed the streets, drug dealers plied their trade unhindered, the Stonewall riots were just around the corner, a mob of construction workers initiated the "Hard Hat Riots" to batter down anti-war student protesters and the city itself was running out of money, leading to mass lay-offs and the slashing of services. New York never had it so bad.
As the metropolis staggered from one crisis to the next, the last thing anyone would have expected to emerge from this fug of fear and hopelessness was a glitzy music movement. But it was the rotten Big Apple of the 1970s which produced disco, a form of music which celebrated glamour, decadence and indulgence, qualities in short supply in its home town at the time of its birth.
But, argues Peter Shapiro in his thorough and often engrossing history of disco's dark days and bright nights, disco was about much more than just surface glitter and gold. It was about escapism, ego and excess, freeing your mind by dancing your ass off in subterranean haunts, hidden rooms and other unlikely venues. That it would in time come to be shorthand for so many travesties of taste was not on anyone's radar when the glitterball first began to spin.
Shapiro has an engaging style and a confident, witty eye for unlikely, incongruous connections. He finds traces of disco's rebel yells in the Swing Kids, the youth movement which sprung up in wartime Germany as an alternative to toeing the line with Hitler Youth. These Swing Kids, bedecked in showy attire and with cavalier attitudes, would gather clandestinely to dance to swing records played on a portable gramophone.
Similarly, in Paris, it was the Zazous who cocked a snook at Nazi occupation by dressing up to go dancing in secret to swing and jazz.
In New York, though, it was the embattled gay community which shaped and defined what disco would be all about. Again, the venues were out of sight and out of mind, with sites such as abandoned warehouses or former Baptist churches finding a new lease of life as hedonistic playgrounds where DJs produced audio thrills with records specially tweaked and treated with the disco dancefloor in mind.
You can see Shapiro's chops as a music writer in his passages on specific records or producers. The chapter on Italian producer Giorgio Moroder and how he turned born-again Christian Donna Summer into the sex machine of I Feel Love is perfectly pitched, showing the European take on what was happening Stateside.
Shapiro is also diligent in highlighting those early DJs who helped disco to find its dancing feet, giving people like Terry Noel, Francis Grasso, Ray Yeates and early mix-tape proponent Tom Moulton their proper place in the big picture. Naturally, like every other writer who has covered this beat, Shapiro also revisits David Mancuso's Loft parties, another fertile source for disco's early development, both in terms of sound and a sense of community.
Yet Shapiro is also quick to point to disco's less savoury aspects, such as the ugly exclusivity and paranoid nihilism of the Studio 54 set or the rampant discophobia of the Disco Sucks movement which had much deeper, darker roots and causes. He's also sharp enough to realise that disco and the mainstream were always destined to get on.
For him, it was 1977's Saturday Night Fever flick which signified the tipping point. Disco was spreading like wildfire from the city centre to the 'burbs and beyond, and suddenly everyone was dancing to the same bad records which Saturday Night Fever had spawned. Now, it was main street discotheques rather than abandoned buildings which were providing disco with a home.
It's a meticulously researched read, though its scholarly tone and forensic approach to often obscure records and micro-scenes may be off-putting to some. Yet, as a readable account of how a music which began as a soundtrack for disenfranchised mavericks and outsiders inevitably moved indoors, it's one to put beside your platform heels.
Jim Carroll is a freelance journalist who writes regularly for The Irish Times about music and the music business.
Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco by Peter Shapiro, Faber, 350pp. £12.99