Powerdance - The Lost Art of Getting Down

The Guardian 100

The collective celebrate disco and post-punk from an age before tedious dancefloor Instagrams – but their bass-heavy toughness means they never become retro

In spring this year, dance music collective Powerdance released their third single, A Safe and Happy Place. It came accompanied by a video shot at the Bethnal Green strip club that hosts Savage, an LGBT+ club night “combining disco music with an army of pole-dancing drag queens” at which Luke Solomon – the core of Powerdance, alongside Chicago-born, German-based producer Nick Maurer – is among the resident DJs. The video features the club’s regulars turning themselves into androgynous creatures of the night, a riot of stiletto heels, leather, sequins, thongs, gold teeth grills and, perhaps more unexpectedly, Jacobean ruffs. The images fit perfectly with the track. Its soft, understated sound, occupying an area somewhere between disco and early Chicago house, seems to capture a sense of anticipation about the coming night; its lyrics hymn clubs as a place of transformation and abandon, where the outside world is barred: “Don’t be afraid to let it go … unless it’s love nobody cares … disco has made this place for us.”

It’s a theme that’s been taken up in countless tracks aimed at dancefloors over the last 50 years, but, as with the music it’s set to, A Safe and Happy Place presents it with what you might term a modern twist. The ideal dancefloor, suggest the lyrics, is a place where “nobody stares”, a line that seems to gently suggest that that you can’t really escape into unselfconscious abandon if there’s someone nearby with their phone out, snapping away and posting the results on social media, searching for likes; that it’s hard to shut out the outside world if people insist on bringing the outside world with them in their pockets.

Related: Run the code: is algorave the future of dance music?