Photo Courtesy of Denyse Le Page
Disco supposedly bit the dust on July 12, 1979.
The venue was Comiskey Park in Chicago where, during a White Sox-Tigers battle royale, a dumpster full of albums and singles recorded and released during the danceable era of excess were ceremoniously blown up in a defiant middle finger gesture to the genre — probably the most unpopular in music up until that point in time.
But the joke was on us — baseball fans in attendance AND the entire world at large. Disco wasn’t going anywhere.
The proof lies within the music charts for the remainder of the year. Four Number One Billboard hits sound drenched in disco’s syrup — “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” by Michael Jackson, “Rise” by Herb Alpert, and “No More Tears (Enough is Enough)” by Summer and Barbra Streisand. And the end was nowhere in sight.
From the second “Auld Lang Syne” stopped playing at 12:01 am on January 1, 1980, the collective disco haters were left to gnash their teeth in anger as one thumping, excruciatingly catchy song ascended into the Top 10 (and in many instances higher). Let me run through the list of some specific notables, bearing in mind this has the potential to be the same length as Santa’s Christmas naughty list.
Please note, all Hall of Fame rock acts are bolded:
- “Please Don’t Go” – KC and the Sunshine Band (#1 – In fact, the first Number One hit of the 1980s)
- “I Wanna Be Your Lover” – Prince (#11)
- “We Don’t Talk Anymore” – Cliff Richard (#7)
- “Emotional Rescue” – The Rolling Stones (#3)
- “Rock with You” – Michael Jackson (#1)
- “Ladies’ Night” – Kool and the Gang (#8 – even mentions the word “disco” in the song)
- “On the Radio” – Donna Summer (#5)
- “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II” – Pink Floyd (#1)
- “Working My Way Back to You/Forgive Me Girl” – The Spinners (#2)
- “Call Me” – Blondie (#1 – The biggest hit of the year)
- “Hold on to my Love” – Jimmy Ruffin (#10)
- “Another One Bites the Dust” – Queen (#1)
- “Funkytown” – Lipps Inc. (#1)
- “Magic” – Olivia Newton-John (#1)
- “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” – The S.O.S. Band (#3)
- “Give Me the Night” – George Benson (#4)
- “Never Knew Love Like This Before” – Stephanie Mills (#6)
Are your eyes bugging out of your skull yet? Remember, I’m not even talking about anything in Billboard’s Bottom 90.
As we move into 1981, we ultimately see that music trends stabilize a bit more with groups like Hall and Oates, Men at Work, and the Human League achieving chart domination. Even so, disco’s tendrils still manage to poke through with force. Don’t even get me started on Boney M, The Weather Girls, or Miquel Brown’s 1983 smash “So Many Men, So Little Time.”
In no way is this better personified than the group Lime — featuring husband and wife team Denis and Denyse LePage from the Great White North (Montreal specifically). The pair struck chart gold that year with a plucky, near-hypnotic call-and-response, synth-driven tune called “Your Love” (B-side “You’re My Magician”). The combination of Denis’ baritone with Denyse’s top-of-her-vocal-range presence would help Lime take the world by storm even though you would have to watch them perform live to see what they looked like.
“Your Love” was a Number One Billboard dance smash. The following year, the group would score a Number Six hit on the same chart with arguably it’s most well-known song — “Babe We’re Gonna Love Tonight.”
The best way I can describe Lime to those of you unfamiliar with the group is as follows: Do you know the song “Babe We’re Gonna Love Tonight” with its repetitive yet tauntingly playful “DADA-DA DA-DAA DAA DE DE DADA-DA DA-DAA DAA DE DE” hook? It goes on for like eight minutes and is a staple of every DJ’s Bar Mitzvah dance mix. You do? Well, that’s them.
With Lime, you’re not going to hear the virtuosity of Zeppelin or the poetry of Dylan (one lyric is as follows, “You’re my magician / I tell you anything / You make it everything”). Instead you will be treated to seemingly endless hooks and straightforwardness. While both didn’t propel Lime into ABBA territory, their unique approach to keeping disco viable certainly accounts for something. Remember, this was a genre that many credible rock acts — Pink Floyd, the Stones, Rod Stewart, and Paul McCartney and Wings included — attached themselves to during respective points of their careers.
Because Denis and Denyse are not pictured on the front of Lime album covers, their story — as succinct as it might be — bears telling to prove this group had actual heart and wasn’t manufactured to meet specific public tastes.
“Denis and I met in a dance hall at 16 years old, and we were both very passionate for rhythm and blues and jazz,” Denyse recently told me. “It (was) in our thirties that we started writing our own music and played in our band.
“Being studio musicians, during that period work was scarce so Denis bought a 4-track Teac and we started recording our own songs written and performed by both of us in my house. We already had worked on disco tracks for Gino Soccio and Tony Green so we had some sort of idea what disco was. When we hit the market, disco was at a low and Lime, being a high energy act, gave the dance scene a new birth.”
A natural to enthrall crowds worldwide (especially in Europe), I asked Denyse about Lime’s American impact. In addition to the two songs already described, Lime scored another four dance hits over the following three years. These include (accordingly to chart chronology) “Unexpected Lovers” (#6 in 1985), “Angel Eyes (Remix)” (#12 in 1983), “Come and Get Your Love” (#18 in 1982), and “Guilty” (#22 in 1983). The last one mentioned contains a synthesizer riff that sounds like it’s right out of the Tangerine Dream songbook.
One memorable gig took place in Winter 1981 at Backstreet in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
“I caught a cold and a sunburn,” she told me. “Denis and I had no idea of our success. The place was packed!
“Lime was very big in the states due to multiple hits …We performed in New York — Studio 54, The Funhouse,” she adds. “We performed in Miami, Atlanta, and all over Mexico.
LePage also points out Madonna, back in the day, was a big fan of the group. Alas, I doubt I can get the Material Girl to concur by the time this column is published. However, a 1985 Spin cover story reveals, in Madonna’s own words, that “the best music at the moment to work out to is anything by Prince, Lime, Bronski Beat or Bruce Springsteen…I make records with aerobics in mind.”
In this case, I say with pride that I’m a fan of Lime, and this is based largely on the sweetness of only two of their songs. Along the way I listened to their other four hits and my opinion hasn’t wavered in the slightest.
While the group would ultimately disband by the end of the decade and the LePages went their separate ways via divorce, Denyse tells me Lime’s influence is still strong.
“The [group’s] impact on the world is huge; something I can confirm with contacts around the world on Facebook,” she said. “We have song versions in Russian, Chinese, Spanish.”
After speaking with Denyse, I find myself relieved that this band still has merit. This is even more apparent after Denyse leaves me with an unprovoked statement that not only sums up Lime’s philosophy, but maybe that of all those people who laughed from the sidelines watching those records burn on a ball field nearly 40 years ago.
“Disco Lives!!!”
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