Strong times make strong People – poor times make people dance (1970s)

Under a cacophony of boos, Denis Healy, the chancellor in James Callaghan’s late 1970s government walks out to the Labour Party conference in Blackpool.

“It means sticking to the very painful current expenditure on which the government has already decided.”

Cries of no echo around the room: it can’t get much worse for the UK…

James Callaghan’s premiership of the UK had been anything but normal; he had inherited an £800m (£5.4bn in today’s money) budget inequality.

In his book The Prime Ministers, Steve Richards writes that James Callaghan’s government was the death of “the cabinet government” and going forwards the prime minister (PM) would assume all power and the cabinet would tow the party line, shown greatly by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

Callaghan’s government were forced to propose £1bn of spending cuts (£6.8bn in today’s money) and were in deep negotiations with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) to bail them out, however the IMF requested even more budget cuts to ensure that they would not need to be asked again.

His time as PM ended under the shame of the “winter of discontent” where gravediggers, lorry and train drivers, ambulance drivers and binmen all went on strike to protest against the budget cuts and Callaghan’s treatment of unions – despite Callaghan himself being a proud unionist before joining politics – swiftly bringing about his end as PM while the UK came close to completely falling apart.

Given how dire the circumstances were, it is not surprising that people sought some escape from the gloom – for many that meant embracing stylised dance music.

Only shortly after homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967 and only five years since racism had been criminalised in 1965, homophobic and racist abuse still ran rampant in society and many individuals created safe havens for themselves.

They turned to a growing music trend in disco and honed it as their sound, a style characterised by escapist themes and encouraging people that it will all be ok eventuall.

Artists like Sylvester, Donna Summers and The Village People rose to become “gay icons” who were praised for their individuality and pushing boundaries, especially Sylvester’s “matter of fact attitude” to being gay and dressing in drag when performing

Shebeens were clubs and bars that were specifically designed for LGBTQ black men who faced more stigma from within their own community as black culture at that time was dominated by a hypermasculine image of a man and the LGBTQ were seen as “soft” and “not true men”.

In Tony Sewell’s book Black masculinities and schooling, he comes to the conclusion that there is a “triple quandary” for black youths where a statistical likelihood of an absent father, rap music encouraging a hypermasculine traditional stoic male image and gang cultures forming in schools in the face of institutional racism stunts young black boys growth and can encourage them to be homophobic.

The turn towards disco echoes on much like the boos at Healy’s speech as something that would become increasingly common in the future – people will keep turning to music with escapist themes and dance to tempo rather than the traditional rhythm when the society fails them although we wouldn’t see it again for a few decades…….