The James Webb space telescope’s pictures are impressive – but disco and Daft Punk did it first
Larry Levan, resident DJ at the Paradise Garage, who kept disco alive in the 1980s, chose an equally extraterrestrial playlist with tunes like Galaxy by War, and Ednah Holt’s Serious, Sirius Space Party.
However, the person who truly launched disco into deep space has to be the Italian DJ Daniele Baldelli, who in 1979 was hired by a club called Cosmic, in Lazise, a resort town on the shore of Lake Garda in northern Italy. There, Baldelli combined conventional soul and funk records with British and European technopop, imported African and Brazilian sounds, as well as snatches of German “kosmische Musik” , by bands such as Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel.
Baldelli and fellow cosmic DJs such as Brescia, Italy’s Beppe Loda and Claudio “Moz-Art” Rispoli from the Baia degli Angeli beach club on the Adriatic Coast, were hugely popular. Local music producers began to reverse-engineer the sound so they could get their records played by the DJs.
In 1977, at disco’s apex, Nasa launched its deep space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Each was fitted with a specially commissioned gold-plated copper 12-inch record, etched with recordings from Earth, as well as universally comprehensible playback instructions for whichever alien crate-digger first chanced upon the probe.
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