Disco’s History Is Finally Told In The New Docuseries ‘Disco: Soundtrack Of A Revolution’

Disco is a genre of music that people seem to feel passionately about. Many love it, while others despise the sound that took over America in the ‘70s. Much has been said about some of the biggest disco-leaning hits from decades past, such as those from Donna Summer, ABBA, and, of course, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, but there is so much more great work beyond the top of the charts that has never received the retrospective recognition that some of the bestsellers have.

Somehow, there has never been a great film about the history of disco, until now. PBS and the BBC aimed to fix that with their new joint production, Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. The three-part series airs on PBS in the United States, with the final installment set to go live on July 2. After it plays on TV, viewers can catch it on the network’s app.

Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution is so interesting because it’s not a history lesson. It’s enjoyable because the filmmakers focused on not just the hits, but the best and the most important songs in the genre’s rise and its heyday.

Co-director Grace Chapman stated in an interview about the series that, “We're talking about a musical genre, so let's not talk about history.” She shared that when they began the lengthy and complicated research process, they decided to start with the songs they knew had to be in the program and build the history around them.

Fellow co-director and producer Shianne Brown backed up her comment. “The music lends itself to the history,” she explained during the same conversation.

So why hasn’t this film been made before? If the style was so popular—or at least so controversial—what’s kept audiences from watching a piece of media about its development and eventual decline?

“Maybe the idea of doing a serious documentary has suffered the same fate as disco itself,” Chapman mused when asked why it took until now for this project to come to life. She stated that perhaps some people in positions of power thought, “That's an underground niche. Nobody really wants to talk about it.”

Thankfully, PBS and the BBC ignored such thoughts, and they poured the necessary resources into properly uncovering the history of a genre of music that’s never really earned its due. As the sounds that backed disco return to prominence and hit the charts again via superstars like Dua Lipa, Lizzo, and even BTS, it’s clear that millions are still dancing to it, and that there’s an audience for this type of show.

Hugh McInytre: I was shocked when I got this email that this docuseries didn't already exist. Why do you think this wasn't made in this form until now?

Grace Chapman: I don't know, I think people have dipped into it. I think there have been projects in the past. We wanted [an] actual documentary about it. We wanted to go and talk to people. Previously, maybe the idea of doing a serious documentary has suffered the same fate as disco itself. That's an underground niche. Nobody really wants to talk about it.

Other ones that have come out, they've been either not funded very well or they've had to buy into the kitschy element to get an audience. They've had to go into the ABBA and this and that. I think maybe it's benefited from societal changes and cultural evolution. People go, “Oh, do you know what? It's okay to talk about that now. We need to talk about that now. We've ignored that for so long. We've ignored the influence of Black and Latinx and marginalized communities and women.” Guess what? They all did something that was really creative.

White men made money off it. Then when they thought, “We've milked enough,” they went on to the next thing. Maybe that's part of the reason, that we're broader minded. I'd like to think many people are. Let's see how the election goes here.

McIntyre: Tell me a bit about how you two came to be part of this and how you came up with the idea that disco needs a history lesson.

Chapman: It was actually an idea by BBC Studios. It was something that was worked up by their development department. I think it was coming off a lot of the back of a series that Shianne worked on. They went, “There's this other genre of music that's been completely ignored.” They wrote quite a good development proposal and then came on board and it's like, well, what's that missing? What other bits do we need to tell? That's where the story grew from.

Shianne Brown: With Fight the Power [her previous project], it was looking at the intersection between politics and the hip-hop community and how hip-hop was a tool for social justice and social protest. I think that disco exists in a similar space, where the culture and the movement was born out of struggle and oppression. These communities created—whether that's art, or a culture to feel free to express themselves. It had such a defining take on all of our lives.

McIntyre: When you are going into a project like this, how do you know that this is going to be a two-hour doc, or three episodes? How in depth do you want to get?

Chapman: Fight The Power was three parts, wasn't it?

Brown: Four.

Chapman: Oh, it was four. This one was charted out as three parts, but it was very broad brushstrokes. Certainly what was broadcast at the end was different from what the proposal had been, but the parameters were still three hours.

I think the more you went into it, the more it felt like this is the right duration. At the beginning, there is a void. At the beginning, we created music. There's no footage, it is so underground, it's not got a name. So, it's trying to create and understand the history properly of that moment of the inception of a new movement, I suppose.

It's when you get to the second episode, we're really into moving towards the high point of disco. By the time you get to episode three, there is archive, but again, it's going underground. There are limitations when you're making television as opposed to making a radio show. When you run out of pictures, what do you fill the space with?

McIntyre: Disco might be a good example of how you can talk about a style of music for a period of time, but if you wanted to, you could trace it back as far as you want it to. Every new thing is based on the last thing, and you could connect it for decades into today. How do you stop yourself from elaborating and adding more?

Brown: From my perspective, I think there's a world in which, like you say, you can go on and on and on. There's so many different social...perhaps there's protests or a particular moment in time that there's a cultural or political phenomenon that may have happened or there's a bunch of artists. Our job is that we really have to narrow down the key moments, because it's not a Ken Burns 15-hour docuseries. We really have to pinpoint the ones that we feel had a huge impact. Those stories particularly that haven't been told in the same light.

Once you go through the research stages of speaking to the pioneers, speaking to artists, speaking to cultural commentators, you understand, okay, these are the key moments. In the film, disco demolition, that was a non-negotiable that had to be in there, because if we're looking at the downfall, that's a key moment.

Chapman: Obviously we do reach into the modern day. We are into the contemporary period when we end the series. But we could have gone back and we could have talked about the underground movement in Hitler's Germany, because that's one of the groups that people sometimes say there's an origin in. Is that disco, though?

Also, then it moves into a history program. Then it moves into, let's bring in the historian, let's bring in this journalist. It stops being the story from the people who made it. I think it's one of the things that we are very blessed with in this program. We're extremely fortunate that so many of those pioneers in every single element came on board and talked about it.

Brown: When you are making something like this, you want to make sure that the people who have taken part are proud to be a part of it because they were there. So once you get their cosign of saying, this is it, they touched upon those important moments, you feel as a filmmaker...okay, we've done our jobs well.

McIntyre: You must have whittled a list of songs down and there were many that you wanted to dive into and didn't get to. Can you talk about the process of picking the songs that must be highlighted specifically?

Chapman: When we started working on this, that was one of the things we decided to do. We're talking about a musical genre, so let's not talk about history and then try and lever that in to fit. Let's look at the music, let's look at what's actually happening and check why that's happening. It was doing it that way around, which is I think the right way.

There are lots more tracks, but they had to be able to tell the story, they had to be able to move the story forward always.

We were talking about “Soul Makossa.” A lot of people wouldn't know what “Soul Makossa” is today. It's not ABBA, they don't know that track. But if you were part of that disco underground scene, that's the one that unified people. All these different clubs that were striving to exist, that's one that brought them all together. That's the glue that started the disco movement, in a way.

Brown: The music lends itself to the history. When you've got artists like Candi Staton talking about "Young Hearts Run Free," her experience of that song is completely different to how we may have consumed it later. That's what was really amazing in this process of interviews and speaking to DJs and artists and photographers—they remember when those specific tracks were played in the club. That had a defining and amazing feeling to them. To be able to unpack that, I think that was what was really important. Because the history can then follow, and the cultural and socioeconomic landscape falls into place once you explore the music.

McIntyre: Where did you look for media, information, and stories to tell that people didn't already know? To bring something fresh to this historical view?

Chapman: There was a lot of research that went into this. We were very fortunate in BBC Studios to have a great research team. We all did deep dives.

We had a wonderful archive team. Lorna Lithgow was our archive producer. Nothing was too great for her. Lorna was there at the very start when we were writing. Again, I hope you feel that the images are not wallpaper because just as with the music, we wanted the images to lead the program so people felt immersed in that period that was under discussion.

Brown: I remember Lorna and Katharine had shown me some footage of Paradise Garage, which infamously had a no photos, no film ban. You saw Larry Levan and Keith Haring in the middle of the dance floor. You're like, this is a moment in time and this feels really special. This feels like this needs to be a focal point because it isn't Studio 54, where it's been photographed to death. It's that underground, it's that hidden moment. When you get those snippets of archive and research, that's what makes it so much more exciting and visceral.

Chapman: When we were trying to talk about “Love's Theme” [by The Love Unlimited Orchestra]. We were doing research calls with people, we know how important that is, and we know how it's inextricably linked to Fire Island. You can't show it, because there's no footage of Fire Island. Lorna went out and found a defunct cable station in New York which had shot on Fire Island. We got possibly the only shots inside a discotheque on Fire Island.

Brown: There's archive, but there's also people. I interviewed Sharon White, who was a female DJ. There is nothing about her online, but she was so integral. It wasn't easy to find her. My producer, Emma Burns, she was amazing and tracked her down and we met her and she was like, "How did you guys find me?" She was the first big female DJ and she would go from club to club to club. She was friends with Larry Levan. She went to Studio 54. But again, that part of the history hasn't really been discussed.

Chapman: Can I just add one thing? I know we said very much BBC Studios, but obviously this is a co-production with PBS. They made it together.