Anyone who was around during the second half of the 1970s will certainly remember a very special kind of life-affirming music that dominated the world at that time. Just a quick glance at the song titles included on this volume of Disco Fever - Get Up and Boogie - is guaranteed to flash any listener back to a period when it seemed the beat of a bass drum was constantly calling for attention. The forces of disco commanded dancers onto the dance floor in the nighttime, and gave life a spiritual kick that made everything seem more fun and effortless in the daytime. By the mid-'70s, its influence had spread far outside club land into all kinds of pop music and way beyond the borders of the U.S. as well—into every country on the planet where popular music was enjoyed. Disco music was a global phenomenon of unfathomable magnitude.

Inevitably, singers, musicians and record producers outside of the United States, excited by this new movement, were eager to prove that they could make credible disco records too. On this volume, for instance, is one of England's foremost contributions to dance-floor flirting: Hot Chocolate's You Sexy Thing, a No. 3 pop and No. 6 R&B hit in 1976—and later immortalized through its highly memorable inclusion in the 1996 film The Full Monty.

Producers in Munich, Germany, were also in on the game quite early, establishing a European disco music center of sorts that led to significant success for a variety of writers and producers. One of the most famous of these is Giorgio Moroder, best known for his trend-setting work with disco diva Donna Summer. This volume features his top-40 pop hit, Chase, an entrancing synthesizer odyssey taken from the soundtrack of the 1978 movie Midnight Express.

A few years earlier, the Munich-based team of Michael Kunze and Silvester Levay concocted a studio group they named Silver Convention ("Silver" was Levay's nickname). After scoring a European hit with a song called Save Me, they followed it with a tune based on a riff Levay heard in his head upon waking one morning. Kunze's original idea for a song title was the slightly grim and not very evocative "Run, Rabbit, Run." Fortunately, on the very day the vocals were to be recorded, Levay happened to hear a similarly titled song on the radio, forcing Kunze to come up with a phrase much better suited to the tune's ascending qualities. Married to an insistent, metronomic beat typical for the Eurodisco coming out of Munich, and adorned by "disco strings" that would come to characterize countless recordings in the genre, Fly, Robin, Fly was an extremely catchy record, giving Silver Connection a No. 1 pop and R&B hit in the United States.

Originally, the female vocalists featured on the Silver Convention records were unknown session singers working for scale; after the enormous success of Fly, Robin, Fly they were understandably less interested in working under the same financial arrangement. Thus a completely new line-up of the group was assembled, featuring Penny McLean (who achieved parallel solo success with Lady Bump), Linda Thompson and Ramona Wulf. With this new trio of singers, Silver Convention scored yet another major triumph with Get Up and Boogie (That's Right), which hit No. 2 on the pop charts (and No. 5 R&B) in 1976. After those successive peaks, however, the group didn't achieve any further major hits, and soon enough, Silver Convention was no more.

If disco's influence transcended the borders of its American birthplace, its stylistic characteristics also seeped into other genres, not least of which was rock. Although disco and rock were often uneasy bedmates, many of the most successful and influential rock acts sat up and took notice of the excitement of disco music. The two styles converged more successfully than ever in Blondie's Heart of Glass, a No. 1 pop hit in 1979. Formed as a punk/new wave band a few years earlier, the group teamed up with producer Mike Chapman to break new ground with their disco-rock fusion. The tune itself had been around since 1975, adorned with the highly appropriate working title "Disco Song." Spending countless hours in the studio, Chapman coaxed the band into really tightening things up, using a rhythm machine to help the group achieve metronomic perfection. Topped off with lead singer Deborah Harry's nonchalantly seductive lead vocals, the result was a fresh-sounding hybrid of disco and rock that managed to obliterate the boundaries between the two genres. Recalled Deborah Harry, "It was one of the few pieces of music of the time that was popular with the rock-pop scene and also took off in the area of urban music."

Naturally, at a time when punk fans and disco dancers were supposed to be mortal enemies, this highly commercial creation didn't go unpunished by certain parts of the disco-suspicious rock community. Blondie co-founder Chris Stein tried to point out to interviewers that Heart of Glass was "not selling out," while bass player Nigel Harrison found himself apologizing for this "compromise with commerciality." Of course, the general public simply responded to the sheer danceability of the song and couldn't care less whether or not rock critics approved. Ultimately, though, the many less convincing attempts by rock, middle-of-the-road and novelty acts to spice up their songs with dance-friendly beats were undoubtedly responsible for the ferocious backlash against disco as the 70s shifted into the '80s. No such tracks can be found on this collection, however - Get Up and Boogie contains only the best!

The absolute peak of disco's popularity happened with the December 1977 release of the movie Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta and his flare-trousered white suit. Even more successful than the movie was the soundtrack album, which is still one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, having notched up global sales of more than 25 million copies. Some of the best tracks from that album have been included in Disco Fever, on this volume are Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band's disco-classical fusion, A Fifth of Beethoven, which had already been a No. 1 pop hit in 1976, and More Than a Woman by Tavares (written by the Bee Gees), which was original to the film.

The five Tavares brothers formed their group back in 1964 - one of the seemingly innumerable black vocal groups around at the time - although it took a decade before they began enjoying chart success. One of their first major hits was It Only Takes a Minute, reaching No. 10 pop and No. 1 R&B in 1975, and the following year they scored a No. 15 pop and No. 3 R&B hit with Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel (Part 1). Both songs rank among the most memorable of the smooth-soul vocal group records to come out of the 70s. Although More Than a Woman was just as strong, the single release was significantly less successful, just missing the top 30 on both the pop and R&B charts. However, it's probably safe to say that the song's inclusion in Saturday Night Fever has made it the most widespread of all Tavares recordings.

And "widespread" could be a keyword for all the tracks on Get Up and Boogie. With pop and/or R&B No. 1 smashes such as Boogie Oogie Oogie, The Second Time Around, Movin', Theme from Shaft, You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine, Do It ('Til You're Satisfied) and Boogie Fever - along with recordings that should have reached No. 1, including The Boss and You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) - there's no shortage of disco classics to get the body moving. So pop a disk into the player, press the play button and start the party!

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