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Horse Meat Disco: 'A naked clubber became our mascot. He had his cigarettes in his socks'

Every club night has its defining “were you there?” moment and, for Horse Meat Disco (HMD), it was Kate Bush and a lot of dry ice on New Year’s Day 2004. The gay bar Dukes, in Vauxhall, south London, was packed, with HMD already making a name for themselves with their flamboyant reclamation of disco – but a guest DJ had overdone it the night before and didn’t turn up. “So I had to play every bit of music I had – CDs, vinyl, the lot,” says Luke Howard, now one of the resident DJs. “I ended up playing Running Up That Hill, which somehow worked: all these queens had a massive acid house moment to it, which just set the tone for how eclectic we can play here. They’d lost the control for the smoke machine, too.” Co-founder Jim Stanton cackles: “Someone was sitting on it!”

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The Horse Meat Disco crew have since headlined international music festivals, hosted DJ residencies in NYC, Berlin and Lisbon, played more Pride events than they can name and hosted their heroes, too. Mick Jagger has popped in to dance, Marc Almond has “been a few times” and the US actor and singer Vanessa Williams came last year (“She did selfies with security and everything,” Howard says).

In 2004, though, HMD’s co-founders Stanton and James Hillard were jobbing around the city’s dance scene alongside future residents Howard and Severino Panzetta, wanting a place to play 70s and 80s disco absent from the queer clubs of the day. “They were all cookie-cutter hard house rip-offs of [Clerkenwell gay club] Trade, or basic funky house,” Stanton grimaces.

Kicked out of a venue in Chinatown “because they wanted to change the name, the music policy … everything but the healthy bar take, basically”, Stanton says, they found a home for their event in Dukes (now Eagle London). “It was a proper bears club then,” Hillard remembers – bears being hirsute, full-bodied gay men. “They had a full Friday night buffet; the event was called Chunkies. That was a godsend as a skint intern!”

Hillard dubbed their weekly Sunday night a “queer party for all”, way before clubland and society in general were talking about safe spaces and diversity. “We always said that the best parties we’d been to – and the best throughout queer clubbing history – have been ones with the most mixed-up crowd,” Stanton explains. Hillard adds: “We made it clear from the off that it was for every tribe, every gender, every sexuality. But with a queer aesthetic and a queer sensibility. Because being queer doesn’t have to be a sexual thing, you know what I mean?”

Panzetta, who has been with HMD since that fateful New Year’s Day in 2004, says it became popular “because no one was really doing that on the queer scene: playing disco and having fun, basically. Our music – which could be Madonna or could be some deep Afro or cosmic track – fits on any festival bill too.” CD compilations and a Sunday afternoon show on Rinse FM raised their profile further (“We get all soulful and help people’s hangovers subside”) and Howard notes that it also chimed with the “nu-disco” scene that rose in the mid-00s with the likes of Todd Terje and Prins Thomas. “They were just relieved to find a gay club playing disco!”

Panzetta says they “couldn’t go on for ever releasing disco compilations. We did four [from 2009 to 2014], but it’s so expensive licensing those old classics.” After a suggestion from Tim Goldsworthy, then the head of DFA Records, they collaborated with a studio engineer, Darren Morris, to make their own disco tracks: “Slow cosmic stuff, some Philadelphia soul-ish, some proto house,” says Howard. “But they sat on the shelf for five years.” The producer Luke Solomon, also an A&R at the house label Defected, got wind of them and reworked their track Waiting or You to Call. “He made it sound like a slower Frankie Knuckles mix – that got our attention. And when [NYC vocalist] Amy Douglas did Let’s Go Dancing with that refrain, ‘Boys and girls sing let’s go dancing’, that’s when we knew we had an album.”

That debut album, out this week, is called Love and Dancing: the club’s vibe in a nutshell. It follows the structure of a night there – even if nowadays the best you can do is “work your disco wiggle” while seated, as Stanton puts it – via disco’s many flavours. Kathy Sledge of Sister Sledge adds diva vocals, while the new wave scene is summed up by Burn, which is pure Talking Heads (always popular at the club).

The title of Sanctuary, with guests the Phenomenal Handclap Band, nods to HMD being a place of refuge. Stanton gives the example of Ernesto Sarezale, a performance poet who would dance naked. “He’s our disco unicorn. He’s not around much now, but for a while everyone knew us for ‘Naked Guy’.” Howard adds: “He’s the mark of a proper Horse Meat. He called ahead before he first came, asking if it was OK if he was naked in the club. I think the club owners thought he was joking. But there he was with his cigarettes in his socks, naturist style. At first people freaked out, but he became like our mascot.” The track Home, says Hilllard, is “Luke doing his take on morning music, or sleaze”, the music disco DJs played as dawn broke in the gay clubs of New York and San Francisco in the 70s and 80s.

“The irony of us launching an album about love and dancing when we bloody can’t dance isn’t lost on us,” Stanton says. “We talked about delaying it, but we thought that people need some disco positivity right now.” Panzetta notes: “Kylie’s got a new album coming called Disco; Dua Lipa is clearly influenced by it. And Róisín Murphy, her new album has disco on it. So we’re all on the same vibe for now.” As he rushes off to host a wellness Zoom group, though, Howard has the last word. “Dancing is good for your mental health – so don’t stop dancing, people. Just not in public, for now anyway.”

• Love and Dancing is out now on Glitterbox Recordings