Reflections on ... Disco Godfather (1979)

Recently watched: Disco Godfather (1979). Tagline: “Touch him and you're dust!” I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend Pal is accompanying me only semi-willingly).   

Blaxploitation action movie. Anti-drug cautionary tale. A joyous celebration of disco hedonism featuring rollerskating. Disco Godfather is all this and more! If that’s not enough, Disco Godfather also keeps threatening to turn into a horror movie when we witness the freaky demonic bad trip “visions” of zombified angel dust casualties. When a reverend and some church ladies gather to perform a bedside exorcism to “save the soul” of a female PCP victim, it overtly recalls the earlier blaxploitation Exorcist rip-off Abby (1974). As if to underscore the comparison, Abby’s leading lady (Carol Speed) even appears here in a supporting role!  

Rudy Ray Moore stars as Tucker Williams, an ex-cop turned fiercely glamorous nightclub impresario and superstar DJ known as “Disco Godfather”. When his much-loved nephew – a promising basketball player – is hospitalized after freaking-out on angel dust, Williams vows revenge on the elusive local drug kingpin – and kicks a lot of bad guy ass along the way! (The ultra-fake fight scenes – complete with sprays of spurting blood – are pure comedy gold. Some martial arts are thrown in too for good measure). 

I’m the first to admit I wasn’t previously au fait with charismatic actor, comedian, singer, film producer and all-round Renaissance man Rudy Ray Moore (1927 - 2008) and haven’t yet seen Dolemite Is My Name (the acclaimed 2019 biopic starring Eddie Murphy), but I’m an instant fan. Apparently, Moore’s homosexuality was a tightly guarded secret during his lifetime (and Dolemite is My Name reportedly skips the issue entirely). For me, seen today there is a genuine camp / queer sensibility to Disco Godfather and Moore himself emerges as a regal, flamingly flamboyant African American man in the grand style of Little Richard or Esquerita. In the close-ups he clearly seems to be wearing false eyelashes, and his outrageous sparkly disco attire is designed for maximum nipple exposure!

The climactic final show-down at the abandoned warehouse goes on forever and the constant fighting becomes numbingly repetitive, but anything-goes oddity Disco Godfather has much to recommend it. For aficionados of seventies style, the disco scenes offer a sublime time capsule of superfly fashion and hairstyles. And watch for the dancing white twink extra with the ultra-seventies “bowl” haircut who manages to hog a lot of screen-time in the nightclub sequences doing his signature “robot move”! 

Watch Disco Godfather here:



Note: the good folks at Vinegar Syndrome have issued a deluxe remastered region free Blu-ray and DVD combo pack of Disco Godfather. 

Reflections on ... Cristina (1959 - 2020)

The sad thing about unsung cult artists is it often takes their death for them to be properly reappraised and appreciated. Take confrontational post-punk No Wave chanteuse Cristina, who has died aged 61 (on 1 April 2020) from coronavirus complications. I’ve known who Cristina (full name: Cristina Monet Zilkha) was since I was a teenager (I’m old, remember) and was of course familiar with her two stone-cold classics (her listless and irreverent interpretation of Peggy Lee’s cabaret anthem “Is That All There Is?” and the gloriously downbeat Christmas staple “Things Fall Apart”) but for some reason I never properly delved into her oeuvre until now. And she’s a revelation! (Thank God Cristina’s entire discography – admittedly small – is represented on Spotify. She made precisely two barbed, weird and distinctive albums – released by the cutting edge ZE label - that flopped commercially and then retired from music).

Some quick reflections on this totally unique and neglected talent. Like many abrasive early eighties New York No Wave / punk funk musicians (see also: James Chance of The Contortions), she may initially work best in small doses and for many may be an acquired taste. But think of Cristina as analogous to Campari – once you acquire that taste, you wondered how you ever lived without it! Also: Cristina’s trademark is setting jaundiced, scathing sentiments to perky up-tempo music, and she mostly writes and performs within the persona of a debauched, jaded party girl or gold digger (a tradition that dates to Mae West and Eartha Kitt).

Self-titled debut Cristina (1980 (reissued in 2004 as Doll in the Box) is her mutated disco-not-disco dance album. Lushly produced by Kid Creole of the Coconuts, it’s campy fun with Latin rhythm in its hips (if you like cowbell, this is the album for you!), but I prefer the follow-up, the tougher, darker and more cutting New Wave pop of Sleep It Off (1984). If embittered songs like “Rage & Fascination” and “He Dines Out on Death” remind you of Broken English-era Marianne Faithfull, they were co-written with Faithfull’s long-time collaborator and guitarist Barry Reynolds. (And in fact, Cristina’s material is considerably stronger than the songs Reynolds and Faithfull rustled-up for Dangerous Acquaintances (1981), the tepid follow-up to Broken English). And Cristina’s cover of Prince’s “When You Were Mine” is superior to Cyndi Lauper’s.

Cristina’s venomous, spikily funny satirical lyrics work as wry poetry already, but then she enunciates them in an alienated, deadpan can't-be-bothered snarl (she has “resting bitch voice”, occasionally punctuated with a Johnny Rotten sneer). Here’s a sampling of her wit and wisdom: “My life is in a turmoil / My thighs are black and blue / My sheets are stained, so is my brain / What's a girl to do?” from "What’s A Girl to Do?" is as lacerating as anything found on Lydia Lunch’s 1980 death kitten magnum opus Queen of Siam. “Don't tell me that I'm frigid / Don't try to make me think / I'll do just fine without you / Don’t mutilate my mink” from “Don’t Mutilate My Mink” (which I’d argue is Cristina’s punk masterpiece. In their tribute to her, The Guardian newspaper describes it as sounding like Audrey Hepburn fronting the Sex Pistols). And on “Things Fall Apart” Cristina pithily condenses the end of a relationship into two lines: “And then one day he said, “I can’t stand in your way - it’s wrong.” “Way of what?” I asked, but he was gone.”

In closing: how did Cristina not become a major star in the eighties? She had it all!  Talent, beauty, mystique, wit, an utterly original pop vision. But let's embrace her now. Cristina’s jagged, anxious music is the perfect soundtrack for our current situation.

/ Sadly, there's almost no trace of Cristina on YouTube and what's there is in grainy poor quality. Here is her 1984 video for "Ticket to the Tropics." You can see her version of The Beatles' "Drive My Car" here./

Read The New York Times' obituary for Cristina here.

Grace Jones' Warm Leatherette (1980)

"It started with a photo. Entitled Samurai Sissy, the stark black and white 1979 portrait by French artist and conceptualist Jean-Paul Goude depicted steel-cheekboned Amazonian black supermodel turned disco chanteuse Grace Jones wrapped in a dramatic padded-shouldered Issey Miyake creation. At the time Goude and Jones were both artistic and romantic collaborators (he’s the father of Jones’ only child, Paulo born in 1979. In fact Jones is pregnant with Paulo in Samurai Sissy). Sinister but sexy, the image is so powerful, androgynous and alluring it suggested a world of possibilities: Jones as a panther in human form. Black Marlene Dietrich. Female Bowie. Space-age Nefertiti. Dominatrix from outer space. In her 2015 autobiography I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, Jones herself describes it as ‘me as an ominous hard-eyed samurai filtered through something occult and African, the killer clown interrupting some mysterious ceremony.’ Chris Blackwell, head honcho of Island Records, had the photo enlarged and stuck to the wall of his deluxe Compass Point recording studio in the Bahamas, instructing his crack team of musicians, ‘Make a record that sounds like that looks.’"

A deluxe digitally re-mastered box set of Grace Jones’ 1980 stone-cold classic Warm Leatherette - the ultimate punk-disco hybrid - is out now. Read my full review for Loverboy Magazine here.



/ Fragment from Grace Jones' avant garde 1982 performance art /concert film A One Man Show. Why oh why has this essential art statement never been digitally remastered and reissued on DVD?! /

Further reading: I've blogged about The Jones Girl - one of my all-time favourite artists - a few times now:

Scene report from her 2010 Royal Albert Hall performance

Scene report from her November 2015 book-signing session at Waterstone's in Piccadilly