In the summer of 1979, 16-year-old French Canadian singer France Joli stepped onto a stage on Fire Island as a last-minute replacement for Donna Summer. She had no idea what she was walking into. The crowd was filled with thousands of gay men gathered for a legendary beach concert known as Beach ’79, and Joli was about to perform her debut single, “Come to Me,” for the very first time in the United States.
“I was brought to Fire Island. I had no idea what I was really walking into, but my first performance in the United States was for 5,000 gay men,” Joli recalls in “A Night at the Disco,” the new coffee table book from music journalist Christian John Wikane. “I just felt the wind was blowing in my hair. And every time that I did this move, they would lose their mind because they were connected to who I was, this young woman.”
By the time summer was over, “Come to Me” had zoomed to No. 1 on the Billboard disco chart, and Joli’s career was launched. She credits that Fire Island concert for everything that followed in her career.
It’s one of dozens of stories featured in “A Night at the Disco,” a 256-page hardcover that Wikane is currently promoting on a U.S. tour. The book chronicles the artists, sounds, and cultural forces behind a decade of groundbreaking dance music from 1970 to 1979. With a foreword by Verdine White of Earth, Wind & Fire and exclusive commentary from more than 90 artists — including Donna Summer, Barry Gibb, Debbie Harry, Giorgio Moroder and founding members of CHIC, Labelle, The Trammps and the Village People — the book is far more than a glossy retrospective. It’s an argument that the dance floor was, and remains, one of the most powerful spaces in American culture.
“When people see the title ‘A Night at the Disco’ they may think it’s just about disco music — for me, it’s more about the music that was played in the discos versus disco as a genre,” Wikane says. “For me, it was important to show the foundation that was laid in the clubs.”
How the dance floor became sacred ground
Wikane, a New York City-based journalist who has interviewed more than 600 recording artists over two decades, served as both writer and photo editor on the project, a partnership with bestselling author Alice Harris. The book is unmistakably Wikane’s labor of love, built on a lifetime of listening and 20 years of interviews with the artists who lived this era.
Born in 1979, Wikane never set foot on a 1970s dance floor. He jokes that he “exchanged souls with somebody that was transitioning out” and stepped right in, but his connection to the music is anything but secondhand. He remembers responding to the sounds of that decade from the time he was 2 or 3 years old, gravitating toward records that were only a few years in the past without knowing it.
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“Growing up in the ’80s and the early ’90s, anything that was from the ’70s, my peer group was like, ‘Why are you listening to that old music?'” he recalls. “And that could be heartbreaking for a young boy to hear. But I never let that deter me from listening to the music that inspired me.”
Over the years, Wikane’s musical devotion became a career. He became a contributing editor at PopMatters, a contributor to People magazine, and a consultant on the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary “Tina” as well as the films “Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over” and “Love to Love You, Donna Summer.” “A Night at the Disco” is, in many ways, a culmination of all of it.
The book gives every featured artist the same two-page spread, whether they were global superstars or cult acts known for a single beloved record. That equity is intentional, as is the book’s unblinking focus on the queer community’s role in breaking records and careers during the disco era. Joli’s Fire Island story is one example, and Wikane also highlights acts like Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, whose debut album and hit “Cherchez La Femme” gained traction only after promoters brought the group to Fire Island and DJs there embraced their sound. By the end of that summer, the album had blown up in New York clubs and the band earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist. “‘Cherchez La Femme’ shows how the gay community really did help break certain artists because of the club play at that time,” Wikane notes.
Record labels, he explains, often had no idea why singles they had given up on would suddenly sell tens of thousands of copies. The Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat,” for example, had a nine-month climb to No. 1 after nearly being discarded, revived entirely through NYC club play. The pattern repeated itself throughout the decade, with DJs and dancers essentially functioning as an underground A&R department, deciding which records lived or died long before the industry caught on.
The clubs weren’t just shaping the music industry. For the people inside them, particularly queer people navigating a world that offered few safe spaces, the dance floor was something closer to sacred ground. Wikane describes it as liberation — a place where people who spent their daily lives hiding or feeling oppressed could step into a room where none of that mattered. One of the artists featured in the book tells him that on the dance floor, “it didn’t matter whose hand was reaching out to you because you were all sort of united in that moment together. It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be someone that you would never have any other occasion to meet, yet the music was this uniting force.”
The Temptations are among the first groups Wikane mentions when discussing the early 1970s club era. When Norman Whitfield began producing the group with tracks like “Cloud Nine” in the late 1960s, it signaled a direction R&B would take for decades. By 1972, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” had arrived as a 12-minute epic whose orchestral drama translated with staggering power in a club setting.
In the book, the late Dennis Edwards, one of the lead vocalists on that track, notes that because the Temptations were one of the most popular groups in the world, DJs would play the seven-minute version of the song. That version won three Grammy awards, but in the clubs, it lived on for years after its release, powered by the lush string arrangements of Paul Riser, the musician who arranged many of the classic Motown hits of the 1960s and ’70s.
“You realize in listening to them how important the strings are to the drama in that song, which when you hear that in a club setting, it’s like this movie playing all around you — a soundtrack,” Wikane says.
The Temptations sustained their club presence through tracks like “Law of the Land,” “Glass House” and “Shakey Ground” well into the mid-’70s, and Wikane credits them as one of the early groups to make a lasting impact on the decade’s dance scene.
Then there’s Stevie Wonder, whose “Songs in the Key of Life” tracks like “Another Star” and “Sir Duke” found unexpected second lives on the dance floor. Wikane loves that the DJs of this era were adventurous enough to mix something like “Sir Duke,” a massive pop hit, into a club set alongside more expected fare. “Versus having to have the same beats per minute for five hours straight, it’s like, no, let’s actually take dancers on an entire experience,” he says. When you translate a song like “Sir Duke” into a club setting, with those horns and Stevie’s voice and his scatting, “it really kind of takes on a totally different personality.”
And of course, there’s Diana Ross. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” produced and written by Ashford & Simpson, is the first song Wikane ever remembers hearing. In the acknowledgments, he thanks Valerie Simpson directly. “I said thank you for composing the melody that made my dreams come true,” he says, “because it’s because of ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ that I have the life that I have with music.”
There’s reason to think a younger generation is particularly primed for this kind of musical archaeology. The TikTok-fueled rediscovery of Billy Joel’s “The Stranger,” the way Gen Z listeners are leaning into music history and sampling sounds from the ’70s through an eclectic mix of artists including Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Tame Impala and many more — the appetite is there.
When Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu won gold at the 2026 Winter Games in Milan skating to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park Suite,” streams of the song surged more than 500% within days. For Wikane, it was one of the greatest gifts imaginable. Summer is widely celebrated for “I Feel Love” and “Love to Love You Baby,” but “MacArthur Park” had been somewhat overlooked despite being a masterpiece in its own right.
“Within 24 hours of her winning the gold, streams of ‘MacArthur Park Suite’ jumped by 1,200% on Spotify,” Wikane says. “That’s the best-case scenario. It’s to have people interested in this music that for me has always been there, but for other people, they’re always discovering it for the first time.”
When asked what lessons from the disco era we can carry into this moment of political and social uncertainty, Wikane doesn’t hesitate.
“We’re living through a period of such uncertainty. Day to day, we don’t know what we’re going to see and who’s going to be here in our life,” he says, mentioning the power of togetherness at the club. “Dancing outside is a different type of high. Just being under the sun or under the stars or having a breeze blow through your hair. Bringing people together that might not ordinarily be together. You see, ‘Gosh, I’m connected to people’ in a way that you don’t get that feeling when you’re just sitting in your apartment worrying about the future.”
And that, for Wikane, is the whole point. “Being together versus being separate from each other. I think that’s one of the most important things that we can do right now.”
Christian John Wikane will be at Stay Gold Books, 1104 S Braddock Ave, on Saturday, May 9, for his “A Night at the Disco” Book Tour with a discussion led by Tomé Cousin.