Overview
"Disco Inferno" is a song by American disco band the Trammps from their 1976 fourth studio album of the same name. With two other cuts by the group, it reached No. 1 on the US Billboard Dance Club Songs chart in early 1977, but had limited mainstream success until 1978, after being included on the soundtrack to the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, when a re-release hit number eleven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
It was also notably covered in 1993 by American-born singer Tina Turner on What's Love Got to Do with It, and in 1998 by American singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper on the A Night at the Roxbury soundtrack. Among others who covered this are Damien Lovelock, Hardsonic Bottoms 3, and Vicki Shepard.
Song information
The song was originally recorded by the Trammps in 1976 and released as a single. It was supposedly inspired by a scene in the 1974 blockbuster film The Towering Inferno. According to Tom Moulton, who mixed the record, the Dolby noise reduction had been set incorrectly during the mixdown of the tracks. When engineer Jay Mark discovered the error and corrected it, the mix had a much wider dynamic range than was common at the time. Due to this, the record seems to "jump out" at the listener. With "Starvin'" and "Body Contact Contract", it topped the U.S. Disco chart for six weeks in the late winter of 1977. On the other U.S. charts, "Disco Inferno" hit number nine on the Black Singles chart, but it was not initially a significant success at pop radio, peaking at number 53 on the Billboard Hot 100.
However, some radio stations, especially the AM, banned the song from the airwaves due to the repeated line "burn baby burn", which reminded people of the Watts riots in 1965.
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