I once had a love, and it was a gas.

Looked like the real thing only to find

Mucho mistrust, you got a big behind.

Picture it: Central Pennsylvania, early 1979, climbing off the highway in a cloverleaf near the mall where they filmed the “new store” sequences of the movie Mannequin, this comes on the radio. Dumbfounded, it’s unlike any music I’ve ever heard before. Visceral feeling of this changes music forever. To this day it is the only song I know exactly where I was the first time I ever heard it.

[quote] Dumbfounded, it’s unlike any music I’ve ever heard before.

Oh honey! It's just disco.

R3 No, it’s not, it’s New Wave and it ushered in the whole wave of New Wave music in the United States, at least as mainstream music radio goes. It was a complete and utterly a revelation at the time, and if you didn’t grow up in it and experience it first hand you can never completely understand that.

Once I had a secret love That lived within the heart of me.

Oh Miss Wondrous and Miraculous Visitation at r4: I also grew up then and experienced it.

Get over yourself.

They were never disco. The original song was a reggae track with some folk-inspired vocals, and it was later planned they would redesign it as a stadium rock song. In the studio, because Saturday Night Fever was the "current" sound they gave it some futuristic edges and it all came together organically.

It's incredible that Mike Chapman was able to get any usable material from those Parallel Lines sessions. With all those fragile egos competing and arguments every step of the way. They weren't exactly studio trained at that point.