I always equated the 12” extended remix with being handed a live grenade, depending on which way you looked at it, it was there to either end your suffering or prolong it – although variously it was the latter. In fact trying to describe the experience to any one of a thousand spotted hoodies today would be like explaining what pulling a tooth was all about and how paying £2.49 to extend the pleasure was cheap at half-the-price. Today’s youth have their mixtapes and DJ remixes. We had our extended monster-raving-loony-accapella-night-bommerang vocal dance mixes’ to satisfy our shameless lust for ‘more’ of the record we loved. Remember, this was back in the eighties when having ‘more’ of anything was considered a plus; whether it was more hair, more money, more stretchy denim, more bangles or more amusingly accelerated vocal passages on your Wham ‘Last Christmas-Pudding Mix’ vinyl. It was the ‘must have’ product of that period in the same way ‘STD’s are the must have product of today, although many STDs today, are arguably less terminal. Mercifully, however, ‘Extended Seventies: The Dawning of The 12” Era’ ignores the usual wretched mannerisms of the early 12” record in favour of some of the more seminal releases: Donna Summer’ ‘Love To Love You Baby’ and Spark’s ‘Beat The Clock’ amongst them.
Diced neatly into three sections: ‘Pop’, ‘Disco’ and ‘New Wave’ the record roughly translates as the unofficial tribute to Tom Moulton who – it is alleged – patented the 12” single and carved his own niche within the disco boom three decades ago to instantly become a DJ’s best friend. Frustrated by the fact that the average song lasted just three standard minutes, and having seen disco tempos start to accelerate, Moulton’s model for the turntable staple was to initially put together a mixtape, where he blended the same song with itself to make a longer version. In lesser hands the output was often less than valid, but Moulton and others like him had a knack for defining the true soul of a record, trimming off the fat, expanding the best bits and prolonging the joy. It might be a riff, it might be a chorus, it might be something the original artist barely intended like the sparkly, delicious fade at the end of ‘Heart Of Glass’ – but it was always valid and always able to justify the extra 10 minutes.
Go away and pontificate on the significance of the 12” record in the growth of clubbing and dance music by all means, but whilst you stroke your chin and squint into the middle-distance stick this on your IPod and chew it. Classic strokes for classic folks.