![]() He called ahead before he first came, asking if it was OK if he was naked in the club. He’s not around much now, but for a while everyone knew us for ‘Naked Guy’.” Howard adds: “He’s the mark of a proper Horse Meat. Stanton gives the example of Ernesto Sarezale, a performance poet who would dance naked. The title of Sanctuary, with guests the Phenomenal Handclap Band, nods to HMD being a place of refuge. Kathy Sledge of Sister Sledge adds diva vocals, while the new wave scene is summed up by Burn, which is pure Talking Heads (always popular at the club). It follows the structure of a night there – even if nowadays the best you can do is “work your disco wiggle” while seated, as Stanton puts it – via disco’s many flavours. That debut album, out this week, is called Love and Dancing: the club’s vibe in a nutshell. And when Amy Douglas did Let’s Go Dancing with that refrain, ‘Boys and girls sing let’s go dancing’, that’s when we knew we had an album.” “He made it sound like a slower Frankie Knuckles mix – that got our attention. “But they sat on the shelf for five years.” The producer Luke Solomon, also an A&R at the house label Defected, got wind of them and reworked their track Waiting For You to Call. We did four, but it’s so expensive licensing those old classics.” After a suggestion from Tim Goldsworthy, then the head of DFA Records, they collaborated with a studio engineer, Darren Morris, to make their own disco tracks: “Slow cosmic stuff, some Philadelphia soul-ish, some proto house,” says Howard. Panzetta says they “couldn’t go on for ever releasing disco compilations. “They were just relieved to find a gay club playing disco!” ![]() Our music – which could be Madonna or could be some deep Afro or cosmic track – fits on any festival bill too.” CD compilations and a Sunday afternoon show on Rinse FM raised their profile further (“We get all soulful and help people’s hangovers subside”) and Howard notes that it also chimed with the “nu-disco” scene that rose in the mid-00s with the likes of Todd Terje and Prins Thomas. Panzetta, who has been with HMD since that fateful New Year’s Day in 2004, says it became popular “because no one was really doing that on the queer scene: playing disco and having fun, basically. Because being queer doesn’t have to be a sexual thing, you know what I mean?” But with a queer aesthetic and a queer sensibility. Hillard adds: “We made it clear from the off that it was for every tribe, every gender, every sexuality. “We always said that the best parties we’d been to – and the best throughout queer clubbing history – have been ones with the most mixed-up crowd,” Stanton explains. Hillard dubbed their weekly Sunday night a “queer party for all”, way before clubland and society in general were talking about safe spaces and diversity. “They had a full Friday night buffet the event was called Chunkies. “It was a proper bears club then,” Hillard remembers – bears being hirsute, full-bodied gay men. Kicked out of a venue in Chinatown “because they wanted to change the name, the music policy … everything but the healthy bar take, basically”, Stanton says, they found a home for their event in Dukes (now Eagle London). “They were all cookie-cutter hard house rip-offs of Trade, or basic funky house,” Stanton grimaces. In 2004, though, HMD’s co-founders Stanton and James Hillard were jobbing around the city’s dance scene alongside future residents Howard and Severino Panzetta, wanting a place to play 70s and 80s disco absent from the queer clubs of the day. Mick Jagger has popped in to dance, Marc Almond has “been a few times” and the US actor and singer Vanessa Williams came last year (“She did selfies with security and everything,” Howard says). The Horse Meat Disco crew have since headlined international music festivals, hosted DJ residencies in NYC, Berlin and Lisbon, played more Pride events than they can name and hosted their heroes, too.
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