Love is the Message: Dance, Music and Counterculture

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing, and dozens more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and become a patron from £3 a month. In this patrons episode we wanted to spend some time talking about the band on everyone’s lips: Kneecap. The Belfast three-piece have been in the headlines of all the papers in recent weeks for their vocal support of Palestine, trouble with...

We’re almost at the end of our 1977 series, but in true LITM fashion why have just one show on a topic when you could have two? Across this and the next episode we’ll be filling in a few gaps we haven’t touched on so far, and providing some broad economic and political scene-setting for this seminal year in both Britain and the States. In this episode we hear about the emergent neoliberal order, t...

This is an excerpt from a patrons episode. to hear the full thing and dozens more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and become a patron from £3 per month. In this patrons-only episode we welcome writer and anti-fascist activist Joe Mulhall to the show to discuss his fantastic book Rebel Sounds: Music as Resistance, a survey across time and place of groups and cultures using musics as part of their...

In this episode, Tim and Jeremy complete our mini-series on Saturday Night Fever by looking at the film in its cinematographic context alongside two other huge movies of the late1970s. With reference to Rocky and Taxi Driver, the guys unearth the shared visions of class and race politics in the USA of the period. They discuss the particular place of Italian Americans in the culture more broadly, d...

This is am excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing along with dozen more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and sign up for as little as £3 a month. In this patrons-only episode we welcome writer Toby Manning to the show to discuss his recent book Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music. Toby's book offers a political reading of popular music, taking as its m...

In this episode, Tim and Jeremy pull on their white suits for a full run-down rewatch of Saturday Night Fever. Starting with the iconic 'Stayin' Alive' opening sequence, they draw out the class, race and gender politics of the film, including Italian American stereotypes, consumer culture, Bruce Lee, meritocracy and male grooming. On the music side, they talk blue-eyed Soul, falsetto, an early dru...

The day has finally come: after 79 episodes of Love is the Message, it’s time to talk Travolta. Saturday Night Fever was always coming down the pipe for us, and now we’re giving it the LITM treatment. In this episode, Tim and Jeremy establish some of the pre-history to the seminal 1977 film. With musical examples drawn from Vince Aletti’s Disco Files playlists, we hear about the rise of the suburb...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing and dozens more episodes on topics ranging from Walter Gibbons to Glam Rock, visit patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons episode we conclude our two-parter on Bob Dylan, dragging him from where we left off last time in 1966 all the way up to the freewheeling year of 1977. Through a glut of albums we hear about John Hammon...

Tim and Jeremy conclude our look at Eurodisco with a series of cuts from the mighty Giorgio Moroder. We hear the silky vocals of Donna Summer, the relentlessness of the 4-to-the-floor, the aesthetics of whiteness and what can only be called Prog Disco. Also in the episode Tim recounts a recent visit to the Philharmonie de Paris, Jeremy revels in a Star Wars rework, and we board the Trans Europe Ex...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing and a hell of a lot more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. Timothée Chalamet is currently lighting up the silver screen as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Have you seen in? We haven’t, but we still thought it high time to dig into some Dylanology. In this episode Tim and Jeremy discuss Bob’s early albums up to 1966, interroga...

Tim and Jeremy are back on European soil for our second episode on Eurodisco. Examining their record boxes with a post-colonial lens they discuss the aesthetics and politics of race within the genre. We also here about homoeroticism, history-themed tracks, ‘the honky box’, and the life and times of two of the key players in the scene: Jacques Morali and Richie Rome. And of course… Village People....

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full show and lots more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. For the first time in a while Tim and Jeremy dig into their record bags for a selection of tracks they’ve been enjoying recently. We hear the strange deep tones of the Rudra Veena, contemporary virtuosic New Age noodling out of California and some Antipodean sitar funk. El...

In the first episode of 2025 Jeremy and Tim attempted to understand a somewhat maligned genre: Eurodisco. What is it and where did it come from? We hear about the cross-continental currents that gave rise to the form, unpack its aesthetics and spend time with some of its key proponents like the French composer and drummer Cerrone. Tim and Jeremy also take time to unpack the Switched On Classics, p...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full show and lots more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. On this patrons episode we complete our close reading of Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain’. Jeremy and Tim take in chapters on criminality and culture, Style, and feminist analysis of girls’ culture. They refer to another seminal work ‘Policing the...

In this episode of Love is the Message Jeremy and Tim have packed a bag chock full of stone cold 1977 dance floor classics that share a Black Disco aesthetic. We hear a number of cuts from Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons that can be pinpointed as some of the most important contributions to early remix culture (whilst still guaranteed to go off at a party). François K makes a fleeting appearance, al...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full show, plus dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. We start this patrons episode with a tribute to Phil Cohen, a colleague of Jem and Tim’s at UEL and a fellow traveller to the Birmingham cultural studies writers discussed in this episode. From there we pick up where we left off in our reading of the seminal edited col...

In this episode Tim and Jeremy continue the story of Frankie Knuckles first year at the controls of the seminal Chicago nightclub, the Warehouse. We hear an investigation of Frankie’s early musical aesthetic, how it would lend itself to the development of the House sound some years later, and whether stability or dynamism are better for a pumping dance floor. Elsewhere in the episode we hear about...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full episode and dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons episode we begin a reading series on a book we mentioned in the last episode: ‘Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain’, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. This collection, first published in 1975, is a classic of the c...

This is the first of two episodes on another seminal club in the history of dance culture: The Warehouse. Jeremy and Tim begin by spending some time discussing the city of Chicago, a place that despite its massive musical output hasn’t really featured in out story so far. A crucible of industrial modernity, they consider its unique historical position, the move from Delta to Chicago Blues, and how...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing, and much much more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod to sign up from just £3 a month. In this patrons episode we thought we’d begin to explore the academic discipline of Cultural Studies. Tim and Jeremy (both Cultural Studies professors themselves remember) explain the ways in which academic study of popular cultural was devel...

We’re back from our summer break and getting straight back to business to examine what was going on in the Downtown party scene during the fabled year of 1977. We return to a favourite of the show - Nicky Siano - to hear how the Gallery wound down, check in on what’s happening back at the Loft, and unearth the very first iteration of the Paradise Garage. Also featured in this episode: a bit more S...

In this episode Jeremy and Tim complete our mini-series on the opening of Studio 54. They discuss links between underground and mainstream both generally and specific to 1977 NYC, consider the importance of celebrities to the Studio project, and interrogate the velvet rope. We hear about Bianca Jagger’s birthday party, spend more time thinking about Richard Long and his sound system designs, and a...

In this episode Jeremy and Tim walk us past the velvet rope and into opening night at Studio 54. They introduce us to Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the two businessmen who owned the club, as well as to the often overlooked Carmen D’Alessio, who’s taste and art world connections were crucial to the look and feel of the party. Through these characters and more we get to learn about the founding of...

This is an excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the whole thing and hours more exclusive conversation, become a patron at Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. In this patrons-only episode Jeremy dons his leather jacket to conclude our history of the early days of heavy metal. We hear about how the convergence of space rock, biker gangs, and the fantasy aesthetics of writer Michael Moorcock created...

In this episode Jeremy and Tim discuss the economic and social setting into which Studio 54 opened in 1977. They talk about the differences between midtown and downtown scenes, the antagonism (or lack thereof) between punk and disco, subcultural theory and escapism.  How did disco become so popular so quickly? The guys explore the commercial phenomenon as it exploded after 1975, including the firs...