In honour of A Roller Skating Jam Named Red Bull Music Academy, we take a brief look at the history of roller skating in popular culture.
Rollerskating. It’s amazing isn't it? It’s free, magical and you can have any (fairly flat) surface at your disposal. And what happens when something takes the planet by storm? That's right, a succession of bad films and dreadful spin-off records.
Here's the opening titles to Roller Boogie (also pictured above), a film starring Linda The Exorcist Blair, and featuring campy numbers such as the theme tune Hell On Wheels by Cher. It's literally uncanny in its depiction of how Red Bull gets into work each morning:
The roller skate was first invented, or at least the first known one was invented in 1743, however disco was still a few months off at that point, with the roller skate form that we know and love coming into being in 1884. Sensing an anniversary of his birth tie-in, Cliff Richard took the opportunity to don wheels for this 1981 number:
Soon everyone was tapping into the rollerskating market. No video seemed acceptable unless there were some kind of eight-wheeled high jinks going on. Cliff's showbiz mate Olivia Newton John also got in on the act with the soundtrack of Xanadu. Even the makers of the film would be hard pushed to remember the plot of it, but no one can deny the pop majesty of the theme tune:
There's only so many boob tubes and lycra one can take, so moving on a few years, to perhaps the greatest music/ roller disco crossover, from 1992 from De La Soul, who mixed a bit of Chic into Chicago, the Grease soundtrack and the Isley Brothers into this:
Just in case she hadn't got that flesh cage fighting/ roller disco crossover nailed enough times, Madonna rammed the point home in the video for Sorry. Not bad for 76, eh readers?
Honourable mentions: Mariah Carey took to the skates and, um, stood around a bit and trilled in octaves only dogs and sonar equipment can detect on her Heartbreaker video; George Benson’s tremendous Give Me The Night works the eight-wheel concept and Robbie Williams’s Rock DJ, which sees him ripping off his flesh and throwing it off at some skating ladies.
A Roller Skating Jam Named Red Bull Music Academy with Moodymann, Horse Meat Disco, B. Bravo, Jullian Gomes & Master MP6-60 takes place at the Renaissance Rooms on Thursday March 4.
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