Hi-NRG: The Club Sound Freestyle Grew Up Next To

A synthesizer standing in for a full band, a falsetto that started in a Pentecostal church, and a tempo fast enough to keep a club moving past sunrise. That's the sound a handful of producers in San Francisco and London built, years before anyone in New York had made a freestyle record.

Hi-NRG is an uptempo electronic dance genre, roughly 120 to 140 beats per minute, that grew out of gay disco culture in San Francisco and the UK club scene starting in the late 1970s. It predates freestyle, which developed separately out of New York's Latin and electro underground in the early 1980s. Its two biggest production hubs were San Francisco, where Sylvester and Patrick Cowley made the genre's founding records, and London, where Ian Levine and Stock Aitken Waterman built its biggest chart hits, with New York producer Bobby Orlando working the same sound.

Where the name came from

The word traces back to Donna Summer, not a club DJ. She described her own 1977 single "I Feel Love," a mostly electronic, high-tempo Euro-disco record, as having "a high-energy vibe." Music writers and DJs picked up the phrase, attached it to that tempo range and production style, and by the 1980s it had been stylized into "hi-NRG." Ian Levine, the in-house DJ at London's Heaven nightclub in its early years, didn't coin the term, but his own definition of it, given later in his career, became the genre's working rulebook: "melodic, straightforward dance music that's not too funky."

San Francisco, the genre's other hub

Before Hi-NRG had a name, it had a singer and a synthesizer player working the same San Francisco disco scene. Sylvester's 1978 single "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" started as a mid-tempo, piano-driven gospel number until Patrick Cowley, who studied synthesizers at City College of San Francisco, heard it performed in person and remixed it into a landmark electronic dance record. Sylvester and Patrick Cowley covers how that happened, and You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) follows the record's own chart run and afterlife. Cowley later ran his own Hi-NRG club night, Menergy, at San Francisco's EndUp starting in 1982, debuting his newest tracks there before he died that same year, one of the AIDS epidemic's early cases; Patrick Cowley's Menergy Night at the EndUp tells that club's own story. Sylvester continued recording and became an outspoken AIDS activist before he died in 1988.

The producers who built the hits

Two production camps outside San Francisco built the sound's biggest chart hits. In New York, Bobby Orlando built Divine's Hi-NRG catalog, including "Native Love (Step by Step)," and separately produced the original 1984 version of the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls," a full year before the EMI re-recording became the actual hit; Bobby Orlando untangles his catalog from a common misreading that Divine only ever worked with him. Divine's other well-known Hi-NRG single, "You Think You're a Man," was produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, the same team that cut its Hi-NRG teeth on Hazell Dean before landing its first UK No. 1 with Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" in 1985. Hazell Dean and Dead or Alive sorts out which producer made which record, and You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) follows that single's own tense studio history, including Pete Burns's own account of writing it and his later insistence that "to me it was just disco."

The other voices that carried the sound

Ian Levine's own biggest production credit, Evelyn Thomas's 1984 single "High Energy," shares its name with the genre itself; sources call it one of the earliest successful songs to carry that name, without going so far as to say it coined it. High Energy covers that record and the question of whether it named anything. Levine and co-producer Fiachra Trench also built Miquel Brown's "So Many Men, So Little Time," a 1983 single that became a Hi-NRG club standard despite modest chart numbers; Miquel Brown tells her story.

Why Hi-NRG's history is hard to pin down

Hi-NRG's real history runs through small independent labels, club nights nobody wrote down, and producers who often don't get equal billing for records they made, the kind of scattered paper trail that lets a bigger act come along later and get credit for someone else's earlier work. Even the artists who made it didn't always agree on what to call it: Pete Burns spent decades rejecting the Hi-NRG label on his own biggest hit. None of that changes how the records sound. A gospel song, a club night that barely outlasted its founder, and a handful of producers working outside any real system built a sound that outlived every argument about its own name.

FAQ

What is Hi-NRG music? Hi-NRG is an uptempo electronic dance genre, roughly 120 to 140 beats per minute, built on synthesizers standing in for a full band. It grew out of gay disco culture in San Francisco and the UK club scene starting in the late 1970s.

Is Hi-NRG the same as freestyle? No. Hi-NRG comes out of gay disco culture in San Francisco and the UK club scene and predates freestyle, which grew separately out of the New York Latin and electro underground in the early 1980s.

Who started Hi-NRG? Sylvester and Patrick Cowley made the genre's founding San Francisco records, starting with 1978's "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)." In London, Ian Levine and Stock Aitken Waterman built the sound's biggest UK chart hits through the mid-1980s, and New York's Bobby Orlando built Divine's records.

Where does the name "Hi-NRG" come from? From Donna Summer describing her 1977 single "I Feel Love" as having "a high-energy vibe." The phrase got picked up by writers and DJs, attached to a tempo range and production style, and eventually stylized as "hi-NRG."

What are the biggest Hi-NRG songs? Sylvester's "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)," Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)," and Evelyn Thomas's "High Energy" are three of the genre's best-known records, each covered on this site.

Did Hi-NRG ever cross over to mainstream pop radio? Yes. Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" reached UK No. 1 and US No. 11, and Stock Aitken Waterman went on to build a pop-chart machine out of the same Hi-NRG production techniques.

An all-80s stream from the Bubble is coming. Part of 80s Radio, the story of how DJs and clubs shaped what the decade actually heard. See also Freestyle, the club sound that grew up next door.