THE STORY BEHIND…

Racism and homophobia provided a dark backdrop to the singer’s disco hit with Nile Rodgers. By Nick Levine

women,” Rodgers would recall decades later. “Look at the pictures of who was there at that Disco Sucks thing. There ain’t a gay person in that baseball stadium, there ain’t a black person there and it was a sell-out: 70,000 people.”

Early in her career, Ross, who’d grown up in Detroit’s impoverished Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, had gone through Motown’s famous finishing school, taking etiquette and deportment lessons as part of the label’s plan to make the Supremes palatable to conservative white audiences. She wasn’t about to squander her hard work by aligning herself with a genre that was now becoming toxic. So with Disco Sucks capturing national attention, Ross and Motown initially rejected the album. “They took the record from us and told us they weren’t gonna put it out,” Rodgers has said. “They told us it didn’t sound like a Diana Ross record. We had to sue them – we had to go to court to force them to put the record out.”

Though Rodgers and Edwards won this first battle with Ross and Motown, they would lose the next. Still unhappy with how the tracks sounded, Ross asked Motown engineer Russ Terrana to remix the entire album behind their backs. Terrana had been working with Ross since her Supremes days, and knew “the kind of excitement” she liked her music to convey.

Feeling that the album sounded “like a Chic album with a Diana Ross voice” on it, Terrana transformed it into “a Diana Ross album” by making her vocals more prominent, removing extended instrumental sections and speeding up the tempos.

Diana was still a disco album, but it now had a punchier sound that would anticipate the harderedged dance-pop of the following decade. Forty years on, it’s still thrilling to listen to it. Still, Terrana’s work didn’t thrill everyone. Rodgers says he was “devastated” and “in tears” when he first heard the new mix – at one point, he and Edwards even considered having their names removed from the credits. Of course, he’s now relieved they backed down and kept their names on it: “Thank God cooler heads prevailed and said: ‘There’s something great here but it has to be made more accessible’.”

Despite their fractious working relationship, Ross and Rodgers reunited for her 1989 album, Workin’ Overtime, albeit with less commercial success. Last year, they performed I’m Coming Out and Upside Down together at a New York hotel opening.

In retrospect, Rodgers also credits Ross with transforming his career, paving the way for his future collaborations with Bowie and Madonna.

“So, maybe the record should have been that difficult,” he conceded in 2013. “Maybe I had to fight because it was so different – maybe I had to prove to them that I was willing to go to court and lose everything because it was so new.”