Disco inferno 

They said you could hear the thud of the 4/4 beat at the Studio 54 discothèque before you saw it. And when you did lay eyes on Studio 54: the first thing you saw was the queue. Though ‘queue’ is not the right word – ‘scrum’ is more accurate. At Studio 54, the club of New York City in the late 1970s, you had to be incredibly famous or impossibly beautiful just to get past the bouncers.

Want to go in with your friends for a dance? Forget about it. Fancy a night with the rich and more-famous-than-you? Not tonight, schlub. Andy Warhol, Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli don’t want to share the air with ‘civilians’. Even Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, the disco geniuses whose records provided the soundtrack to Studio 54 were knocked back. They were so angry they went home and wrote a track called F*ck Off – which, renamed Le Freak – became a Studio 54 anthem.

One person who did get in was photographer Tod Papageorge. Between 1978 and 1980, he crossed the velvet rope and photographed Studio 54-ers in their halter-neck-and-flares finerie. Now those images have been collated in a most desirable photo book, Studio 54.

His images – taken on medium-format 6x9cm cameras – show New York at its most decadent. Beautiful men and women strut their stuff on the packed dance floors; celebrities look for members of their tribe to talk to, and the inebriated seek solace in their drugs and drinks of choice.

“It helped to be beautiful”

“It helped to be beautiful”

“Only the famous or socially connected could assume they’d find themselves shooed around the flock of hopeful celebrants milling on the street side of the velvet rope and guided through the door,” he says. “Otherwise, the thing most likely to help was to be beautiful. Once inside, though, everyone there seemed thrilled by the fact, no matter how they’d managed it, an excitement fed by the throbbing music and brilliantly designed interiors, which, on a party night, could suggest anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem.”

There’s sadness here, too. Sadness that comes from knowing some of the young men in these images would soon fall victim to the AIDS epidemic that decimated the gay population in the 1980s – and which robbed the city of so many of its shining stars.

Studio 54, which Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager (now a hotelier) owned, defined the disco scene with the impeccable musical selection of DJs Nicky Siano and François Kevorkian. And though it closed after only 33 months, its legacy of hedonism and glamour lives on in every VIP room, luxury hotel lounge and members’ club we civilians can’t gain entry to.