Disco Inferno

Song information[edit]

The song was originally recorded by the Trammps in 1976 and released as a single. It was inspired by the 1974 blockbuster film The Towering Inferno, in which a party in a top floor ballroom is threatened by a fire that breaks out below.^[5] According to Tom Moulton, who mixed the record, the Dolby noise reduction had been set incorrectly during the mixdown of the tracks. When engineer Jay Mark discovered the error and corrected it, the mix had a much wider dynamic range than was common at the time. Due to this, the record seems to "jump out" at the listener. With "Starvin'" and "Body Contact Contract", it topped the U.S. Disco chart for six weeks in the late winter of 1977.^[6] On the other U.S. charts, "Disco Inferno" hit number nine on the Black Singles chart, but it was not initially a significant success at pop radio, peaking at number 53 on the Billboard Hot 100.^[7]


However, some radio stations, especially the AM, banned the song from the airwaves due to the repeated line "burn baby burn", which reminded people of the Watts riots in 1965.


"Disco Inferno" gained much greater recognition when the nearly 11 minute album version was included on the soundtrack to the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever. Re-released by Atlantic Records, the track peaked at number 11 in the U.S. during the spring of 1978, becoming the Trammps' biggest and most-recognized single. Later, it was included in the Saturday Night Fever musical, interpreted by 'DJ Monty' in the "Odissey 2001" discothèque. A cover version of the track was issued by the group Players Association in March 1978 on the Vanguard record label both in 7" and 12" format. It was produced by Danny Weiss and also issued as a track on their 1979 LP Born to Dance.


In 2004, a 12" version with the 10:54-minute version and "Can We Come Together" (from the album Where the Happy People Go) on the B side was released in the UK.^[8] This version was certified Silver in 2021 by the British Phonographic Industry.^[9]


On September 19, 2005, "Disco Inferno" was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame.^[10]


In 2009, the song was featured in Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony, the second downloadable content pack for 2008's Grand Theft Auto IV, on the in-game disco radio station "K-109: The Studio". Also in 2009, at the same time as the release of The Ballad of Gay Tony, it and Grand Theft Auto IV's first downloadable pack, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned were packaged and released together through physical media under the title Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City, in which the song appears in both episodes on the same radio station (the song was not present in the initial downloadable release of The Lost and Damned).