(Credits: Far Out / TIDAL)
Fri 24 October 2025 19:00, UK
In the 1970s, a new fever was simmering in the underbelly of New York, one that Don Henley would soon come to despise so passionately he had to write a song about it.
The fever – or, more specifically, disco fever – was a cultural slow burn, starting in nightclubs with a specific appeal to marginalised and oppressed groups, providing a space for them to let loose and self-express before bursting into the mainstream as a major genre of music.
For some at the forefront of this explosion, like the Bee Gees, it was so gradual to explode that they didn’t even realise they were part of it, much less leading the charge. Or, at the very least, they didn’t ever enter the studio thinking they were going to make a disco record, or even felt that they were playing into those tropes at all.
As producer Albhy Galuten once told Music Radar while discussing the pinnacle of all disco records, Saturday Night Fever: “We didn’t listen to disco. We didn’t think we were a disco band. We thought we were an R’n’B band. Barry [Gibb] and I connected because we loved Stax and Motown. We had the same sort of history.”
Those immersed in the scene didn’t realise what was happening until much later, but those in other spaces, like rock and country, were already feeling the fatigue. The Damned’s Captain Sensible once said that, were it not for bands like them, people would have had nowhere to turn to – it was either disco or “pogoeing spiky-haired types having a bloody good time”.
Don Henley was another established hater. Something about disco made his hair stand on end, and it wasn’t just the fact that it threatened to overthrow every other genre vying for commercial success. It was the way it sounded, the song structures, the rhythms – all of it filled Henley with this inexplicable rage, enough for him to start a song about it, aptly titled ‘The Disco Strangler’.
As the name suggests, it captured the crux of Henley’s feelings towards disco. He’d actually worked to finish the lyrics with Don Felder, both of them creating a story where this “disco strangler” character observes the disco scene unfold and lures unsuspecting victims into his embrace like a predator. Discussing the song in a previous interview with Guitar World, Felder recalled how Henley’s distaste for the entire genre is where it all started.
“I wrote the song that Don Henley started writing lyrics to called ‘The Disco Strangler’,” he said. “It was back in the disco days, and [Henley] hated disco. He hates the four-on-the-floor beats; he just wanted to kill disco, you know? So he took this little music track I had written and he wrote [the lyrics for] ‘The Disco Strangler’.”
The song sat on The Long Run, the highly anticipated follow-up to the “monster” that was Hotel California. A new music scene and pressures to maintain success likely made Henley even more sceptical about disco, but it’s also clear it was simply a matter of personal taste. Henley was never one to follow the crowd, and with a sound so different from his own game, it’s no wonder he felt completely plagued by it. Enough to feel vengeful.
As is clear in the lyrics: “You looking for attention, darling / He will surely give you some / He’s the crimson in your face du jour / The fiddler in your darkest night.”
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