Renaissance Village People RCA/Casablanca
Disco was dead. A year had passed since the Village People starred in Can't Stop the Music, a semi-biographical movie so bad it inspired the creation of the Razzies. They had lost their best songwriters and producers. Things really weren't going well for the world's most famous sexually ambiguous band.
It was time for a rebirth, but what they got was more like the afterbirth.
Yet it must have made sense in some record executive's office. New Wave was in, disco was out: dress them up like New Romantics, slow down the tempo of the music, and let the dollars flow in.
The album title, Renaissance, made the metaphor obvious: this would be the return to pop success.
Let's think. The Hindenburg? The Titanic? The Challenger? Nope. It's impossible to conjure up an allusion that adequately illustrates the true magnitude of just how frighteningly wrong this assumption was.
Let's start with that cover. Yes, there in tight PVC trousers, with bare chests and modified mariachi waistcoats are the men who, with their runaway hit YMCA, did so much to advance the cause of gay shower sex. They're hardly recognisable: no more cop, no more construction worker, no more random native American. But it's them, for sure. Suddenly, however, they're wearing Boy George make-up and hairstyles lifted from Spandau Ballet. All of parody's power couldn't paint a more uncomfortable scene.