Across the crowded disco-room
Edwin Starr - Contact/Don't Waste Your Time 12"
Edwin Starr was American by birth and Polesworth by choice. I used to go to college with one of his backing singers.
I’d bought the 12” of this in 1978, then sold it to a girl at school. I later picked up this copy in a second hand shop down the south coast somewhere. It has ‘Toffs’ written in texta on the label.
The only Toffs disco I can find online is in Sligo, Ireland, but this is an Aussie pressing, so it’s unlikely to be from there. I can’t help thinking there would have been loads of discos with that name when this record came out. Fucking terrible name.
Contact is a cracking slab of disco: Starr’s roaring vocals, sweeping strings, bongos, hi-hats, open percussion breaks – wicked.
Lyrically, it tells the story of our protagonist seeing someone he fancies across the other side of the disco, where she is sitting quietly by herself. She meets his glance and Edwin locks eyes with her. He seems to have read an awful lot into her catching his glance, if you ask me, but that was the seventies, I suppose. He then describes his state of excitement as he crosses the dancefloor to bother this woman. Rather disturbingly, he says ‘I never took my eyes away from yours, not even for a moment’, which could be perceived as a bit odd, menacing perhaps, not to mention increasing the risk of bumping into people.
The B-side, Don’t Waste Your Time, is a dreary ballad, and is, rather ironically, a waste of time.