A band born from a UK-only JBs compilation and a refusal to be bored by rockism, Boots For Dancing present “Dance & Resist” — ten tracks of funk, protest, and dancefloor testimony.
Boots For Dancing (BFD) trace their roots to probably one single record: Giving Up Food For Funk, a UK-only JBs compilation released in March 1976. The band cross-pollinated P-Funk with the raw energy of Richard Hell & The Voidoids and No Wave. They were chasing a deliberate drift away from the “1,2,3,4” boredom of rockist punk, and toward something else entirely, band members all pulling in different musical directions.
The band came up during the era of the euphemistically-named Standard Music Business Contract — young, naive, and part of Thatcher’s mass youth unemployed, willing to be exploited by the “honest capitalism” of the music industry with little expectation of reward. Anything to get off the Giro.
About the Album: The title Dance & Resist captures the band’s guiding contradiction: that you can acclaim and celebrate something while still seeking to change, challenge, disrupt, or overturn it — the same spirit found decades later in people doing the Electric Slide at BLM protests.
Tracks:
South Pacific — The desire for the unobtainable, and the question of just where “anywhere since sunset” might be.
Shout & Testify — A booty-shaking call to dancefloor action.
Different From You? — Inspired by Winston Rodney’s “Social Living” and the Rastafarian concept of positive livity: peace, love, and respect toward others, with no room for tribalism.
Hold Up Half The Sky — A phrase drawn from the women’s movement, particularly the Grunwick Picket of South Asian textile workers, and later used more broadly in the fight for women’s rights. BFD’s attempt to align themselves with that struggle — with a nod to Rosie the Riveter.
Blue 4 U — On mass media’s ability to manufacture personal disquiet and a desire to escape — “affectionate propaganda” becoming suffocating, answered with open minds and open hearts. Written well before algorithms and AI.
Hesitate — The band’s attempt at a Chic-style arrangement, about putting things off until “mañana.”
Rain Song — A celebration of Edinburgh’s micro-climate — four seasons in a day — and one of the album’s few strictly narrative lyrics, inspired by August Darnell and film noir.
Wild Jazz Summers — Title lifted from a Tennessee Williams biography. An attempt at West Side Story meets beat poetry, with a Hammond B organ outro.
BFD — In their later days, the band closed live sets with this percussion-heavy number, breaking the fourth wall in a manner indebted to the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Get Off Your Ass And Jam — A loose, live take on the Funkadelic tune, capturing the band’s earliest iteration — recorded at their first ever hometown gig.
