Queen Butch Presents Horse Meat Disco ATX Labor Day Weekend
Music by Horse Meat Disco, Amarji King, The Electric Pearl & P1nk Star
Horse Meat Disco is a byword for Sunday night London bacchanalia which accidentally resuscitated
the original dance music genre onto the world stage. The four-strong DJ collective of Luke Howard,
Severino Panzetta, James Hillard and Jim Stanton began their disco shenanigans on New Year’s Day,
2004 at The Eagle, Vauxhall. Beside their famous well-hung equine neon logo (“Our Eiffel Tower”),
their brand of reverential, revisionist bonhomie turned out to be its own form of futurism,
restructuring the London nightclub pyramid. “You put music at the top and getting high or jiggy
follows,” they say, “not the other way round.”
In the 20 years of their nightclub tenure, HMD have become a global brand. They have added monthly
residencies in Berlin and New York to their London bedrock as well as touring week in week out
around the globe. They are a rock solid festival attraction, persistent bookings which fanned from the
initial impetus they lent the NYC Downlow, Glastonbury’s first LGBTQ+ space back in 2009. Each
year they return to site for what has commonly been dubbed “gay disco Christmas”.
Act Three of the gilded Horse Meat Disco story saw the release of their debut artist album ‘Love and
Dancing’ for Glitterbox/Defected. Jim, James, Luke and Seve have turned from disco enablers to
creative, freewheeling disco inventors. Under the masterful tutelage of zen nightlife don, Luke
Solomon (“The fifth member for the record, very much the daddy of it”) the boys fashioned a record
gilded with the fleet-footed spirit of their disco forebears. Love and Dancing was the culmination of
seven years’ work, fashioned from demoes the four had been working on simply for the love of making
music. Free of cover versions and lazy samples, it is documentary evidence that disco has a present
and future every bit the platinum-grade equal of its storied past.
The accidental phenomenon of Horse Meat is built on the shared good vibrations and aesthetics of
their genre. As testament to the public love for their makeshift, DIY brand, no other disco collective
has arrived in their lifespan to attempt to knock them from their beloved perch.
With brand new original music on the skyline as well as a brand new compilation in early 2024 with a
scattering of remixes for artists such as Jessie Ware and David Holmes – watch out as HMD have no
intention of slowing down with their release schedule!
