Can you believe the hip-swivelling Twist has been around for 60 years? Did you ever dance this iconic move or were you a fan of some of the other crazes below?
Let’s do The Twist!
Can you believe on September 24 it’ll be 60 years since Chubby Checker’s hit shot to the top of the charts? The song was originally recorded by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters the year before and the band, inspired by seeing people twisting their hips while dancing, tried to get a Twist craze going in their shows around America. But it wasn’t until Chubby released his version that a dance phenomenon truly began.
The Twist was an instant success because everyone could do it – the movement was often described as if you were stamping out a cigarette and drying your back with a towel. Even better, though, unlike previous popular dances, you didn’t need to be led by a man or touch a partner (making it ideal to recreate in these difficult times too perhaps!) Despite protests from some that the dance was too promiscuous, soon everyone was doing the Twist – even Jackie Kennedy reportedly used to hold ‘Twist parties’ at the White House.
The Birdie Song
With a little bit of this and little bit of that and shake your bum…Love it or hate it, this dance became a staple of every child’s party, wedding and get-together in the Eighties. Released by The Tweets in 1981, the tune actually came from a Swiss accordionist who released the track as The Duck Dance in the Fifties.
It was later recorded under various different names including The Chicken Dance and Tchip Tchip until The Tweets brought it to the UK. Somehow the tune made it to No. 2 in the charts – thanks largely to the dance craze it inspired – despite being voted the most annoying song of all time!
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Hey Macarena!
No one really knows if you should cross your arms or touch your hips first but the Macarena has to be one of the most universally recognised dances on the planet. Released in the summer of 1996 by the Spanish Latin pop band Los del Rio, it was initially seen as a harmless Spanish-language rumba. But once a couple of Miami record producers got their hands on it, it morphed into a phenomenon that would spark a worldwide dancing epidemic.
YMCA
The moves are ingrained into the psyche of just about anyone who’s ever been to a disco, but did you know that the YMCA dance as we know it came about by a happy accident? When the Village People performed their number on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in 1979, they hadn’t choreographed a dance but the audience, mistaking the way the band raised their arms for the chorus as a ‘Y’ formation, invented a full dance on the spot. The band and Dick Clark, flabbergasted, made the crowd to do it again immediately. Forty years later, we’re still following their choreography.
Night Fever
There’s something about a dance craze that consists of nothing more complicated than a diagonal point and a bob that is instantly appealing – especially when it makes you feel like you’re John Travolta in an all-white suit! Even better, the dance was so simple it could be – and regularly is – applied to pretty much every Bee Gee song.
The Time Warp
First created as a send-up of the novelty dance genre, The Time Warp became popular after a number of midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show where fans would get on their feet and do the dance in the cinema. But the best thing about The Time Warp has to be the step-by-step instructions making it accessible for even the most left-footed among us.
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