The hands on the entertainment clock are going back many years and creeping into the 70’s and 80’s.

The nights of that time had the stamp of an entertainment that left an era – the era of discotheques, which have been very characteristically captured in “Roda, bag and kopana” and the unforgettable video films with Stathis Psaltis and Rena Pagratis.

There isn’t a film of that era that doesn’t have a little shoot or even a little passage outside a discotheque.

Loud music (from Michael Jackson, ABBA and Italian disco to Litsa Diamanti), neon lights and wild dancing under the huge silver disco ball, to the sounds of the DJ’s musical selections and… dedications – in the 80s there was neither an area that didn’t even have a similar entertainment venue with the… decibels above them.

Every neighborhood and disco

Disco flourished in Greece from the mid-70s until the early 90s.

The journalist and music producer Lefteris Kogalidis lived the disco era from its beginning to its end, since he was a correspondent of the American magazine “Billboard” in Greece and even had access to the legendary Studio54 in New York.

He himself remembers the years when every neighborhood had a disco, where all the youth of the area used to go.

Almost everyone has gone through the discos. Student dances, parties, even dance competitions with a jury, among which was often the well-known music producer of Thessaloniki.

The contestants, as he remembers, “gave it all” on the dance floors, with improvised – and not only – dance figures, to the sounds of imported hits, which became known within a few hours.

“Not only in the most secular discos, but also in those in the neighborhood, competitions were often held, in which they invited journalists, actors for the jury. We saw the couples who danced with the goal of winning and a bottle of whiskey or wine as a prize, but mostly they danced for distinction. They would swing in the air and land on the dance floor until the music started again. It was mainly in the new tracks, the dances, the moment when everyone got on the dance floor, where they left a bucket of sweat before sitting down again, and that’s how the night went,” he describes.

How the disco ball “went out”.

Gradually, from the late 90s, discotheques began to close as the seasons, music and fashions changed.

“In 2000 we still had disco but it was slowly dying out, giving way to other dance music. Today, people dance wherever they are, get up in their seats and just move,” says Mr. Kogalidis.

However, in recent times retro disco music has been reviving, with new hits abroad “stepping” on the sounds of the past and new shops opening in central parts of big cities.

Also, the young people’s love for the songs of another era was also shown by the event “Summer Full Moon Festival”, which he has been organizing since 2017. This year, the area on the beach was flooded with people, and indeed of a much younger age.