In the wave of glitterball-dazzled pop-dance albums that sparkled a little light into 2020’s gloom, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia was the world-beating monster smash – No 1 in 15 countries, 10bn streams and counting on Spotify. Kylie Minogue’s Disco, meanwhile, was the career-boosting critical and commercial hit, restoring its author to her natural habitat after forays into country and Christmas albums. But Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? was the classiest. In contrast to the neon-hued Future Nostalgia and Disco, it painted dancefloor euphoria in coolly muted shades and came wrapped in a sleeve that recalled one of Andy Warhol’s late 70s Polaroid portraits. It tapped a succession of hip names as collaborators – house producers Midland and Morgan Geist and Metronomy’s Joseph Mount among them – and it eschewed the obvious reference points, operating instead under the influence of Italo disco, baroque soul producer Charles Stepney and the kind of chugging 110bpm sound that the late Andrew Weatherall favoured at his A Love from Outer Space nights.
