Boogie Wonderland

I was recently asked by my son Quinn if I could compile an Earth Wind & Fire playlist for him. While on the surface that might seem like a perfectly normal request, he’s only 12, and I was more than a little (shocked and) amused that he even knew who Earth Wind & Fire was. Let alone be keen to fill his device with music by a band from a bygone era. But then I realised how he became aware of Earth Wind & Fire; there’s a scene from the movie The Intouchables where our hero – played by Omar Sy – enthrals an otherwise staid group of party-goers with some great dance moves against the backdrop of Earth Wind & Fire’s epic ‘Boogie Wonderland’.

Clearly it was this moment that captured Quinn’s imagination, and made Earth Wind & Fire de rigueur in his otherwise very limited post-millennium pop culture world. I realise there are other clips of the band I could conjure up for purposes of this post, but for me (and Quinn, obviously) this scene sums up perfectly everything that was great about Earth Wind & Fire’s music while the band was in its late Seventies/early Eighties pomp. What a great band they were, and this exciting track in particular just goes to prove how cross-generational disco music can be when done well.

R.I.P Maurice White