Scene and heard: Italo-disco

A bathtub full of disco paste ... Italo-disco duo Sebastian Muravchik and Ali Renault, AKA Heartbreak

When I think of Italo-disco my mind conjures up images of suave men in cream suits, with big fake-gold medallions floating in a sea of swarthy chest hair, playboys smoking cigars in ornate hot tubs in the Italian Alps, and white tigers chained to Ferraris. But that's just me.

What's genuinely strange and intriguing though, is to find that the genre has been having something of a renaissance of late, in the dingy pubs and run-down clubs of Dalston and Hackney.

Dalston club nights Disco Bloodbath and Late Night Audio are playing their part, but the night which initiated the Italo revival is Cocadisco, run by two very un-Italian chaps called Piers Martin and Rodaidh McDonald. After quite a long hiatus, Cocadisco started up again last November in a pub in Hackney called the Dolphin. I was at some of the first few nights and initially it was quite a low-key affair - the pool table pushed to one side, covered with a board, but still with more than enough room to play pool. Word soon got around.

As the office workers leave the City behind and head to Shoreditch to "let off steam" by running up and down Brick Lane in Borat mankinis and fairy wings at 4am screaming at the top of their lungs, the kids are all heading up to Dalston and Hackney. And one place many of them settled was Cocadisco. A few months into the Hackney residency, the place was heaving. I remember standing in the smoking area on more than one occasion (I don't smoke, but it was uncomfortably busy inside) and seeing people sweep down off the top of the 10ft-high perimeter wall like clumsy ninjas, desperate to beat the hour-long queue.

The night moved this summer to a dilapidated basement club in Dalston called Visions. But it still remains as popular as ever - such as the event taking place this Friday, September 5 with special guest David Vunk - and the setting is much more fun.

Italo-disco began in the early 1980s when producers like Casco and Kano (not the Kate Nash-collaborating grime MC, unfortunately) began making poppy futuristic disco with melancholy melodies, weird sounds and unorthodox production techniques.

"I'd say Italo was mainly about creating an illusion, one of raw and passionate fantasy, of wealth, fun, romance and sorrow - all the essential attributes of brilliant pop music," explains Cocadisco's Piers Martin.

Early mass-produced drum machines and synths were used to make quite experimental music, but with a classic-pop sensibility. Producers and singers in places like Milan and Verona would work in studios like charismatic battery hens, bashing out what they hoped would be hits played for the kids at the local nightclubs. These songs were then pressed up and distributed by the Discomagic company in Milan.

It was probably quite a dull job for the artists, but nowadays the fans and collectors romanticise these records and pay hundreds of pounds for 12-inch singles from the halcyon era of 1983-4.

The term Italo-disco wasn't coined until around 1985, when a German called Bernhard Mikulski, who ran the ZYX label, decided there should be a name to market this type of music. By 1988, it had disfigured mainly into Eurodance, Hi-NRG and Italo-house.

Italo's influence can be heard in the music of groups like the Pet Shop Boys, New Order and Erasure, but it never really made it big the UK. That might be about to change though. London-based duo Heartbreak - comprising of singer Sebastian Muravchik and producer Ali Renault - are set to release their debut album, Lies, on Lex Records later this month.

If an album that sounds like being transported to 1984 Rimini inside a hand-scuplted marble bath tub filled with a mixture of uncut Bolivian cocaine and Veuve Clicquot Champagne (AKA "disco paste") is your kind of thing, you should check it out.