Produced with love: Joey Negro is riding the recent disco revival

Tell us about the album...

I prefer doing an album to a stream of throwaway singles that come out and last for three weeks on Traxsource. Originally the plan was to do an album that sounded like Chic; I got about three tracks in and thought ‘this isn’t a great idea’, but I kept a couple of those tunes on the album. I guess it’s a modern disco-type album.

It’s almost feels like a tribute to disco itself...

I think that’s just how the tracks turned out. The first few tracks I did with the Chic blueprint, the next few were songs I’d been working on and then seven or eight tracks that were consciously made for the album. At the same time, I also wanted to make tracks that I could play in a club.

We assume you started this quite a while ago because it has Diane Charlemagne, who passed away 18 months ago, on a few songs...

I suppose it was started about six or seven years ago. Having said that, ‘Dancing Into The Stars’ was written with [former partner] Andrew Livingstone in the mid-90s.

Who’s the best singer you’ve worked with?

They’re good at different things, really. Some are really good at backing vocals, some have a lot of energy but they’re sometimes out of tune, and some are brilliant singers but crap writers. Jocelyn Brown was really good. She came in eight hours late, but she just banged out the track really quickly in about half an hour. Definitely didn’t win on the timekeeping front though…