Glasgow madmen, inventors and invigorators, Shaka Loves You, ace their sets and productions with fatback funk, disco sparkle, and a party-starting gospel that feels both vintage and ferociously now. They cut their teeth on crate-dug soul, but deliver it with turntablist sleight of hand, live percussion, and edits sharp enough to draw blood. Here they throw it all in the air and land it into utter magic with their rework of Joe Thomas – Plato’s Retreat from 1978.
Joe Thomas carved out his own disco-funk mythology in 1978 when he dropped Plato’s Retreat on TK Disco — a near-seven-minute instrumental glide, lush with jazz-fusion currents and velvet-slick grooves. The title was no accident: Plato’s Retreat was the notorious Manhattan playground of swingers and seekers, a neon temple to sexual liberation that throbbed through the late seventies. Thomas, a jazz-trained flautist and sax man born in 1933, transposed that atmosphere into sound — brass, bass, and rhythm colliding in a pulse that belonged as much to smoky clubs as to packed discotheques. Plato’s Retreat isn’t just a track, it’s a dispatch from a fevered New York night, where boundaries blurred and the music kept time with bodies in motion.
Shaka Loves You (almost everywhere):
