Alicia Bridges

In 1978 Alicia Bridges achieved major success with the upbeat disco number "I Love the Nightlife (Disco 'Round)," which climbed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100. That breakthrough constituted the high point of her recording career and placed her Polydor-issued self-titled debut album at the center of the buoyant disco movement that defined the close of the 1970s. The blues-infused tracks "Diamond in the Rough" and "Broken Woman" registered only modest chart action, after which Bridges proved unable to reclaim her earlier disco prominence. She issued one further album on Polydor, 1979's Play It as It Lays, before turning to a sequence of independent recordings and collections—among them 1984's Hocus Pocus, 2007's Say It Sister, and 2008's FauxDiva XX—that reflected an expanded array of musical influences. "I Love the Nightlife" has since appeared on numerous disco anthologies, including the soundtrack to The Last Days of Disco, which also contains a reworked version from Masters at Work's Nuyorican Soul project.