Dead Disco

Did You Know?

• Dead Disco released four singles: "The Treatment", "City Place", "Automatic", and "You're Out".
• "City Place" appeared on the 2006 Dance to the Radio compilation What We All Want.
• After the split, Catherwood and France formed the band Video Villain and founded the clothing brand Art Disco.

Career

The three members met in August 2005 at the University of Leeds after Hesketh answered an online advertisement placed by Catherwood and France seeking a lead singer. Their influences included the Bangles, Blondie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ladytron, the Killers, Billy Idol, Gang of Four, the Slits and the Rapture. The band name was chosen by randomly picking words from a hat. With only a few songs written, Dead Disco began performing gigs around the north of England; a headline slot at the "In the City" event in Manchester brought enough recognition to secure a recording session with James Ford. Working with Ford in his London attic studio, the band released a limited edition of their debut single "The Treatment" in April 2006 on High Voltage. Their second release, "City Place", was a digital-only single through Playlouder Records. Following several sell-out shows and an appearance at the Leeds Festival, the group moved to Los Angeles to record a debut album with Greg Kurstin. Around that time Hesketh began writing songs that did not fit the band's "indie" style. Choosing a new musical direction, she left Dead Disco; the band announced their disbandment on their Myspace blog in December 2008. Hesketh later told The Times that she had been hiding her own songs and finally needed to make the music she wanted to listen to, and noted that the label pressured the group toward a certain style and that her bandmates lost confidence in her because she wanted to write "cheesy" songs.