A view of the dancefloor at the Mudd Club on White Street in New York in 1979
Typically, a musical happening acquires a genre term. But every now and then, there are happenings referred to only by a time and a place. New York in the 1979 to ’82 period is possibly the most spectacular example. Too big for any one genre label to fit, this was the mother of all melting-pot eruptions, that shaped the popular landscape for at least two decades to come.