When it comes to the best disco song of all time, I Feel Love is surely in a class of its own. But if we exclude Moroder’s masterpiece, then Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King’s song Shame is well worth a shout.

I’m talking about the six-and-a-half minute 12-inch version, which interrupted my sneering disdain for disco when it appeared at the height of punk in 1977.

The song has a momentum all of its own, with the rolling bass intro, the drums, the handclaps, the piano roll, the distant wah-wah guitar… and then the squeal of Sam Peake’s sax.

Everything is in exactly the right place in Al Garrison and David Todd’s precision production. It’s a full minute before the 17-year-old King comes in: “Burning, you keep my whole body yearning…”

It wasn’t a big hit here, just creeping into the singles chart at no.39 in May 1978, but it reached the Top Ten in America where disco fever was at a higher temperature.

King came from a musical family in Philadelphia but she owes her career to a slice of spectacular good fortune.

She was discovered while working as an office cleaner in a Philly record company when she was overheard singing in the washroom by a local record producer called Theodore T. Life.

Apparently he was in the corridor outside when he overheard King – then aged only 14, and filling in for her sister at work that day – singing Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come.

He was so struck by her talent that he tried to persuade Philly soul legends Gamble and Huff to sign her up. They passed, and King wanted to carry on with her education.

Undaunted, Life recorded some demos with King and, after they lay on a desk unheard in an office at RCA Records for more than a year, he ended up getting a deal for his protegee.

Shame came from her debut album Smooth Talk, released in 1977 and was a sleeper hit, taking six months to make the move from disco clubs to the pop charts. King went on to have several hits, of which the biggest was Love Come Down in 1982.