After persuading New York editor Clay Felker to let him write an article about the 1970s disco scene, Cohn, a newcomer to the United States, set about researching the American working-class subculture he was trying to cover.
However, when he arrived a drunken fight was taking place outside the club, and one of the participants rolled over in the gutter and threw up on Cohn's trouser leg, leading him to return to Manhattan.
[3] To overcome his lack of familiarity with the New York disco scene, Cohn combined the image of the figure outside the club with people he knew from his youth, including a gang member from the Northern Ireland city of Derry, where Cohn had grown up, and a young man he knew in England.
As for Vincent, my story's hero, he was largely inspired by a Shepherd's Bush mod whom I'd known in the Sixties, a one-time king of Goldhawk Road.
On the 40th anniversary of the article’s publication in 2016, Cohn said that he thought that such a fictionalised piece would not be published in the contemporary press:[3] It reads to me as obvious fiction, albeit based on observation and some knowledge of disco culture.