THE NIGHT THAT BURNED BEFORE GO GO 70

Seoul in the 1970s lived under a night curfew. The streets stopped at midnight, but until the final moment the go-go clubs boiled with brass, guitar, sweat and dance. At the centre stood Devils, a band remembered at the time as the “kings of soul music.”

Devils in 1968, a first album in 1971

Leader, guitarist and vocalist Kim Myung-gil began performing with Devils in 1968. Yonhap and reissue notes report that the group won an ensemble prize at the second Playboy Cup vocal-group contest in 1970, then released its first album through Asia Records the following year.

At clubs such as Nirvana and My House, the band's core was soul rooted in Black American music and matched by vivid showmanship. It is equally significant that, in an era dominated by translated covers, much of the first album consisted of original material.

Before the film,
there were the real Devils.

Why they were called the kings of soul

The 1974 second-album centrepiece “The One I Miss” announces the band's breath from Kim's opening guitar. Contemporary accounts describe Devils as a soul group: not backing players arranged behind a single star, but musicians making one concentrated sound together.

Brass, rough guitar, soul singing and stage steps moved as one. Continue with “I Don't Know” and the first album's “A Date on a Snowy Night,” and it becomes clear that Devils cannot be reduced to a single famous track.

The film is a reconstruction, not a history book

Choi Ho's 2008 film Go Go 70 began with the real Devils and the club culture of the decade. The real women's dance group Wild Cats also helped inspire Mimi and the Wild Girls.

Yet Cine21's production report is explicit: Choi used the real band while changing member names and reconstructing particular events for cinema. Sang-kyu and Man-sik should not be read as a documentary chronology, but as a musical condensation of youth, censorship and curfew-era nightlife.