God may have made the boringly bucolic country, but the devil made the town. Ever since Sodom and Gomorrah, cities have been synonyms for vice, infernos of wicked delight where prohibitions collapse. In New York during the late 1970s, the favoured location of the beautiful and the damned was Studio 54 – a defunct television studio on West 54th street, reoutfitted as a spangled nightclub where a thousand customers could drink, dance, drug themselves, and retire to a shady balcony to have public sex.