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Saturday Night Fever is my favorite movie. My mother didn’t allow me to watch it when it first came out on Betamax in Iran, which was understandable, since I was still in single digits. But I was so obsessed with the music and the dancing that she relented, especially once she realized I had no idea what was going on in the rest of the film. I asked to rent it so many times that my parents finally bought it. I still watch it at least once a year, and it keeps giving. I’m playing it as I write this, and I just caught four lines I’ve never noticed before. It’s an onion, with one more layer each time.

All of this is to say that sitting on a video call with Nik Cohn, whose 1976 New York magazine article, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” became Saturday Night Fever, has me completely undone. The 80-year-old British expatriate is at his home in upstate New York. Despite living with Parkinson’s disease, he is as sharp as ever and still writing. Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old, a collection of his nonfiction spanning 60 years, has just been published, and it feels as if it were written last week.

Each piece is self-contained and specific, vivid in detail and driven by story. They draw on his firsthand experience and are arranged chronologically, but you can dip into any one without prior knowledge. They read like fiction. Whether he’s describing getting immaculately dressed before being taken to jail, telling tales of the people he meets along Broadway in Manhattan, or offering outrageous observations about the Rolling Stones, it’s all gold. Of the Stones he writes, “They’d gone badly stale in themselves, they’d lost pace and direction. Like the Beatles, they’d stopped touring. Unlike the Beatles, they didn’t use the extra time to make better music; their records went flabby and gutless instead.”

The Stones quote comes from his definitive 1969 rock ‘n roll book, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock. Cohn wrote about music for only a handful of years, but he is considered one of the original rock critics, and he is discussed primarily in that context and, of course, as the man behind Saturday Night Fever.

He began his writing career at 18 at The Observer, soon expanded to the lifestyle magazine Queen, and then moved on to books. His unfiltered take on his subjects is refreshing and funny, mainly because he says what many of us think but feel we can’t express. When I tell him that saying anything negative about an artist or their music these days is almost impossible, he says, “I wouldn’t go very far, would I? That’s depressing.”

“I was writing about music from ’64 to ’70,” he continues. “I came back to it from time to time, but never as a permanent day gig, except when I first came to America in New York magazine. It was all about enthusiasm. Everything was going up at incredible speed. It was the artist of the week, and they were all major players who lasted. The flip side of the enthusiasm was you would turn on somebody quickly and extremely.”

Past the snow-white hair and black-rimmed rectangular glasses, I can see the keen interest in people he has always had. His book collection is staggering. Bookcase after bookcase lines the room he’s in, and the room beyond it, which I can spy through the open door. The shelves repeat so endlessly that it’s like an optical illusion, a fun-house mirror.

He asks me what my “first breach in music” was. “How did you get in? What sucked you in?” I tell him that although it wasn’t my first breach, my first music memory where I can name the song is hearing the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” over the speakers at our country club pool in Tehran. The song is, naturally, from Saturday Night Fever. It was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. I wouldn’t put my head underwater because I wanted to hear it more and more, and it carried across the surface, since water is such a good conductor of sound. I get teary telling him this, and he can see it. I sense he’s touched, but also a little weary.

“When I die, here in America the headline will be: ‘Fever Man Kicks Bucket,’ not the noblest summation of my life,” he says. “In Britain, it would be different. Fever is part of the résumé, but only part.”

“Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” isn’t included in Corner Boy, mainly because it’s fiction, although it was originally presented as nonfiction. Its success made Cohn a rich, if unhappy, man, at least for a long while. Two decades after publishing the story, he revealed he made most of it up, yet the characters, setting, and story feel tangibly real.

“I wasn’t talking from a world I didn’t know anything about,” says Cohn. “The actual incidents are made up, but the character is not made up. I know characters like that. I specifically didn’t know about that group in Brooklyn going in, but, you know from reading the whole book [Corner Boy], from the age of 10, I’ve been fascinated by those male groups and the erotic rituals. It’s not lovable, but it’s interesting.”

Every person he writes about in Corner Boy could have a film built around them. He says the key to making nonfiction seem like fiction is to start with a visual, in detail. He would write a lead paragraph, continue to the rest of the piece, and then go back and remove the lead, even if it was really good. “It had to go because that’s throat clearing,” he says. “We don’t clear our throats here. We go straight in. You never have someone walk up to the door, then go through the door before you start. You never see anyone coming.”

He says this method makes article writing feel like a story rather than journalism. This worked in his favor with musicians because they thought of him as a writer, which leveled the playing field for him.

“When I started, there was nobody in England doing what I was doing,” he says. “I was 18. The next youngest writer who was reviewing pop records was 55. It was great for me. For two years in London, if any editor wanted to have a piece about music, or the streets, they had no choice, they all had to go through me. It was a golden age. But it only lasted two years. Suddenly any stone you lifted, a music writer crawled out.”

As vivid as Corner Boy is, it’s a strange feeling for Cohn to read these writings, and he says he feels “only a very faint connection” to them. Editor Ben Ratliff helped with the selections, though nothing made it into the final book without Cohn’s approval. The older the piece, the more Cohn relied on Ratliff’s objectivity, since it was hard for him to judge it himself. Yet the writing feels current, like characters I could meet in situations that could happen today.

“Part of that is due to this technique I worked out remixing old pieces, which I approach as pieces of music,” says Cohn. “That keyboard, or theme, that you can hardly hear, I want to bring that up. ‘Delinquent in Derry,’ which leads off the book, is one of the longer pieces and is 50% new. The rules of the remix are clear. If I said someone is great, and I gave you all the reasons why he’s great, in remixes I’m not allowed to say he’s not great, so as to be true to the original. But I’m allowed to amplify certain aspects that seem more interesting to me over the past 10 years, and I’m allowed to take out bits that no longer resonate with me.”

Despite the retrospective Corner Boy, Cohn isn’t looking back. Big projects are his focus. He is collecting two thematically similar novels he wrote in his teens into one volume and is also working on a nonfiction book about 1962 London. He wants to reread Proust for the fourth time, saying, “It’s always completely different.”

What you won’t find him reading is any music journalism. “I’ve reached a stage where there are certain things I want to reread while I still can,” he says. “That’s taking all my time. When I do look, and it’s really superficial, it’s a lot more to do with ‘8.8,’ or ‘We’re marking this one at 7.4.’ Scores. I always approached it from the other angle. I wanted to create the feeling of watching that person live, and then get into the music through that. How someone presents the effect was really primary for me. Marking end-of-term papers is the hardest thing I would ever want to do. I like singles more than albums.”

Nik Cohn and Ben Ratliff will appear together at New York’s 92nd Street Y on October 27 to discuss Corner Boy and celebrate its release. Tickets are available for in-person and livestream here.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.