On today’s electro-obsessed dancefloors, original Italo disco is now a big deal, a regular fixture with DJs and dancers seduced by the the epic, spacey energy, the brash synths and heavy percussion breaks leaping from the grooves. Acts as diverse as Metro Area, Hot Chip, Pet Shop Boys and Ricardo Villalobos owe much to late ‘70s and early ‘80s Italian music. John Travolta as Tony Manero, it is not.

Italo-disco has boasted a major role in dance music heritage since it first surfaced. New York and Chicago clubland held a close affinity as Italo productions sat perfectly alongside early boogie and Latino freestyle at feted spots like Paradise Garage, The Funhouse and The Music Box. Labels like Emergency regularly licensed tracks and cemented a presence Stateside. The music’s roots can be traced back to early Moroder and Cerrone and, later, Mauro Malavasi’s productions for Change and BB&Q Band, a spacious, tight production style that still sparkles with its electro touches and warm, jazzy arrangements.

‘Italo Disco’ brings together original classics and rarities by some of the leading producers of the time from Claudio Simonetti and Giancarlo Meo (aka Kasso and Easy Going) to Peter Micioni and Balearic favourite, Tullio De Piscopo. Many tracks appear on CD here for the first time and the album features several exclusive re-edits by compiler Stevie Kotey, member of DJ / producer team Chicken Lips and label boss of Bear Entertainment. The album is packaged in a 4-panel card digipak. Booklet features rare photos, original sleeve artwork and extended notes by Bill Brewster, author of ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’ and the website djhistory.com

01. Five Letters – Tha Kee Tha Tha (5.30)
02. Kasso – Brazilian Dancer (DJ Version) (4.42)
03. Number One Ensemble – Flor De Coca (5.40)
04. Kano – Now Baby Now (Kotey Edit) (5.52)
05. Freddy The Flying Dutchman and The Sistina Band – Wojtyla Disco Dance (Parte 1) (7.07)
06. Firefly - Love (Is Gonna Be On Your Side) (7.20)
07. D.D. Sound – Burning Love (5.30)
08. Revanche – 1979 It’s Dancing Time (Kotey Edit) (8.26)
09. Red Dragon Band – Let Me Be Your Radio (Part 1) (5.37)
10. Rainbow Team – Dreaming (4.12)
11. Easy Going – Do Its Again (8.07)
12. Tullio De Piscopo – E Fatto E Sorde! E? (Money Money) (Maxessa Edit) (5.06)
13. Valentine – Tina Are You Ready (Instrumental) (5.15)

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LINER NOTES

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Orson Welles, The Third Man

Propelled by the metallic klang of Giorgio Moroder and the effervescence of Boney M, Italo-disco was born. Derided by many for its gaudy melodies, primary-coloured basslines and synthetic production values, were it not for Italo-disco, dance music would have remained decidedly more monochrome and house music would almost certainly never have happened.

At its extreme end, with sleeves adorned by nuclear-breasted women and men with enough highlights to fill a year’s supply of Match Of The Day, Italo-disco was as synonymous with Benidorm as chips, lager and sunburn.  It was the soundtrack to a thousand lousy German discos (it’s no coincidence that the term was coined by a German record executive).

Yet, it also contained within its broad DNA the recipe for house and some of the most sublime post-disco music ever made. It was the conduit through which the most gifted Italian musicians of their generation expressed themselves and produced acts of the quality of Change, Capricorn, Kano, D.D. Sound, Revanche, Ago, Vivien Vee, Tullio De Piscopo and Easy Going.

Outside of the gay community, Italo-disco was almost entirely ignored by British DJs, who were still disdaining towards it in favour of the music of African-America. Paradoxically, those same African-Americans were the keenest champions of this new sound, promoting the productions of Claudio Simonetti, Mauro Malavasi, Alexander Robotnick, Tony Carrasco and Mario Boncaldo on their radio shows and dancefloors. Italo-disco was the crucial bridge between the death of disco and house’s astonishing arrival.

ITALY 1970s

The Italy of the late 1960s and 1970s faced even more turmoil than its Western allies, the USA and Britain. Huge political conflicts raged and a state of virtual Civil War existed with assassinations rife and competing terrorist groups waging bombing campaigns that culminated in the Bologna massacre in August 1980, when explosives detonated in a waiting room at the central railway station killed 85 people and wounded 200 more. It was a country struggling to free itself from the suffocating grip of the Catholic Church with divorce only becoming legal in 1970 (a popular referendum ratified it in 1974) and abortion in 1978.

Unsurprisingly, it was also an era in which creativity flourished. A new generation of Pulp Artists like Fernandino Tacconi and Alessandro Biffignandi, inspired by Pop Art and American comic books, launched a series of their own comics including Zora and Playcolt, often featuring women sporting Colt 45s and not much else, that challenged the church’s hegemony and resulted in long-running battles with the authorities over censorship; something that was also extant in the work of satirist and Nobel prize winner Dario Fo, whose seminal 1970 play The Accidental Death Of An Anarchist was based on a terrorist attack on a bank in Milan.

In the fashion world, designers like Elio Fiorucci, Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Versace and Missoni flowered while traditional French houses, attracted by cheap labour, began to use Italian fabric manufacturers like the Como silk-makers or wool producers in Piedmont. And in cinema too, filmmakers such as Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani continued the trailblazing work of Luchino Visconti, Frederico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose tragic death in 1975 epitomised the brutality of the decade.

In the early 1970s, the pop music scene was dominated by the sound of progressive rock with British acts like Gentle Giant and Van der Graaf Generator finding huge audiences in Italy and also inspiring a generation of similarly-minded domestic bands like PFM – one of the few bands to find success internationally – New Trolls (the Emerson Lake & Palmer of Italy), Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Il Balletto di Bronzo and Libra (who were briefly were signed to Tamla Motown). While British progressive rock eventually descended into a nether world of sweeping arpeggios, hobgoblins and bewildering time signatures (and Marillion), Italian prog rock would provide the foundation, just a few years later, for Italian disco.

THE BIRTH OF ITALIAN DISCO

Emilia-Romagna, whose capital is Bologna, is a triangular administrative area of Italy that stretches out to the Adriatic coast and inland towards Piacenza. During the 1970s, it was the heartland of the Italian Communist Party. At its south-easterly tip is Rimini which, alongside its sister town Riccione, is a gaudy seaside resort (a bit like Blackpool with sun-bronzer and Armani shades instead of Kiss-Me-Quick hats and candy floss).

Giancarlo Tirotti, a local tycoon who eventually married a member of the Romanov dynasty, took the lease on a sports club that hugged the hills overlooking the aquamarine sea and bleached sand of Rimini and turned it into the most glamorous nightclub of 1970s Europe. He called it Baia Degli Angeli and it became famous all over Italy. On his travels to New York, Tirotti had heard disco-mixing and the amazing sound systems that were springing up in Manhattan and resolved to bring them back to his homeland. He employed two American DJs, Tom Sison and his accomplice Bob Day. The club opened on June 29th, 1975. They caused an immediate sensation.

“At that time, watching them was very exciting,” recalls Daniele Baldelli, who later – with Mozart – replaced Bob and Tom at Baia. “Firstly, the important thing was that they had a lot of records that we didn’t know. They had records one year before Italians. It was really new and different music from what we had. Also, to see the mixing at that time was incredible. Now – I have some tapes by them – it’s something simple. Just two bits, boom boom, finished. Very short. But to think I could do this with two records then was incredible.”

The club itself was streets ahead of anything in Britain at the time. It had a DJ booth that moved from floor to floor to accommodate the different dancefloors. The interior was said to have been designed by Valentino. It attracted the beautiful people of Italy.

Gianna Zufo, who opened the influential Disco Piu in Rimini, recalls the effect of the club on people. “The main thing, the first thing, was the location of Baia. It was incredible. I went to Baia a few times as a kid. You felt overwhelmed in this place, a bit intimidated. ‘Where have I ended up?’ It was like being in a film. Everything was beautiful there. Bob and Tom were the first to mix records. No one had thought of that. In 1975 and 1976 when 12-inches first came out, we didn’t think anything of them. ‘What are these for?’ We didn’t know that they were for mixing. I was still buying 45s or albums. It was beyond our conception. They were the first that showed you could mix. We just thought, ‘12-inches? Waste of plastic!’”

“Just prior to this, DJs were changing records with these big knobs and with talking between the records, whereas these two were putting records in time and mixing them. You have to remember what the equipment was at that time; they didn’t have mixers with faders. The record players were belt-driven so they really weren’t made for it. It could be that they were just some ordinary DJs that had landed in the right club at the right time. But Baia had become a myth in all of Italy; people would come from all over. The DJs had become names as DJs and other DJs tried to imitate them.”

The discotheque phenomenon exploded and beautiful clubs sprang up everywhere, like the notorious Jackie O’ in Rome, Astrolab in Parma, Ritual in Baia Sardinia, Charlie Max in Milan and Paradiso Bilbo in Rimini. A new band of pioneering DJs appeared, like Sergio Cossa, co-owner of Emergency Records, who produced Shannon as well as the hugely influential ’Feels Good’ by Electra (from which Jamie Principal’s ’Your Love’ took its bassline), Claudio Casalini and Piero Fidelfatti. There was Gianni Naso, who founded the Italian DJ association AID, Marco Trani, Mario Boncaldo (of Klein & MBO infamy), Leonardo ‘Leopardo’ Rececconi, who produced Koxo’s ’Step By Step’, the Micioni brothers and Ronnie Jones, a former American serviceman who had sung with Alexis Korner in the early ’60s.

SPAGHETTI DANCE

In 1978, another important club opened in Rome called Easy Going. It was the first openly gay club in Italy. The club’s resident DJ was Paolo Micioni, who was soon joined by his brother, a precocious 14-year-old called Pietro, and Marco Trani. Since Easy Going was located in the heart of the Italian filmmaking industry, it had its fair share of actors and celebs, too. “It only held maybe 300 people,” recalls Paolo Micioni, “But sometimes you felt like the world was there because the atmosphere was magical. There were lots of important people there like Bianca Jagger, Roberto Rosselini and actors like Marcello Mastroianni. But also many many American DJs came to visit Easy Going, like Tom Savarese. It was a very trendy disco.”

One of the people Micioni met there was a musician called Claudio Simonetti. Up until then, Simonetti had been a member of Goblin, whose soundtrack work in association with Dario Argento had brought them worldwide acclaim. Simonetti was born into a musical family in Sao Paolo, where his father Enrico was then working (Enrico is well-known throughout Italy and the Latin countries as both a TV personality and musician). Returning to Rome as a teenager, Claudio studied music and composition at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia but also played in groups, firstly with Ritratto di Dorian Grey (Dorian Grey’s Picture) and then with Goblin, a progressive rock band whose first album ’Profondo Rosso’, an Argento soundtrack, sold three million copies.

“I was always a fan of electronic music,” explains Simonetti. “My first Moog, the Mini-Moog, I bought in 1972 so I was one of the first keyboard players in Italy playing synthesiser. I had a lot of synthesisers later. You can hear it in Goblin stuff and, for Suspiria, we used the big Moog, the 1500 Moog of Robert Moog. We rented it because it was so expensive.”

The pair teamed up with Giancarlo Meo, another Easy Going devotee, who at the time was a fashion importer/exporter and began to make records together. “When we met together, Paolo and Giancarlo, we decided to do a record for Easy Going,” says Claudio. “It was the first time in Italy anyone had done this. There were the brothers La Bionda but they were produced by a German label. But actually in Italy no one was producing this music when we decided in 1978 to make this record. Many Italian producers told me I was crazy for doing this. ‘It’s Americans who do this not Italians!’ they said. So Easy Going was the first album.”

Simonetti wasn’t the only musician to defect from the prog-rock and fusion camps. Several of Simonetti’s Goblin colleagues went on to contribute to disco releases, including bassist Fabio Pignatelli, who played with Easy Going and Mike Francis. Two drummers, Walter Martino (Goblin, Libra) and Tullio De Piscopo, whose early 1970s library releases now sell for huge sums, played on many of the era’s greatest records. Stefano Pulga began his career alongside Piscopo playing in bands with Stefano Cerri and Alberto Radius and went on to collaborate with the master drummer on his greatest productions under the name Kano, while Radius himself also contributed to Freddy The Flying Dutchman & The Sistina Band (included here). They frequently made up American-sounding names to lend credibility to their productions. “That’s because if we had told the people it was an Italian production, nobody would trust that it was good, because no one had done it,” laughs Simonetti, who used the alias Simon Pouds. “It was very funny.”

Almost simultaneous to the Easy Going project, two other singles made their bow: Macho’s ’I’m A Man’, produced by Mauro Malavasi, and LaBionda’s ’One For You, One For Me’, produced by two brothers working in Germany, Angelo and Carmelo La Bionda. La Bionda, in particular, was a huge holiday hit all over Europe.

You could even argue that the roots of Italo-disco lie in these Summer holiday smashes. Prior to their occupation in our charts, Britain had remained regally impervious to the sounds of the continent. But, once it had swapped its holiday destinations from Blackpool Tower and Butlin’s in Clacton to Benidorm and Torremolinos, it was game over. Like a maggot in an apple, these novelty hits worked their peculiar charm into the heads and wallets of holidaymakers. Usually, by mid-August, resistance was futile. The first big hit in Britain was Marcello Minerbi’s ’Zorba’s Dance’ in 1965 but the genre was codified in the 1970s with a string of Euro-hits, such as Sylvia’s ’Y Viva Espana’, a cheesy disco song about Spain sung in English by a Swede and the Dutch group George Baker Selection singing in Spanglish on ’Una Paloma Blanca’. By the mid-1980s, the British charts were awash with Italo-disco and blond highlights, the charge led by Ryan Paris’ ’La Dolce Vita’ and Baltimora’s ’Tarzan Boy’.

The most important of all was a French production, The Peppers’ ’Pepper Box’. Patently inspired by Hot Butter’s ’Popcorn’, ’Pepper Box’ was a daft electronic novelty tune with a Sturm und Drang rhythm that was huge all through the summer of 1974. It was a virtual Italo template. It featured Pierre-Alain Dahan who went on to produce albums for Voyage, Arpadys and a series of highly desirable library releases for Telemusic. It stormed into the British and American charts like an invading Valkyrie.

ITALO-DISCO

The first wave of Italo-disco records was dubbed “spaghetti dance“ by its domestic press. It wasn’t until 1984 when George Mikulski of German label ZYX coined the phrase Italo-disco for a highly successful series of compilations.

In fact, the phrase Italo-disco didn’t necessarily mean they were Italian (though they often were). Equally, there were Italian disco acts, such as Mauro Malavasi and Jacques Fred Petrus’ Change, who hardly fit the sound, which was usually wholly electronic with a healthy disregard for the English language and melodies so sweet that they could make teeth drop out. “The X-factor in Italian music is having too much melody”, commented Jacques Fred Petrus. He wasn’t joking.

What began as the verve and invention of a few gifted individuals soon turned into a multi-million pound industry. Badly hit by recession and with the lire plummeting against the dollar, imports became prohibitively expensive. Several distributors, the most famous of them being Discomagic, cut back on pricey imports and began releasing their own domestic music.

This was the golden age of Italo-disco when its industry flourished and labels like Discomagic, Banana, Baby and Full Time churned out dancefloor hits weekly. Many of them were terrible in their simplicity and effectiveness; it was like an itch that you couldn’t stop scratching. Lyrically veering between the infantile and pure gibberish, there is something strangely compelling about a nation that can write such moving songs as Stargo’s ’Capsicum’ (chorus: Capsi, capsicum, capsi-capsicum) or even Glasses’ ’Crystal’ which has the greatest opening lines of any song ever:

My mother is crazy;

My father is lazy;

And my sister and my brother get me drunk;

So I'm gonna steal somebody from a band

The discovery of Vivien Vee perfectly illustrated the gap in English language skills. The girlfriend of Giancarlo Meo, Vivien replaced an American model who had demoed the songs, then promptly disappeared. “We had the studio and we needed a girl so Vivien said, ‘Well, I sing but only Italian songs’,” explains Simonetti. “She had this low voice, which we loved. So we called an English teacher who coached her through the song. She became very famous in the USA. It was strange, especially for her, because she’s Italian, and she spoke very bad English. She just sang in English because she learned it. Many times I saved her because people would talk to her and she had no idea what they were saying. I’d say, ‘No no! Vivien Vee doesn’t talk to anyone!’”

Even at its worst, Italo-disco still had legions of fans. Some of them were even straight. Stock, Aitken & Waterman were obviously influenced by America’s hi-NRG and the Italo-disco washing up from resorts in the Mediterranean. Madonna professed her love for Italian disco and promptly ripped it off in her early releases. Pet Shops Boys, naturally, loved it.

“It used to be regarded as utterly tragic,” Neil Tennant told Smash Hits in 1985. “A lot of the records we like are Italian. The other thing about them is that they always sound like they’re dead cheap. I think that’s their appeal. They’re a bit like punk records: they go in and get very excited by the most banal sounds. We’re very attracted to banal sounds and rhythms. At the moment, there’s that vocal that goes ‘oh woah oh’. This summer, on every Italian record, there was at least one ‘oh woah oh’. RAF's ’Self Control’ started it and then Laura Branigan covered it. And, of course, Baltimora used it. That was the ultimate ‘oh woah oh’ record. It was very clever, the way that it was used as the foundation for ’Tarzan Boy.’”

This cheapness, as voiced by Mr. Tennant, was a mixture of the new technology freshly available during the ’80s and the beginning of non-musicians, often DJs, moving into the studio to pick up Linn drums, Roland JX-8Ps, Juno 60s and 106s, ARP Odysseys, Roland 808s, Minimoogs and the ubiquitous Yamaha DX-7s.

At its best, however, it combined the raw energy of punk with immense synthesised basslines and mesmeric vocal lines. D.D. Sound’s ’Burning Love’, an early classic, shows the best of the brothers La Bionda (it was also engineered by one Harry Thumann, another Italo legend). The Malavasi/Petrus team (whose Revanche alter ego is included here) were also responsible for Change, who launched the career of Luther Vandross, BB&Q Band, Macho and Peter Jacques Band.

Paolo Micioni, whose career was launched by Easy Going, went on to score four top five hits in his native Italy with Gary Low, Amii Stewart, Gazebo and Mike Francis & Amii Stewart.

Alberto Radius, another prog-rocker on vacation from his cape and toadstool, collaborated with both Tullio De Piscopo and Stefano Pulga on his earlier rock releases before producing the daffy, yet ace, ’Wojtila Disco Dance’ by Freddy The Flying Dutchman & The Sistina Band. Pulga himself, of course, was responsible for the significant Kano.

Many classic Italo tunes were house records in all but name, like Klein & MBO’s ’Dirty Talk’, the inspiration for scores of records from house to ’Blue Monday’. Many others inspired house records, like Kano’s ’Holly Dolly’, which begat ’Sharevari ’ by A Number of Names, the seminal early Detroit tune.

In fact, Italo-disco could have easily ended up as a minor footnote in dance music history had it not been for a group of DJs and producers in the midwest of the United States. For, while most British DJs studiously ignored Italo, African-Americans in Chicago and Detroit, in particular, ravenously ate up Italian imports. As Peter Shapiro comments in Turn The Beat Around, “[One] way of expressing the formula was Salsoul + Italo = House.”

ITALO IN AMERICA

Right from its earliest releases, Italian productions enjoyed a certain notoriety in the USA, although it’s probably fair to suggest that lyrical and vocal deficiencies did occasionally prevent them from greater success in such a demanding marketplace.

But, while that might have hampered their chances of entering the Billboard Hot 100, there were still scores of Italian productions being licensed to American and Canadian labels, with Unidisc and Emergency foremost among them. So, when did this generation realise the impact they were making on the USA? “When I had no problem at all getting an appointment to see A&R men,” laughs Stefano Pulga.

It was a defining moment in Paolo Micioni’s career when he heard one of his records played in New York. “I remember in 1979 I was with Claudio recording the second Easy Going LP and we went to The Loft, where David Mancuso played,” he remembers. “He played ’Baby I Love You’ and announced the record on the microphone. It was the first time that we were really conscious of our music being iconic for gay people in the world.”

It wasn’t only at The Loft that Italo-disco found a natural home. The gay community was its biggest consumer, outside of a few pockets of interest in the Hispanic community in Florida. But, in Chicago, a group of radio DJs called the Hot Mix Five were revolutionising how music sounded on the airwaves. Their show on Chitown’s WBMX was called Saturday Live Ain’t No Jive and people would drive from miles away and sit in their cars taping the shows to take back home, such was its impact on the youth of the area.

“If you were a DJ in Chicago, you had to come to Imports Etc,” recalls Chip E, one of its former employees. “There was no way around it. So I knew what the [Hot Mix Five] were playing.  I’d say that four of the five, Kenny Jason, Ralphi Rosario, Scott Silz and Mickey Oliver, those guys weren’t too influenced by anything other than what was sold at the store. And they were looking for Italo disco. Disco had died out around ’81 but you still had the Italo: Claudio Simonetti, Doctor’s Cat, all the Kasso stuff, Capricorn, Klein & MBO. Within six months it became the club style. They changed the music.”

When the well ran dry, it was Italo-disco that took up the slack, feeding hungry dancefloors with Roland beats and DX-7 basslines. It was its simplicity that gave inspiration to this energised generation of Chicagoans, its DIY-ness. When you heard a Trevor Horn production, you knew you’d never be able to emulate him in a million years. But when you heard a Capricorn or Klein & MBO record, you could dissemble the elements very easily. They were imitable.

One of the young kids travelling to Chicago with a thirst for Italo was Derrick May, techno’s auteur. “Italy was where it was at: Klein & MBO and all the Capricorn stuff,” enthuses May. “I was the one who brought it back to Detroit. Nobody had it. And then there was a period when the Italy thing dried up. That was a bad time and that was when we got really serious about music. It was, I think, right at the point when Italy dried up and Farley and those [Chicago] guys made their first records.”

By the mid 1980s, inspired by Italo’s rhythmic chintz, Chicago had produced its first house records (followed swiftly by Detroit). The trickle soon turned to a flood. The arrival of Chicago house killed Italo-disco, but not before many Italians, inspired in turn by America, began producing their own house records again with a uniquely Adriatic sound.

The impact of Italo-disco, accidentally, on dance music was enormous. Yet what is refreshing about so many participants of the Italo-disco boom is just how little most of them know about the tidal waves their music caused on distant shores. “No, for us it was a big, funny game,” concludes Stefano Pulga. “We were just having fun, we were doing dance music as a teenager now would have fun playing a video game.”

The fun never did stop.

Bill Brewster

Co-author Of ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’ (Headline Book Publishing) and co-founder of the DJ History website