I Feel Love: Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and How They Reinvented Music

INTRODUCTION

MERV GRIFFIN: Tell me, Donna, is it true that every recording star needs an image?

DONNA SUMMER: Well, Merv, even a tomato has an image.

Merv Griffin Show, 1982

This book is the story of a moment in time, of how half a dozen unique and unrelated elements, each poised and purposeful in its own stark chronology, suddenly crossed one another at precisely the same moment . . . and what happened when they touched.

The stark adventuring of electronic music, the lush orchestrations of a dirty French pop song. The nihilistic purging of punk rock, the party-before-the-bomb-drops hedonism of disco. The rise of the twelve-inch single and the fall of high street synthesizer prices. Six disparate sounds, scenes, and scenarios coming together to alter the entire course of predicted music history. To herald the dawning of a future age.

There are no heroes to this story, beyond those who snatch that mantle for themselves. Nor are there villains. There are landmarks, to be sure, and the ghost of a map, clearly marked in some spots, fogged by forest in others. Some of the story is vouchsafed by history, some is mired in conjecture and chance. If there was a grand design, it was forged in neither laboratory nor studio, and was most likely doomed to failure regardless.

Six disparate sounds, scenes, and scenarios . . . not even coincidence would try to be that bold. And as for the dawning of a future age, we only had the prophets’ words for that, and who believes in prophecy anymore? They just happened to get it right, that’s all. Every single one of them.

It’s not easy to change rock’n’roll. Yes, styles do come and go, and—to slightly paraphrase writer Nik Cohn—this year’s anarchist will certainly be next year’s boring old fart. But to actually stand in a studio, beneath the red light, and physically voice the words that will reinvent everything, that’s hard.

Elvis did it, with Heartbreak Hotel. More than sixty years on, one can still uncover accounts of musicians and fans alike turning to stare at the radio, their mouth open in a stunned, silent what? as the Pelvis paraded down lonely street.

The Byrds may have done it with Mr. Tambourine Man, less seismic in overall impact, but significant all the same, bequeathing folk rock unto a grateful world; the Sugarhill Gang certainly did it, as Rapper’s Delight, turned R&B upside down. Some say Nirvana’s Smells like Teen Spirit did it, but the jury might still be out on that one.

There are other contenders for similar status, but it’s strange. Their claims rely more upon the circumstances under which they were heard, than the music that people were hearing. No single record defines the point at which the Beatles became a mania. Rather, it was their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 that transformed a mop-topped Anglo cult into the dominant force in sixties rock. The songs they performed that night were largely irrelevant.

David Bowie fans of a certain vintage speak still in hallowed tones of the first time they heard his breakthrough single Starman. But again it was television—Bowie’s dazzling appearance on British television’s Top of the Pops in the summer of 1972—that beamed tomorrow into today, not a simple song about a spaceman.

The Sex Pistols birthed punk rock, and Anarchy in the UK was their stillresonant debut 45. But the watershed moment was not the release of the record. It was an expletive-laden appearance on local London teatime television, and the tabloid media fallout that followed.

Music, by its very definition, is an aural experience. More often than not, however, it is the accompanying visuals that make the most profound impression. This was particularly true in the early to mid-1980s, when many of the records that became major hits barely even qualified as songs, let alone music. They were simply the soundtracks to people’s favorite videos.

Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, like Heartbreak Hotel, like Rapper’s Delight, did change things.

Musically, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Sonically, it was like nothing on earth. And culturally, it tossed aside all predictions for what the next few years in music might sound like, and reshaped them in its own pulsating, pounding, peripatetic image.

Its commercial success only amplified its creative achievement. Far too much influential music is made under the cover of obscurity, heard by mere handfuls of people at the time of its release, and already years old before it is discovered by anything resembling the mainstream—one only needs think of the lifetime of ignominy endured by the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. Nobody denies either band’s importance today. At the time, however, it was a very different story.

I Feel Love was recognized instantaneously. It topped charts the world over, including the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Italy, and Holland, and it reached the Top 10 almost everywhere else.

Its success, however, is, and always will be, secondary to its impact. To the ideas it uncaged in countless musical minds around the world; to the sense of excitement and liberation that it forged in the souls of all who heard it. To the sheer weight of adventure and artistry that it was responsible for unleashing.

It is routinely featured toward the top of manifold greatest song Top 100s; it is included in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry (one of just a handful of non-US recordings featured therein); and the Financial Times—scarcely the first place one looks for musical commentary, it is true, but nothing to be sniffed at regardless—described I Feel Love as, indeed, one of the most influential records ever made.

On the streets of New York and London, the rising punk hordes were spellbound by the record. It pumped from the sound system at Max’s Kansas City in New York; it thudded from the disc jockey booth at the Vortex in London.

The thrill of I Feel Love would become a key component in Blondie’s set list, and evolve into their own Heart of Glass—which the band then utterly subverted by covering I Feel Love as well.

The discipline of I Feel Love would be reflected in the strivings of a horde of bedroom synthesizer acolytes, to create a sound that reduced even Summer’s icy symphony to minimalist poetry, a duet for disassociated voice and cold waves of sound.

And the questing innovation of I Feel Love would tattoo itself onto the consciousness of a generation.

Musicians who might never have considered listening to the music of Donna Summer, or the productions of Giorgio Moroder, suddenly found themselves compelled to pay attention. Not only to the record, not only to the performance. In the words of Brian Eno, himself regarded as the patron saint of the electronic music of the day, they found themselves face to face with the sound of the future.

I Feel Love, Eno is said to have told David Bowie, is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years. Which, Bowie later concluded, was more or less right.

Except, fifteen years was an underestimate. I Feel Love is almost three times that age, and people are still discovering it, whether through one more spin for the original record, from cover versions that stretch from Bronski Beat and Marc Almond, to the Blue Man Group and Sam Smith, or from performances of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.

Not everybody likes the song. History is subjective, and music history especially so. A record that one person regards as the most scintillating sound that has ever been made will routinely be dismissed by another as trash, and vice versa. It has always been that way, just as that condemnation has not always been dependent upon a record’s own merits.

Its influence across the musical spectrum notwithstanding, for some listeners I Feel Love has never escaped its generally accepted branding as a disco record, with all of the attendant baggage and opprobrium which that entails. Four decades on from its peak period of usage, disco sucks remains one of the best remembered slogans of the seventies: I Feel Love was disco. Therefore, it sucked. End of conversation.

It was a pernicious debate, and a lingering one as well. The disco sucks movement, created on a slow night by DJ Steve Dahl, arguably hit its peak with the Disco Demolition Night at Chicago’s Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979, where the crowds applauded as a crate of disco records was blown up. The event was only ever intended as a promotional device for the local White Sox baseball side, but it touched a nationwide nerve regardless.

In New York the following year, Jimi Lalumia and the Psychotic Frogs scored a local hit with Death to Disco; touring the United States, later in 1979, Ian Hunter rewrote the chorus of his song Cleveland Rocks as Disco sucks, and rooms full of fans sang lustily along.

As late as 1981, opening for the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles, the still largely unknown Prince was forced offstage after just three numbers by an audience that was hurling abuse, trash, and antidisco catcalls at him—and this from a crowd that, later in the night, would be applauding Miss You, the Stones’ own contribution to the disco inferno. A few years later, they were probably also singing along to 1999 and Little Red Corvette, and lining up for tickets to Prince’s own headline shows. But that’s not the point. Disco had apparently stopped sucking by then.

Donna Summer herself remains as controversial a figure as the music she championed. In 1983, the born-again Christian found herself lambasted for remarks she allegedly made to a fan, describing AIDS (then a newly emergent and barely understood disease) as God’s punishment for homosexuality.

She didn’t say it. Decades of denials by Summer, years of forensic research by fans and journalists, and ultimately, a $50 million libel payout, all of these things heap scorn upon the story. Yet still it persists, haunting the fringes of popular culture, ready to be raised whenever Summer’s name is mentioned in certain company, and pathetically poised to poison any dialogue regarding her contributions to popular music.

Which, in truth, would never eclipse I Feel Love, but that is neither here nor there. In 2020, a budget-busting thirty-three CD box set of (almost) her entire works, aptly titled Encore, was topping Amazon UK’s best-sellers chart a full two months before it was released.

Besides, even music’s most unassailable geniuses can count on the fingers of one hand the number of genuinely unique accomplishments in their repertoire, but most artists don’t even manage one.

Summer’s own recollections insisted that she was simply the singer of the song, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its subsequent impact. Of course, that isn’t true—if it were, then every subsequent cover (some more than others, it is true) would not try so hard to replicate her soaring, swooping, keening vocal line.

But her words do acknowledge that the music, the arrangement, the performance, and the production were indeed the work of just one man, Italian-born, Germany-based studio maestro Giorgio Moroder. And he would, and could, follow it up. The most important question there is, did he even need to?

• • •

Although the phrase itself is of relatively recent coinage, the notion of alternative facts, like fake news, is now an integral staple within both our language and culture; a viewpoint that, no matter how absurd it might appear to the orderly mind, is treated with both validity and even acceptance by today’s media.

The concept, however, is far, far, older than a 2017 Kellyanne Conway sound bite. Whether intended as disinformation or misinformation (there is a difference), a slip of the tongue or a genuine belief, the idea that there is often a gulf between what we are told and what we should hear is as old as language, or at least, conversation.

We find alternate facts in the most ancient writings; in the histories penned by the Greeks and Romans; in the teachings of the philosophers; in the theories of academics; in the promises of politicians; in the pledges of propagandists.

It is not always done to deceive—or, at least, not only done for that purpose. Sometimes, the evidence of one’s own eyes, or ears, screams so loudly against what others term reality that one simply cannot take any other viewpoint seriously.

Neither is it the big issues alone that are subject to this. A misheard song lyric is as much an alternative fact as any grand pronouncement from our political leaders. (Does Rod Stewart really admonish Maggie May with the caution my love, you didn’t need two Cokes? Does Bob Dylan’s Lily, of Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts fame, really take a cabbage into town?)

Likewise, anybody with a genuine intellectual death wish needs only spend a few evenings browsing sundry Internet musical forums to encounter any number of equally thoughtful projections.

The pros and cons of disco—the dreaded D, the D-word, the D-bomb—are definitely a popular topic for debate within such realms, even if it is the negative (it sucks) viewpoint that is guaranteed the most traction. For that reason, one is advised to treat this book with a certain amount of caution, and again to remember that history is not, and never should be, regarded as a mere procession of straightforward facts.

It is the enduring conflict of cause and effect; the awareness that nothing . . . not even flashes of absolute brilliance . . . can be forged in a vacuum, no matter how obscure its constituent elements might be. Just because you’ve not heard of something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And that’s the problem with alternative facts. Sometimes, they’re the correct ones.

There are going to be a lot of alternative facts in this book. A lot of unpalatable observations and untenable quotations. Not every disco record was a musical hate crime. Electronic music is not going to be celebrated in the fashion that others believe it ought to be. Punk rock will be lionized more for what it made possible than for what it actually was.

The point is to tell the story of this one single song from every direction.

To pinpoint not only the ideas and emotions that went into its creation, but also those that comprised the world into which it was released, there to become the focal point from which an entire new wave of talent and creativity would radiate. And yes, the pun was intended, for at least some of the music that emerged on the other side was tagged new wave by the media. But by no means all of it.

Much of this book is set, as expected, against the turbulent, fractured backdrop of midseventies club and dance floor life. But contrarily, the story opens with the ultimate slow dance floor filler, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s Je t’aime . . . moi non plus, and the tsunami of suggestiveness that oozed out in its wake.

From there, it journeys into the worlds of an American nightclub singer, touring the US Air Force bases of West Germany; an Italian-born producer scoring pop hits out of his studio in Munich; and their own contribution to that still fractured debate, the even slower dance floor filler Love to Love You Baby.

The story shifts with the song, from the studios where Moroder and a wealth of other synthesized mavericks created their icicle symphonies, each placing their own mark upon the slow rise to prominence of electronic music, to the hedonistic Wild West of the American disco scene, where Summer’s US record label, Casablanca, became a synonym for excess, corruption, and coke-fueled madness. And thence to the scorching earth of the punk explosion, where nihilism and anarchy met steaming teenaged hormones in a frenzy of outsider art attacks, only for I Feel Love to stop the clock and reset it in its own image.

From the discordant dramatics of New York’s no wave scene, to the masturbatory basement laboratories in which a generation of would-be musicians were toying with homemade oscillators and electronica, searching for the sound that would synthesize their dreams of pop stardom with their love of their own new noises. From cold wave to synthipop, house, rave, industrial, all have at least a root firmly implanted in the sound of Munich, circa 1977.

Yet still I Feel Love transcended them all. A single, some say simple, song that did not simply cross musical boundaries. It erased them; and, from what observers already termed an unlikely marriage of musical extremes, there would stream the most unexpected offspring.

In the rock mainstream of the day, artists as far apart as David Bowie, Joy Division, and Bob Geldof’s Boomtown Rats were swift to incorporate I Feel Love’s vision into their music. David Sylvian’s art-punk (!) outfit Japan headed for Munich to record with Giorgio Moroder; as they marched toward 1979’s watershed Quiet Life album, new wave Ultravox! traveled to Cologne to record with Kraftwerk’s early mentor, Conny Plank. Their first album had already proclaimed I Want to Be a Machine; now German studio technology was going to show them how to achieve that ambition.

But at least most of those bands had synthesizers. What about Sparks, who didn’t have synthesizers, but wanted to discover what would happen if they did? Yes, disco sucked. It sucked everybody in.

Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, 1971. (Photofest)

Great swaths of what, in the early 1980s, would be seen as the first wave of MTV-generated hit artists shared the same Road to Damascus moment as their more veteran peers, and I Feel Love’s imprimatur can be found throughout their output. The singing half of synthesized pop duo Soft Cell, Marc Almond, even scored a major hit when he teamed with fellow electronic acolytes Bronski Beat to cover I Feel Love in 1984, and time had not erased the song’s inventiveness.

Both Moroder and Summer would go on to further monster successes, side by side and, later, separately. Moroder’s post–I Feel Love career includes work alongside some of the biggest names in seventies and eighties rock history, including Bowie, Blondie, Janet Jackson, Kylie Minogue, and more; Summer, until her death in 2012, remained among the few true legends of the so-called disco generation.

But still I Feel Love worked its magic. In the mid-1990s, in the heart of the then-burgeoning industrial music scene, Thomas Thorn of Electric Hellfire Club declared, "We’d all grown up with [the Who’s] ‘Baba O’Reilly’ and understood that rock music could be written and played around a sequencer.

"But it was ‘I Feel Love’ that showed us that sequence could not only carry the song, it could be the song. You could feel it. Pulsing. Pounding. For some of us, that first foray into programming sound, whether it was holding down three keys on a secondhand synth while the arpeggiator churned or actually looping the first sequence you ever wrote, was magical."

Don Gordon of fabled Canadian noise terrorists Numb insisted, "‘I Feel Love’ was the jumping-off point for electronic music. Athan Maroulis, whose band Spahn Ranch would spearhead the 1990s dance revolution that the media tagged noir, continued, I was driving in the car recently, and ‘I Feel Love’ came on the radio. I was, like, ‘wow, Moroder really had it down.’"

Today, too, I Feel Love remains a touchstone for all who loved it.

Tim Bowness, one half (with Steve Wilson) of modern prog leviathan No-Man, recalls, "When [we] first starting working [together], we discovered that three of our shared earliest influences . . . were the film music of John Barry, Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On [You Crazy Diamond]’/‘Echoes’ long-form pieces and the Donna Summer albums produced and cowritten with Giorgio Moroder.

We both loved the ambition of the numerous side-long epics, and pulsating synths of ‘I Feel Love.’ A love which was revealed in all its glory across No-Man’s 2019 Love You to Bits LP. Even the album’s promotional video featured a mirror ball!

Modern remixes, too, draw fresh ears to the original record. But, arguably, no single record or artist plays as great a role in perpetuating the influence of I Feel Love as the original oldie itself. Because even that is a key to the song’s importance; the fact that it can never be described as an oldie.

It still sounds like the future.

1

SEVEN MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

People were so easy to offend back then.

In early 1969, sensitive ears across western Europe were outraged when the latest single by French songwriter and performer Serge Gainsbourg, nominally a duet with his girlfriend, English actress Jane Birkin, turned out to be nothing less than a heavily orchestrated recording of the pair. . . .

. . . well, it sounded like they were fucking. Yes, that’s exactly what it sounded like.

Gainsbourg already had a reputation, in his homeland at least, as something of a provocateur; had, in fact, attempted to record Je t’aime . . . moi non plus (I love you . . . neither do I) once before, with actress Brigitte Bardot. The fruits of their labors, however, went unheard. The moment Bardot’s husband got wind of how she’d spent her time with Gainsbourg, he demanded the recording be scrapped. Bardot, too, had second thoughts about her role in the affair. Gainsbourg acceded to their wishes.

Birkin was less squeamish. I got a bit carried away with the heavy breathing, she told writer Celia Walden. So much so, in fact, that I was told to calm down, which meant that at one point I stopped breathing altogether. If you listen to the record now, you can still hear that little gap.

You could apparently hear a lot more than that. According to the media of the day, few people doubted that the couple were genuinely making love, and neither Gainsbourg nor Birkin seemed inclined to contradict them.

Indeed, in those days when anything even remotely resembling actual sex was still banned from television, radio, print, and film (many television couples still slept in single beds), the record was already selling heavily on the strength of that belief when another rumor emerged. Pope Paul VI had personally excommunicated the record company man responsible for releasing the record in the first place. Sales jumped even higher.

Radio, naturally, was incensed by the song, by both its content and its success. Indeed, the bigger Je t’aime . . . moi non plus became, the more frustrated the disc jockeys grew. The performance could never be broadcast; in fact, many stations enacted full broadcast bans. It didn’t matter how many listeners called in requesting to hear the song. It remained unplayed. It remained unplayable.

The bans did not make a difference. In Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden, four of the European nations to outlaw the song, word of mouth alone was sufficient to propel Je t’aime . . . moi non plus up the chart.

In the United States, where there was no central authority for such authoritarian crackdowns, radio didn’t so much ban Je t’aime . . . moi non plus as bow down to the general belief that it was obscene, and shunt it quietly off to one side. It still reached number 58 on the Billboard listings.

Even in France, where Gainsbourg’s mischievous proclivities were already an open secret, and the song’s—actually, rather sweet and sensitive—lyric was a lot less explicit than it sounded to non-French-speakers, it was agreed that stations should not play the record before eleven p.m.

In the United Kingdom, the record was not simply banned. Gainsbourg’s record label of the time, Fontana, actually withdrew Je t’aime . . . moi non plus from sale . . . but only after it had soared to number 2 on the chart on the strength of the outcry alone.

Of course another label promptly stepped in to pick up the slack and Je t’aime . . . moi non plus became both the first foreign-language record ever to top the national chart, and the first to do so under the confines of a broadcast ban. (It would be fifteen years more before Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax duplicated the latter feat.)

Elsewhere, too, Je t’aime . . . moi non plus worked its magic. In Jamaica, it failed to chart, but it entered the national consciousness regardless. A decade later, Gainsbourg hired a clutch of crack Jamaican session men, ace rhythm section Sly and Robbie among them, to accompany him on his latest album, Aux Armes et caetera.

It was an uneasy partnership from the start, and matters only worsened when Gainsbourg asked his bandmates whether they knew any French music. Once the musicians had finished laughing, Sly acknowledged that they liked one song, an old instrumental with a woman groaning over the strings.

It was Je t’aime . . . moi non plus.

The sessions relaxed after that, and Sly and Robbie not only cut a second album with Gainsbourg, they also toured France with him.

Genuinely seductive, genuinely sexy, and framed by a genuinely lovely melody, Je t’aime . . . moi non plus has been compared