Giorgio Moroder interview: ‘I’m not a party guy anyway’

Also a prolific writer of film scores – his music for 1978’s Midnight Express won him his first Oscar, and his American Gigolo (1980) and Scarface (1983) soundtracks are just as good – he produced Blondie’s supercharged hit Call Me (from American Gigolo), and produced and co-wrote three further huge and enduring cinematic singles: Flashdance … What a Feeling (1983), Together in Electric Dreams (1984) and Take My Breath Away, the signature ballad for the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun. The last two tracks won Moroder his second and third Oscars, for Best Original Song. (He also owns four Grammys and four Golden Globes.)

In 2013, dance supremos Daft Punk sought him out to collaborate with them on Giorgio by Moroder, the standout track from their 2013 album Random Access Memories. And when, in 2015 – at the age of 74 – Moroder decided to create an all-new album of dance songs, Déjà-Vu, so enduring was his reputation that such pop stalwarts as Sia, Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue got on board, joining a list of previous collaborators that also included David Bowie and Freddie Mercury.

You might well assume that at 78, Moroder would have long ago put his international touring days behind him. But in fact, they’re just beginning: his gig at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Monday will launch his first ever full European tour. What took him so long?

“To be honest,” he says, “I never thought about ‘doing live’. Even 10 years ago, when the Heritage Orchestra played all my songs in Sydney at the Opera House with 70 musicians, and I loved it – even then, I didn’t think of doing it.”

However, he “slowly, slowly” began to warm to the idea. And, rejecting the idea of going on the road with 70 musicians as too cumbersome and expensive, he arrived at “a good kind of a compromise. A band, strings, about four singers, which I think is almost ideal.”

Although the tour is billed as a “Celebration of the ’80s”, Moroder says that each night will kick off with an instrumental from Midnight Express, followed by his first big hit, 1969’s Looky Looky, an appallingly catchy bubblegum number that sounds like the Beach Boys huddled around an old pub Joanna. “Then,” he says, “I build up. I sing [the evergreen 1977 floor-filler] From Here to Eternity, and all the rest: Donna Summer, and all the songs from the movies.” Most of the singing will be live, though the set will also feature pre-recorded vocals by Summer and Bowie.

At 78 – based in LA, married since 1990 to former restaurant hostess Francisca Gutiérrez and with one grown-up son, Alex – Moroder looks very chipper and is charming, confident, courteous company. Although his signature moustache is now grey and no longer looks as if it should have its own passport, it is – rest assured – still very much present and correct. And for anyone who knows his sonorous Tyrolean speaking voice only through the opening of that Daft Punk track – on which he narrates a thumbnail account of his early days in music – hearing it in the flesh is a childish but definite thrill.

Still, how did a fellow born in 1940 in the tiny Dolomites town of Urtijëi come to be dubbed as the “godfather of disco”? When I ask Moroder what sort of musical upbringing he had, he replies, “Zero, unfortunately. My dad [who ran a pensione with Moroder’s mother] had a piano, which was in a terrible state … and he never played. After World War II, they couldn’t care less about pianos, right? So some of the keyboard was not even there, and my upbringing was Radio Luxembourg and some American stations.”

Giorgio first picked up a guitar in his mid-teens – but at what point did the idea of a career in music “bite”, and when did he think he might have to look elsewhere to further it?

“Well, the feeling to leave Italy was always in my mind,” he explains, adding, in a near-perfect echo of his Daft Punk voice-over, “but the occasion, the possibilities, were zero. So,” he continues, “I was in Italy playing guitar in summer in the resorts, in the Dolomites, and then one day, when I was 19, I got an offer to become a musician. So, I skipped school, and I started in Switzerland, in a hotel. There were three guys: piano, drums and me on guitar.

“Well,” he adds, laughing, “I played guitar until the keyboard player told me, ‘Look, you’re so lousy as a guitarist, why don’t you learn bass?’ So, I started to play ba-boom, boom, boom, boom…”

Upright bass led to electric bass (“because to travel with that big thing in a Volkswagen …!”) and doing the local rounds for six or seven years. “And then,” he says, “finally I decided, that’s it – I have to get out of being a musician and be a producer-composer.”

What was the tipping point?

“I remember the real reason was, we would play until 12 o’clock at night, and then go to another nightclub at 2 o’clock. I was only 21 or 22, and I saw these [other musicians] there … they were probably only 40 but they looked ancient, so I said, ‘No no, I don’t want to end up like that!’ So I made a deal with my two friends, and I said, OK, let’s work for two years more, put all the other money away you can, and I’m going to split and you can do whatever you want, but I’m going to become a composer.”

And he did just that. Having saved enough money, he took himself off first to Berlin (in 1963), and then Munich, in 1968. Looky Looky set the ball rolling – and, for the next 20 years or so, Moroder proved unstoppable.

He admits that I Feel Love’s astonishingly influential bassline came about almost by accident: one of his co-producers, Jürgen Koppers, happened to put “a little delay” on the four-note, C C G B flat synth bassline, urgently doubling up every note in a way that instantly made Moroder realise, “Oh God, this is totally new!” However, the more you talk to him, the more you realise how little of his success is otherwise down to luck.

For one thing, there’s that early determination. For another, when I ask him about a riotous 1979 photograph of him that was taken for a German magazine – sitting next to a Beverly Hills swimming pool, beaming, arms aloft, surrounded by three scantily clad young women – he explains, “That was only an idea of the photographer. He said, ‘Give me the Giorgio The Hollywood Guy!’.”

But was that snap nevertheless perhaps representative of his life then? “No, no …” he replies, almost ruefully. “I worked a lot. Very few parties – I’m not a party guy anyway.”

Tellingly, too, when I press Moroder (an Ed Sheeran and Weeknd fan, by the way) for anecdotes about the megastars he has worked with, his recollections feel above all like those of a diligent musician. Take, for example, his memories of Bowie, with whom he made the song Cat People (Putting Out Fire) for the 1982 Paul Schrader film.

“He was such a nice guy,” he recalls. “I spoke to him the day before over dinner. We were talking about all kinds of things for a few hours. And he wrote the lyrics, and came to the studio well prepared – the voice was great. Sometimes, the singer comes in and does not know the lyrics, and has to learn them – it’s a little frustrating. But with him, he didn’t even have to write them down.”

However, having released an album in 1992 – and until Daft Punk looked him up almost 20 years later, introducing him to a whole new generation – Moroder very largely stepped out of the musical limelight. Why the hiatus?

“I guess I was tired,” he says. “I thought, OK, I’ve made enough money to live well. And then I thought, I’m a mini-architect – why don’t I do something architectural?”

And so he did – a party animal he may not be, but Moroder, who is worth an estimated £15million, clearly has an appetite for life’s extravagances. First, he designed a vast pyramid that he hoped would become part of the Dubai skyline. Then, he started work on a new cognac.

Neither came to fruition, but one ritzy project of his did: the Cizeta-Moroder V16T supercar, which he co-built with “the guys who worked for Lamborghini”. Moroder now has the prototype in LA. And, although it was not legal to drive in the US (for emissions-related issues and so on), he says he can now legalise it. “Oh,” he says, “it’s incredibly beautiful!”

Given that the cars themselves have a silhouette like a spaceship and a comparable top speed, that prototype must, I suggest, be worth a fair bit. “I got some offers for quite a lot of money,” Moroder confirms.

Dare I ask how much?

“Well,” he says breezily, “probably between half a million and two million dollars. It all depends on the guy who wants it.”

I tell him that I may have to stick with my trusty Seat Leon for now.

“Sorry?” he replies, looking genuinely perplexed.

I’m not sure the phrase “Seat Leon” means anything at all to Giorgio Moroder. But nor, perhaps, would you really want it to.

Giorgio Moroder tours to Birmingham (April 1), London (2), Glasgow (4) and Manchester (5). Tickets and details: livenation.co.uk