Giorgio Moroder – 10 of the best

1. Donna Summer – Love to Love You Baby

Giovanni Giorgio Moroder’s dream of rock stardom in the conventional sense was never truly realised, but once the schlager-meister inadvertently discovered the Moog, he was on the road to immortality as one of pop’s most important innovators. The Italian’s musical career began 49 years ago in Berlin, and he scored a moderate hit with Looky Looky three years later in 1969, and then another with Son of My Father in 1971. Chicory Tip recorded the latter song in 1972, which went to No 1 in the UK charts, becoming the first hit record with a prominent synth (played by Roxy Music producer Chris Thomas).

Moroder’s real breakthrough came after he met Donna Summer, who’d had a few minor hits in Germany and the Netherlands herself. Their three-minute single version of Love to Love You Baby in 1975, recorded with Pete Bellotte at Munich’s Musicland Studios, went to No 13 in Holland, though it was when it fell into the hands of Neil Bogart of Casablanca Records that things really got interesting. New York producer Tom Moulton had inadvertently created the disco mix in January that same year, with Gloria Gaynor’s Never Can Say Goodbye album (at 19 minutes long and containing three songs, it was assembled to allow DJs to take a toilet break); Bogart convinced Moroder to do the same, extending their track to 17 minutes.

The panting sensuality of Gainsbourg’s Je T’aime (Moi Non Plus) was married to “a very catchy bassline, a very emphatic bass drum part and a funky guitar, sort of Philadelphia feel,” said the producer. This elongated disco masterpiece followed on the heels of forthright, empowering hits by young black American feminists such as Chaka Khan and Patti LaBelle, though the explicit nature of the track would sit uneasily with Summer later in her career when she became a born-again Christian.

2. Donna Summer – I Feel Love

Moroder, Bellotte and Summer collaborated on a number of iconic disco tracks, including the high-kicking camp of Hot Stuff and a dazzling version of Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park that slays Richard Harris’s original rendition, but few songs are regarded as seismic in their importance as I Feel Love. If Love to Love You Baby had ushered in year zero for Eurodisco, then I Feel Love would distill that sound into its purest mechanical form and disseminate it all around the world, changing dance and club culture (gay and straight) forever. Brian Eno famously told David Bowie: “I have heard the sound of the future” while they recorded together in Berlin in 1977, and even 38 years later, it still sounds futuristic.

Following quickly after Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express and Summer and Moroder’s own incredible Working the Midnight Shift, I Feel Love also signposted electronic music as the emerging dominant art form. I Feel Love appears as if coming over the horizon like a new technological dawn, ushered in with a wave of static synth, before the emphatic, metronomic bass thud emerges, rendering obsolete the R&B-inflected disco that was so prevalent at the time. The repetitive Moog bassline was a feat of ingenuity as well as perseverance, painstakingly spliced together by Moroder and engineer Rob Wedel, who had to record it over and over because the modular kept going out of tune. And then you have Summer’s icily seductive vocal pinning it altogether on top. Its influence is immeasurable, and the bassline keeps turning up in the unlikeliest of places, from Simple Minds’ I Travel to Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer.

3. First Hand Experience in Second Hand Love

Moroder had proved, during his time in Spinach in 1973 alongside old pal Michael Holm, that he could be a schlocky lyricist (listen to (Sweet Sixteen) You Know What I Mean and behold a marriage of hackneyed rock’n’roll phraseology and out-and-out plagiarism). On First Hand Experience in Second Hand Love, there’s a narrative about a Roma person that might raise some eyebrows in the 21st century, but the track itself is a delightful melange of warm disco groove, cold clinical vocoder and splashes of wild psychedelia.

After achieving global notoriety with Summer, he decided to use aforementioned engineer Wedel to help him produce the solo record From Here to Eternity. The spirit of the title track couldn’t be more like I Feel Love if it tried, though Moroder, having invented the blueprints for Eurodisco and hi-NRG, surely had carte blanche to do exactly as he pleased. In 1977 he also released an album under the alias Munich Machine, featuring two robots on the cover, who might have conceptually influenced a certain French robot duo from the future who’ll we’ll come to later.

4. Sparks – The Number One Song in Heaven

Another duo who called upon Moroder to sprinkle some of his disco dust on their careers in 1978 was Sparks, who’d not had a major hit for a few years. Having expressed their admiration for the producer to a German journalist who happened to be a personal friend of Moroder’s, they were soon hooked up, and the chance encounter reaped dividends too: the Number One Song In Heaven not only achieving empyrean supremacy but also charting in the Top 20 in the UK and Ireland.

Written collaboratively between Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks, and Moroder, the song is a high-octane slab of disco campness, with a cerebrally comedic concept in keeping with much of Sparks’ tongue-in-cheek oeuvre, while the galloping space groove underneath was perfect for Russell’s firmament-bothering castrato. So pleased were they with the results of album No 1 in Heaven that they worked together again on the 1980 follow up. The Mael brothers achieved an unexpected smash in France with When I’m with You, and spent the best part of a year there promoting album Terminal Jive.

5. E=MC2 – Giorgio Moroder

There’s a scene in Nicolas Roeg’s 1986 movie Insignificance where Marilyn Monroe demonstrates the theory of relativity to Einstein with a couple of torches, a balloon and two toy model trains – this movie moment is apparently the favourite scene of famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Whether Hawking is a fan of E=MC2 by Giorgio Moroder is unknown (he’s a big Wagner fan, so perhaps not).

Hawking could do a lot worse than champion this wonderful quantum disco odyssey, even if the lyrics under that vocoder are breathtakingly banal (“bi di di di / ba da da da / everybody dow dow dow”). The 1979 album, from which E=MC2 is the title track, was said to be the first ever digital album, and the subject matter was inspired by Einstein himself – or rather the Albert Einstein medal – which was getting a lot of press coverage at the time with the first-ever presentation taking place in Bern that year. The first recipient? Hawking, of course.

6. Giorgio Moroder and David Bowie – Cat People (Putting Out Fire)

As well as his pioneering dance music, Moroder had become a go-to man where cinema was concerned, after the lauded soundtrack he composed for Alan Parker’s 1979 movie Midnight Express. It would win him his first of three Academy Awards for best music (for this score, and then two later Oscars for original song); a boon considering Parker had simply instructed him to come up with something that sounded like I Feel Love. One of the most interesting movies he was asked to write the soundtrack for was the 1982 remake of Cat People, a supernatural erotic thriller starring Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell. Better still, he got to write and record with David Bowie for the title track, who was so pleased with the collaboration that he included a re-recorded version on his Let’s Dance album with Nile Rodgers the following year.

The more dynamic version made with Moroder commences with some ominous synths, the lurching of percussion and the clattering of chains, and Bowie drawling in a deep register that exudes gothic menace. “Feel my blood enraged … see these eyes so red …” he chants like some high priest of the grotesque, before rising to a mighty crescendo and confessing that he’s been putting out fires with gasoline, a schoolboy error. The song was so brilliantly effective on the big screen that Quentin Tarantino recycled it again for the climax of his 2009 slapstick Nazi war picture Inglourious Basterds.

7. Tony’s Theme

The commissions kept rolling in, and, in 1983, Moroder got to record perhaps his finest soundtrack of all for Brian De Palma’s Scarface, starring Al Pacino as Cuban immigrant and white powder enthusiast Tony Montana. Tony’s Theme (not to be confused with the Pixies’ song of the same name) is a moody and moving requiem featuring synthetic voices chanting in unison like a choir, with a simulated cello chugging underneath. Musically, the instrumental track is one of Moroder’s most ambitious, an elegiac mass that bursts into a full widescreen experience before tapering away again at the end; it’s just a shame that the full orchestral flourishes weren’t actually played by an orchestra. According to the director, Universal had intended to re-release Scarface in 2004 with a rap soundtrack, but De Palma put the kibosh on it, saying the score was already perfect. Whether they were going to use Mobb Deep’s 1997 G.O.D Part III single, which purloins a hearty sample from Tony’s Theme, is a moot point.

8. Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder – Together in Electric Dreams

In 1985, Moroder effectively retired from making albums for 30 years, and listening to the hastily cobbled together, synthpop-driven soft rock meanderings that constituted the album Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder, it’s easy to see why. The pair had initially been brought together for the Bafta-winning number Together in Electric Dreams. The movie itself (Electric Dreams) even featured a cameo by the Italian as a record producer (it has subsequently passed into obscurity). Virgin Records’s decision to make the pair record an LP was logical enough – the single had clearly demonstrated a musical affinity between Moroder and the Human League man – though, while the single was dynamite, the rest turned out to be mediocre at best. Setting out with a furbelow of twinkly noises and a heroic guitar line, the song then breaks into a cascade of keyboard power chords before settling into a sparse groove, with Oakey delivering one of the purest of melodic verses the 80s had to offer. By the chorus he’s almost certainly overshooting his range, but it’s such a life-affirming number and the backing singers are supporting him so gracefully, that it hardly matters.

9. Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Love Missile F1-11

Formed by Tony James of Generation X in 1982, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were a curious glam-punk outfit who introduced corporate art into their work like some postmodern Warholian nightmare, selling advertising space to corporations on their album Flaunt It, perhaps as an indictment of the times. It’s hard to imagine now, but the band, featuring Martin Degville on vocals, were considered the most dangerous thing to happen to music since the Sex Pistols, for 15 minutes at least. Allegedly signed for as much as £4m to EMI, they released the single Love Missile F1-11 in March 1986, a whole month before the US bombed Libya using British air bases.

Reaching No 3 in the UK charts, they hit Top of the Pops like a gang of New York Dolls impersonators robbing a bank, before seemingly being consumed in a fireball of their own hype. What’s left is the patchy Giorgio Moroder-produced album, and, most importantly, the lead single, which actually stands the test of time. Featuring an irrepressible bass loop, some outlandish use of delay and Neil X’s scything rockabilly guitar hooks, it’s a surprisingly spacious and deceptively smart record. A little too knowing, Sputnik appreciated their records would eventually be tossed away like bits of chewing gum, but even they must have been surprised by just how quickly they became dispensable.

10. Daft Punk – Giorgio by Moroder

Giorgio By Moroder is distinctive as the only track on this list not produced by Giorgio Moroder. It was also released in 2013, nearly three decades after he decided to spend more time on the golf course; precipitating a revival in interest, it culminated in Déjà Vu, his 2015 album featuring contemporary pop artists such as Kylie, Charli XCX and Sia, among others. Fittingly, the most envelope-pushing track on Random Access Memories, Giorgio by Moroder, features excerpts from a two-day interview with the man himself conducted by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk, who later spliced the highlights over a song they’d written previously that bore a stunning likeness to the work of their idol.

The track begins with just a human voice – Moroder’s – reminiscing about his 16-year-old self picking up his first guitar, followed by some dreamy muzak and continuation of biography, eventually alighting on the crux of the song, a methodical pulsing click. “My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody just calls me Giorgio,” he says as the music pulls out; from here it springboards into a spiralling, sprawling soundscape of mind-altering beauty. Fastidious to the last, apparently Daft Punk made Moroder speak into a different microphone from each decade to represent each period of his career – undetectable to the human ear, the robots would be able to detect the difference. The French duo are certainly more meticulous than Moroder ever was, but the nine-minute epic is a comme il faut tribute to a living legend, and a gracious thank you to their musical progenitor.