7x7-1977

DONNA SUMMER: I FEEL LOVE (GTO)

Over the weekend I’ve been listening to Déjà Vu, the seventeenth album by Giovanni Giorgio who everybody calls Giorgio (Moroder).

Packed with collaborations with the likes of Kylie, Kelis and Charli XCX, sadly the bulk of his first album in 30 years sounds suspiciously close to the kind of generic EDM that stations like Clyde 1 seem to specialise in playing at every available opportunity although I did rather enjoy a couple of tracks that recall his seventies heyday, 74 Is the New 24 and La Disco both channelling at times Chase from his masterful Midnight Express OST.

Moroder also repeatedly employs slick and shimmery guitar riffs similar to the one used to frankly better effect on Get Lucky from the album Random Access Memories, which of course featured Giorgio by Moroder. Nowadays Daft Punk, it would have to be said, do a better Moroder than the man himself.

Certainly by his own standards, Déjà Vu has more lows than highs, with its nadir being an utterly pointless version of Tom’s Diner with vocals supplied by Britney Spears which is every bit as awful as you might guess that combination would end up sounding.

Needless to say, none of the acts drafted in by the septuagenarian remotely match his best production work with the American singer named LaDonna Adrian Gaines who moved to Europe from the States at the tail end of the sixties for a small role in hippie dippy musical Hair and who Moroder came across in his adopted hometown of Munich. Yep, Donna Summer.

Written by Summer along with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Belotte, Donna Summer’s finest moment was undoubtedly I Feel Love, a British number one single for four weeks in the long hot summer of ’77, taking over the pole position in a chart that also included The Sex Pistols (Pretty Vacant), Bob Marley and the Wailers (Exodus) and the Stranglers (Peaches).

An erotic electro disco classic, I Feel Love, was conceived for what Moroder termed the ‘future’ segment of Summer’s I Remember Yesterday album and at the time with its trancelike, pulsing beat and lack of what at the time could be described as a single conventional instrument, it did indeed sound like the future; a future that wasn’t coming along any time soon.

Or maybe even one that was due to arrive from another planet.

Ooh, it’s is so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good.

Actually, it’s much better than that. Here is I Feel Love, a track that American critic Nelson George laughably claimed was ’perfect for folks with no sense of rhythm’.

 
For more on Giorgio Moroder, click here.