Giorgio Moroder: Boy Of Summer

Aged 73, and living in blissful semi-retirement in Los Angeles, Moroder is well aware of his influence. He isn’t boastful, merely matter of fact. Remove him from the equation and there would be no Detroit house, no hip hop, no house revolution, no big beat. The contemporary EDM scene would be a figment of somebody’s imagination. All of it flows back to ‘I Feel Love’.
“Electronic dance music is derivative of what I did,” he agrees. “I’ve been working with people like David Guetta and Avicii and they tell me ‘you are the grandfather of it all’. They say, ‘You are the reason we are doing this’ It’s nice to know.”
Some earthquakes are an accident. ‘I Feel Love’ – officially credited to Moroder’s vocalist/muse Donna Summer – was entirely on purpose. “I said to myself, ‘I have to get something new’. It was meant to be a song of the future. I knew synthesisers and computers were the way to go.”
Moroder is having a moment, a return to the spotlight everyone can agree is greatly overdue. Ubiquitous through the ‘70s and ‘80s, as dance music moved on, his reputation started to dwindle, to the point where he was in danger of being forgotten. With millions trousered from his parallel career as a movie composer, in truth Giorgio was too busy being fabulously wealthy to notice. Still he was flattered when, out of the blue, two younger musicians got in touch last year and asked if they could pay him musical homage in highly idiosyncratic fashion.
“I was in Paris and Daft Punk came to me and said, ‘We you want you to talk about your life, for our album’,” resumes Moroder, his northern Italian intonations sounding, to inexpert ears, curiously Teutonic (accent-wise he’s a dead ringer for Bavarian director Werner Herzog). “We went into their studio and started recording – it was basically three hours of me telling my story.”
Moroder can confirm Daft Punk were not wearing robot helmets during the sessions, so at least he knows what they look like. What he didn’t know was how they would use the spoken word session. Hush-hush to an almost pathological degree, Monsieurs Homem-Christo and Bangalter told him precisely nothing. When their album came out – eventually they coughed up the fact that there would, indeed, be an album – it would all make sense. Until then he had to trust them.
“I had no idea what they would do with it,” he confirms. “They didn’t tell me. Everything was very secretive. Then, in April, they got in touch and played me the song [‘Giorgio By Moroder’]. I was absolutely surprised and happy at how they used my voice, how the track came out.”

Daft Punk aren’t alone in offering homage, though not everyone has been as upfront about their admiration. Surfing the internet the other week, Moroder was surprised to come across a promo-shot for Lady Gaga’s forthcoming album Artpop which bore a striking similarity to the sleeve of his 1978 ‘Munich Machine’ collection A Whiter Shade Of Pale. In the shot, Gaga appears to mimic the pose and dress of the model gracing the Whiter... cover, down to the white retro-future ski-masks.
“It has a little bit of the look,” says Moroder, trying to be diplomatic. “It’s not too bad, yeah. It’s always nice to have somebody copy you a bit.”

Moroder and Summer cut ‘I Feel Love’ at a studio in Munich, where the Italian-born producer had been based since the early ‘70s. As is often the case when lightning strikes, serendipity played its part. The song had been recorded and was being mixed when a hiccup developed – a delay that played under the main beat. Sitting at the mixing desk, Moroder asked his engineer to turn it up – the ghostly echo had transformed a workaday disco tune into something epic and ethereal.
“When we mixed it, by accident the engineer added a delay at the same tempo as the beat,” he recalls. “It suddenly doubled the speed of the synth pulse. That became the key sound of the record.”
He was aware of Kraftwerk and kindred acts such as Tangerine Dream. After all, Kraftwerk were based just up the autobahn from Munich, at their Klingklang facility in Dusseldorf. As it happens, Moroder had released a Kraftwerk-style experimental album but was appalled when it proved a commercial flop. He admired what the self-professed Men Machine were doing. He, however, did not wish to be a critics’ band. He wanted to sell records. As many as possible.
“Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk were at the time very popular. Kraftwerk are still popular now. I gave something new to the whole thing by putting on a dance track, which they never did. We can say that Tangerine Dream had some dance songs, but nothing like ‘I Feel Love’.”
It was around this time that he came to the attention of David Bowie, always one to glom onto a hot new trend. Proudly, Moroder recounts the story of Brian Eno bursting into the Berlin studio where Bowie was recording Low, brandishing the 12” of ‘I Feel Love’ and shouting that he had heard the future of music.
“That quote was enormously helpful,” Moroder smiles. “I got to know David quite well. We worked on the Cat People soundtrack together. I was pleased that he thought highly of me.”
What’s often forgotten about disco, and Moroder’s contributions in particular, is that it was genuinely of the underground. Rock critics loathed electronic music, which was regarded as the preserve of gays and ethnic minorities (this was the ‘70s – overt racism was still okay). Adding to the guerrilla-like quality of what they were doing, Moroder and Summer were signed to Casablanca Records, a screwy Los Angeles independent whose chief claim to notoriety was their discovery of Kiss and having bowls of premium grade cocaine dotted around the offices.
Operating outside the mainstream, Casablanca gave Moroder the freedom to follow his instincts. The label was early aboard the disco bandwagon and among the first to embrace the trend towards extended-play 12” records. In 1975 it’s doubtful a major would have allowed Moroder and Summer to release a 15-minute single, the running time of the full version of ‘Love To Love You Baby’.
Casablanca was a highly unorthodox, at times chaotic enterprise. It made millions flooding the market with often below-par disco songs, pouring much of the profits into George Clinton’s P-Funk band (Clinton was a long-time friend of label boss Neil Borgart). The rest of the cash, it seemed, was blown on partying. In his 2011 biography of his time at the label, music executive Larry Harris paints a lurid picture of life at Casablanca.
“There was blow everywhere,” he wrote. “It was like some sort of condiment that had to be brushed away by the waitstaff before the next party was seated. Cocaine dusted everything.
It was on fingertips, tabletops, upper lips, and the floor...”
“Neil Borgart was a larger than life person, a big entrepreneur,” recalls Moroder. “And he was crazy. Always ready to do whatever it took. He was an absolute promoter. He knew how to get a song on the radio, in the newspapers. “
Had he done nothing else apart from ‘I Feel Love’, Moroder’s place in the annals would be assured. But the song was just one achievement among many. Working with Summer he recorded a slew of disco classics, including the hyper-sexualised ‘Love To Love You Baby’ and the eerie ‘Pandora’s Box’. As a composer, meanwhile, he reinvented the motion picture soundtrack with the chillingly robotic score to Midnight Express. Winner of the 1978 Academy Award, it’s the first OST assembled entirely with synths.
From there, Moroder’s life went super-sized. He swapped Munich for Los Angeles, started hanging out with big-shot producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Thus began the most lucrative phase of his career. He penned the music for Flashdance, including the supremely cheesy title-track (yes, he’s the guy to blame for ‘What A Feeling’). The success of that project led Bruckheimer to hire him again, this time for a movie about jousting US fighter pilots.
“Top Gun was a lot of fun,” Moroder notes. “I wrote ‘Danger Zone’ for Kenny Loggins after watching planes landing on an aircraft carrier. That gave me the idea. I thought it would be perfect for that section of the movie. ‘Take My Breath Away’ – performed by Berlin – was written after Jerry asked me to do a love song. That’s what he said, ‘Just give me a great love song’. Writing for the screen was totally different to being a producer. You have to talk to the director to see what they want. Sometimes they let you do what you want, sometimes they don’t.”
Not all of his Hollywood work was as brag-worthy. In 1987, Sylvester Stallone asked Moroder to score Rambo III. After Giorgio tentatively agreed, Stallone eagerly explained he’d also persuaded Bob Dylan to sign up. How about they write together? Moroder wasn’t sure. Nonetheless, he agreed to pay a call to Dylan and see if they had any chemistry.
“I went to Bob’s beautiful house in Malibu. He was very eccentric. I had a song which I played to him. I think he was a little bit scared. Plus, I don’t think he liked the idea of doing a movie with Rambo. It was kind of a political movie anyway.”
This was a bittersweet period for Moroder. For all his prominence, his relationship with Summer had largely fallen apart. They’d drifted from one another when David Geffen declined to release a double record Moroder had produced and she had agreed to work with outside producers (she went on to have huge success with Michael Jackson wing-man Quincy Jones). For decades they barely spoke. Moroder is deeply grateful that they were able to reconnect in the months before Summer’s death from cancer in May 2012.

“When Donna moved to Geffen, they didn’t release our double album. Towards the end of her life Donna moved into the same high rise where I lived with my wife in LA. We spoke a lot. About two weeks before she died, we talked about maybe doing some DJing. Then she was gone and it never happened.”
As the ’80s came to an end, Moroder had started slipping from prominence. Fabulously wealthy, music no longer held any interest for him. He started exploring other interests. From 1988 to 1991 he worked on a sports car with ex-Lamborghini engineer Claudio Zampolli. Retailing at $300,000, only 19 models of the Cizeta-Moroder were ever built. Rather than return to music after the project unraveled, he started to drift further and further away.
“I went into so many other things. There was the car, which took a lot of time. Then I started to play golf. So I was half-retired. With that, you start to get lazy. This whole resurgence, with Daft Punk and everything, came as a surprise. I had my hobbies, my nice life. Now I’m back. So I have to put all of that away and start working again. I’m very happy. There is nowhere I would rather be. “