Moroder Of Invention - A Metropolis Primer

Ahead of his Sunday November 8 appearance in the RDS, we gear up for Giorgio Moroder at Metropolis by taking a look at his impact on electronic dance music, with a few words from the man himself. But first, if you fancy firing up Spotify, here's your ultimate Giorgio playlist. If you're not driving towards the RDS with 'Danger Zone' blaring come Sunday, you're a lost hope!

Giorgio Moroder is everywhere today. His quicksilver grooves are part of the architecture of the EDM movement, while mainstream pop will be forever indebted to the records he cut with Donna Summer in the late ‘70s – blueprints for a formula today ruthlessly promulgated by Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Ellie Goulding… and, well, take your pick really.
Now after a retirement that threatened to go on longer than his actual career – and included a bizarre interlude as a designer of high-end watches and automobiles – 75- year- old Moroder is back in active service, with a new remix album featuring guest turns by Britney Spears, Iggy Azalea, Kylie Minogue and others.
In person, Moroder is a charming mix of humility and bombast. Based in Los Angeles since the ‘80s, he is self-effacing by nature yet understands that, along with Kraftwerk, he helped create modern dance music.
Without him, the past four-and-a-half decades of chart pop would be very different (his soundtrack work, particularly on Alan Parker’s Midnight Express and Top Gun, for which he wrote ‘Take My Breath Away’, is equally influential).
“Electronic dance music is derivative of what I did ,” he told Hot Press in 2013. “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.”
Far from a fortuitous accident, all of this was planned.
His most important production, ‘I Feel Love’, was an attempt by Moroder to make the future happen in the present. He knew technology was about to profoundly change the recording process. Why shouldn’t he be the one to fire the starting pistol?
“I said to myself,’ I have to get something new’,” he told this writer. “It was meant to be a song of the future. I knew synthesizers and computers were the way to go.”
“When we mixed it, by accident the engineer added a delay at the same tempo as the beat,” he recalled several years ago. “It suddenly doubled the speed of the synth pulse. That became the key sound of the record.”
“Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk were at the time very popular,” he added. “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. Nothing like ‘I Feel Love’.”
The love goes both ways as Moroder had a memorable cameo on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories LP, narrating his life story in his distinctive northern Italian accent as vintage grooves twinkled in the background.
“I was in Paris and Daft Punk came to me and said, ‘We you want you to talk about your life, for our album’,” he said. “We went into their studio and started recording – it was basically three hours of me telling my story. And then, that was it.”
In addition to forever altering the course of dance and pop. Moroder can claim a walk-on part in the biography of David Bowie too. There’s a famous anecdote of Brian Eno bursting in on the Thin White Duke toting a copy of ‘I Feel Love’. This was it, Eno declared, the future of music. Bowie stuck the record on and agreed on the spot.
“That quote was enormously helpful,” says Moroder. “I got to know David quite well. We worked on the Cat People soundtrack together. I was pleased that he thought highly of me.”