How Giorgio Moroder conquered the dancefloor
The godfather of disco will soon begin his first ever tour aged 78. He talks to Mark Monahan about Bowie, Donna Summer and building supercars
Seldom has one person had such a titanic influence on their chosen sphere of music as Giorgio Moroder. In the mid-to-late Seventies – as co-writer, co-producer or producer – Moroder was behind the Donna Summer smashes Love to Love You Baby, I Feel Love and Hot Stuff, the second of these creating, at a stroke, electronic dance music as we know it today.
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 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.
In 2013, dance supremos Daft Punk sought him out to collaborate with them on Giorgio by Moroder, the standout track from their 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 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 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. Although the tour is billed as a “Celebration of the Eighties”, 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.”
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 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 the Second World War, 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.”
However, he started gigging with local musicians in his late teens until, in his mid-twenties, he decided: “That’s it – I have to get out of being a musician and be a producer-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 is modest about his career, explaining that I Feel Love’s influential bassline came about almost by accident. However, the more you talk to him, the more you realise how little of his success is 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, with three young women – he explains, “That was only an idea of the photographer. He said, ‘Give me 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 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 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 £15 million, 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 Cizetamoroder V16T supercar, which he co-built with “the guys who worked for Lamborghini”. Moroder now has the prototype in LA. And, although it used not to be legal to drive in the US (for emissions-related issues and so on), he says he can now legalise it.
Given that the cars 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.
His signature moustache is now grey and no longer looks as if it should have its own passport