AUGUST 1977 …Donna Summer Feels Love
Punk may have been raging, but disco was reaching its commercial peak in ’77. Furthermore, between the opening of Studio 54 in New York in April and Saturday Night Fever hitting movie screens in December, there was a disco hit that revolutionised what popular music could be. Spending its third week as Britain’s Number 1 as August began, Donna Summer’s mechanoid-yet-libidinous I Feel Love predicted nothing less than the future of electronic music.
Its co-producer and co-writer, Giorgio Moroder, was happily nonplussed. “We did it just as an album track,” he told Record Mirror later that year. “Donna finished in 10 minutes. Neither of us thought it would be as big as it’s been.”
Summer was a versatile pop vocalist from Boston who’d moved to West Germany to be in a production of Hair. She’d already enjoyed worldwide success with 1975’s torrid Love To Love You Baby, co-written with Moroder and Pete Bellotte, his production partner at Munich’s Musicland Studios. The song included sufficient orgasmic groaning to warrant an airplay ban from the BBC, but Summer was unruffled. “In Germany it’s very hard to make a decent record because they
AUGUST
have no taste,” she told Sounds. “So the only way is to shock them and then they will start to accept you.”
The road to I Feel Love began with
Summer’s fifth album with Moroder and Bellotte. Released in May ’77, it was conceived of as a disco album which revisited the sounds of previous decades, variously taking in ’40s big band stylings, Spectoresque girl group drama and Motown. The album’s closer, I Feel Love was intended as a sudden leap into the future – coloured, no doubt, by Wendy Carlos fan Moroder’s interest in electronic sound, which had already manifested on his 1972 hit Son Of My Father. Moroder admitted that he’d briefly considered the cantina music from Star Wars as a possible blueprint: “[But] I didn’t think it was the music of the future,” he told The Guardian in 2015. “I thought, the only way to do it is to do it with only computers.”
Working at Musicland in early ’77, the vehicle used to achieve fusion was a Moog modular synthesizer borrowed from composer Eberhard Schoener. The lush disco norms of strings and horns were replaced by a driving electronic pulse marshalled by Moog expert and Schoener technician Robbie Wedel. Adding delay to the throbbing bass line, Moroder sculpted a snare drum sound from white noise generated by the Moog, though the metronomic thump of the bass drum came courtesy of London-born session man Keith Forsey. A human heartbeat among the oscillators, Forsey also played with Moroder’s Munich Machine on ’77’s racy near-hit Get On The Funk Train.
In 2017, Bellotte told Mixmag’s Bill Brewster that before she recorded her vocal, Summer had been in discussions with her astrologer about new love interest Bruce Sudano of blue-eyed soul act Brooklyn Dreams. Sudano was declared a keeper. Infused with emotion, she cut the song in a high, breathy register in a single take, losing herself in the minimal lyrics of heightened
“To me, discos are indoor playgrounds.” DONNA SUMMER