Henri Belolo
Music executive who brought his French-moroccan heritage and sense of fun to the Village People
HENRI BELOLO, who has died aged 82, was, with his creative partner Jacques Morali, the French music executive behind the success of the gleefully flamboyant disco superstars Village People, remembered for such imperishable hits as YMCA and In the Navy.
Belolo had already enjoyed a notable career in Paris as a producer for recording companies when in 1970 he set up his own Scorpio label and, later, music publisher.
He began by licensing US hits such as Carl Douglas’s Kung Fu Fighting but in the mid-1970s he moved to America in search of a bigger market.
Belolo was drawn by the records coming out of Philadelphia made by Teddy Pendergrass and the producers Gamble and Huff. In his younger days, he had loved losing himself in the songs played in French nightclubs, or discotheques, but to his mind US singles were mixed too much for radio and tended to push the beat into the background.
So as disco began to take off in the US, Belolo eagerly exploited the trend. In 1975 he met his fellow Frenchman Morali, an A&R man (talent scout). Morali had an idea for a group which would sound like the Forties musicals of Busby Berkeley and Carmen Miranda, and so he and Belolo put together an act they called the Ritchie Family, which had a minor hit with Brazil.
Morali was gay, and through him Belolo (who was not) was introduced to the gay nightclub scene – always a key driver of musical taste. At places such as Ramrod, a leather club in New York, and at the tea dances on Fire Island, Belolo finally found Americans who danced with the same sense of release he had known in France.
He was walking through Greenwich Village with Morali in 1978 when their gaze was arrested by an Indian in a feather headdress strolling along Christopher Street.
He turned out to be a barman, Felipe Rose, who doubled as a DJ. Sitting a few stools away, noticed Belolo, was a patron dressed as a cowboy, and the idea for Village People was born.
On the back of a napkin, Belolo
wrote down a list of half a dozen gay stereotypes and fantasy figures, including a construction worker and a leather-clad biker. They then held auditions for the roles, though they recruited the lead singer of the group, Victor Willis (the cop), after seeing him perform in the musical The Wiz. The records were released on the Casablanca label, home to Donna Summer and Kiss.
Allying Belolo’s influences of French
chanson, his Moroccan rhythmic heritage and a sense of subversive fun, the hits soon followed. These included
Macho Man, Go West – a paean to sexually liberated San Francisco set to the strains of the USSR’S national anthem, and the double entendres of
YMCA. The last is one of the handful of singles to have sold 10 million copies, and brought the band a Grammy.
Belolo almost persuaded the unsuspecting US Navy to adopt as their official song, in place of Anchors
Aweigh, the group’s hymn to the delights of sailing the seven seas, In the
Navy. The Navy even laid on warships and aircraft for the accompanying video, until newspapers began to ask what taxpayers’ money was funding; the Navy eventually stuck with Anchors Aweigh.
Belolo helped to produce the film starring the group, Can’t Stop the Music
(1980), but by then a backlash had begun against disco and it flopped.
Until 2015 he claimed to have co-written, originally in French, many of the lyrics to the band’s songs, but in that year a court accepted Willis’s claim that they had been mostly penned by him and Morali. The latter died of Aids in 1991, and Belolo was thereafter an outspoken supporter of gay rights and causes.
The son of a sailor turned port employee, Henri Belolo was born in Casablanca, Morocco, on November 27 1936. As a child, his musical influences included the records played by US troops during the war, such as Glenn Miller’s, and the sounds made by wandering musicians, or gnawa.
After studying Business at university, Belolo moved in 1956 to Paris. There he met Eddie Barclay, who noticed the sophisticated choices Belolo was making on a jukebox in a café.
Barclay, a former musician and nightclub owner, had become one of the leading lights in the French recording industry. His artists included Dalida, Jacques Brel and Juliette Greco. He recruited the suave, good-looking Belolo to run the subsidiary label he was starting in Morocco.
There, Belolo kept up with trends in music by working as an early form of disc jockey in clubs, claiming later to have pioneered cutting and mixing between two turntables playing different styles of song.
As the political situation in Morocco deteriorated in the late 1950s, Belolo returned to Paris to become general manager at the Polydor label. Encouraged by the conductor Herbert von Karajan to follow his instincts, he organised concerts in Paris by the likes of James Brown and produced million-selling LPS by Jeanne Moreau and Georges Moustaki.
After disco faded, Belolo was the force behind one of the first hip-hop acts to gain attention, Break Machine, who in 1984 reached No3 in the UK with Street Dance. Thereafter he continued to work with musical acts in France and Europe, including 2 Unlimited.
Belolo was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2016.
His two sons, who took over the Scorpio label from Belolo, survive him.