A1 “Boom Boom Boom”
It’s a school night in 1987, sometime after dinner but before bed, and I’m crouched over my cassette deck, ready to record songs from 103.7 Kiss-FM’s “Top 8 at 8” pop countdown. I’ve already dubbed the likes of the Beastie Boys, Bon Jovi, and U2 onto my young tween mind, in addition to Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam and Club Nouveau—and my fingers are hovering over the record and pause buttons in anticipation. It’s that peculiar moment as a nascent music fan, before sounds begin to stratify, when there’s little to differentiate hip-hop from hair metal, or synth-pop from college rock. There’s but one criterion: Does this song sound “cool”? Or maybe more accurately: Will the very act of listening to this song make me feel “cool” the next day on the basketball courts?
Slotted somewhere amid such hits one night was a song featuring the chintziest of keyboards, the most tuna-can-like drum machines, and a chorus so idiotic that it made my prepubescent mind think: “If this is about sex, sex sounds stupid.” This song was so not cool. In the deepest, most dramatic register imaginable, singer Paul Lekakis intoned: “Boom boom boom/ Let’s go back to my room/ So we can do it all night/ And you can make me feel right.” It was as dumb as chewing gum and it stuck to my mind every time I came in contact with it on the radio, its tackiness inescapable.
Only some years later did I even see the single's cover and glimpse this Lothario: Chiseled and sporting an asymmetrical haircut, there stood Lekakis with a pink fluorescent shaft in his hands. Despite being Greek, Lekakis was my first encounter with the musical genre known as Italo, that oft-maligned bastard child of Giorgio Moroder, Cerrone, and Patrick Cowley, a Mediterranean mélange of disco, new wave, hi-NRG, and ESL-pop. So while Italo was a reflection of the pop music of its era, it was also a little cracked. “It felt like it was coming out of some mirror world where everything was slightly off-kilter, especially with its mangled English,” says producer and Italo enthusiast Eddie Ruscha, who records as Secret Circuit.
Though most actual Italians disowned the genre—“I have friends who grew up in Italy at that time, and it was forbidden to like the stuff,” adds Ruscha—and Italo songs rarely charted in the States or in the UK, its influence can still be felt far away from Europe.
“Chicago House music, Detroit Techno, and Miami Freestyle were all influenced by Italo,” says Josh Cheon, whose Dark Entries imprint has reissued classic Italo tracks like Charlie’s “Spacer Woman” and Helen’s “Witch”. Metro Area co-founder Morgan Geist concurs: “Jamie Principle’s ‘Your Love’ is cited as a seminal house music track, but it clearly jacks ‘Feels Good’ by Electra, one of my favorite Italo tracks ever.”
A2 “Feel Italo Round”
Like chest hair poking through a silk shirt, you can see Italo almost anywhere. That’s Gary Low’s speedy “I Want You” slowed down to a chillwave crawl on Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around”, now best known as the “Portlandia” theme song. In 2013, you could hear Umberto Tozzi’s hammy “Gloria” both in the Chilean drama Gloria and in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. The likes of New Order, Erasure, and Pet Shop Boys have always been shameless fans of the form, and Italo’s paternity extends to the mannequin incantations of Glass Candy and Chromatics, as well as any new coldwave act. It’s in the cheesy synth progressions of Todd Terje, the wiggling productions of Metro Area and LCD Soundsystem, and even the by-turns giddy and melancholic sides of Daft Punk—which is no surprise, since their Chicago forebears like DJ Pierre loved Italo, too.
In the past year, a handful of labels have been reissuing some of Italo’s most precious and pricey singles. In addition to Dark Entries, there’s also Italian DJ Manu Dall'Erba’s Archeo Recordings, which has re-released rarities like Tony Esposito’s Balearic classic “Je-Na’” and the Ron Hardy-approved “Radio Rap”. The excellent Archivio Fonografico Moderno label (cofounded by one of Italo's most golden of voices, Fred Ventura) recently re-pressed some of Italo’s most beguiling oddities, from Mr. Master’s fidgety “A Dog in the Night” to the stunning “Stop” by B.W.H. In a few months, Anthology Recordings will reissue Black Devil's 1978 maniacal Italo masterpiece Disco Club, an EP so ageless that when Richard D. James first reissued it on his Rephlex label in 2004, people assumed it was yet another Aphex Twin pseudonym.
B1 “La Voce”
In the 21st century, Italo began to make inroads from pariah to acceptability, thanks to a few crucial compilations like Dutch DJ Ferenc E. van der Sluijs’ epochal Mixed Up in the Hague as I-F, which connected the dots between disco, electro, and techno via Italo. “I have to give credit to Mixed Up in the Hague being a gateway,” says Morgan Geist, who would release his own mix of Italo guilty pleasures, Unclassics, in 2005. “But it’s frustrating, because I heard Ferenc got most of his stuff from a distro in Chicago that I used to buy from. Why couldn’t have I made Mixed Up in the Hague? Because I’m not as cool as Ferenc.”
Dark Entries’ Cheon credits another turn-of-the-century Italo comp for introducing him to the Marzipan-flavored pleasures of the genre. “I was the music director at my college radio station and I reviewed the I-Robots compilation in 2004,” he says. “It contained mostly instrumental versions of many Italo Disco classics and I loved them. Little did I know I was missing a key element to the genre: The vocals.”
And where would Italo be without those vocals? Operatic, halting, and cardboard-like, sexy to the point of being creepy, bizarre, robotic, histrionic, sleazy, utterly baffling. Any DJ can find gold on those instrumentals, with their dizzying Korg lines, busy arpeggios, and flanged drums, but it takes a certain level of tolerance to get into those vocals. “At first I would pretty much just play the instrumentals because the vocals were so cheesy and wrong,” Ruscha says. “But when you start to get into Italo, you start accepting the vocals more, and then you actually want to listen to them.”
No matter the Italo track, there’s always a veil of mystery that might never be pierced. Even after hearing “Stop” more than a hundred times, I still don’t believe I’ve ever made out a single coherent word beyond “don’t be thinking about me.” Is the singer of Evo’s “Din-Don” mocking Chinese, or just a doorbell? And what the fuck is going on in Blackway’s “New Life”?
More questions abound: Why would Big Ben Tribe decide that the world needed to know what Tarzan’s favorite season was? Who knew Italians were keen on rap from the start, as on Plastic Mode’s “Baja Imperial”, Marzio Dance D.J.’s “Rap-O-Hush”, and Radio Band’s “Radio Rap”? When multiple voices enter into the Italo equation, they become exponentially stranger. Expansives’ flanged-out “Life With You...” seems to offer a duet between a parallel-dimension Bee Gees’ falsetto and a vocoder. On Gaznevada’s “I.C. Love Affair,” there’s the sexiest utterance possible of the number “77”, but then it’s conjoined with a jerky guy’s voice that sounds like an Italian rip-off of “Two Wild & Crazy Guys”.
Who on earth ever thought that these were good ideas for songs, or that they could become a hits? And why, ill-fitting as it is, do I still find some of these strange songs stuck in my head? There will always be something a bit off about Italo but that might be what makes it so pliant, so resilient. It’s failures become its strengths. Its sexiness is like a mannequin posed for a hug, its futurism like a cyborg soaked in seawater, trying to pass as human.
B2 “Medley Mega-Mix” (DJs Select Their Favorite Italo Tracks)
Todd Terje*
*Capricorn: “I Need Love (Instrumental)”
Metro Area’s Darshan Jesrani*
*Gaucho: “Dance Forever (D.J. Version)”
Advance: “Take Me to the Top”
Jago: “I’m Going to Go”
Dark Entries’ Josh Cheon*
*Some Bizarre: “Don’t Be Afraid (Vocal Version)”
Joe Garrasco & M.M.: “Action (Extended Version)”
Sensitive: “Driving”
Vivien Vee: “Blue Disease”
M & G: “When I Let You Down”
Secret Circuit’s Eddie Ruscha
B.W.H.: “Stop”
Mr. Flagio: “Take a Chance (Vocal Version)”
Alexander Robotnik: “Problèmes D'Amour”
New York Endless' Dan Selzer
Mr. Flagio: “Take a Chance”
Pineapples: “Come On Closer”
Gaznevada: “I.C. Love Affair”
Archeo Recordings’ DJ Manu
Gazebo: "Lunatic (12" mix)"
Clio: "Faces (extended 12" version)"
RAF: "Self Control (12" mix)"
Cube: "Somebody Told Me"
Gaznevada: "Special Agent Man (12" female version)"
Listen to a playlist of Italo Disco classics:
