I Love Italo Disco

Europe never experienced "Disco sucks" phenomenon and Funk & Disco remained at the height of its popularity. Many FM radio stations had Disco-focused shows on the air, featuring mostly top-chart hits.



Another important reason for the speedy development of Italo Disco in Europe was purely economic. In the early 80s US dollar was traded too high against Italian lira. Records imported from US were expensive. Main music importers were forced to drastically reduce orders for imports and refocused their business on the local productions. Discomagic, Lombardoni, IL Discotto and many other record labels were born from the main Disco music importers out of sheer economic necessity. Italian productions began to flood European music market and it was difficult to find any US imports in Italian record shops.



Most of the Italo-Disco records were produced by studio session men, mainly keyboardists, or Dee Jays-turned-musicians who had little or no skill of playing musical instruments. Their sole assets were only their ears and uncanny feel for dance music. That was the time when many Italian Dee Jays started to experiment with synthesizers and electronic drum machines, playing keyboards slowly with just one finger and then elevating the speed with computers. Many young musicians were able to earn some money with low cost productions and fast consuming product."



The fusion of electronic Disco and Disco-Funk created "Spaghetti-Dance". The new blend of sound was completely different from what the old Dee Jays were used to listen to: there was no bass, no brass, only synthesizers, keyboards and drums machines. Italo Disco was all about percussion. The classic Italo sound was created only by keyboards. The rhythm section is totally electronic. The voice is used only as an instrument, in order to complete the melody. Most of the songs were very simplistic in structure, but infectious melodies, with catchy hooks, and always in 4/4.



The "classic" synthesizer sound heard on Italian tracks was created by ROLAND JX-8P, Roland Juno 60 and Roland Juno 106, Yamaha DX7, ARP Odyssey, Roland TR 808 drum machine, Simmons Drums (electronic, but played live), Minimoog, Oberheim, Linndrum, and sampler Emulator II. This sound is very unique and special in dance music history.



B. Mikulski's marketing name

for Spaghetti-Dance

New music needed a catchy name. "Spaghetti-Dance" sounded silly and was not very marketable. It was Bernhard Mikulski, the late founder of ZYX Records, Germany, who coined the ubiquitous term "Italo Disco" in 1984. The name caught on with the fans and it was destined to describe perhaps the most misunderstood and under-appreciated genre of electronic dance music. The words "Italo Disco" decorated in the colors of Italian flag (as seen on the picture) were printed on sleeves of every promo sampler and mixed LP released and marketed by ZYX. In only four years (1984-1988) ZYX released 13 volumes of 2LP sets "The Best Of Italo Disco", and 10 volumes of "Italo Boot Mixes".



Den Harrow, "TheFace"



Tom Hooker, One of

Den Harrow's Voices



Many Italian musicians released records under various aliases. Perhaps that was a marketing strategy to get records airplay, or a deliberate business decision by record label owners who reputedly refused to invest any money into promotion of any one particular "artist".‡ Instead, the investment was made into a "brand name" like Den Harrow (three different vocalists), or Joe Yellow (also three different vocalists) etc. It was much cheaper to promote music this way: if an artist commanded higher fees, record producers could gave him/her a boot, and replace with someone new. After all, there was no shortage of musical talent in Italy.



Regrettably, lyrics played a minor role in Italo Disco songs. Many Italian Dee Jays-turned-singers couldn't really speak English at all, therefore you can often hear voices being manipulated by computers or using a vocoder with overdubs. Lyrics in Italo Disco were often just outright gibberish. I am not asserting that a dance song must reach a high mark in poetry, but it certainly helps if you could sing along.



"…A perfect example where the melody is amazing and the lyrics are awful is in the song "Love In Your Eyes" by Gazebo. Could be as pop perfect a song you'll ever hear, however, "You are just a damn sequencer/Digital Delay" would not go down in history amongst the most beautiful or meaningful lyrics ever written."



In spite of all those obvious limitations, Italo Disco became enormously popular in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, and especially in Japan.



It was so easy to record an Italo track that almost all the Dee Jays working in Florence recorded their own track! (Ago, Riccardo Cioni, Grecos, Marzio Dance, Eddy Trauba, Miki Fornaciari & the others). All that they needed now was to find a record distributor.