Giorgio Moroder

Daft Punk booked Giorgio Moroder for a session with no playing in it. They sat him before microphones whose birthdates ran from the 1960s to the present, each standing in for a decade of his life, and asked him to talk. “They did not let me get involved at all,” he remembered. “[Thomas] asked me if I wanted to tell the story of my life. Then they would know what to do with it.”¹ He talked across two days, with Nile Rodgers in the room, and wondered afterward whether the duo “might cut it up into a rap.” They cut “Giorgio by Moroder” instead: nine minutes of his voice over a track that swells from soft disco into an orchestral blowout, and when Random Access Memories took the Grammy for Album of the Year, Moroder’s life story was on the winning record.² Moroder is the producer-as-author made literal: a man whose instrument was the studio and whose biggest hits belong to other people’s voices. Electro-disco tells his method at session level and Donna Summer the partnership; this note follows the career whole.

From Ortisei

Giovanni Giorgio Moroder was born on April 26, 1940, in Urtijëi (Ortisei), in Italy’s Ladin-speaking Dolomites, the son of a hotel concierge; he grew up among three languages, and his mother called him Hansjörg.³ He taught himself guitar at fifteen, and at eighteen he went out touring Europe, playing bass and guitar in pop bands by night and making recordings on Revox tape machines by day.⁴ He reached Berlin in his mid-twenties, cutting demos and engineering, and moved to Munich in 1968 with a commuter’s logic: “I liked Munich because it’s only about three hours from my home in Italy.”⁵ The records went out under one name, Giorgio. “Looky Looky” (1969), a bubblegum single he sang himself, earned a gold record the next year.⁶ “Son of My Father” mattered more. His 1971 original carried his first synthesizer and an English lyric by a British writer named Pete Bellotte. In 1972 a cover by the Kent band Chicory Tip beat him to the prize, reaching No. 1 in Britain — by Songfacts’ count the first UK chart-topper with a synthesizer on it.⁷ Bellotte stayed.

The basement decade

Moroder set up Musicland Studios beneath the Arabella-Haus, the Munich high-rise where he lived, and with Bellotte writing the lyrics he turned a session singer named Donna Summer into the era’s defining voice — the whispered “Love to Love You Baby” in 1975 and, in 1977, the sequenced-Moog “I Feel Love.”⁸ The room became a destination in its own right: “once Mick Jagger has called and asked if he could have the studio, you couldn’t say no.”⁹ The method traveled. Sparks handed him a whole rock band to replace in 1979, and the basement’s session drummer, Keith Forsey, would follow Moroder into the next decade as a lyricist.¹⁰

The commercial composer

Film scoring arrived by label politics. Alan Parker had temp-tracked Midnight Express with Vangelis — “we were very pleased with it” — but Casablanca, the film’s umbrella company and a record label, “politely asked” him to try an alternative, and the introduction came from the top: “Neil Bogart, the head of Casablanca, suggested Giorgio Moroder to me.”¹¹ Parker went to Munich and watched: “being all electronic, we could build up the layers of sound with great control as Giorgio experimented with repetitive rhythms while watching a small monitor showing the cut footage.” The composer’s own account is unbothered: “I did it without knowing anything about scoring a film. I was watching movies like everybody else, not thinking about how the music for a movie should sound – I just did it.”¹² The 1979 Academy Award for Best Original Score followed, “the first all-electronic score to win an Oscar” in Parker’s words, and the opening theme, “Chase,” became a single in its own right.¹³ Offers followed, “American Gigolo and then later Scarface, et cetera,” as he put it, and he took them on pop terms: “I am a commercial composer. The music obviously has to fit the movie, but I was always wondering how it could work on the radio, how could people listen to the song without knowing the movie.”¹⁴

He spent the next eight years proving the credo on the charts. For American Gigolo he wrote an instrumental called “Man Machine” and offered the vocal to Stevie Nicks, who was blocked by a new contract. It landed with Debbie Harry, who wrote her lyric picturing “the opening scene, driving on the coast of California.” “Call Me” by Blondie spent six weeks at No. 1 and finished 1980 as Billboard’s single of the year.¹⁵ For Cat People (1982) he put his music under a David Bowie lyric.¹⁶ “Flashdance… What a Feeling” (1983) carried a lyric by Forsey and Irene Cara; Cara sang it through a six-week run at the top of the Hot 100 and to Moroder’s second Oscar.¹⁷ For Scarface he scored restraint into the violence: “I didn’t want to make it too big because you already see them killing.”¹⁸ Then a mechanic named Tom Whitlock fixed the brakes on Moroder’s Ferrari and mentioned that he wrote lyrics. The pair wrote Top Gun’s “Take My Breath Away,” performed by Berlin, which won the third Oscar, and “Danger Zone,” which gave Kenny Loggins the same film’s other anthem.¹⁹ He kept a sense of humor about the sideline: “Together in Electric Dreams,” written with Philip Oakey, outlived its 1984 film, and of his NeverEnding Story theme Moroder offered, “if Puccini had written it, it would probably have been sad, but not too sad.”²⁰

Cars and neon

By the mid-eighties the film run was thinning into anthems and hobbies. He wrote official songs for the Los Angeles and Seoul Olympics and for Italia ‘90.²¹ He spent years assembling a restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — “It took me about two years to research. I had a very hard time finding the prints” — and released it in 1984 scored with contemporary pop, Freddie Mercury among the voices.²² He designed a sixteen-cylinder supercar with Marcello Gandini and Claudio Zampolli, made his own cognac, took up neon and digital art, and drew an unbuilt pyramid tower for Dubai.²³ After Forever Dancing (1992), no album came for twenty-three years. His own summary of the era skips straight to its end: “And then, they rescued me! Daft Punk.”²⁴

The comeback

In May 2013, at seventy-three, Moroder played his first DJ set — a Red Bull Music Academy edition of Deep Space, François Kevorkian’s Monday-night party, at the Brooklyn club Output — and found a working life he had never had: “I always wanted to be a performer.” He was candid about the other reason: “the money’s great! I make more money now than I did in my good days.”²⁵ Déjà Vu (2015), his first album since 1992, topped the US dance-albums chart, and its Kylie Minogue single put him at No. 1 on Billboard’s dance-club listing — his first chart-topper in fifteen years.²⁶ Asked about Daft Punk, he left the door open: “If they call me like they called me last time, I’m ready.”²⁷

The credit

The scoreboard reads three Oscars and four Grammys. The Oscars: the Midnight Express score and the Flashdance and Top Gun songs. The Grammys: two for Flashdance, the 1998 dance-recording award with Summer for “Carry On,” and the Random Access Memories Album of the Year.²⁸ The Dance Music Hall of Fame inducted him as a producer in 2004, and the Library of Congress added “I Feel Love” to the National Recording Registry in 2011.²⁹ Honorifics chase him and he swats them away — “It’s better than being called the grandfather, but I still don’t like it,” he said of “godfather of electronic music” — though when Moby tried “the pope of electronic music” on him in 2015, he came close to accepting: “‘The pope’ is good. ‘The grandfather’ is less good. ‘The father,’ yes.”³⁰ The largest claim belongs to Simon Reynolds, writing about the record that came out of the Munich basement: “If any one song can be pinpointed as where the 1980s began, it’s ‘I Feel Love’.”³¹

rhapsode

Explorer

Giorgio Moroder

From Ortisei

The basement decade

The commercial composer

Cars and neon

The comeback

The credit

See also

rhapsode

Explorer

Giorgio Moroder

From Ortisei

The basement decade

The commercial composer

Cars and neon

The comeback

The credit

See also

Footnotes