Easy Going: Easy Going

In 1975 Claudio Simonetti’s group Goblin created the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s movie Deep Red; the soundtrack sold 3 million copies. Goblin released the album Roller in 1976, then the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria in 1977, then the concept album The Fantastic Journey of Mark the Cockroach and the soundtrack to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in 1978. That year Simonetti, clearly poised to take over the world, left Goblin. 

Producer/songwriter Giancarlo Meo asked Simonetti to create a disco product for him. By then disco had been seeping into Italy for several years and was quickly becoming the biggest mass-market musical product in two decades; and in Italy, as in America, this presented the music industry with a conundrum. Big-time music producers whose interests were above all to grab and maintain their share of the mainstream music market suddenly found that in order to stay on top, they had to get down with a genre of dance music that wasn’t just happy and danceable and toujours gai but also gay as a gay guy from Gaytown. Like everyone else in Italy, Siomonetti had seen the Village People and Sylvester on Italian TV, so he knew the score; quite reasonably he decided to build his new group from the ground up from three gay DJs.

Simonetti had seen Paolo Micioni driving the wheels of steel at the Rome club Easy Going (in Via della Purificazione 9, behind the Piazza Barberini); it was a crowded underground joint with a mosaic on the wall depicting a naked cop wrestling a sailor. Simonetti recruited Micioni to be the frontman for the new group, which would be named after the club. To perform alongside Micioni, Simonetti recruited two dancers who were also DJs for another local club, Il Mais: Francesco Bonanno and Ottavio Siniscalchi, who was also a lighting designer. (In group photos, Micioni is the moustachioed one; between Bonanno and Sinischalchi, I’m not sure who is who—sorry.)

The group’s debut album, Easy Going (1978), became the first release on Banana Records, which Meo and Simonetti co-founded. (My copy digitized here is the German version on the imprint Ariola.) Meo and Simonetti co-wrote all the songs, except the cover of “Suzie Q”. Meo produced; Simonetti played keyboards and sang the Vocodered lyrics to the opening track “Baby I Love You”, which became a worldwide Hi-NRG dance hit. Session musicians provided the rest of the disco orchestra backing. All the songs were performed in English, more or less. The notorious mosaic from the club became the album cover.

Like their first LP, the second Easy Going album, Fear (1979), contained just four tracks at the default extended club length of eight-plus minutes. Basic tracks were recorded in New York; the orchestra was recorded in Philadelphia. After Fear was released, Micioni left the group; for the third album Casanova (1980), the group’s new frontman was New Yorker Russell Spellman, aka Russell Russell. There was a single, “Go Away Little Girl”, released in 1982; a best-of compilation was released in 1983; and that was it.

And so, in Fear and hot water—Italo Disco is born! Sort of. These three albums definitely form the genesis of the genre that infiltrated pop music in the 1980s and eventually took over Euro-disco as we know it. Banana Records lasted through 1989 and became the home of disco songstress Vivien Vee, as well as Simonetti’s eponymous solo releases and side projects including Kasso and Capricorn.

(A big hat tip to Luca Locati Luciani; I gleaned most of the information in this post from the chapter “Macho, I’m a Man” from his book Crisco Disco: Disco Music & Clubbing Gay Negli Anni ’70—’80, published in 2013 by Vololibero Edizioni, Milano.)

Baby I Love You

Little Fairy

Suzie Q

Do It Again

Album audio & artwork

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