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
DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge,
this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you
are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove
it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or
sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.
