{{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}Your submission failed. The server responded with {{status_text}} (code {{status_code}}). Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Learn More{{/message}}

{{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}It appears your submission was successful. Even though the server responded OK, it is possible the submission was not processed. Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Learn More{{/message}}

If you’ve found yourself on a dancefloor, for better or worse, over the past 45 years, you’ve probably heard the intriguing tumbling synth sensation, ‘I Feel Love’ by Donna Summer. The fearless and rather intense frequency of the synthesised sound effects flow like an aural blitzkrieg as it forces dancers to move their bodies subconsciously, making even the most pent-up desk jockeys look like a pint-sized Mick Jagger for the weekend. 

So, what’s the secret to the songs enduring success and dancefloor dominance? It lies in the creative vision of Giorgio Moroder and the vivacious vocals of Donna Summer, the “Queen of Disco”. 

The Italian composer and “Father of Disco”, Moroder, set the bar impossibly high for himself and his co-producer Pete Bellotte while working with Summer for her fifth album, I Remember Yesterday, in 1977. 

In the early 1970s, Summer moved to Munich, Germany, to perform in the musical Hair. Following her successful run in the musical, she became a session vocalist and it was only a matter of time before she fell into the orbit of Moroder, who had established his famous Musicland Studios in the German city. 

“We became good friends,” Moroder remembered, “She was an incredibly talented singer, who could improvise but was also very disciplined. As a person, she was very funny.” It is also apparent that Summer was very easy to collaborate with in the studio. According to Bellotte, it was because she wasn’t particularly interested in the production of the music. 

“The whole time that we worked together there was never the slightest bit of friction,” Bellotte remembered. “We were so lucky, because she wasn’t interested in the productions at all. So she’d come in the studio, usually at four o’clock in the afternoon, and would chat for hours. Then she’d look at her watch and say, ‘Oh I’ve gotta go!’ and she’d go into the studio and mostly sing it in one take – and be gone.”

The pair collaborated in 1975 on Summer’s classic single ‘Love To Love You Baby’. Following this breakout success for the partnership, Moroder, Summer, and Bellotte were looking to new horizons. Intent on creating an album together, Bellotte devised an excellent idea for the concept of the next project. 

Inspired by Anthony Powell’s novel A Dance to The Music Of Time, Bellotte proposed that each song of I Remember Yesterday (originally named A Dance to The Music Of Time) should evoke a different decade’s sound, from 40s swing to the 1960s hippie era, and from ’70s funk through to contemporary disco and beyond. The concept for the album’s final track, ‘I Feel love’, was beyond.

For the emphatic closer, Moroder and Bellotte endeavoured to charter new ground. The song would have an entirely original sound and will conclude the album’s conceptual scope with a soundbite from the dance music of the future. In order to take on such a feat, they decided to produce the entire song using only a Moog Modular 3P synthesiser. The only issue was that they didn’t have one.

Fortunately, the classical composer Eberhard Schoener had the right synth for the job and since the Moog was notoriously temperamental, they also needed to hire Schoener’s engineer, Robby Wedel, in a package deal of sorts. Moroder admitted at the time, “I needed him because even if I’d owned one, I wouldn’t have been able to get any sound out of it.”

With their new equipment in place, which comprised four cabinets, countless patch bays, and their trusty new minion Wedel, they got to work. Bellotte remembers being astonished by Wedel’s sorcery as he tamed the wild beast of electronic equipment surrounding him. 

“We got the first line down,” Bellotte recalled. “So then Robby says, ‘OK, do you want to synch the next track?’ We didn’t even know what that meant. So he says, ‘I’ve laid down a synch tone from this Moog so that anything we record on the next track is going to lock it into that’. When we put in the next track, it was absolutely spot-on. It was a revelation for us. The most astounding thing about Robby Wedel, who is the unsung hero of all of this, is that Robert Moog himself didn’t even know about this – he had no idea that this synching was even possible.”

After hours of trial and error, Moroder and Bellotte got to grips with the Moog, and they gradually pieced together the pulsating rhythm of the instrumentals. For the interjecting cymbal sound, they produced white noise using the machine’s envelopes and cut it up; meanwhile, the distinctive bassline was a sequenced sound that Wedel produced. Unable to find the right kick-drum sound, they employed the only human element of the instrumentals, their long-time drummer, Keith Forsey. 

“The Moog was really fun to work, but the problem was it would go out of tune every few minutes,” Moroder remembered. “It was a disaster. With ‘I Feel Love’, I think we’d do twenty or thirty seconds, then stop. Then we’d go back, tune it and drop it in. It was quite a job.”

With the music in place, the final jigsaw piece was Summer’s lyrics, which she planned to write in collaboration with Bellotte. One night, Bellotte visited Summer at her house to get the words down. Summer was busy with a phone call to an astrologer in New York and so Belotte got started on the lyrics. After a three-hour phone call, Bellotte had finished the lyrics alone. 

“Look, I’m really really sorry, but I’ve been on the phone to my astrologer in New York. We were discussing my relationship,” Bellotte recalled of their conversation. “She was with a guy called Peter Mühldorfer, but she’d just met Bruce Sudano of Brooklyn Dreams, who she’d fallen for,” he continued. “She called the astrologer because she wanted to go through Bruce’s star sign and charts; the astrologer had decided that she had to go with Bruce. She came down and said, ‘I’ve made my decision’.”

After acquainting herself with the lyrics, Summer hit the studio and recorded the vocal tracks in one take. The song became an instant sensation upon its release in 1977 and inspired countless musical artists over the years that followed right up to the modern-day. 

Soon after ‘I Feel love’ was released, David Bowie, who was working on his Berlin Trilogy at the time, remembered his collaborator Brian Eno “running in” and telling him that he had heard “the sound of the future”. According to Bowie, Eno predicted that the song would change the sound of dance music for the next fifteen years, which “was more or less right”.

Listen to the dancefloor classic, ‘I Feel the love’, below.

{{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}Your submission failed. The server responded with {{status_text}} (code {{status_code}}). Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Learn More{{/message}}

{{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}It appears your submission was successful. Even though the server responded OK, it is possible the submission was not processed. Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Learn More{{/message}}