I have to admit, I‘m an absolute latecomer to Donna Summer, but I sure as hell made up for lost time.
As 1988 mutated into 1989 I found myself dating an alumni from my old high school, Richard Collins. We had little in common interests as far as music was concerned, though: he liked Call Me by Spagna, I liked Call Me by Blondie. He liked Hazell Dean, I liked Heaven 17. In fact, picking him up in my more rusty than trusty Peugeot 304 for a jolly up to the Central Milton Keynes shopping centre one Saturday morning, he got in the car and then enquired imperiously of the cassette rotating in my stereo, which was H17’s Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry off of their Endless compilation.
“What is this crap?!”
“Whatever it is it’s still better than Hazell Dean.”
He turned away and looked out the window and didn’t say another word to me for the entire drive. This time I knew it wasn’t for real.
Happily, I’m pleased to say there was one artist we could agree on. Impossible, I guess.
Ensconced in Richard’s bedroom at his parents’ house on the Springfield estate, I was flicking through his collection of around 20 compact discs and one jumped up at me. It was by a singer I knew I needed to check out, who that was by that time something of a forgotten historical figure, with just one bona fide British hit in the five years prior, the delicious Dinner With Gershwin.
Yes, Richard owned a Donna Summer CD called The Summer Collection, and I’m forever thankful he did. I was infinitely curious to scan the track listing on the back as I remembered so few of her hits and hoped the song titles might act as a memory jogger.
Hmmm, the compilation only had ten tracks and out of them I had definite memories of just three: MacArthur Park, which was on British radio a lot when I was at infant school, and this then chef always remembered the strange line that “it took so long to bake it”; then there was Unconditional Love, the so-so collaboration with Musical Youth, and She Works Hard For The Money. They were more recent, both released in 1983 as I turned 14.
Scanning the small print, the album itself dated from 1985 so too soon to feature the Gershwin tune, but, incredulously, the one single everybody and their mother remembered wasn’t there either.
I’m talking I Feel Love, and it was utterly absent in every inconceivable way. What the actual, love?
Still, if nothing else The Summer Collection allowed me to develop a huge appreciation for Donna’s voice, her artistry and her incredibly diverse catalogue of songs. Indeed, it was only a matter of weeks before I’d bought my first Summer album, a far more comprehensive exploration of her classic Casablanca era recordings, entitled On the Radio: Greatest Hits Volumes I & II. Happily, despite dating from 1979, this double set was way more thorough in the hits department and, with almost all tracks seamlessly segued by Giorgio Moroder, producer of most of them, happened to be one of the very first examples of the dance megamix.
Knowing how important Donna’s music has been to me personally, it’s easy to feel the weight of a decade’s distance since her untimely death in 2012. The ‘First Lady of Love’ defined a specific epoch in popular culture and beyond, and although she’s been silenced in voice, her influence will continue to speak through the pulsing genre of dance and pop she proudly built. And none more so with I Feel Love.
Like most of Summer’s early disco hits, I Feel Love was written and produced by Moroder with Pete Bellotte. And 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, or endless variations and permutations of it, such is its colossal influence on popular music thereafter.
The fearless and 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 clubber look like a pint-sized Mick Jagger for the weekend.
The track sounded like a transmission from a distant, sexy planet. I vividly recall when Patrick Cowley’s immense remix was a minor hit across the UK in the winter of 1982-83 and how my bestie Steve Day sat in his dad’s living room (also on Springfield) and declared it was “better than the original”.
I don’t know if it’s better or just on an equal footing, but in the summer of ’77 it was a seminal slab of electronic disco unlike anything that had come before it. It’s actually impossible to underestimate the impact and influence of I Feel Love except to say that this is the track that singlehandedly birthed modern EDM and all its associated post-disco sub-genres.
And so on the 45th anniversary of this groundbreaking Moog-driven masterpiece reaching the top of the singles charts in the UK, the following is taken from a Perfect 10 article I put together with Quentin Harrison, author of the Record Redux: Donna Summer discography book. Transition, transmission…
Pop’s paradigm shifts often happen peculiarly. By 1977, Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were assuredly one of the brightest teams in popular music. During their transcendental time together, the American, Italian and Englishman married sonic passion and precision in a way not heard before or since. Nothing encapsulates this more than the seminal electronic pop bauble that is I Feel Love. A landmark in studio recording, I Feel Love has become one of the most influential and imitated tracks ever, but was initially housed as something of an afterthought: first almost apologetically as the B-side to the balladeering Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over) single and then on the larger parent project, I Remember Yesterday.
Aided by the chart-topping success of I Feel Love, Summer’s fifth collection gave Donna her only Top 10 studio album in Britain, reaching No.3 that July and stuck behind the infuriatingly immovable Johnny Mathis Collection and Streisand’s A Star Is Born soundtrack. Another ambitious concept affair, I Remember Yesterday transported listeners on a breezy historical journey through various eras of popular music, past, present and future — incorporating 1940s jazz (I Remember Yesterday), ’50s bad romance (Love’s Unkind), ’60s Supremes-style girl groups (Back In Love Again) through to ’70s funk and onto an imagined future. Alas, the song representing the future became the future.
The cutting edge clinical soul of I Feel Love cast this other-worldly mechanic masterpiece as the belated pièce de résistance of the entire project. Consisting of an entirely synthesized backing track, all the residual elements in disco — the aspects that connected it to pop tradition, show tunes, orchestrated soul, funk — were ruthlessly purged in favour of brutal futurism: icy electronic repetition, a blank-eyed fixated feel of post-human propulsion pulsing with ten tons of galloping bass. The first techno record, in other words, and an aural revelation barely seen outside of Kraftwerk. Yes, the Düsseldorf Kling Klangers were making music entirely by machines a few short years before this, but we’re talking techno as we know it today: sleek, stream-lined, pulsing, thumping dance music.
Four and a half decades later I Feel Love still stuns. There is unrelenting power in those pulsing, relentless synthesiser arpeggios. Those washes of Moog are like the Doppler effect from a passing supersonic train going Station To Station. The double stabs at the beginnings of bars also anchor the listener back to the dancefloor, and the possibility of what our new present could be – both now, and for ever. It held any who encountered it spellbound with its laconic sensuality, most famously David Bowie and his colleague Brian Eno, who were recording “Heroes” in Berlin at the time. No strangers to sonic inventiveness themselves, the pioneering pair were so enamoured with its innovative and insistent persuasion that Bowie famously recalled the former Roxy Music synthmeister rushing into the room waving a copy of the single with a breathless and prescient proclamation.
“One day in Berlin Eno came running in and said ‘I have heard the sound of the future!’. He puts on I Feel Love by Donna Summer and said ‘This is it, look no further, this single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years’, which was more or less right.” — David Bowie, Sound + Vision liner notes, 1989
Except, of course, that egghead Eno was a little short of the mark in his estimation, as echoes of I Feel Love have never faded, with musicians today still trying to recapture the ineffable magic of the original.
I Feel Love was so revolutionary it has continued to blaze the path for pop music and club culture for 45 years, not 15, and pointed the way forward for genres such as Hi-NRG, Italo, house, techno, and trance. Covered by everyone from Blondie to Bronski Beat ft. Marc Almond, Madonna to Sam Smith, the track has since gone on to inspire countless homages and recreations, but Summer’s cool, originating take makes hers the definitive version.
And it’s still so good.
Steve Pafford
