In 1975, a stellar team based in Germany laid the groundwork for a musical revolution, the aftershock of which is still being felt today. American singer Donna Summer, alongside production and songwriting duo Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, were responsible for the torrid single Love to Love You Baby. In technical terms, the track’s modernism can be heard in a heavily foregrounded 4/4 beat bolstered, metronomically, by rudimentary drum programming. But that isn’t what initially captured the imaginations of the disco cognoscenti.
During a coke-fuelled orgy at his LA mansion, the head of Casablanca records, Neil Bogart, took a break from the festivities to phone Bellotte in a state of high excitement saying that everyone was “fucking to this track” and demanding constant rewinds. He asked the trio to expand the song until it filled the side of an album, something that was relatively easy for them to do because of the rigid grid of drum machine beats. The resulting track, replete with 22 simulated orgasms (courtesy of the 12-inch version at least), earned Summer, a practising Christian and trained gospel singer, a BBC ban, a trans-Atlantic hit and a new record deal with Casablanca.
I Feel Love began life in 1977 as a bookend track to round off a disco concept album. The theme of I Remember Yesterday, Summer’s fifth album, was to evoke different decades, starting in the 1940s and ending up with a song that would represent the future. Moroder and Bellotte realised the sci-fi textures they needed could only be produced using a modular synthesiser. The pair had previously used a Moog Modular 3P to record Son of My Father but found the process of wrangling the complicated, Tardis-like rack of oscillators and patch cables to be “a pain in the butt”. The process was complicated by the fact the synth was owned by a pop-phobic avant garde composer called Eberhard Schoener.
But Schoener’s assistant Robby Wedel – the unsung hero of the I Feel Love story – borrowed the Moog and reassembled it in Moroder’s studio. As well as supplying the technology, Wedel solved the most pressing of many problems that the team faced in creating the sound of the future by sequencing the electronic composition to the 16-track recorder. It was this act that made it such an outstandingly avant garde track – no one knew the synth was capable of this, not even Robert Moog himself. But the task remained painstaking. The highly temperamental instrument would not stay in tune for long and had to be manually retuned after each 20-second section was recorded.
Wedel nails one of the key ingredients of the track when he describes the bassline as being like “a giant’s hammer on a wall”, its power matched only by trance-inducing hypnotism created by astute use of a delay-like effect. If you listen to the track through good headphones you can hear the bassline hit first via the left channel only to play again a sixteenth later through the right channel, giving it that instantly recognisable juddering spatiality.
Of course, it’s not entirely machine-made. Apart from Summer’s peerless vocal performance, which included a spontaneously improvised falsetto, there’s also the beat. Wedel, who knew the Moog inside out, used it to generate hi-hat and snare sounds with white noise but couldn’t quite get the bass drum sound right, so a session musician, Keith Forsey, was brought in to play the metronomic 4/4.
Remarkably, Casablanca didn’t think that much of I Feel Love’s future potential and it was consigned to the B-side of the Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over) single, released 1 May 1977. Yet the track soon took on a life of its own and began tearing up dancefloors. By 2 July, it had been released as an A-side. It went to No 1 in the UK, Australia, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands.
For many, what was already a damn near perfect track, was – somehow – improved the following year by a remix. Patrick Cowley, a visionary cosmic disco producer who was part of Sylvester’s backing band, warped the track into a psychedelic 15-minute masterpiece. What’s truly stunning about his remix is that it was a bootleg made from an off-the-shelf copy of the album, with him adding extra percussion, crackling snare fills, and washes of ecstatic electronic noise. Not having the luxury of having Wedel sync his work, he did everything painstakingly by hand. While initially only available on DJ acetates and white labels during Cowley’s active lifetime, it got an official release at the end of 1982 and became a massive hit all over again.
It’s impossible to completely quantify the effect of I Feel Love on dance music. It signified the end of one era in disco (that of lush orchestration and large bands) and the start of another (the producer as electronic auteur backing a diva). Along with Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, it acted as a conduit between the avant garde and the dancefloors of the world. It foreshadowed the rise of house music and techno. Despite early outlier users such as Stevie Wonder, I Feel Love decisively recast the image of the synthesiser. It was no longer primarily the tool of pallid European futurists and the toy of rich prog rock musicians, but the key to dance music’s revolutionary potential going into the 1980s and beyond.
Not only has I Feel Love never gone out of fashion, it has consistently jumped between genres in the intervening decades with incredible ease. I Feel Love is, or has been, a staple of house, techno, electroclash and nu-disco sets while also exerting an influence on post punk, new wave, EBM, hi-energy, P-Funk and industrial. There is no end to the list of artists who have been influenced by this track, but one exchange acts as a revelatory example: in 1977, Brian Eno charged into the studio while David Bowie was recording, brandishing a copy of I Feel Love, and stated excitedly: “This is it, look no further. This is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.” His only mistake was one of gross under-exaggeration.
