No place like Rome

While some 80s trends are best forgotten – stone washed jeans and mullets – let’s not forget that the decade good taste forgot nonetheless boasted an inordinate amount of musical innovation. Apart from the commercial success of synth pop acts like Depeche Mode, Soft Cell and Ultravox, during this period Detroit techno and electro and Chicago house were spawned in murky sweatboxes and in isolationist, high rise flat complexes.

While these pioneering styles went on to become the foundations for modern dance music, the start of the ’80s also saw the development of a lesser known electronic style.
As disco threatened to implode at the end of the ’70s, many prominent composers discovered and started to use the first generation of electronic studio equipment.
Rather than having to draft in and pay a band or an orchestra, they realised that they could use synthesisers and drum machines to programme their musical and rhythm elements. By the end of the decade, there was an explosion in electronic sounding disco music.
Known as Italo Disco because nearly all the records were released by Italian producers, this music combined disco’s love of melody and emotion – as well as its adherence to a verse-chorus format – with tragi-comic lyrics and crisp, clubby beats.
Artists like Giorgio Moroder – including his work on Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ – Bobby O and Patrick Cowley as well as tracks like Klein & MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk’, Alexander Robotnick’s ‘Problemes D’Amour’ and Cerrone’s ‘Supernature’ were among some of Italo’s finest moments - and they’ve been relived by Belgian DJ Spacid on a new mix compilation, Theme From Radius.
Containing classics from Alexander Robotnick, Tapps, ETMS and High Energy, Spacid, who is a resident at Club 69 in Ghent in Flanders, believes this is the first time many of these classic tracks have appeared on together on one compilation.
“News, a Belgian music company asked me to do an Italo compilation,” he explains. “The result is Radius. All tracks are officially cleared, so there are no bootlegs and the original artists get paid in full, something that is rather exceptional these days. Italo has always been popular among collectors, but, nowadays, more and more people are buying it. That means most titles are very rare and you can be charged high prices.”
Radius doesn’t aim to just capture a musical sound from the early 70s. Spacid believes that the influence of Italo informs contemporary electronic music – and intends to source new school electro disco for the Radius label.
“Artists like Legowelt, I-F and Bangkok Impact have all been influenced strongly by Italo, but they use it in a very individualistic way,” he believes. “I think I-F is the man who brought Italo back to life and, along with producers like Legowelt and Alden Tyrell brought the style into the new millennium.”
While an increasing number of producers, DJs and tastemakers look to the sound, there have been mutterings from some modern Italo producers that, like electroclash, commercial success would see the music losing its edge and the scene diluted. Like most of his peers, Spacid is understandably cautious about the music crossing over.
“It’s a good thing that it becomes more popular, because it certainly is good music and I’d prefer a lot of people listening to Italo than to pop junk,” he maintains. “I don’t mind if more people start making Italo either. As long as it’s done in a good way the quality isn’t affected and it doesn’t become a pale imitation or a rip off of what it used to be.” b

Theme From Radius is out now on Radius Records.