FEATURE:
Groovelines
Donna Summer – I Feel Love
__________
A huge song that…
must rank alongside some of the best of all-time, I Feel Love came out on 2nd July, 1977. Originally a B-side, Donna Summer’s classic was produced and co-written by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. Included on Summer’s phenomenal fifth studio album, I Remember Yesterday, it was the B-side to the single, Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over). It seems like one of the oddest A and B-side combinations in music history. Given how much more emphatic and better the B-side is! A couple of months after the single was released, it was reissued with the sides reversed. I Feel Love reached number one in many countries and is one of Donna Summer’s most iconic songs. This futuristic cuts that sounded like nothing else in 1977, it struck a chord with David Bowie and Brian Eno. When making the Berlin Trilogy, Eno came running in after he heard I Feel Love and told Bowie that the song would change the sound of Club music for fifteen years to come. Quite a lot has been written about I Feel Love. I am going to source from a few features. All state how this 1977 song was the sound of the future. One that sounds ahead of its time and untouched now. In 2017, Pitchfork marked forty years of I Feel Love. They look at the background and history of the song and spoke with the studio gurus behind the masterpiece. The Robot-Funk classic that has endured for decades. Rather than include the whole feature, I have taken the opening sections - but would advise you to read the entire thing:
“Released 40 years ago, in early July 1977, “I Feel Love” was a global smash, reaching No. 1 in several countries (including the UK, where its reign at the top lasted a full month) and rising to No. 6 in America. But its impact reached far beyond the disco scene in which singer Donna Summer and her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were already well established. Post-punk and new wave groups admired and appropriated its innovative sound, the maniacal precision of its grid-like groove of sequenced synth-pulses. Even now, long after discophobia has been disgraced and rockism defeated, there’s still a mischievous frisson to staking the claim that “I Feel Love” was far more important than other epochal singles of ’77 such as “God Save the Queen,” “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” or “Complete Control.” But really it’s a simple statement of fact: If any one song can be pinpointed as where the 1980s began, it’s “I Feel Love.”
Within club culture, “I Feel Love” pointed the way forward and blazed the path for genres such as Hi-NRG, Italo, house, techno, and trance. All the residual elements in disco—the aspects that connected it to pop tradition, show tunes, orchestrated soul, funk—were purged in favor of brutal futurism: mechanistic repetition, icy electronics, a blank-eyed fixated feel of posthuman propulsion.
“‘I Feel Love’ stripped out the flowery aspects of disco and really gave it a streamlined drive,” says Vince Aletti, the first critic to take disco seriously. In the club music column he wrote for Record World at the time, Aletti compared “I Feel Love” to “Trans-Europe Express/Metal on Metal” by Kraftwerk, another prophetic piece of electronic trance-dance that convulsed crowds in the more adventurous clubs.
The reverberations of “I Feel Love” reached far beyond the disco floor, though. Then unknown but destined to be synth-pop stars in the ’80s, the Human League completely switched their direction after hearing the song. Blondie, equally enamored, became one of the first punk-associated groups to embrace disco. Brian Eno famously rushed into the Berlin recording studio where he and David Bowie were working on creating new futures for music, waving a copy of “I Feel Love.” “This is it, look no further,” Eno declared breathlessly. “This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.”
In the wake of “I Feel Love,” Giorgio Moroder became a name producer, the disco equivalent of Phil Spector. He even appeared on the cover of Britain’s leading rock magazine, New Musical Express. The Moroder hit factory was widely considered the Motown of the late ’70s, with Donna Summer as its Diana Ross”.
In 2022, Jude Rogers spoke with co-producer Pete Bellotte about the song. She also spoke with a few of its famous fans. Published by The Quietus, it is a fascinating and insightful feature. There is a whole new generation who are discovering Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. It is a song that will never sound dated or a sad product of its time. I have been thinking about the track a lot recently and how ahead of its time it was. Such an amazing moment of gold that must have sounded completely unlike anything else when people heard it in 1977:
“But ‘I Feel Love’’s magic is also about another extraordinary element: Donna Summer’s ethereal vocal, which helped create a template for the future of club mixes, and the bedrock of genres like house and garage. Summer had had hits already with Moroder and Bellotte, most famously 1975’s ‘Love To Love You Baby’, inspired by a lyrical ideas of hers, which she recorded lying on the floor in the studio, so her friends couldn’t see her, singing it in an approximation of the voice of Marilyn Monroe. She had intended that to be a demo for somebody else, she told German TV in 2009, as it felt “too sexy a song” for her to sing.
But the emotion behind ‘I Feel Love’ came from a very real place. “We wanted the music to sound like an automaton – relentless,” Bellotte explains. “The beat sounded heartless, but Donna was the heart. She was love.”
On the night that Summer was meant to be writing the song’s lyrics with Bellotte, he was kept waiting for three hours. Summer was having a romantic crisis, trying to work out whether or not to leave the boyfriend she had thought about while writing ‘Love To Love You Baby’, artist Peter Mühldorfer, for a man she’d just met, Bruce Sudano, of the group Brooklyn Dreams. “She was on the phone to her astrologer trying to work out her astrological compatibility with both of them,” Bellotte says, a smile in his voice. “And that was the very night that she decided to be with Bruce, who became her husband, who she had two children with, and who she stayed with for the rest of her life.’
Bellotte completed the lyric himself while he waited. Summer apologised profusely to him when she came down – "she was always such a lovely, easy person to work with" – and delivered the song in one take. Summer was also fun, Bellotte says: she loved messing around with different tones and delivery. “Whatever suited the song. She just did the vocal for ‘I Feel Love’ that way, going high, in that range.” As she did, the idea of female pleasure and ecstasy entered the synthesiser’s mechanical world, one often thought of as very masculine before, especially in the world of prog. A new shimmering juggernaut of sound was launched into the world, accessible to everyone.
The trio “didn’t think that much” of their new song to start with, but their boss at Casablanca Records, Neil Bogart, jumped on it. He’d also spotted ‘Love To Love You Baby’’s commercial potential in 1975, after seeing the effects it had on people at an orgy in his house, and asked for it to be made into a 17-minute mix, long before the era of the commercial twelve-inch disco single). “He was an incredible music man,” Bellotte says. “He also suggested three edits to the track which really made it work. He understood what it could do and where it could go.”
Despite its success, Bellotte is still staggered by the song’s ongoing legacy. “Thing is, none of us – me, Giorgio, Donna – ever planned anything. Things just evolved. Here we were, an Italian, an Englishman and an American in Munich, three foreigners in a foreign land – it was an accident we got together in the first place.” Giorgio, Donna and him were in the studio all the time, he adds, working hard. “We didn’t drink, smoke, or take drugs. We barely went out.” After ‘I Feel Love’ was a huge global smash, however, things changed a bit. “We’d stop at 6 pm, and go out to nice restaurants every night for our dinner.”
Bellotte also only saw ‘I Feel Love’’s impact in a nightclub once, in the late 1970s. A friend had begged him to come along, and see it for himself. “I couldn’t believe it. I’m not a nightclub person, as you may have realised from my other interests. But people were going absolutely mad.”
In the last forty-five years, he has also had time to reflect on why the song might work. “Music changes but love doesn’t. Love’s the same as it was centuries ago.” And when it’s coupled with a relentlessly physical, sexual beat – bringing men and women, men and men, women and women, together – love keeps going, backwards, forwards, everywhere, forever”.
I am going to end with a couple of features from The Guardian. First, in 2012, music critic Jon Savage and producer Ewan Pearson spoke about the iconic and majestic I Feel Love. A song that clocks in at under four minutes, it packs so much in during that time! It is an epic track with a short runtime. I want to include what Jon Savage noted:
“Pop critic Jon Savage
A cinematic drone comes in fast from silence, quickly overtaken by two synthesised rhythm tracks that will go in and out of phase for the next lifetime. On top, Donna Summer soars and swoops as she tackles the minimal lyric: "It's so good [x five], "Heaven knows" [x five], "I feel love" [x five]. The words are so functional that her voice becomes another instrument, almost another machine, but then there is the real heart of the song: "Fallin' free, fallin' free, fallin' free …"
I Feel Love was and remains an astonishing achievement: a futuristic record that still sounds fantastic 35 years on. Within its modulations and pulses, it achieves the perfect state of grace that is the ambition of every dance record: it obliterates the tyranny of the clock – the everyday world of work, responsibility, money – and creates its own time, a moment of pleasure, ecstasy and motion that seems infinitely expandable, if not eternal.
Back in 1977, I Feel Love was a radical breakthrough, and was designed as such. It was started as a cut for I Remember Yesterday, an album that producer Giorgio Moroder originally planned as a mini-tour through dance music history: a Dixieland number here, a Tamla number there. To complete the project, he needed what NME called a "next-disco sound".
"I had already had experience with the original Moog synthesisers," Moroder told NME in December 1978, "so I contacted this guy who owned one of the large early models. It was all quite natural and normal for me. I simply instructed him about what programmings I needed. I didn't even think to notice that for the large audience this was perhaps a very new sound."
I Feel Love was quickly remixed and, extended to eight minutes on a 12in, made an immediate impact. As Vince Aletti wrote in his 13 August 1977 column for Record World, "perhaps the most significant development in disco sound this year is the success of totally synthesised music. Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express was the breakthrough record." Name-checking Space (whose all-synth Magic Fly was a huge UK hit in late summer 1977), Aletti observed that Kraftwerk's "impact was immediately underlined by Donna Summer's I Feel Love, which took the synthesiser rhythm and compressed and intensified it so it was both more physically exciting – like stepping into a tangle of high-voltage wires – and more commercial".
I Feel Love went to No 1 in the UK during the high summer of 1977, and stayed there for four weeks – filling dance floors everywhere, because it's so good so good to dance to. Like David Bowie's Low and Heroes, and Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, it was also the secret vice of those punks who were already tiring of sped-up pub rock, and it sowed the seeds for the next generation of UK electronica.
It didn't chart as high in the States – No 6 – but it became an all-time gay classic, a totem of the pre-Aids era ("Fallin free, fallin' free, fallin' free"). That iconic status was reaffirmed by (Sylvester producer) Patrick Cowley's monumental 15-and-three-quarter-minute remix, which really does go on for ever and ever without trashing – even enhancing – the concept of the original.
I'm guessing many of you will have heard I Feel Love pumped out loud, will have felt moved to dance, and will have felt time stop, the instant prolonged. Something of that feeling attaches itself to the record wherever it's heard, and it never gets dulled by repetition – or endless imitation. I must have heard I Feel Love a thousand times and it still takes my breath away: it's one of the great records of the 20th century, and the name on the label is Donna Summer”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Daniel Simon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
I am ending with a feature from 2020. The Guardian were ranking the best British singles of all time. Donna Summer’s I Feel Love came in fourth. Hailing its “Hypnotic synth, peerless vocals and visionary ambition”, they remark how this timeless song is one of the greatest ever. A huge moment in popular music. A turning point. It still sounds so bold and hypnotic to this day. A track we will be talking about for decades more:
“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”.
I thought I had included I Feel Love in Groovelines before but haven’t. It is long-overdue that I should come to this song from the late and great Donna Summer. A classic B-side that got a swift promotion, Brian Eno underestimated the power and legacy of the track! It completely changed Pop music. Such a radical and futuristic piece of art, it is still inspiring artists now. I Feel Love has a huge impact on genres like Post-Punk and New Wave. It also affected and influenced future sub-genres of Electronic Dance Music such as Techno and Italo Disco. One of the greatest Dance songs ever and one that has been ranked highly by critics through the years, I was excited to explore it for Groovelines. Such a work of genius that will…
NEVER lose its magic.