Giorgio Moroder (live at The Apollo)

London
2 April 2019

Italian producer and songwriter Giorgio Moroder is basically a legend. After discovering a certain sound in the mid-seventies, he reinvented disco music overnight. The sound was full of synthesizers pulsing to a pounding beat, but also never forgetting that key ingredient, melody. Moroder then won three Oscars for his soundtrack work and during the 1980s, he was pretty much everywhere working with many top artists. At the grand age of 79, this tour is a celebration of his work since those heady days of the 1970s.

The Apollo seems packed with people ready to party tonight, as more than a few empty plastic bottles of wine seem to come rolling down the floor of the venue — and that’s even before anything has happened onstage. I settle down to enjoy whatever the Italo disco king will throw at me for the evening, as I really didn’t quite know what to expect.

As the band start playing “Giorgio By Moroder” from his classic album From Here To Eternity, I was sold. The eighties gaming visuals projected on the screen behind giving an extra sense of nostalgia to the whole proceedings. This is a classic disco tune that plenty of synth-wave artists have been influenced by in recent years. As the song comes to its climax, Giorgio enters the stage, moustache ever-present and sunglasses glistening in the lights of the venue. A massive cheer goes up as the man himself launches into “Looky Looky”, a song that I didn’t really know, but which Giorgio reveals paid his rent for several months when he was first starting up.

After that number it was a barrage of hits played by Giorgio and his five-piece band, four singers and a string quartet. It was then that part of the audience got to their feet to dance and didn’t sit down again all evening. First we are treated to Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby”, a song I had not heard in years and certainly a great toe-tapping tune. Tonight Moroder plays several of Summer’s songs that he wrote in tribute to the late star. OK,  “The Never Ending Story” did feel a little karaoke-like, as the singer during the first verse struggled with the tune, but by the chorus he was belting it out in good fashion to the delight of a group of women near the front. “Bad Girls” rescued the show with a fine performance and a reminder of just how catchy some of Summer’s songs were.

This was followed by “On The Radio”, again a song I had not heard in years and one of the few disco singles that I ever owned back in the seventies. My personal highlight came next as the pulsing rhythm to “The Chase” from the Midnight Express soundtrack kicked in. For me, this is perfect representation of Moroder’s sound and why he was deemed important in electronic circles at that time (he even worked with Japan on their “Life In Tokyo” single). This was followed by “Together In Electric Dreams”, and again the singer struggled a bit with the verses, but dis a very showbiz-style chorus, which made me realise what a good and underrated vocalist Phil Oakey is on the original track.

And the hits kept coming. One of my personal favourites From Here To Eternity was next, the perfect cross-pollination of Kraftwerk-style electronics, Mordoder’s phased Farfisa organ and a big stomping beat, the sound that the space disco movement bought wholesale and made classic records with. Next we danced our way through “Flashdance — What A Feeling” before hitting the more sombre tones of the Scarface theme and “Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun.

But most people seem to be here to hear one tune in particular, the song that Brian Eno told David Bowie while they were recording in Berlin was “the sound of the future”, which of course is Donna Summer’s classic “I Feel Love”. By now the entire venue was up on its feet and even Moroder himself seemed over-awed by the extended applause at the end of the song. After this we had a video tribute to  Bowie while his voice sings eerily over the band playing “Cat People (Putting Out The Fire)”. To be fair, it’s not one of Moroder’s strongest tunes and with anyone apart from Bowie singing it in his passionate way, it would fall a bit flat.

After a couple more numbers we headed into a kind of encore, even though nobody had left the stage. Summer’s “Hot Stuff”, again a song I’ve not heard in years, and the set finished with Blondie’s “Call Me” a track I had forgotten that Mordoder had anything to do with, to be honest.

All in all it was a fine celebration of Giorgio’s work, with him talking enthusiastically between numbers about how songs came to be written. On the way out, someone in front of me said the evening had a bit of a hen night feel to it, which was a slightly unfair comment. In the end it was people reliving their youth and out to have a good time, and to dance to the soundtrack of their lives. Between 1975 and 1985, Moroder was one of the most important artists in popular music and certainly introduced new ways that the synthesizer, like the Moog, could be heard away from progressive rock, etc.. For this alone he remains something very special, and so any evening with him will always be a joyous occasion.

-Gary Parsons-