Between Prog, Giallo, and Disco: Our Interview with Claudio Simonetti.
How the composer, arranger, and producer brought Italian disco to global charts.
Claudio Simonetti achieved cult status in genre entertainment because of the movie soundtracks he penned for some of the most prominent Italian Giallo films: Profondo Rosso (1975) celebrating its 50th anniversary, came with a soundtrack that effortlessly elevated typical “spooky” soundbites with prog influences; Tenebrae (1982) combines horror hints with synths and electronic stylistic flourishes. Demons (1985) added tribal beats, while Phenomena, of the same year, mixed electronic instrumentation with operatic vocals.
He is also one of the most influential composers, arrangers, and producers of disco music in Italy.
The son of composer Enrico Simonetti, the Brazilian-born Claudio started playing the piano at age 8. “I then started studying at the Conservatory, specializing in piano and composition, but in parallel to that, I was active in various rock bands, all the way to Goblin,” he tells us. “Then, we split after 1978, because the prog era was over, and in came this dance and electronic-disco music era. Since I really liked this new genre, I just started being active in that scene.” To this day, he has dance music in his earbuds in his day-to-day life.
He attributes his love for dance to his Brazilian roots. “Rhythm is in my blood, so the 4/4 beat brought me back to my roots.”
Upon his pivot to disco, he and record producer and entrepreneur Giancarlo Meo worked on their label Banana Records, which Meo already had and which Simonetti joined as a partner. “In the late 1970s, the big Italian record labels did not believe in disco music,” Simonetti recalls. “I was one of the first disco-music producers and composers in Italy and we would pitch projects to big record labels,” he explains. “executives would say leave this stuff to the Americans.” Their successes proved them wrong, and, since they already had their own label, they no longer needed backing from the majors.
His project Vivien Vee actually charted in the United States with “Give Me a Break.” “She was both the face and the voice of the act,” Simonetti specifies. “Sure, singing was challenging, but mainly because she could not speak English. Actually, when we came to America to promote her, we created a whole mystique about her being unwilling to do interviews. The truth was that she would not be able to conduct the interview because she was not fluent in English.” This was hardly an exception in that era. “Raffaella Carrà was the exception: she could basically speak any language,” says Simonetti, remembering her fondly.
Another one of his creations, Easy Going was actually a living documentation of the way disco and club music was evolving at that time, especially regarding the juxtaposition of the more Soul-inspired sounds from America and the electronic beats from Continental Europe. “Baby I Love You,” from 1978, combines the feel of Saturday Night fever with electronic vocal distortions, while he 1979 track “Fear” starts in Moroderian fashion, a symphonic poem of cyberpunk dystopia, only to then give way to strings, similar to what Amanda Lear accomplished with “Follow Me” in 1978. “A Gay Time Latin Lover,” from 1980, is almost retro in its orchestration.
His most mainstream success even among those who are not acquainted with giallo or Italo disco is “Gioca Jouer,” a 1981 novelty hit that’s halfway between a line-dance track and a carnival melody, but with synths. “That was an idea Claudio Cecchetto had, but he had never been a recording artist himself, as he was mainly a DJ and presenter. He went I want to do this thing where give people commands and then they will dance along following them.” Simonetti was game. “What makes people dance, I thought to myself. I thought of the tarantella, so I set Gioca Jouer to a baroque-like tarantella melody.” The overwhelming success of the track came thanks to the Sanremo music festival, as this ended up being its opening-theme song when Cecchetto hosted. In 1983, Black Lace localized it in the UK as “Superman,” which put it straight to the top 10 tracks, and there are versions in French, English, Spanish, German, and Chinese among others.
Banana Records inserted itself in a context where “indie” disco and “dance” music labels flourished: think of Goodie Music, Disco Magic and, on a more schlager and continental-Europe-inspired beat, Baby Records. “Baby Records launched Pupo, Ricchi e Poveri, and many more artists,” Simonetti reminisced. “Then there was Claudio Casalini’s Best Records, who was behind Gazebo and his “I Like Chopin,” Ryan Paris’s “Dolce Vita—all of these people were Italian, by the way,” he comments, given the penchant, during the Italo Disco era, to anglicize the names of the performers and to make up an international background who was not necessarily there.
One underlying question Italian Disco Stories has been trying to answer since its inception is why Italian disco and electronic seemed to spearhead a lot of innovations both in melody, vocals, instrumentation, and art direction. Simonetti, despite being a pioneer himself, could not pinpoint a rational explanation. “You know, Italians are, by their own nature, great imitators.” This statement is deeper than it seems: upon deeper reflection, it actually harkens back to when Romans fully adopted Grecian visual and literary arts. In terms of 20th-century pop culture, Simonetti points towards things like Peplum movies, in the style of Spartacus and Ben Hur, Spaghetti Western, and Giallo itself, which he reads as an Italian reinterpretation of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. He also uses The Goblins as an example of this, and if you have ever listened to video game music, especially the one produced between the 1980s and 1990s, you can see their legacy (compare the boss theme from Final Fantasy VIII to the main theme of Profondo Rosso) “We have great ingenuity, and then, upon imitating at first, they fashion their own style in those artistic and cultural expressions—Sergio Leone, after all, took inspiration from American Western movies and now international directors, including Americans, are the ones drawing from Leone himself.”