Disco and Deep Space: Between Utopia, Metaphor and The Endless Night Sky
Exploring the Cosmic Influence on Disco’s Sound, Style, and Cultural Impact.
Through disco music and the dance floor, queer people, women, and other marginalized individuals and communities across nationalities and ethnicities sought respite from daily life and a place for self-expression. In metaphorical terms, what’s the ultimate stand-in for both a utopia and a refuge? Outer space, of course. “Of course, outer space—‘the final frontier,’ so to speak—is often viewed in popular culture as the ultimate refuge of humanity and is emblematic of the hoped-for freedom of marginalized communities,” writes Ken McLeod in the essay Outer Space, Futurism, and The Quest for Disco Utopia. “It is our very lack of knowledge about its apparently limitless vastness that makes it a blank slate for projecting an equally limitless number of utopian fantasies and futures onto it.”
Both disco pioneer Nick Siano and journalist Vince Aletti saw dance floors as stand-ins for a self-sufficient (micro)cosmos, where a form of planetary love was possible.
Marginalized communities could identify with aliens. “Aliens were swamping popular culture, be they actual extraterrestrials on the theatre screen or metaphorical ones in disco music where otherness prevailed: gay men (Village People, Patrick Cowley, Sylvester), black people ‘subliminally appropriating white symbols of power’ (Chic in their business suits), and powerful women (Donna Summer, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear),” writes Daryl Easlea in Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco.
Additionally, the interior design of clubs reflected a fascination with outer space and futurism. “They were calculated to be de-familiarizing spaces that would take participants on an exotic, otherworldly trip that transported them outside of the often mundane confines of their everyday existence,” continues McLeod. “The very latest in spectacular lighting effects, including multi-colored shimmering strobe lights and illuminated flashing dance floors, were the order of the day. Almost all clubs featured the now iconic disco mirror ball hanging from the ceiling like some spectacular futuristic planet that beamed, to all appearances, infinite flecks of light across the otherwise completely dark universe of the dance floor space.”
So what does this mean, musically? Early examples are due to the popularity of the Star Wars saga: suddenly, space-age imagery went beyond genre-specific fandoms, and robotic vocals and girls dressed in Barbarella-inspired outfits emerged from sci-fi-specific realms. Enter Domenico Monardo, an Italian-American classically-trained musician and dj. “Morphing his name into Meco, he taught Darth Vader to dance with the 1977 hit single, ‘Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band,’” writes Frank DeCaro in his book Disco. “A disco medley of John Williams’s soundtrack, punctuated by R2-D2 beeping and Luke Skywalker’s X-wing fighter pew-pew-pewing, the song rocketed to Number 1 in America.” Similarly, inspired by the 1977 success of Meco’s disco Star Wars, producer Don Gallagher put together Mankind to create a disco version of the theme to Doctor Who, the hit British sci-fi series starring Tom Baker. In a similar vein, in 1979 British musician and producer Kenny Denton decided to create a dancefloor-friendly version of the theme from Alien. Upon his putting together a studio band he aptly christened Nostromo, after the spaceship in the Ridley Scott sci-fi thriller, the result was a synthesized rendition of the Alien theme that, while commercially disappointing, did get decent airplay.
Space-themed disco is marked by internationalism and international collaborations, in the spirit of actual deep-space missions. On top of movie-soundtrack reworks, British-born but Munich-resident Deirdre Elaine Cozier’s alter ego Dee D. Jackson released “Automatic Lover,” complete with vocoder-distorted robotic vocals. Her follow-up single, “Meteor Man,” was another slam dunk. Prior to becoming a musical-theater heavyweight, Sarah Brightman tried her hand at space-themed disco with “I Fell in Love with a Starship Trooper” and “Love in a UFO.”
Even German-Caribbean Boney M, known for their Russian-inspired “Rasputin” and their rework of the Rastafari mainstay “Rivers of Babylon,” took a trip to space with “Nightflight to Venus,” a seven-minute-long space trip described and performed in the style of an airline flight.
France has been a hotbed for space-themed music. Take, for example, the 1977 track “Magic Fly” and the following year "Just Blue" and "Symphony" by the French band Space, or Sheila, a former Ye-Ye girl who acquired mainstream fame with a disco cover of “Singin’ in the Rain,” who, in 1979, was shot into space with the Nile Rodgers-Bernard Edwards hit “Spacer.” Or even Austria, with the alien-inspired Ganymed with their hit “It Takes Me Higher” brought space allure in discotheques all over Europe.
When it comes to Italy, we cannot help mentioning Les Rockets. In 1975, the band formerly known as Crystal rebranded as “Les Rockets,” known for singing, dancing, and moving like robots, all the way to their silver-painted faces and skulls. Their album On the Road Again became the hallmark of space-tinged electronic disco, even though they never succeeded in breaking into the Anglo market. Relevant singles include “Electric Delight” and “Galactica.” They enjoyed a lot of popularity in Italy: their first appearance dates back to the 1977 Pesaro Summer Show, followed by a live performance at Milan Lyric Theatre. Interestingly, their ethos and presentation clashed with the sentiment of the tail end of Italy’s “lead years,” and their performances did feature some audience-led riots. Maybe, though, Les Rockets were just harbingers of a new aesthetic and way of life, heralding the music of the following decade.
When it comes to music culture, we can’t fail to mention that they also had a fixed slot on the visionary variety show Stryx, where they played characters known as “The Cosmodevils,” and in the late 1970s, they held around 200 concerts in a calendar year across the country.
Stryx was also the vehicle for the space-disco anthem “Mr. Moonlight” by Indian-born Asha Puthli, which is a perfectly balanced hybrid between a ballad, a serenade, and a disco track. Two years prior, Puthli had achieved underground immortality with “Space Talk,” notable for its saunter-encouraging bass, spaceship synth, dip-and-soar vocals, and softly clipped lyrics like “Space talk, taking a space walk, space.”
Italian-born Giorgio Moroder was the biggest commercial driver of space-themed disco. After hits like “Utopia,” “From Here to Eternity,” and “Faster than the Speed of Love,” he fashioned a cyborg princess out of American-born but German-based singer Donna Summer. With “I Feel Love,” he revolutionized the panorama of disco music, making space-derived electronic sounds mainstream.
However, even before becoming a pop culture affair, music reminiscent of aliens and distant world had been already explored by soundtrack composers, and also lesser known musicians who wrote and produced library music, compilations of various compositions for TV stations that used them a la carte, when in need, for example, of music for documentaries, news reports, background for variety shows, etc. Think of Riz Ortolani’s “Il Corpo Di Linda” or even Morricone “Spazio 1999” from the movie “Cosi Come Sei” are examples of space/cosmic sounds that characterize a composition.
Towards the end of the 70s, in Italy, space, aliens, and distant galaxies had captivated both emerging and popular artists. In 1978, actress and dancer Gloria Piedimonte recorded “Ping Pong Space,” a disco stomper that capitalized on the growing popularity and availability of synthesizers.
That same year, composer and comedian Tony Santagata released “Ufo Sexo,” a track where, over a cosmic disco beat, he narrates a sexual encounter so strange it felt extraterrestrial. While not explicitly space-themed, Patty Pravo’s “New York” (written by Flavio Paulin) from 1979 evokes an atmosphere that could be from a documentary on unknown life forms from distant planets.
We will dedicate a full article to Italian space disco in the coming weeks, but we feel this is a fitting introduction to the genre's unique fusion of music and cosmic themes.