Ilona Staller, Italo Disco Queen

How Staller Made a Mark on the 1980s European Music Scene With Synths, Sex, and Sylph-like Vocals.

Ilona Staller had many incarnations: a radical politician, a muse to the likes of Jeff Koons, a dead ringer for a Botticelli female figure (in that particular late-70s/80s color palette), and a famed adult-entertainment performer. Yet we would be remiss to neglect her Italo disco career, and now that she is giving interviews in magazines for the re-release of her memoir, we thought it was the right time to highlight her musical output—hey, in 1978, she almost made it to Sanremo, with the song “Cappuccetto Rosso” (Little Red Riding Hood), authored by one Vito Tommaso, a storied Mia Martini collaborator who then found his fortune with anime opening themes for the Italian market.

And while that did not happen for a host of mundane reasons, Staller was among the first to ride the wave of the showgirl-to-disco-starlet pipeline and released a full-length disco album. The self-titled 1979 record Ilona Staller contains highlights such as a cover of Leif Garrett’s 1978 hit “I Was Made for Dancing” and a disco version of the American standard “Save the Last Dance for Me.” There’s also a Michael Zager–authored track titled “It’s All Up to You,” originally recorded by Andrea True Connection. Most notably, though, the album contains Ennio Morricone’s “Cavallina Cavallo,” which appears in the softcore film Dedicato al Mare Egeo—an ethereal, mid-tempo track that fully highlights Staller’s wispy, high-pitched vocals. “It’s kind of a forerunner to Italo Disco, especially of its “sexy sound” iteration as embodied by Chrisma before they turned punk,” writes music and culture writer Demented Burrocacao in his book Italian Futuribili.

In 1980, she co-hosted Enzo Trapani’s C’era due volte, his follow-up attempt to combine fairytale, lite erotica, and varieté elements after his monumental 1978 show Stryx. Trapani was the first notable TV director who dared to bring nudity to national networks. And while both Stryx and C’era due volte were axed after only a few episodes, his version of nudity set the tone for decades to come. Its theme song starts as an acoustic lullaby whose lyrics adopt the structure “if I were X, I would do Y,” then, after the synths join in, she starts telling fairy tales. What stands out about C’era due volte is that, despite being shot in 1980, it still heavily features disco tracks, such as Queen Samantha’s “Sweet San Francisco,” Amadeo’s “Moving Like a Superstar,” and “Sex Appeal.” This goes to show how disco music’s popularity endured in Europe despite its sudden demise in North America.

As an aside, Trapani’s influence went beyond variety shows: even socialist Bettino Craxi, who published Garofano (Carnation), devoted an entire page of the publication to a topless woman having a drink, with the copy reading, “I vote socialist, how about you?” And while that initiative was panned—especially because the women of the socialist party were quite horrified—that stunt had everyone talking.

Her 1988 album Muscolo Rosso was released only in Spain by Boy Record. Many of its contents were penned by prog-rock and smooth-jazz musician Paolo Rustichelli, who worked under the pseudonym “Jay Horus.” Horus, an early synth appreciator since at least 1972, would go on to become one of the most eminent composers for the Italian adult-entertainment industry but he also composed the 1991 record Mystic Jazz, which featured performances by Miles Davis on the track “Capri” and Carlos Santana on “Full Moon.”

Watch the video for “Muscolo Rosso”

The title track “Muscolo Rosso,” whose melody is reminiscent of a 1980s anime opening theme but whose lyrics simply describe the joys of sex and getting railed, received heavy airplay in France, making it a local club hit. That’s how it percolated back to Italy, with Italians scavenging for copies just across the border. This thirst among Italians for a single that was banned in their country echoes what happened with the release of Je t’aime… moi non plus, which was heavily censored by RAI and had its available copies seized—yet it still received airplay from Radio Monte Carlo and Radio Capodistria.

“Russians” is a cover of Sting’s song of the same name, based on Lieutenant Kijé Suite, Op. 60 (Part II: Romance) by Sergei Prokofiev. In Staller’s version, it takes a stance against war, relying heavily on the words “atomic” and “anatomical,” as a pun. With its propulsive keys and elegantly thumping bassline, “Inno” is the main theme of the previous year’s Cicciolina Number One, an Italo-disco ballad that, in Demented Burrocacao’s words, has a little bit of Alphaville, a little bit of Moroder, a little bit of Gazebo. “Black Sado” has hints of psychedelia and foreshadows the new-agey soundscapes of the 1990s, while “Perversion” is robotic in a quintessentially 1980s way. “Animal Rock” samples “Old MacDonald” before descending into ‘80s-do-the-’50s synth-pop about bestiality. “Goccioline” feels like a lush, digital medieval fantasy.

Other notable tracks include the melancholic electro lullaby “Baby Love,” the recitativo-heavy “Professor of Percussions,” the anime-disco–like “Disco Smack,” and “Sexy Shop,” which she re-released for her greatest-hits album Italo Disco Queen, released in 2020.

Her productions have all the hallmarks of Italo disco: rich but melodic synths that indulge in wistfulness, ethereal vocals sung at the top of her register, much like the tracks in Amore by Alessandra Mussolini and even Valerie Doré’s The Legend. Where her performances do not have virtuosic vocals (and let’s face it, very few Italo productions have performers who are also distinguished vocalists), they remain a joyfully radical act that combines sex, giggles, and inventive melodies for something that is fully deserving of its cult status.