THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

A guest posting by Leon MacDuff

Around this time last year, I offered up an ICA looking at what Giorgio Moroder had got up to in 1983. And I ended with a bit of a tease regarding what was to come in 1984, so it’s time to deliver, right? I wouldn’t say the quality or musical diversity of this ICA necessarily matches the 1983 selection, but I think there is still a lost gem or two, a story or several you may not have heard before, and maybe the odd song that may not be what you’d expect from the people involved. And the opening track is a solid gold classic…

Side One

(1) Giorgio Moroder & Philip Oakey: Together In Electric Dreams

Plot summary of the movie Electric Dreams: Young architect Miles buys a home computer to help him in designing an earthquake-resistant brick. You want to see this movie already, don’t you? But wait, there’s more! Hooking it up to his employers’ database and attempting to download “everything”, Miles causes the computer to overheat and in a panic tries to cool it down by pouring champagne on it. Good job this guy’s an architect and not an electrician. Or a sommelier. Naturally there’s sparks and smoke but the computer is not dead, quite the opposite in fact as it has somehow become sentient… and then the next hour follows a love triangle between Madeline the cellist who lives downstairs, Miles, and the computer, but to cut a long story short, after much hijinks and cyberjealousy, eventually the computer sacrifices itself to give Miles a chance of happiness with Madeline. Before it gets destroyed by a massively improbable plot device, the computer reveals its name as Edgar, and it having a name was obviously meant to be a tear-jerking revelation but the publicity people clearly didn’t understand narrative structure and put the big reveal on the poster, so everybody knew already. The main thing is, it does come up with a design for the earthquake-resistant brick, so it’s a happy ending really. Well, assuming you’re really into earthquake-resistant bricks, but then again, who isn’t? No, it is actually better than I’m making it sound. Weirdly, there’s been serious talk lately about a remake, though I can’t see it working now. In a world with AI everywhere, Edgar would have to be less intelligent than the average computer – though admittedly if you pour champagne over the motherboard, that is actually a more realistic outcome.

But back to 1984. And back to relevance. The whole concept of Electric Dreams was that it would be a musical, but – like Flashdance the previous year – rather than having the characters themselves burst into song, the action would be shot like music videos accompanying the songs on the soundtrack. Writer-producer Rusty Lemorande (great name) wanted no more than two songs from any given artist – though he did briefly consider taking Jeff Lynne up on his offer to do the whole thing. Arguably the headline act is Culture Club, who offer a pair of ballads (if you look up Love Is Love online you’ll find loads of people commenting on how beautiful it is, which is pretty hilarious considering that in the context of the film it’s explicitly a bunch of cliches put together by a computer struggling with the concept of human emotion… I mean, it’s essentially “ChatGPT, write me a love song”). P.P. Arnold gets the opening title song, although in the movie you only hear the chorus because the verses give away the plot (“He was a boy who bought a computer… taking over was its only crime!” Yeah, quite a biggie though, wasn’t it?). Jeff Lynne gets two songs, of which Video is especially of-its-time. Heaven 17 supply a driving synth instrumental, Chase Runner – and while Moroder wasn’t involved there, it’s pretty much a straight homage to him, even to the point of having a title that combines two of his!

And as for Giorgio himself, despite the supposed two-track maximum, he actually manages to have a hand in no fewer than four: two instrumentals credited to him alone (an underscore piece called Madeline’s Theme, and The Duel, which we’ll get to later), an upbeat number called Now You’re Mine, sung by “fifth Culture Clubber” Helen Terry, and of course this classic from the movie’s finale, when Edgar – who has somehow transferred his consciousness to what we’d now call “the cloud” – bids farewell to Miles and Madeline by making this song play on every radio in California. (Moroder himself has a fleeting and funny cameo as a radio producer wondering what the hell is going on.)

And the single… you know the single. A compendium of fantastic moments: that shimmering intro, the “however far it SEEMS!” in the chorus, Elizabeth Daily‘s “Love ne-ver ends!” and Richie Zito’s crunchy guitar solo… it doesn’t try to be clever-clever, it’s just brilliantly put together. Maybe it’s become over-familiar – it’s certainly one of the media’s go-to tracks for evoking the era – but genuinely, it’s just great, isn’t it?

(2) Berlin: Dancing In Berlin

The name alone was a clue that Los Angeles new wavers Berlin looked to Europe for their inspiration, and when you actually heard them, it wasn’t hard to spot the influence of electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder. So a collaboration was an obvious move, and for the group’s third album Love Life, they managed to book some time out of Moroder’s busy schedule to lay down a couple of tracks. (OMD producer Mike Howlett handled the remainder.) On this occasion Moroder was not called upon to write anything but just to produce. And the band – and Geffen Records – were obviously very pleased with the results, since those two songs also became the album’s singles. No More Words was probably the more popular, but I’m sharing Dancing In Berlin as it feels like more of a classic Moroder production.

Of course it also led to Berlin getting the call two years later to record Take My Breath Away for the Top Gun soundtrack, one of Moroder’s biggest hits but so far from Berlin’s previous sound that it ended up causing massive disagreements over their future direction, resulting in them splitting up and only talking to each other through lawyers for ages. They’re all friends again now, though.

(3) Janet Jackson with Cliff Richard: Two To The Power Of Love

Janet Jackson seemed to burst onto the scene with her style fully-formed on 1986’s “Control”, but before that, she recorded two albums that even her fans never really talk about. The second of these was 1984’s Dream Street, for which Moroder produced five tracks including this one. Now, I’m not going to pretend this is a lost classic. It’s better than you’d expect, but nevertheless, it’s as good an example as you could wish for to explain why nobody ever talks about the early Janet Jackson LPs.

I’m including it for two reasons: firstly, because the fact that Janet Jackson recorded a love duet with Cliff Richard, and Giorgio Moroder produced it, is so bizarre that unless presented with the evidence, nobody would ever believe it. And secondly… look, I know this is a wild idea, but you know how David Hasselhoff goes on about how his song Looking For Freedom helped to bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall – and how, much as everyone mocks him for it, the really weird thing is that he may actually have a point? Well, I’ve never noticed any of the people involved in this record claiming that it helped, even in the tiniest way, to bring about the end of apartheid, but the one place it actually became a top ten hit was South Africa, where the front cover looked like this:

Terrible design (it doesn’t even get the full title on!), but also a harbinger of change? I know it’s a hell of a stretch, but little things do feed into bigger things and, well, I’m just putting the hypothesis out there… I do so wish it had been a better song, though.

(4) Freddie Mercury: Love Kills

When Moroder was working with David Bowie on the title song for the 1982 remake of classic 40s horror Cat People, talk naturally turned to the pair’s common love of European expressionist cinema. Both men harboured an ambition to find a suitable old silent film and put a modern soundtrack to it, and at this stage Bowie had been trying to get the rights to one film for years. Moroder’s project was already more advanced: he had, he enthused, found and acquired the rights to a movie nobody had heard of but which was ideal for his purpose: a 1927 dystopian epic called Metropolis. Bowie was a bit taken aback, but didn’t let on that this was the very same film he’d had his eye on. Maybe if he had mentioned it, there could have been a collaboration: Moroder and Bowie doing a full film score together, now there’s a dream team.

Moroder ploughed money into having the film restored, tinted, and re-edited to make sense (necessary because at the time large parts of it were still missing). And he wrote a full score with songs performed by some big names: Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant were pretty big catches, as was Jon Anderson (coming off the back of Yes‘s US number one Owner of A Lonely Heart) but the biggest coup of all was getting Freddie Mercury, who brought with him a song idea he’d been kicking around for a few years, initially as a ballad before Moroder reworked it into the pulsating electropop groove heard here.

While most of the backing is played by session keyboardist Fred Mandel, many years later it emerged that all of the other members of Queen made contributions as well. This wasn’t entirely surprising and many people had already surmised as much, considering that it was taped during sessions for Queen’s own 1984 album The Works, which was recorded – as the last couple of Queen albums had been – at Moroder’s Munich studio Musicland with in-house producer Reinhold Mack. (Mandel is on The Works too – most memorably providing the wah-wah laden not-a-guitar solo on I Want To Break Free.)

Love Kills was the lead single from the soundtrack, a pretty substantial hit, a barnstorming club monster, and it goes down in history as Freddie Mercury’s first ever solo single – as long as you ignore the Larry Lurex episode, which luckily everyone does.

(5) Giorgio Moroder: The Duel

This one’s just plain fun. We’re back to Electric Dreams and one of the movie’s highlights. The first demonstration of Edgar’s newfound sentience comes when Miles goes out, the cello player downstairs starts practising – and Edgar joins in. So this is their duet, or duel. A word of warning: this track has full stereo separation with the cello in the left channel and the computer on the right. So you really do need to be listening in stereo for this one. If you’re on a single speaker / earbud / whatever, you’ll be missing half the duet and all of the point.

Side Two

(1) Giorgio Moroder and Paul Engemann: Reach Out

On my first Giorgio Moroder ICA, side two opened with a cheesy but suprisingly popular song performed by Paul Engemann. So with that precedent in mind, it was obvious what had to fill the spot this time.

If you give the Olympic Games to Los Angeles, you can hardly be surprised if they make it a bit showbiz. The LA Games arguably invented the even-more-modern-than-the-Modern Olympic Games, for which part of the masterplan was bringing music into the presentation – and with the world’s top film composers right there on their doorstep, naturally the Games were going to be scored like an action blockbuster. The likes of John Williams, Christopher Cross, recent Oscar winner Bill Conti, Philip Glass and Herbie Hancock all supplied pieces to the soundtrack, as of course did Giorgio Moroder, whose “Reach Out” was designated the “Track Theme” although it wound up as arguably the most-recognised sonic signature of the games, alongside John Williams’ “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” (the latter remains well-known in the US as it’s been NBC’s theme for its Olympics coverage ever since).

Is Reach Out a great song outside of that context? I wouldn’t say so, no, mainly because Tom Whitlock‘s “inspirational” lyric just grates too much. But it’s absolutely spot-on for that moment, in the same way that Together In Electric Dreams is exactly right for the climax of its movie. So much so, that it wouldn’t be the last time Moroder and Whitlock were commissioned to write the theme for a sporting event: they would also go on to write songs for the 1988 Seoul Olympics (Hand in Hand) and the 1990 FIFA World Cup (To Be Number One). Those are pretty cheesy too – but they certainly did the job.

(2) Melissa Manchester: Thief of Hearts

From the list of people involved in the Thief of Hearts soundtrack, you could be forgiven for thinking it must be another Moroder score: among the contributors were his frequent backing singers Beth Andersen, Elizabeth Daily, Joe Esposito and Joe Pizzulo, guitarist Richie Zito, lyricist Keith Forsey and programmer Brian Reeves. It was basically Moroder’s entire regular crew, and even recorded at his Beverley Hills studio, Oasis, but actually the man in charge was another recurring Moroder collaborator, his sometime protégé Harold Faltermeyer, who considers it the start of his own career in soundtracks. Moroder’s one contribution was writing the title song, and though he got a production credit as well, it seems he wasn’t exactly hands-on.

From Faltermeyer’s autobiography Where’s the Orchestra?:-

“Although Giorgio declined to score it, because he was busy with various projects, he agreed to contribute at least one song to the project. He quickly came up with a song called Thief of Hearts, and we needed to find a singer. We were lucky to sign Melissa Manchester for this […] I got busy working on a demo, which we sent over to Melissa. She was quite happy with it, so we were rockin’ and rollin’. Under one condition: Giorgio had to be present for the vocal session, because who was Harold Faltermeyer? Giorgio’s appearance was limited to a “Good morning boys”, or in this case: “Here she is!” With this he disappeared, and we did the rest. Once I got famous, her management asked me to produce her, typical Hollywood but at that point I didn’t even consider it!”

This particular version is the remix by John “Jellybean” Benitez, who at this point seemed to be the “soundtrack doctor”, sprinkling his remixing magic on movies like Breakdance, Footloose and… The Muppets Take Manhattan?! Yes, really. Variety is the spice of life!

(3) Giorgio Moroder: Rotwang’s Party (Robot Dance)

As well as the ten tracks featured on the Metropolis soundtrack album, there were further instrumentals hidden away on the B sides of the three singles. Bonnie Tyler‘s “Here She Comes” shares its vinyl with a confused slow-fast-slow piece called Obsession that I don’t rate all that highly; Jon Anderson‘s Cage Of Freedom has Workers’ Dance which lacks a real hook but would have made a decent theme for a TV technology show (and might still do even now); but the pick of the bunch is this one from the Love Kills single. The influence on known fans Daft Punk is evident particularly toward the end, and paired with Love Kills it made for a good value package.

(4) Limahl: L’Histoire Sans Fin

Although Giorgio Moroder is fluent in five languages, he tends not to write lyrics in any of them, preferring to pen the melodies and leave the actual words to his collaborators – if he’s working with a big name artist then they’ll often provide their own lyrics, while the rest of the time it falls to one of his regulars such as Pete Bellotte, Keith Forsey or the now late Tom Whitlock. Sure, he cares about the quality of the lyrics, but basically, the words in a Moroder song are first and foremost a medium for melodies. And that, combined with the notion that maybe it would be nice to offer something a bit less familiar, is my excuse for including this oddity on the ICA.

Of course in its English version (words by Forsey), The NeverEnding Story is one of Moroder’s biggest and most familiar hits. Since The NeverEnding Story was a German film – still the highest-grossing German film of all time, as it happens – it would make sense for the title song to also have a version in German, but actually the German version of the film didn’t use the song at all. It didn’t even use Moroder’s music – Moroder and Klaus Doldinger each wrote scores and the international release has a pick’n’mix from both, but the German cut went with Doldinger alone.

The French and Canadian single releases did however feature – as a B side – this version en Français, with a loose translation by prolific Francophone songwriter Pierre-André Dousset, and original co-lead vocalist Beth Andersen replaced by Parisienne A-list session singer Ann Calvert. To be honest, I rather miss “Show no fear / Or she may fade away…” and I’m so used to Andersen’s wailing before the instrumental break that Calvert’s imitation just doesn’t sound right. But the tune’s still hard to resist. I just wonder what this would have sounded like in German?

(5) Pat Benatar: Here’s My Heart

A lighters-in-the-air moment to finish. To my mind, this should have been the big breakout hit from Metropolis. It pops up twice in the movie and a third time as a triumphant reprise over the credits, but the version released on the soundtrack album is a weirdly stodgy remake with different lyrics. Which then wasn’t even issued as a single, so it wound up as a bit of a lost song, never performed live and not featured on a Pat Benatar album until it popped up many years later as the conclusion of her otherwise chronologically-sequenced career retrospective Synchronistic Wanderings.

However the actual movie version is much stronger, and it’s easy enough to find the full film score online, so a bit of fiddling about in Audacity et voila! You can find videos on YouTube where people have just run the three original variations together, resulting in an awkwardly-structured song that runs nearly eight minutes, but I’ve gone for a tighter edit that is pretty much the same length as the album version, give or take a few seconds, and I think could have worked as a single too. This could so easily have been a karaoke standard – it’s got the kind of chorus people would find it hard to resist having a go at. I don’t think many people could do it quite this well, though: I have to admit, basically only knowing Benatar from her growly rock hits, I hadn’t realised quite what a strong melodic vocalist she actually is.

So that’s Moroder’s 1984. I don’t think there will be a 1985 ICA because he just didn’t do all that much in ’85: apart from a dashed-off Giorgio Moroder & Philip Oakey album (which neither man rates highly, though I think it’s actually pretty good), his only other significant release was the odds-and-ends collection Innovisions, which I remember being a staple of the reduced-price racks for a very long time afterwards. And after that, well, there are stories later on but I’m not sure the music itself is quite so interesting. But of course Moroder’s career goes back in time from here as well as forward, so… watch this space!

Leon