You either know Giorgio Moroder from the 1975 hit ‘Love To Love You Baby’ or Daft Punk’s recent ‘Giorgio By Moroder’. There’s no way you’ve escaped this Italian record-producer-turned-DJ. In fact this 75-year-old granddaddy of disco has worked on the soundtrack of classics like Top Gun and Scarface and collaborated with everyone from David Bowie, Cher and Freddie Mercury to recent chart favourites like Sia and Charli XCX. In terms of young acts to watch he picks Charli XCX. Who he describes as “a very good talent, very good composer, [she has] very good presence. She is definitely one girl who is going to become very big. She is already big in the music scene but she could become bigger.”
He took to DJing only in 2013, even though he claimed to have the “first electronic live-to-digital album” with E=MC² and was among the early adopters of the synthesizer. His most memorable gigs are both good and bad: “The bad one was in Greece, on an island where the discotheque was not finished. When they opened it, it was half empty. The best one was in Italy where I performed in a park, and the organiser underestimated the amount of people that were coming and the crowd just grew and grew – it was a huge success! That was overwhelming. And of course a gig I’m really looking forward to is Johnnie Walker The Journey in Mumbai!”
He has a strong legacy but if he had to pick only three songs to be remembered by Moroder says they’d be: “’Love To Love You Baby’ because it was one of the most sensuous songs and my first big hit; ‘Flash Dance’ which worked so well in the movie, and then definitely ‘I Feel Love’ as a new kind of song.” Ahead of his gig, stream the songs to know him by with this #ELLEPlaylist.
Giorgio Moroder performs at Johnnie Walker The Journey, in Mumbai on December 12. .Johnniewalkerthejourney.com
