Italo disco: the name came from a warehouse in Germany

A genre usually takes its name from the people who play it, or from the people who listen. This one took its name from the man who kept it in a warehouse.

Bernhard Mikulski was a Pole who had emigrated to Germany. In 1971 he founded ZYX, an independent label that among other things imported Italian music into Germany and northern Europe.

At some point he ran into a filing problem. A lot of records were arriving from Italy at his large distribution warehouse, records that did not sound like each other and did not fit any existing box.

The criterion he chose was geographical rather than musical: they come from Italy, so call it italo disco. Between 1983 and 1991 ZYX released sixteen volumes of a compilation series called Best of Italo Disco, and the name stuck.

The people making it did not call it that

Before the name there were nearly ten years of records. The dates usually used to bracket the phenomenon, 1977 to 1985, come from the title of an English compilation released in 2008.

In Italy it was never recognised as a genre in its own right. That is the observation of Salvatore Cusato, who produced these records as Casco and still plays them in European clubs.

He only found out much later, through an internet search, that in Detroit and Chicago this was a leading sound. The people making the records had no idea where they ended up.

Seven minutes made with a razor blade

The way these records were made explains why they all sound slightly alike and slightly wrong. Alexander Robotnick’s “Problèmes d’amour”, from 1983, is the best documented case.

The track was built in a non-professional studio on a sixteen-track recorder. A Roland TR-808 drum machine acts as the master clock for everything else, and the bassline is a Roland TB-303.

The moves that would now take a mouse click were made by splicing tape with a razor. The original version runs seven minutes.

Behind the invented name is Maurizio Dami, and behind the character there is a deliberate piece of staging: a Russian immigrant singing in French, accent included.

That choice is a close cousin of what everyone else was doing, which was singing in English. Not real English: English convincing enough to sell abroad, under names that sounded Anglo-American.

Listen while you read

Years later, Robotnick sums up the effect in a line: people really liked the bassline, and they told him he had started electronic disco.

The market was somewhere else

Writing in English was not an affectation, it was the business plan. Italian producers saw that the tracks worked abroad and started writing for the international market.

Canada is the oddest case. The Italian community there was large, and Canadian labels did not stop at importing: they made their own records, cut locally.

Two different things ran side by side in the same years. One was the chart record, Pino D’Angiò’s “Ma quale idea” in 1980, which sold at home as well as everywhere else.

The other was the twelve-inch pressed in a few thousand copies, which filled a floor and then vanished. Klein & M.B.O.’s “Dirty Talk”, out in November 1982, runs five and a half minutes and belongs to that second family.

Today the name means the opposite

The word changed sense while nobody was watching. In the eighties italo disco simply meant disco made in Italy, million-selling hits included.

Now it points almost exclusively at the other half: the club records that never charted, the ones pressed in a few thousand copies.

The reversal is legible in the prices. An Italian million-seller is worth five or six euros as an original copy today, while some twelve-inches distributed in ten thousand copies worldwide go for hundreds.

Cusato names one, Brand Image’s “Are You Loving”. He also recalls opening his flight case in Copenhagen to find eight records gone: replacing them cost him a thousand euros.

The return to circulation did not start in Italy. In 2008 England’s Strut Records put out Disco Italia: Essential Italo Disco Classics 1977-1985, with the selection handed to an English DJ, Steve Kotey.

Music made in Italy to be sold elsewhere, christened in Germany, kept alive by the Dutch and the Spanish, reissued from London. The name, in the end, records precisely where the interest was not.

Worth hearing

• Pino D’Angiò, “Ma quale idea” (1980): the chart side of the phenomenon, the one that sold at home and not only in clubs.
• Klein & M.B.O., “Dirty Talk” (1982): five and a half minutes built for the floor rather than the radio, and the record where two italo DJs say they hear the basis of house.
• Alexander Robotnick, “Problèmes d’amour” (1983): a TR-808, a TB-303 and a Russian character singing in French, edited with a razor blade.
• Casco, “Cybernetic Love” (1983): Salvatore Cusato’s own record, later reissued in Belgium once requests started arriving from abroad.