The Italo-Dining and Disco club, presented for Vivid by Modulations, reminded us of summer holidays in Italy in the old days.
It sparked memories of traveling to small beach towns to discover that in Italy the beach is rented out by the square foot and you pay for everything, including the umbrellas and everything is organised and somebody’s patch – except the very small “public” beach situated next to an open sewer.
And that in Italy there isn’t much beach and the sand is a grubby brown cover and the water full of rubbish. But that style at the beach is everything and every boy smoked and flexed, and every girl got wolf whistled.
And in the evening you took the sun burn, mosquito bites and the embarrassment at being foreign to the town centre where restaurants set up outdoors with local wine in carafes, and amazingly tasty food came on paper plates. Stuff we just dreamed about like calamari and lasagne, and even vegetables that tasted amazing and weren’t boiled which all made our spaghetti seem very unsophisticated.
After the food and wine they pushed the tables aside and a terrible disco started. At first the parents and kids danced, and the teens stood around the sides but later the floor filed with the cool kids who arrived by scooter. And we felt superior because we didn’t understand the fascination with awful disco records and we thought English music was better.
But DJ Beppe Loda recaptured that sound for Modulations beneath a banner that proclaimed “DISCO ULTRAS”
A strange amalgamation of Progressive rock and Giorgio Moroder, with some New York jams thrown in alongside Nessun Dorma, next to sneaky African and Latin records & lots of re-edits and in the beautifully created vibe it all made sense.
So if you like disco different it’s worth a try and you can take “il magico” home!
It would seem obvious that Italo-Disco was linked but it’s not really, being much more commercial and “hit based”. But it’s still really bizarre and interesting, with as many hits as it had misses. So if you fancy a window on that rather unique world here’s a very good TGIF- playlist on which no one knows the artists well enough to dwell but the records are rather unique! Click HERE for just a bit of pure fun for a Friday!
-TH
[Beppe Loda is one of two Italian DJs who can justifiably claim to have reinvented dance music, alongside Daniele Baldelli. Typically they were split North & South – with Beppe representing the Northern “Afro” sound and Daniele the “Cosmic” sound. Naturally the Afro sound reflects Loda’s heavy use of African and Latin rhythms, as opposed to Baldelii’s more electro/new wave ones, but honestly it’s hard to tell the difference now. What they both ARE is early Balearic and as such incredibly cool and worth listening to!)
