Dj Casco tells his story

We're wearing new clothes now that we talk about italo-disco. It's neither our passion nor something we were particularly proud of back in the star-spangled 1980s. And yet, as Italians, italo-disco is in our blood, because it reached us through soundtracks (from Claudio Simonetti's work for Dario Argento's films to Giorgio Moroder's "Midnight Express") and assorted hits from a very young age. So, as the saying goes, "nemo propheta in patria" (no one is a prophet in their own land): while we buried it for at least two decades, abroad it kept thriving, gathering disciples and captivating admirers. So much so that, in recent years, a genuine "italo-renaissance" has been sweeping across dancefloors in half of Europe (especially in the North): themed nights, hunts for 45s, the revival of vintage instruments symbolic of a generation (Moog and Korg technology above all).

If for us italo-disco still tends to rhyme with dubious-taste chart hits, there is nonetheless a darker, more genuine and original side to it, one that deserves to be rediscovered and reassessed — both for the genius of certain artists (Giorgio Moroder first and foremost), and for the huge influence it went on to have on the development of dance music (the "characters" of the Chicago house scene, the forerunners of techno and trance music, and even the Chemical Brothers, openly acknowledge the debt — and you can hear it).

Say italo-disco to a DJ in Berlin or London and what comes to mind are dance tracks pairing a warm, repetitive vocal melody (often run through a vocoder) with a futuristic, "spacious" and tremendously danceable sound, built from first-generation effects produced by synthesizers, drum machines and vocoders. A trivial description at first glance, but a genuine breakthrough on closer inspection. While the German futurists were making colder, more mechanical music and the French experimenters were toying with the avant-garde, the Italians conjured up a perfect cybernetic world for the dancefloor, for track mixing, laced with a distinctly Latin taste for melody and decadent romanticism.

Let's recap the timeline: in the late 1970s dance music explodes (already dubbed italo-disco by the Germans) and soon splits into two strands: a commercial dance strain that sells millions of copies, and a dance strain (later a "cult" one) that cares less about big sales figures than about getting even the highest platform shoes moving under the strobe light. While the former disappears quickly (like all mass phenomena), cult italo-disco finds disciples and admirers (especially between England and Germany) who turn it into an exclusive alternative weekend hobby, keeping that interest alive for at least a couple of decades. Given the rarity and the astronomical prices original records had come to fetch, and given the well-deserved tributes paid by international DJs and producers, in the 2000s italo-disco resurfaces as a cult phenomenon, once again taking over the decks of major clubs and getting new audiences dancing on the strength of the allure of those "forgotten sounds".

The moment is sealed by the compilation “Disco Italy – Essential Italo-disco Classics 1977-1985“, released at the end of May by Strut Records, an English label that would deserve an article all to itself. Since we can only spare a paragraph, let's stick to the essentials: Strut Records was founded in 2000 on the initiative of Quinton Scott (previously at Harmless) to shine a light on the musical background that today's hits draw from. A fine philological intent, matched by an extraordinary skill in compiling the material and by the consistently high quality of the booklets (period photos and stories, artwork, liner notes by knowledgeable writers).

With such credentials, interest seemed guaranteed (at least in Britain), and yet Strut folded in 2003. We now see it reborn thanks to Berlin-based !K7 Records, which, despite the tough times for the music business, believes in the label and wears it as a badge of honour. In the first five months of 2008, it has released the excellent compilations “Disco Not Disco: Post Punk, Electro & Leftfield Disco Classics 1974-1986“, “Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980-1986”, “The August Darnell Years 1974 -1982”, “Nigeria 70 Lagos Jump: Original Heavyweight Afrobeat, Highlife & Afro Funk“.

The same approach applies to “Disco Italy: Essential Italo Disco Classics 1977-1985” (June 2008, distributed in Italy by Audioglobe), where the chosen tracks piece together the genuine feel of a glittering era now living through its second, more understated youth.

The compilation brings together original classics and embarrassingly rare b-sides from some of the era's best-known producers, from Claudio Simonetti and Giancarlo Meo (aka Kasso and Easy Going) to Peter Micioni and Balearic Favourite, all the way to Tullio De Piscopo and l'Olandese Volante.

The album's 13 tracks (some appearing on CD for the first time) were selected by someone who knows more than a thing or two about dance music, Steve Kotey, a member of DJ/producer collective Chicken Lips and boss of the Bear Entertainment label.

We too spoke about it with an italo-disco DJ who has spent an entire career behind the decks of Europe's best clubs, and still does today (for astronomical fees). He is Salvatore Cusato, aka Casco (the man behind the 1983 hit “Cybernetic Love”), who had this to say about the new Strut release: “it's a compilation where classic original tracks sit alongside more minor cuts, in which the era's finest artists nonetheless shine through, from the great Simonetti and Micioni to the legendary D.D.Sound and Malavasi. A compilation well worth recommending both for dancing and for listening, since it gathers rarities that capture the genre's originality”.

Given such flattering praise for “Disco Italy”, we thought we'd continue the chat with Casco to tell the story of the italo-disco phenomenon through the eyes of one of its protagonists.

With Salvatore we talked about the role of the DJ in the 1970s (his beginnings and his story), the birth of italo-disco and its social context, and the “italo disco renaissance” we're currently witnessing. These are the three themes of our long conversation.

Being a DJ in the 1970s

Salvatore, your story is a very long one and we'd love to tell it in full, but, knowing you a bit, no amount of web space would be enough. Take us, step by step, through how your career developed, because you've lived a DJ's life right up to today. What does that mean?

Having spent a childhood glued to my one and only toy: a gramophone, one of those with the “His Master's Voice” logo. I'd play at spinning the crank faster to make it sound like Donald Duck, or like the great Caruso. My father was mad about opera singing, and his one luxury was that gramophone, which he let only me touch (out of the eight children we were). I soon realised that would be the only real pleasure of my whole life. In fact, I lived through the evolution of the DJ profession right from its earliest days. At 16 I started learning the dance repertoire from the orchestras. With painstaking patience I'd jot down in a notebook all the dance tunes I managed to glimpse on the musicians' sheet music, then I'd go and buy them for the venue owner from the jukebox suppliers, and play them during the little band's breaks. I saw that people danced just the same. The owner noticed it too, and that's how, starting from the orchestra's breaks, I gradually got more and more time.

My first night as a DJ at a real discotheque (Ovest Danze in Genoa) came when a crafty DJ, who had a habit of abandoning the decks during slow songs, left me a nice run of slow numbers to play and then never came back: that's how, on 4 October 1971, I found myself at the controls of the decks of my first real discotheque. From that moment on, I never stopped.

How was “discotheque music” born?

As early as '72, young people favoured novelty: the wave of 45s marked “for djs only” or “discotheque specials” was a true godsend for pioneering DJs.

Dance music split into “discotheque music” and “hit parade”. Buying records became easier, since the sleeve of the 45 would carry the words “discotheque music” in various forms (suggestive images of bodies in motion, hints of the sensuality of the emerging phenomenon). You'd listen to the record in the shop's booths and then decide whether to buy it. Whoever designed the sleeve artwork played a fundamental role, making sure dance music could first work as an object of visual temptation before ending up in the “DJ's hand” and becoming a tool for dancing. There were no reference points like specialist magazines, specialist charts, free radio stations or anything of the sort, so those logos I mentioned were a great invention, and became the trait d'union between two emerging forces: the discotheque DJ and discotheque music.

What were you playing back then?

A preamble: audiences were split into two categories, the orchestra crowd that went wild for mixed rhythms and classic evergreens, and the club crowd, where sometimes a band would play - underground, mind you - covering Vanilla Fudge, Brian Auger and Trinity, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. In clubs I often found myself alternating on stage with historic names of the Genoa music scene, like the fledgling Trolls (later New Trolls), the New Jet (later Matia Bazar), the legendary Garybaldi, Nuova Idea, Gleemen, Latte e Miele and many others who went on to become famous for their progressive rock.

Once their psychedelic set was over, we'd pick things back up with Sex Machine or the more sophisticated Thomas Booker and Mg's, Isaac Hayes, Stevie Wonder and the whole Tamla-Motown sound. There was also room for British glam rock, filed under club music, meaning T. Rex, Gary Glitter, Sweet etc.

The DJ could also suddenly turn delightfully daft (there'd come a point for the "tuca tuca" towards the end, and the casatchok, the letkiss, and the conga line to Fausto Papetti's "Samba d'orphée"), and then move into the revival moment (and I'd spin a 60s record, or my favourite slow number: Procol Harum's "Fortuna"). Unlike today, back then there was just one DJ at the booth all night, blending different styles and genres together.

From disco music to Italo disco: a brief history of a genre

In the 70s you were a "generalist" DJ, so to speak, whereas today you're an Italo disco DJ - a style of music that back then was mixed in with plenty of other sounds, but today stands as its own cult genre. Do you agree? How did it become a genre in its own right? And finally: what does Italo disco mean to you?

The step from generalism to specialization is a short one. Times change, and as in every profession, specialization yields more fruit, both for those who sow and for those who get to taste it. Genres no longer mix. A DJ has to be a bit like a good farmer, ploughing his own little plot. I chose Italo disco because I consider it the most fertile ground for me to sow in.

In its early days, there were two kinds of Italo disco: the commercial hit-parade kind (records built to order for the charts, think "Happy Children"), and the kind that later became a cult phenomenon. The latter took shape starting with Giorgio Moroder's productions in the mid-70s, when rock began giving more and more ground to sequencers and vocoders. Some Italian DJs turned producers, struck by the genre, absorbed the feeling that Moroder's Teutonic sound brought to the dancefloor. Having learned the lesson, in the early 80s they gave rise to a genuine musical movement. Thus was born cult Italo disco. Its common traits: a particular attention to melancholy melodies, synth-riff beds repeated obsessively, and a distinctive structure in which the intro, the break and the ending carried as much weight as the chorus (or rather, the gimmick). Unlike commercial Italo disco, these were extended mixes made purely for the joy of dancing and to make the DJ's job easier when mixing.

The fact that Italo has become a genre in its own right is also thanks to the internet, specifically to those maniacs on eBay. To give you a comparison: a million-selling hit produced in Italy in the 80s is valued today (or rather "devalued") at around 5-6 euros per original copy, while Italo cult records that back then barely reached a worldwide distribution of 10,000 copies now sail up into the hundreds of euros per copy! Brand Image's "Are You Loving" is a case in point.

Italo disco is nothing but a back to the future. Too far ahead of its time then, too current now.

Where does the term Italo disco come from?

It all comes from Bernhard Mikulski, the fiery Polish emigrant to Germany. One day, already at the helm of Zyx, he decided to slap a label on the many records arriving from Italy into his huge distribution warehouse. What genre to give to all those "Dolce Vita", "Vamos a la Playa", "I Like Chopin" and so on? They came from Italy, so he settled on "Italo disco", which ended up muddling genres and styles together, united only by their geographic origin. Today, though, the term has taken on the opposite meaning: it now refers only to records that were never a huge hit-parade success, but a hit at club level, selling a decent number of mixes (a few thousand was enough).

To be "Italo" today, a record has to be practically impossible to find and bear some resemblance to Giorgio Moroder, and ideally to the great Claudio Simonetti, another founding father of the Italo cult sound.

Where did people play Italo disco back then? Where did you play, and where do you play now?

Italo dance in general was played everywhere in the 80s, in every club. I was resident DJ on weekends between '82 and '85 at the Piranha in Novara.

As for abroad, I knew that a certain kind of italo was being played in parallel in Spain (the labels Max Music and Blanco Y Negro championed the trend), as well as in Germany thanks to the late, already-mentioned Bernd Mikulski. Only later did I discover, thanks to Google, that in Detroit and Chicago it was a leading genre.

Today I'm bringing that same genre back (the one from Piranha's golden years) from Scandinavia to Russia, from France to Spain, in the UK and even in Australia: there, a "Casco club" has sprung up where they're making preparations to welcome real italo played by an "old DJ" dug up out of mothballs for them... that's me, would you believe it.

Italo-disco renaissance

Casco, at least 15 years of silence and then, from the new millennium, the rebirth: would you agree if we said we're witnessing a renaissance of the italo-disco genre?

Absolutely, every day there are more articles and websites talking about it, more compilations and venues throwing nights dedicated to it.

Everyone's crazy about italo-disco, except Italians. It sounds like a film title, but it's actually a short description of a phenomenon that's discredited in its own homeland. Can we say why?

Is it all Alfredo's fault? No... rather, credit goes to the Spanish and the Dutch. Some Dutch DJ, playing electronic sets in the disco's tierra caliente (Barcelona), discovers that Moroder is as relevant as ever and that music produced in Italy in the '80s is easy to mix into a set alongside today's electro: from Moroder to Patrick Cowley, by way of the very Italian Easy Going, the step forward is not just short but painless too. The audience picks up on it, and a small window of vitality opens.

Meanwhile, a pair of Spanish journalists, Javier Blánquez and Omar Morera, write "Una historia de la música electrónica" for Mondadori, the first official encyclopedia of electronic music, and they can't help but cite the forerunners of the vocoder-and-sequencer genre. So, thanks in part to this bestseller, italo-disco gains more relevance. Radio shows dedicated purely to italo-cult spring up (Cbs above all), and even labels start reissuing bootlegs. On Myspace, people start invoking strange names danced to on italo-disco nights, and people start asking who Cellophan Brain, Camarro, Digital Game, Mr Flagio, Charlie, Mito, Sphinx, Dharma Alexander Robotnik and, last but not least, yours truly actually are. Some of these, still active as DJs, answer the call and get booked to perform; others keep quiet, either because they've erased that era from their lives or because they have no idea they've become cult figures (one name above all, Alex Novaga, check discogs.com).

The difficulty of finding these records also played a role in italo-disco's rebirth: where there's rarity, a cult is born.

What does it mean, on the other hand, to be an italo-disco DJ today?

Good question. First of all, it means being a nemo propheta in patria. Italo-disco has always been snubbed in Italy, where for quite a few years now house seems to be the only thing that exists in clubs. But beyond that, in Italy, unlike in other European countries, italo-disco isn't considered a genre in its own right. It's always been mostly a phenomenon in English-speaking countries, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Spain.

I'm told, in fact, that your fees abroad are still quite high today and that your old 45s are worth quite a lot. How much?

An anecdote explains it better than numbers would: not long ago, before getting behind the decks in Copenhagen, I opened my flightcase and realized 8 records were missing. Stolen in a moment when I wasn't paying attention: I spent 1,000 euros buying them back. I did it gladly, but by now certain records really ought to be kept in a safe, not in an ordinary DJ bag.

Which DJ-producers do you rate most highly today? And which of them make clear references to original italo-disco?

I've always had favourite producers for every era, but one stands above all: Giorgio Moroder. I can't put any other name next to his, it would be sacrilege. The funny thing is everyone talks about him, but few actually know his complete body of work. It should be taught in music history classes right alongside Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart and so on.

You keep touring clubs across Europe with 45rpm italo-disco singles, but who's the audience dancing to your music today?

Yes, true, I play a lot of 45s, the sound is much richer and clearer than the awful CDs and absurd mp3s. The crowd sometimes just stares, enchanted and curious, wondering if I still run on coal. But the ones who stay glued to the dancefloor don't know what's spinning, they dance because the moment was right for that particular song. It's a mixed crowd when I play as DJ Discjokin, whereas they're only Casco fans when I go out as DJ Casco. 

Your own fame hasn't been left out of this revival either: can you briefly tell us how you came to have your hits “Cybernetic Love” and “Stop/Living Up” reissued by the Belgian label N.E.W.S on Radius Records?

Fame… wow, what an honor… I re-read that word four times before continuing with this very pleasant question, are you talking to me? I'll gladly answer, because I want to give credit where it's due to Belgian DJ Spacid, the deus ex machina of the Radius label. They paid close attention to the needs of that market segment and believed they'd be doing something the growing fanbase wanted, since fans had been asking on Myspace for reissues of those tracks. They brought in current DJs to do the remixes (expensive but worthwhile), and even now, years after the reissues, requests for the compilations haven't stopped. Well done, Radius Records.

Are you still a full-time DJ-producer today?

Yes, they say it's the second-best job in the world, by the way.

Any projects in the works?

I'm preparing the second volume of “Myspace Top Electro Hits,” coming soon on my digital label “Music Control,” distributed by the industry leader the orchard and presented by the up-and-coming Milanese DJ Pippi Kid. I've also got a production in the works under the Casco name, in collaboration with a legendary name from the italo-cult scene. As the great Nino Manfredi used to say, “fusse ca fusse la vota bona”.

Thank you so much, Casco, it's been a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you, Livia, for the interview, and thanks to all you unrepentant italo lovers out there. Oh, and if you want to listen to some italo, head to www.myspace.com/casco1.

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