Cerrone

Dancing on the edge of the apocalypse. An irresistible rhythm, an electronic pulse that offers no escape, synths moving with ominous intent, and a mysterious voice foretelling nature's revolt against those who tried to manipulate it. This is "Supernature", the masterpiece with which Marc Cerrone turned the dancefloor into the setting for an Armageddon. A sort of ecological nightmare disguised as a disco music anthem, able to make the Saturday night fever coexist with the dread of a future spiraling out of control. Miracles of the year of our Lord 1977.

The sound of the future

There couldn't have been a more fitting moment for such a short-circuit. 1977 was a year of parallel musical revolutions: while punk was shaking rock to its foundations, the discos were preparing an equally radical transformation. Disco music, grown at the crossroads of funk, soul and club culture, was beginning to break free of its orchestral roots to explore the infinite possibilities of electronics. The path had been blazed above all by the man who held the title of "the sound of the future" (as Brian Eno famously put it), his majesty Giorgio Moroder, who with "I Feel Love" — made together with Pete Bellotte for Donna Summer — had ushered in a new era: pulsing synth bass, hypnotic sequences and a futuristic sensuality destined to influence entire generations of producers. Hypnotized by that sound, first and foremost, would be the man who'd come to be recognized as the godfather of French Touch, monsieur Cerrone.

Born in 1952 in Vitry-sur-Seine, near Paris, but of Italian descent (his father was from Frosinone), self-taught drummer Marc Cerrone cut his teeth playing on the Côte d'Azur in clubs and holiday resorts as drummer for Kongas, a sextet that also featured Raymond Donnez, aka Don Ray, on keyboards, blending Afro, funk and rock rhythms. After a few years he set off on a solo path, developing a language in which the centrality of the drums went hand in hand with a pronounced taste for orchestral arrangements and lengthy compositions built for clubs.
His debut album, "Love In C Minor" (1976), had been an unexpected success, boosted above all by its popularity among American DJs. The title track, a suite running over 15 minutes and dominated by lush strings, funk pulses and sensual atmospheres, had shown how European disco music could compete with its American counterpart while still developing an identity of its own.
The following "Cerrone's Paradise" (1977) had consolidated that formula, but the French spaceboy was starting to feel its limits. Fascinated by the experiments of Kraftwerk and by their ability to turn mechanical repetition into a hypnotic experience, he was searching for a new direction. And it was precisely during the making of his third album, at Trident Studios in London, that a chance encounter with technology would radically change his course.

A synth as a gift

As Cerrone himself recounted in an interview with Neil Mason for Electronic Sound, it all began with the arrival at his home of an Arp Odyssey synthesizer, a kind gift from the manufacturer. Cerrone had no familiarity whatsoever with the machine: "They told me that if I used it on the album and credited it on the sleeve, it would be mine. I said: 'But what is it?'. It took me maybe ten minutes just to find the power button. With all those controls, it looked more like a telephone to me than a musical instrument".
Together with the sound engineer, he began experimenting, stumbling upon an insistent electronic sequence, a pulse that kept repeating as he changed its notes. "We couldn't stop that sound, that 'dut-dut-dut-dut'. I changed the chord and it became 'dat-dat-dat-dat'. It just kept going, non-stop! After a lot of trial and error trying to figure out how the machine worked, that sequence got stuck in my head and I said to the engineer: 'Wait, maybe we've got something here. Let's record it'. Then I added the bass and drums, and in one afternoon we'd made 'Supernature'. It happened incredibly fast".
The result is a monumental song, driven by synths and powerful drum rolls, in which the rhythmic obsession of Kraftwerk crosses paths with the dystopian imagery of science fiction and the ecological anxieties of the Seventies. In the original extended version, which runs close to ten minutes, Cerrone builds a hypnotic progression based on a synth ostinato that runs through the entire composition. The electronic bass pulses with relentless regularity, while the drums bring in an organic, aggressive element, made of dry hits, syncopated accents and cymbal work that continually ramps up the tension.

The kinship with the revolution kicked off by Moroder is obvious, but it would be reductive to view "Supernature" merely as a French answer to "I Feel Love". The two tracks share the idea of a continuous synthetic rhythm and a progression built through repetition. But where Moroder pursues an almost abstract perfection, a futuristic eroticism entrusted to the interplay between machines and the human voice, Cerrone introduces a more physical, dramatic and cinematic dimension. Drawing on his training as a drummer, he shapes a rhythm that doesn't just mark time, but assaults the listener through a state of constant tension.
"Remember, this was 1977, and it was still very early for that kind of sound", Cerrone would later point out. "The Arp was a huge shift for me, because I went from very lush orchestral music to music made with machines. There's no other track like 'Supernature' on any of my records, even though of course I tried to make another one".
The imagery, too, is radically different. While "I Feel Love" seems to celebrate a technological scenario in which pleasure can become infinite, "Supernature" instead tells of a nightmarish future, in which scientific progress turns against humanity. Beneath the glittering surface of disco music, then, lies an ecological tale, populated by genetic experiments, monstrous creatures and the lethal revenge of Mother Nature.

The encounter with Lene Lovich

The idea for the markedly "sci-fi" lyrics came from an equally chance encounter. During a break from the London sessions, Cerrone noticed an eccentric-looking girl dancing in the street alongside a group of Hare Krishnas. Her name was Lili-Marlene Premilovich, known to friends as Lene Lovich. "She was a really strange girl, but she made us smile. She came over and asked us: 'Why are you laughing?'. We asked her what she was doing, and she replied: 'You can see what I'm doing. What about you?'. I told her I was a musician and invited her into the studio. We hit it off straight away, and I asked her if she wanted to write the lyrics for a song I was working on". That girl would soon become one of new wave's most original performers, thanks above all to the single "Lucky Number", but at that moment she was still a virtually unknown artist. Lovich brought to the table her visionary, theatrical sensibility, shot through with that taste for the grotesque that would also define her later work. Drawing on the imagery of H.G. Wells's "The Island of Doctor Moreau", she built a story in which man, attempting to artificially improve nature through chemicals and genetic mutations, ends up spawning monstrous creatures that rebel against their own creators.
Nature's revenge thus becomes the core of an apocalyptic narrative. Progress, initially presented as a promise of dominance and well-being, reveals itself to be an uncontrollable force. A theme that resonates with particular force in the context of the Seventies, marked by the birth of the modern environmental movement, by concerns over industrial pollution, and by growing distrust of science's unchecked applications. So disco, generally associated with escapism, physical pleasure, and the celebration of the night and of desire, turns into the vehicle for a dark prophecy that remains strikingly relevant today.

Lene Lovich's role in the song's composition is beyond question, but her vocal involvement in the original recording has been subject to conflicting accounts. Some reconstructions credit her with both writing the lyrics and singing them. Other sources draw a sharp distinction between the two contributions: a 2020 Rolling Stone Italy article, in particular, attributes the lyrics to Lovich and the vocals to Kay Garner, a British session singer, while other discographical reconstructions likewise point to Garner as the uncredited vocalist.
Complicating matters further is the fact that the original credits themselves offer no precise indication: Lovich appears in the thank-you notes, but without any specification of her contribution. In an interview with MusicRadar, Cerrone describes Lovich as both writer and singer, only to then recall that he was looking for a deliberately androgynous voice for the track, neither male nor female, almost animal-like. There is, however, a more explicit account from the producer himself: in a 2024 interview, on the occasion of the Paris Olympics, Cerrone identified Kay Garner as the singer on the original recording, explaining that he specifically wanted to preserve her voice for the ceremony's performance.

Controversy aside, the vocal performance is one of the decisive elements of the song's appeal. The tone is controlled, distant, almost devoid of the soul inflections most typical of American disco.
Cerrone would go on to collaborate with Lovich for many years afterward, entrusting her with the lyrics for other compositions, including "Give Me Love", "Je Suis Music" and "Rocket In The Pocket". "I was truly happy for her when she found success on her own", he would recall. "'Lucky Number' was a great song. Back then disco and punk were two very different worlds. I loved the idea of weaving them together on my records".

The legacy of "Supernature"

"Supernature" caught the record executives off guard. "When I brought the final tapes to Atlantic, in New York, I was really excited", Cerrone recounted. "I played the rest of the album first, tracks like 'Give Me Love', which were in the style of my first two records. At the end I said: 'Now I want to play you the single'. I put on 'Supernature' and everyone reacted by asking me: 'What is this? Marc, you made your name as an arranger, with strings and horns. Why did you do a complete 180?'".
But in the end the gamble would pay off. Released in 1977, the album "Supernature", also known as "Cerrone 3", would definitively establish the French musician on the international scene. The title-track single, together with "Give Me Love" and "Love Is Here", spent 4 weeks at the top of the American disco chart in early 1978 and also entered the Billboard Hot 100. In Britain it climbed as high as number eight, helped by the heavy television exposure it got through the Kenny Everett Video Show.

It would be the song that earned Cerrone a permanent place in the disco pantheon and his crowning as godfather of the future French Touch movement of Daft Punk and company. Who certainly remembered him, not least in the sprawling "Giorgio By Moroder" from 2013, which sounds very much like a double tribute, to the Italian producer and to his French disciple.
Nearly half a century later, "Supernature" still sounds surprisingly modern, both musically and in its sinister message. Proof that disco music could break free of its original orchestral and funk templates, paving the way for a conception of dance built on electronic repetition and sound manipulation. Its influence would surface in the birth of Hi-NRG, in the evolution of Italo disco, in Chicago house, and in the later transformations of European techno. In 2016 Pitchfork included it (at number 187) in its list of the best songs of the Seventies, crediting it with introducing "an unprecedented form of dystopian dread into disco music", noting how neither Kraftwerk nor David Bowie of the Berlin period had an immediate international impact on dancefloors comparable to that of "Supernature". 

Inevitable, then, the long string of reinterpretations, remixes and covers that followed. In 1989 Erasure offered their own version, released alongside the single "You Surround Me", while in 1994 Scottish act The Time Frequency included it on the album "Dominator". In 1996 came Danny Tenaglia's remix, which shifted the track into progressive house territory. In 2012 Elly Jackson of La Roux performed "Supernature" together with Cerrone during a concert in Montreux, while in 2014 Beth Ditto lent her voice to a reworking by Alan Braxe, one particularly admired by the author himself. In 2023 even Duran Duran recorded a cover of it for "Danse Macabre", a nocturnal, gothic-tinged album in which the Frenchman's composition found a natural home.
Its cinematic fortunes have been just as remarkable. In 2018 Gaspar Noé chose an instrumental version of "Supernature" to accompany the extraordinary opening choreographic sequence of the daring "Climax", a film in which dance, altered perception and psychological horror intertwine until they become indistinguishable. And the definitive consecration, nearly 50 years after its release, came on 26 July 2024, during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. "Supernature" accompanied one of the evening's most spectacular moments, with the Eiffel Tower lit up by laser beams and the Olympic flame passing along the Seine. A song born in the discotheques of the 1970s thus became the soundtrack to a planetary celebration.

Once upon a time
Science opened up the door
We would feed the hungry fields
Till they couldn’t eat no more
But the potions that we made
Touched the creatures down below
And they grew up in a way
That we’d never seen before

Supernature, supernature
Supernature, supernature
Supernature, supernature
Supernature, supernature

They were angry with the man
‘Cause he changed their way of life
And they take their sweet revenge
As they trample through the night
For a hundred miles or more
You can hear the people cry
But there’s nothing you can do
Even God is on their side

Supernature, supernature
Supernature, supernature
Supernature, supernature
Supernature, supernature

How can I explain?
Things are different today
Darkness all around
And nobody makes a sound
Such a sad affair
No one seems to care

Supernature, better watch out
Look at you now
Better watch out
Look at you now

(Supernature) Better watch out
There’s no way to stop it now
You can’t escape, it’s too late
Look what you’ve done
There’s no place that you can run
The monsters made, we must pray

Ride the wave of great music

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18/10/2026