“’I Feel Love’ is a brilliant combination of whipped-up synthesiser and Summer’s dreamy, driven, ecstatic vocals,” wrote Vince Aletti in his August 13, 1977 column for Record World. “The pace is fierce and utterly gripping with the synthesiser effects particularly aggressive and emotionally charged. Again, this is unlike anything Summer, Moroder and Bellotte have done before.”
During the session for David Bowie’s ‘Low’ album, also recorded in Germany, producer Brian Eno ran in one day after hearing ‘I Feel Love’ for the first time and said, “I have heard the sound of the future. This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.”
Despite the eventual rapture, few inside Casablanca had much faith in the song. “I remember, at the very beginning, [Casablanca MD] Neil Bogart was interested, but not as much as I would have liked,” recalls Giorgio [Moroder]. In fact, ‘I Feel Love’ was originally released as B-side to the ballad ‘Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over)’. Nobody seemed to have an inkling of what they had done.
“To us it was just a track and we didn’t even think it was a single,” recalls Bellotte. “We definitely did not think when it was released, yes we’ve done something special. It didn’t feel revolutionary.” But the song began to take off in clubs, first in the UK, where it was quickly switched to the A-side. ‘I Feel Love’ became Donna Summer’s biggest hit in the UK and reached No 6 in the US Hot 100.
Until ‘I Feel Love’, synthesisers had either been the province of serious musicians like Keith Emerson, Jean-Michel Jarre or Tangerine Dream or used as a novelty prop in throwaway songs like ‘Popcorn’ by Hot Butter or even on Moroder and Bellotte’s first hit ‘Son Of My Father’. ‘I Feel Love’ was a rejection of the intellectualisation of the synthesiser in favour of pure pleasure…
Still its influence grew and spread. Hi-NRG, the white gay propulsive sound pioneered by Patrick Cowley, stood on its shoulders; the new romantic explosion of electro-pop in the UK came from a similar place; Italo-house, one of the foundation stones in house, was heavily influenced by it; and techno, as in love with glacial German synthesisers as it was P-funk, is massively indebted to this strange and beautiful teutonic masterpiece.
I FEEL LOVE: Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder created the template for dance music as we know it