From the archive: When Donna Summer made her comeback

An 18-minute burning slow groove, tripped-out synthesisers and a deeply sexual female moaning. The coming together of American soul and wild European electronics. It was ‘Love To Love Ya Baby’, it was Donna Summer and it was, get this, 1975. Now Donna Summer is back with ‘Melody Of Love’ and she’s ready to talk.

To today’s average clubgoer - the E-popping, sexually liberated, skinny teenage sophisticates whose feet are drawn to podiums and hands to the rafters - it’s difficult to paint a nasty enough picture of ‘discotheques’ in the '70s.

In the provinces, girls in tie-dye T-shirts shuffled their white slingbacks in approximate time to ‘I Will Survive’. While lads in leather ties, maroon slip-ons and wispy moustaches smirked and teased each other from the safety of the industrial-strength brown carpet area of the bar, resolutely refusing to dance to ‘girlie’ music, unless they could convince their mates they were only doing so in order to slip the tongue in at a later point in the evening.

I, however, was different. While my friends played silly air guitar to Pink Floyd or Yes with their posters of gnomes and their smelly bodies I was the only 13-year-old disco diva in the whole of Wales. Spurning the turgid and even then outdated rock dinosaurs, I merrily twirled around my bedroom to Diana Ross, Kool & The Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire. I cried to ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, and danced myself dizzy to ‘Y.M.C.A’.

But one woman meant more to me than anyone else - Donna Summer. She represented a way of life that I knew existed but had never even glimpsed. Her ground-breaking songs were sexy, liberated, though highly sentimental and exceptionally emotive - all the things that a Welsh-speaking 13-year-old boy was not supposed to be. Summer, for me, like a million other adolescents all over the world, promised a better future outside my dreary home town - big cities, bright lights, glamour, friends, emotion and excitement. Above all, she promised a world where men were allowed to leave the carpet section of the disco, and dance…

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Summer was a showbiz kid. Leaving her native Boston to tour with the ground-breaking hippie show Hair as a teenager, she spent her early days in the relaxed and liberal cities of Europe, putting down roots in Munich where in 1973, she met up and coming producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte who were fascinated with the early technological developments of the synthesiser and embraced the advent of electronic music as eagerly as Kraftwerk. Moroder and Bellotte also adored soul music and were interested in fusing two completely alien forms of music together - soul and synthesisers.

“They were geniuses,” Donna told me last month after arriving in the UK for a quick promo tour for her come-back single ‘Melody Of Love’. “They had so many hot new ideas, and because they were European and white they didn’t have the same approach as traditional US R&B producers. Soul music in the US was still very traditional - Stevie, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, the whole Philadelphia thing - and there were wonderful records, but Giorgio and Pete were coming from a different angle that was seen as very avant-garde.”

Summer’s first single was a little-known throwaway called ‘The Hostage’ which Donna laughs about when I mention it. “Burn your copy!” she shrieks. “It was a hit in Holland and Germany, but it wasn’t what Giorgio and Pete wanted to do.” I suggest the single aped the style of another German veteran of the time, Frank Farian, who had put together a band called Boney M, and was giving them strange story-telling theme songs like ‘Ma Baker’, ‘Belfast’ and later ‘Rivers Of Babylon’.

“Well, yes of course Frank was having great success, and it was definitely in that mould but within a few months we'd realised we didn’t want to do that, so they went and put together a very sexy, synthy backing track and asked me to moan and groan like Marilyn. By the time we'd finished the song, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was 18 minutes long and shocking a lot of people.”

Not only credited with being the world’s first 12” single, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was ceremoniously banned by the BBC and ensured Summer a notoriety that she'd never shake. Moroder and Bellotte were daring and theatrical in their approach, and with the release of her truly innovative ‘I Remember Yesterday’ album, Donna really hit high gear. The album traced the music of previous decades and brilliantly threw in a premonition of things to come.

The title-track was a campy homage to the Charleston of the '30s, ‘Love's Unkind’ a bobbysox tribute to the ‘50s, ‘Back In Love Again’ a piss-take of the ‘60s Supremes, but it was the last track ‘I Feel Love’ which predicted perfectly the music of the future - trancey, multi-layered synth effects under a breathy, spacey vocal. The track was a ground-breaking Number One and the inspiration for a generation of record producers.

“Not many people realise that the albums were themed so compulsively by Giorgio, I'm glad you saw it,” Donna smiles. “Giorgio and Pete didn't just want to make soul records, they wanted concepts and new ideas. Doing a version of Barry Manilow’s ‘Could It Be Magic’ was seen as a very strange move by a lot of people, but they wanted to try stuff that hadn't been attempted before. With ‘I Feel Love’ we were trying to make something special - it was the combination of American and wilder European ideas that made that record so different.”

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Behind the scenes, however, the original disco diva was experiencing another side of the music business. Casablanca Records was the disco label of the ‘70s, though it was only Donna Summer and the Village People that really achieved multi-million-selling status.

The offices were a typically extravagant duplicate of Rick’s Cafe from the movie Casablanca, and though it was earning tens of millions of dollars, the label was haemorrhaging much more, while its excesses with sex and drugs were, and are, legendary in the music business.

While Summer was hurtling through the '70s with hits like ‘MacArthur Park’ (originally a Richard Harris song from ‘Camelot’), ‘Bad Girls’, ‘Hot Stuff and even winning an Oscar for ‘Last Dance’, the pressure of her success, and the outrageousness of the Casablanca operation drove her to the brink of suicide.

“I nearly killed myself,” she confesses. “It wasn’t just the scale of the success, although that’s difficult to deal with. You've got to understand that the '70s were a revolutionary time in the music business. Disco music was making hundreds of millions of dollars and everybody wanted to get into it. Casablanca Records had been set up by Neil Bogart, and represented pure madness. There was a constant supply of drugs, people having sex all over the offices, and above all this Caligula craziness there were my records playing so loudly that no one could hear anything else. I was their golden girl, the person allowing all the good times to roll, and it was the most unreal, illogical period of my life.”

I gamely tell Donna I’ve had my share of wild times in the business too. She gives my chin a fond tug. “Baby, whatever you've done, believe me, it was nothing like this.”

I confess to her that in New York a couple of years ago I had appeared on a Black music panel with Fredric Dannen, the author of HitMen, the book which blew the lid off the US music business, and had some damning things to say about Casablanca: “At three o'clock in the afternoon, an adorable little girl would come and take your order for the following day’s coke supply,” said one ex-employee in the book. “On a Monday, I'd be looking for my secretary and I'd be calling her name, and there she’d be with a credit card in her hand chopping, chopping the coke on the table.”

Eventually, of course, the label collapsed but worse still Donna was not getting paid. “It was terrible. Imagine being Number One on the chart, and not getting any money for it. Of course I had to sue, which was a horrible experience, but I’m still not allowed to talk about it.” Donna actually sued for $10 million, and won, but her heart was big enough for her to have sang at Bogart’s funeral in 1982, even though she was still in litigation with his estate.

Summer was in negotiation with another music business maverick, David Geffen who was just starting up his own Geffen Records. With the label move, along with the litigation and her exhaustion, Summer was looking to leave the past behind her, and typically and unremarkably, became a ‘born-again Christian’, a decision which she now says saved her life, but which was also the start of another nightmare which led in just a couple of years to her virtual retirement. The warning signs started soon after the news of her new found Christianity first broke.

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“I had turned to God, because I just couldn't cope, and I think things started when a few journalists saw what a great story it was that this girl that had shocked the world with her outrageous sexy records and costumes was now saying, ‘I’ve changed.’ I read reports that I was refusing to sing any of my old records because they were too rude, that I wasn’t going to do any gay clubs any more because I'd ‘found the Lord’, that I'd lecture young people about the evils of the music business...” she explains.

“It didn’t really affect me particularly, because I was used to the press saying all sorts of things about me that were silly and ridiculous, I'd lost count of the times I'd read that I was actually making love when we recorded ‘Love To Love You Baby,’ or that | was a transvestite. But a rumour started to crop up that I'd said that AIDS was God's plague on gay people for their wickedness, which was the most hurtful thing anyone could have printed. Not only had gay people built up my career, not only were a huge proportion of my friends gay, but worst of all, in the mid-'80s, many friends of mine started dying of this disease.”

It’s easy to see how this story would come almost naturally to a lazy journalist, leading from the fairly harmless ‘Disco slut turns to God’, through ‘Disco diva is dragged up guy’ to the unforgivable ‘Gays’ favourite pin-up claims AIDS is God’s punishment’. Before my interview with Donna I had been warned several times not to mention the ‘AIDS thing’ to Donna, but I took a flyer and found her happy to talk about it.

“I never said it, I've never felt it, I hate it.” She looks at me squarely. “Paul Jabara was the guy that wrote ‘Last Dance’ for me as well as many other hits. He was my kid brother, my baby. He died from an AIDS-related illness just three years ago. That's just one person, and I have spent my entire adult life within the gay community. I’ve always felt that I’m not going to defend myself against these horrible charges, my friends know me, the gay communities who know me know that I couldn’t have said it. If I'd have murdered someone I'd be outta jail by now, but people hold something against me even though they've never heard this rumour other than tenth hand.”

I mention that although the subject is still hotly debated on the gay scene, I've never met anyone that actually read the quotes themselves. Similarly, some people think it was a TV interview, while others insist it was a newspaper. “Exactly,” Donna laughs, “it never appeared on TV or in a newspaper, that so-called quote just never happened. It’s just a nasty rumour which has caused me more heartache than anything else in my life.”

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Unfortunately, it came at a time when Summer couldn't have been more vulnerable. She’d gone to Geffen and understandably - if foolishly - tried to lose her disco tag, another reason for her gay audience to believe that Donna was ditching her past and looking for a different kind of future. Her debut for the label, ‘The Wanderer’, was her worst album yet, an appalling mishmash of half-baked directions. “I was tired of doing similar types of record, the disco thing, the epic 18-minute long, slow intro thing,” she sighs, “but also, disco had gone, it was declared dead, and Geffen decided on a more MOR [middle of the road] approach to my career.”

In reality, Donna’s days with Geffen only produced one album that will be remembered, 1982’s ‘Donna Summer’ which tried to turn Donna into a worldwide superstar in the manner of Ross, Streisand or even Tina Turner who was enjoying something of a comeback. Produced by Quincy Jones, and with contributions from Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Kenny Rogers, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick and Rod Temperton (who'd written a dozen of Michael Jackson's biggest hits), the true standout track on an otherwise unbalanced mixture of rock and ballads was the unbelievable grandeur of Jon & Vangelis’s ‘State Of Independence’ which showed Summer in a whole new light.

lf Summer had kickstarted the whole techno boom as early as 1977, with ‘I Feel Love’, the pure uplifting spirituality of ‘State Of Independence’ was another benchmark for dance music of similar importance. If you've ever heard that tune off your face, you'll know what I mean.

As far as the rest of the '80s are concerned, however, Summer's career was over, apart from a brief resurrection in 1989 thanks to Stock, Aitken & Waterman's ‘In Another Place And Time’. The gay community hated the star and Summer, understandably depressed and angry, virtually withdrew from public life. Now, a decade on from the AIDS rumour she feels she’s back with a single that’s already stormed the clubs and an upcoming ‘Greatest Hits’ album. Even if it's not with quite the same degree of enthusiasm.

“I’ve had a wonderful life. I've done everything, I’ve seen it all. Now I want to make some more great records, and I want to make peace with my fans - I’ve lost so many friends to this horrific disease, lost too many years hiding and I want to be at peace again. My ‘Greatest Hits’ album is a way of putting the past to bed, and starting on a new phase, with new fans and old friends alike.”

‘Melody Of Love’, with its Morales mixes, its ultra-modern New York pianos and pounding house groove, has put Summer back on the dancefloors where she belongs. Remember her this way.

This feature was taken from the January 1995 issue of Mixmag