How Italian Media Shaped Amanda Lear’s Career

Disco beats and gender enigma, made Amanda a queen in Italy (and beyond).

In previous installments, we discussed the way Italians appeared both wary of and intrigued by sexual taboos, and how disco music provided a “safe” conduit for them to explore them, visually and culturally.

Androgyny, ever one of the main tenets of some of the most illustrious performers in the genre, enticed the Italian public, and Amanda Lear was the performer who most toyed with ambiguity thanks to a cleverly crafted stage persona. 

Despite her French nationality and her early career in the UK, Lear has been a fixture of the Italian TV and music scene for the past 45 years. Italy is the country where she acquired the most widespread and mainstream fandom, where she is mainly known as a TV host and media personality. 

While she innovated the disco genre by writing narrative lyrics that sometimes bordered with actual poetry because she often expressed disgust at the banality of the lyrics of your standard disco fare, the average Italian was not into her because of the depth of her songs, nor for the way she combined the Philly Sound with the Munich sound. It was the German producer Anthony Monn who had fashioned her unique, hybrid sound at the intersection of disco, schlager, and electronic.

If you want to read more about Lear’s music, we suggest Angelica’s old Guardian feature, which also includes expert quotes from Stryx author Carla Vistarini and Disco Bambino himself. Here, we will examine how the Italian market allowed Lear to become a full-fledged media personality.

Her first no.1 single in the Italian market was “Tomorrow,” from the 1977 disco-schlager album I am a Photograph, and her first Italian-language release was the Italian version of “Alphabet,” which became the B-side of the Italian print of “Queen of Chinatown.” The La Bionda brothers, who became one of the most recognizable and well-established Italo Disco acts, also produced some of her earlier singles, including “Lethal Leading Lady”.

In 1977, she recorded the Riz Ortolani tracks “Look at Her Dancing” and “Your Yellow Pyjama,” for the movie The Girl in a Yellow Pyjama by Flavio Mogherini. The following year, she released her sophomoric album Sweet Revenge in 1978, and she appeared in three Italian productions. One was Italian Disco Stories’ favorite Stryx (learn more about its performers here, and here), where she played the role of Sexy Stryx, usually combining billowy capes with bodycon jumpsuits and dresses; while on Stryx, she heavily (but elegantly!) promoted the leading tracks of Sweet Revenge,  such as the Faustian tale of “Follow Me,” the cheeky “Enigma”, “Gold,” and “Comics.” 

Other productions included the soft-porn documentary Follie di notte and the wartime parody Zio Adolfo, in arte Führer, helmed by Adriano Celentano in the dual role of two brothers on the opposite sides of the Nazi party. In it, she played a Marlene-Dietrich-like singer who also sang a parody/tribute to “Lili Marleen.”

As part of the 1979 album Diamonds for Breakfast, Lear released the single “Ho Fatto L’Amore Con Me,” which was written by heavyweights such as Cristiano Malgioglio, Giuni Russo, and Maria Antonietta Sisini. It’s a slow song where she details the perks of female masturbation, which allow her to avoid getting involved with the wrong man.

 In 1982, she released the Italian-market-exclusive collection Ieri, Oggi, which contains  the single “Incredibilmente Donna,” a pop-orchestral anthem that marks a stark departure from the Euro-Disco sounds of her earlier releases. It served as the closing number for Premiatissima, the Canale 5 variety show that Lear hosted. 

For her last album with the German label Ariola called “Tam Tam”,  she enlisted the likes of Roberto Cacciapaglia and Paul Micioni from the disco project Easy Going, to cement her ties to Italy. It’s a synth-pop/Italo Disco hybrid that draws inspiration from African traditions, necromancy, and macumbas. In his book Italian Futuribili, the music writer Stefano Di Trapani, known as Demented Burrocacao claims that the track “Bewitched” is “perfectly halfway between Italo Disco and New Order,” while “Wicked Lady” anticipates Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel” by four years. “Magic” is equated to Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy” (which, however, only charted one year later). “The Last Track, “Music Is,” sounds like it was penned by Yellow Magic Orchestra,” writes Demented Burrocacao.

Ariola made the minimum efforts in promoting this album, and this attitude fully allowed Lear to pivot to TV. In parallel to the release of Tam Tam, she was hosting the variety show Premiatissima, where she’d shoehorn some promotion to her album.  Her love affair with Italo disco continued though for two more singles, “No Credit Card”, produced by Maurizio Sangineto (known as Sangy) who had already produced successful Italo disco acts such as Firefly, Passengers and The Creatures; and “Assasino”, Amanda’s second collaboration with Cristiano Malgioglio, this time with the contribution of iconic producer and songwriter Alberto Radius. The song was also released in English with a video that combines red lights, gay leather culture and street hustling in some anonymous Italian city.  

Admittedly, the intrigue of Amanda Lear was due to the mystery surrounding her gender. Was she previously known as Alain Tap or as their stage alias Peki d’Oslo? Was the transgender rumor planted by Salvador Dalí or David Bowie? In her autobiography, she attributes it to the surrealist artist. “It’s always been the Grecian ideal: the hermaphrodite, the divine being,” he had told her. And when the rumor was picked up by tabloids, “everyone will be intrigued by you,” he told her. “You’re neither a girl, nor a boy. You’re angelic, an archetype.”

She toyed with the mystery of her identity both in her songs and in her public life, to the point that, in February 1979, she posed for the Italian edition of Playboy with the tagline “Sono Donna Donna Donna.” In the corresponding spread, full-frontal nudity was meant to both quash and furtherly fan the flames of the rumors surrounding her biological sex.

As recently as 2022, comedian Teo Teocoli candidly relayed on the tv show Belve that, while he never had same-sex experiences, he’d definitely thought about it. “Back then, there were transvestites [sic.] that were out of this world,” he explained. “The one I was obsessed with the most was Amanda Lear. I saw her with Salvador Dalí and I would have hit that, but she completely ignored me.” The fact that this mythology about her gender identity still persists means that whatever branding effort Lear was undertaking back in the 1960s actually worked.