Unexpectedly Disco: the B-side culture

Italians experiment with opposite sides.

“One day in 1979, when my older brothers were out playing soccer with their friends, I went into their bedroom to secretly play the records from their weekly music shopping spree. It was a secret little ritual  that only my mom knew about.   I remember picking “Ricominciamo” , a 7” single by Adriano Pappalardo, singer with a deep raspy voice, who used to sing love songs as if he was screaming at someone. The first 5 seconds were enough for me to quickly lift the needle and remove it from their Philips turntable, but I was curious about the B-side. In fact that was a completely new “movement” for me… flipping the record, intrigued by the name of the track, “Hi-Fi”. Especially when all I was curious about was the main tracks I would also hear on the radio or TV. To my surprise, I was blown away by the completely different change in mood from the A side track. This one was disco, sensual and epic, armed with a magical force pulling you to the dancefloor. I found myself dancing it, between the two single beds where my brothers slept, jumping from one to another, as that had suddenly become the stage of a stadium, full of people who were there to applaud me…”

Disco Bambino

Have you ever stumbled upon an Italian disco track, released between the 70s and 80s that you weren’t familiar with, only to be surprised upon learning the identity of the performer and the songwriter? This feeling doesn’t subside even among long-time vinyl collectors. They’ll notice that musica leggera, folk, and Italian-pop singers are no strangers to avant-garde and experimental tracks. Does this belie a desire for experimentation or change in artistic direction? Is this a career gamble? Or is it a way to both give in and skirt the gauntlet of the market demands?

Once you start noticing this phenomenon, you inevitably open a Pandora’s box, and, for Italian Disco Story’s own Disco Bambino, the only way to sate that curiosity is via a completionism approach: he is in the process of maniacally collecting each Italian-music vinyl record released between 1970 and 1980 in search of unexpectedly disco tracks.

Italian artists saw in disco music a way to experiment with new sounds and a way to approach youth, rebel, and underground culture. Many took an overtly hostile stance due to the use of synths, which, in some contexts, replaced acoustic instruments; others for the transgressions and rebellions it embodied. The more daring artists gave the genre a try, but confined it to the B-side of a 45 single. 

B-sides were for those tracks that were not deemed strong enough to have a competitive edge on radio shows and and their most popular rotations, and they often did not align with the image a particular artist projected onto mainstream audiences. 

This makes B-sides even more fascinating to explore, as they fully reflect the cultural context of Italy, torn between tradition and change. A-sides were for daytime creatures, salarymen, housewives, and those who dreamed of one and only everlasting love. B-sides, on the other hand, embodied the night: club revelers, unbridled passion, excess, glamour.

This doesn’t mean that B-sides could not chart, either on the radios or in the djs’ own selections for the dancefloor. For some artists, B-sides proved to be career-defining: think of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody,” and Queen’s own “We Will Rock You.” 

In Italy, a glaring example of this can be seen in the band known as Ricchi e Poveri. They started off as a melodic-pop group in 1970, and, after releasing a few records with labels such as Cetra and Apollo Records, they took a stab at disco music in 1980 with the tracks “Somebody To Love,” (The B side to the German edition of the more trad-pop “E no e no”), and “Jungle Beat,” which was featured in their album  “La Stagione dell’Amore” released by Italo-Schlager powerhouse Baby Records. The sounds of those two songs are the typical Euro-disco fare of the time featuring  an upbeat bass line and arpeggiating synths, something the band had never included before. This new direction also coincides with a restyling of the two female vocalists, namely Angela Brambati and Maria Occhiena, who donned a full-fledged disco attire made with sequins and lurex for all the visual materials connected to the album. The author and arranger is a young Toto Cutugno, who, at the time, was no stranger to experimentation (think of his “Voglio L’Anima,” which became Dalida’s disco anthem “Laisse Moi Danser”) only to then resort to that overly sentimental Italian pop that, while schlocky, became catnip to continental-European listeners. 

Other artists started as disco performers, only to depart from the genre in order to reach wider audiences. This is the case of Giuni Russo, who, in 1976 released the disco track “Che Mi Succede Adesso,” the B-side to the single “Mai.” For commercial reasons, and given the association of disco music to America, she had to pretend she was an Italian-American singer hailing directly from the US, and thus styled her name as “Junie.” 

Vocal powerhouse Fiorella Mannoia started her career as Monica Vitti’s body double, and released the funk/proto disco track “Che Sete Ho” as a B side of her 1976 single “Piccolo.” 

In 1980, Luca Sardella surprised his listeners with a disco-funk bomb titled “Fammi un po’ Morire,” the B side to the single “Mi Rode Mi Scoppia,” published by Alpharecord. The track is full of double entendres, and even the arrangement breaks all the conventions of the time. 

Writer and composer Cristiano Malgioglio, who first rose to fame as a writer for Mina and Raffaella Carrà, with ballads notable for lyrics full of longing, yearning, and passion (respectively, “Ancora, Ancora, Ancora” and “Forte Forte Forte”) finally succumbed to disco in his seminal 1979 album “Sbucciami,” an international sensation in Italy and Latin America. “Luci a San Francisco” is reminiscent of the music style of The Village People, while “Io…La Pantera” is a sophisticated Euro-disco anthem about wishing he were a panther in the sky, which would, in turn, allow him to color it pink. 

Flavia Fortunato was subject to a recent rediscovery thanks to her disco track “Se Tu Vuoi,” the B-side to her 1983 single “Rincontrarsi.” The track is notable for its real-time-like feel, as it does not seem to be aided by a metronome or a sequencer. Fortunato, alongside Patrizia Pellegrino’s “Automaticamore” (1981) and “Musica Spaziale” (1982), both B-sides to, respectively, “Beng” and “Matta-ta” is responsible for the Italo-disco revival of the 2010s.

Even rock/pop machos did, sometimes, give disco music a nod. Franco Califano released “Balla ba…” in 1977, which cheekily describes the discotheque subculture of the time; Adriano Pappalardo’s “Baby,” the B-side to the 1978 single “Voglio Lei” brushes elbows with American funk thanks to his piercing, soul-like vocals. Even mainstream pop-rocker Vasco Rossi experimented with the genre in his 1982 album Vita Spericolata: “Amore…aiuto” and the instrumental version of “Splendida Giornata” are his two forays into disco music throughout his entire career. 

Aside from unusual combinations between track and performer, what surprises about these B-sides is their timelessness. Some are now almost 50 years old, but given that they were created without pressure from the market, they are not easily datable, because even the most straightforward disco tracks eschewed the clichés of chart-topping disco hits. B-sides allowed for unfettered creation, and we believe that arranging, producing, and performing without the yoke of airplay and streaming performance is what can allow for productions of great artistic and experimental value. Of course we are only scratching the surface here,  but we will come back to this theme soon to discover more B- side wonders.