The coda to my recent research into the retro-pop renaissance
Six years before David Guetta, French DJ’s Sound of Legend (Jean Luc Legrand and Nicolas Gueguen) re-tooled Eiffel 65’s ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ turning it into a club hit. Shrouded in Deadpool anonymity, they hit their stride at the end of 2019 with an EDM reworking of Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’. Covers of Michael Sembello’s ‘Maniac’ (1983) and The Pointer Sisters ‘I’m So Excited (1982)’ consolidated the formula. Sympathetic updates of big Eighties classics with 21st-century beats and radio-friendly edits followed. These include Eurythmics ‘Sweet Dreams’ (Are Made of These (1983) and Irena Cara’s ‘What a Feeling’ (1983). More recent tracks are more abstracted, distilling 80s rock classics into hook-heavy dance floor anthems that obfuscate the original. ‘Dream On’ (2021) takes the chorus of INXS’s ‘Original Sin’, moves it into a minor key and slightly lowers the tempo to 128BPM. Most audaciously, ‘Some Kind of Kiss’ takes the hook line of Cutting Crew’s ‘(I Just) Died In Your Arms Tonight’ (1986) in its original minor key, ups the BPM to 128, to deliver a Top 20 European hit. The song dominated the airwaves in the summer of 2023 and has clocked up 20 million streams on Spotify. While Kungs and Purple Disco Machine lovingly pay homage to the authentic Italo sound, Sound of Legend’s impudence is perhaps truer to both Italo’s punk spirit and mass production sensibility.
Comments