Let's talk about Italian music.
Italo disco, to be precise, a term coined in the mid-80s by German record producer Bernhard Mikulski as a reference to the disco of Italian artists, a genre that exploded towards the end of the 70s.
A famous example of Italo disco is the song Self Control by Raf, released in 1984.
Famous all over the world, I'd say, thanks to the various covers.
The original version, written by Raf himself with Giancarlo Bigazzi and Steve Piccolo, and arranged by Celso Valli, was a hit in Europe.
In the same year, American singer Laura Branigan proposed her own version with excellent results in Europe and the rest of the world.
Branigan, who died prematurely in 2004, was no stranger to covering Italian music. In fact, two years earlier, she had climbed the charts with her version (in English) of Gloria by Umberto Tozzi. In the following album of 1983, he had included Mama, another piece by Tozzi; in the 1984 album, in addition to Self Control, there was Ti Amo, again by Tozzi, also proposed as a single.
Self Control boasts numerous other reinterpretations, including one in Spanish published in 1993 by Ricky Martin.
Returning to Raf, Self Control is included in his debut album, Raf, his only album in English.
A lucky debut, therefore, which paved the way for subsequent albums, all successful despite the change of language and musical style.
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