Déja vu strikes again! And this time I’m hearing one song but then seemingly again, but it’s different and this is where this entry starts with not just one — but two tracks by Italian synth artist Savage that would definitely fit into the realm of italo disco. The solo recording project of Robert Zanetti from the Massa commune in Italy, the man behind Savage started music from a young age in the 1970s, first with the band Santarosa who released a minor hit called “Souvenir” in 1978 and then in a group called Taxi in the early 80s that was around only briefly to release another minor hit in Italy called “To Miami”.
But it was when Zanetti launched the Savage project and in turn the project’s first release in 1984 called Tonight where things really took off. His slow and romantic take on the genre saw him slow down the tempo to emphasize the dramatic and lush elements of the genre with his hit “Don’t Cry Tonight”, which I first discovered years ago when exploring artists in the genre, and cementing my curiosity about him as an artist due to a rather interesting “live” (read: lip-sync, as was the norm for those days) performance of his track on the popular Italian music revue show Discoring — with a similar format to Top Of The Pops or Soul Train — on the national television channel RAI which can be watched in the clip below.
Dressed like a moody, young goth pulled out of some fog-enshrouded basement club somewhere — with a wardrobe that’s possibly inspired by cult, 80’s horror villian Freddy Krueger — Savage first appears on screen kneeling on the neon-lit stage, his large brimmed hat obscuring his face while the song’s instrumental intro plays out. Following that are a series of rigid dramatic gestures in a tableau vivant style, followed by pulling in his fists to cover his face while the Italian professional football scores scroll across the screen.
The track itself is simple, lush and somewhat delicate — pulling in a lot of standard themes from the italo genre, including longing, love and an keen interest in using the word “night” whenever possible. The slower, deliberately plodding pace of the song — clocking in at just over 100 BPM — makes for a more sensual energy and definitely stood out from the more uptempo fare of other contemporaries working in the genre that is italo disco. There’s a sampled choir sound that comes in right before the chorus which has a bizarre, distressed quality about it — likely due to the sampling bitrate which actually for me adds a bit of strangeness to the music.
Despite what many listeners out there might perceive as cheezy, I have a fondness for italo, perhaps due to contrasts I have within me when listening. On one hand I’m relating to the moods and the style of the sound but at the same time having some distance to it. If anything I’ve always viewed the genre as a fusion of European traditional “love songs” filtered into the then modern era — Italian romanticism and that sort of thing. It might be less appreciated by your stereotypical American as it’s a very European thing that I can observe living over this way for a long time.
It’s something I got into quite a while ago, with my first real introduction to the genre starting with a good friend of mine from Vancouver named Michelle, whom I used to DJ a night together back at the turn of the millenium and was always in awe — especially now — of the LPs of italo and minimal wave she was playing long before both genres had been re-discovered in the internet and social media ago. I’ve probably mentioned this all before, so this is where I’ll end this anecdote.
And this is where the déja vu comes in, as while I’m very aware of another Savage hit from this time called “Only You” that I have heard numerous times before, it was only recently when my partner was playing it loud enough in the other room that I could hear it that I thought, “Oh! That’s “Don’t Cry Tonight” playing. I like that one!”
But it here I realised it wasn’t the said track, but indeed “Only You”. In fact, if you listen of these two tracks — which are both from the Tonight album — back to back you’ll definitely notice they were pretty much based on the same idea, using the same plotting eighth note bass lines. The clincher though is that both tracks use the exact same chord progression that makes for the choruses on both of these tracks, and even in the same key and the same tempo — well, a slight difference in BPM.
That got me thinking, “Isn’t that really obvious?” — I mean, perhaps it’s because I personally grew up in the mindset that songs needed to sound different from one another but in more recent years have been intentionally playing around with breaking that mindset, which I’ll get into further. Maybe Zanetti loved the chord progression and the vibe so much he felt he could produce two tracks out of it. I mean, “Only You” offers a rather fitting macabre organ motif in its verses to add some variation. Or maybe he was short of tracks for his début album that he had obligations to his record label — the appropriately named Discomagic Records — to fill a quota of tracks for an album by a deadline. Perhaps the label said, “Hey, that “Don’t Cry Tonight” was a smash. Make another track like it!”. Or maybe, if he had my mindset, was having a bit of mischievous fun by writing two tracks that sounded extremely similar to one another and wanted to see if the general consumer public would even notice.
It could be anything really. Another Italian producer Alessandri carried over what seemed to be two variations of one song across two different projects. I clocked that that same tactic was used on two songs on the sophomore album Blank-Wave Arcade by The Faint. resulting in a clever little motif on that album. I’m sure many others have done it for any given variety of reasons.
And here’s where I can confess I’ve re-used riffs and lyrics across numerous Soft Riot albums, but totally intended — as if putting little easter eggs in songs that probably no-one is going to notice. For me the reason is just having a cheeky laugh and if anything to purposefully break that mindset that “every track needs to be unique”, albeit in a orchestrated and contrived way. There’s lots of them — too many to list — but that’s for another entry unto its own for another time.
Oddly enough Savage‘s Tonight was reviewed on Pitchfork in the past couple of years, as part of a series of reviews they did (or used to do) every Sunday, showcasing an album from decades past for reappraisal. The review seems to allude to the fact that this reviewer — named Rich Juzwiak and coming from probably a more contemporary indie rock/pop background — is probably not as emmersed in the genre as the superfans if you will, but like myself he apparently was tranfixed by Savage‘s “Don’t Cry Tonight” Discoring performance.
Savage only released that one album and then faded for a while. This could be for a number of reasons, including perhaps that life under the spotlight was far too much from the apparent darker climes he was more comfortable in, but the most likely reason is that he got more into music production and doing music for other artists, and indeed working on numerous other projects. I’m guessing he felt more at home in the studio than on the stage but as said, that’s just a guess. It would be a few decades later when he’d finally start working on new music under the Savage banner again.
And with closing up, there is actually a third track entitled “A Love Again” that carries the same mood as “Don’t Cry Tonight” and “Only You”, but this additional track diverges from the other two more so — more lush synths, more slowness and even a ripping guitar solo.