Disco Godfather Cerrone’s Enduring Influence on Dance Music
By
Andy Thomas
·
November 14, 2024
In the same year Earl Young invented the backbeat of disco on Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’s “The Love I Lost,” another drummer, this one thousands of miles away in France, was creating his own forward-looking dance rhythms. That drummer was Jean Marc Cerrone, and he’d go on to be widely sampled by stars of the French Touch, as well as by the first generation of hip-hop producers, and have his hit “Supernature” used as a soundtrack to the dramatic finale of the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. As Nile Rodgers suggested to writer Bill Brewster: “His contribution to dance music may be as important as Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk.”
Cerrone got the music bug after a concert by Jimi Hendrix at L’Olympia in Paris in 1967. He was instinctively drawn to the drums. “Since I was unruly, and not really a good student, I would drum on the tables non-stop and get thrown out of class,” he explained in a French interview at the 2015 Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Paris. His mother offered him his first drum kit if he could last a year without being thrown out of class.
Troubles at home persisted, though, and at the age of 16 he took off for Saint Tropez, where he became a busker. One day, by a sheer stroke of luck, French record producer Eddie Barclay walked past. Impressed by what he heard, he suggested to Cerrone he form a band. The drummer replied that he had already got a group of musicians together back in Paris; they called themselves Kongas. Soon enough, Knogas were playing a month-long residency at a Saint Tropez spot called Le Papagayo.
Released on his label Barclay, Cerrone’s debut album with Kongas in 1973 opened with a track called “Anikana-O.” When it reached the hands of New York party host David Mancuso, he knew it was the kind of Afro-Latin track that would send his dancers at The Loft wild. Picked up by Salsoul in 1977, “Anikana-O” was subsequently released as an extended 10-minute Tom Moulton Mix, alongside two other Moulton mixes of “Kongas Fun” and “Jungle” from Kongas’s debut.
Their follow-up album Africanism—originally released in France on a subsidiary of Cerrone’s newly formed label Malligator before being picked up by Polydor—was most notable for a wild, 15-minute version of Stevie Winwood’s “Gimme Some Loving.” (The album also gave its title to the French house series by DJ Gregory and Bob Sinclair, two French Touch producers who were inspired by Cerrone.)
Although Cerrone remained onboard as Kongas producer, and continued to release their subsequent albums on Malligator, he became disillusioned with the poppier direction in which the group was headed and decided to set out on his own. It was at the famous Trident Studios in London, where Cerrone’s original disco partner Alec R. Costandinos—the lyricist and writer for Kongas—also produced his own Euro disco projects like Love and Kisses, that Cerrone made his first album under his own name. Written by Costandinos, the title track of Love in C Minor stretched out over 16 sultry minutes of symphonic disco excess. With French record companies either asking him to make a shorter, radio-friendly version, or questioning how high he’d placed the drums in the mix, Cerrone decided to just release the album himself. A huge hit in America that ultimately led to Cerrone performing on prime time TV and partying at Studio 54, Love in C Minor was to be the first of 14 drum-heavy electronic disco albums he released on Malligator.
Cerrone’s birthplace has afforded him the title Godfather of French Disco. But it’s a title he avidly disowns. “I have never made a record in France. I have always done it in England or in the United States,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in Paris. “I am French by birth, but I’m not really a French musician or French singer. So, without any pretensions, no—I’m not a French disco composer.” But Cerrone does take pride in his influence on the French Touch, the dance sound of the ‘90s whose producers look to Cerrone as a founding father. Whether it’s Daft Punk sampling his epic sci-fi disco track “Supernature” on “Veridis Quo” from their album Discovery, Bob Sinclair doing a mix of Cerrone tracks on a 2001 album that reputedly sold one million copies, or Dimitri From Paris remixing “Love in C Minor” on the 2015 album The Remixes, Cerrone’s legacy is assured.
It doesn’t end there though. In recent years, Cerrone has returned to the studio with a string of releases for Malligator. What follows is our guide to the music of one of disco’s true pioneers.
Cerrone
Love in C Minor
Cerrone’s full immersion into disco began in a famous London studio. “I had gone to England because I was a fan of a studio called Trident, where Elton John and Genesis recorded. I had succeeded in hiring an engineer for a few weeks, and everything that I needed,” he told Red Bull Music Academy. The ‘everything’ to which he referred included acclaimed library musicians led by keyboardist Alan Hawkshaw, Pat Halling’s String Ensemble, and four female vocalists, including the great Madeline Bell, whose famous orgasmic cries through the record were loossened by free champagne.
This string-laden disco symphony was marked out by its almost proto-house-drum kick and heavy bass. “The way I made it, I thought that it was never going to be released,” he told Music Radar. So Cerrone pressed 5,000 copies himself and distributed them to the key record shops in Paris. When 300 albums arrived in America thanks to a mailing error, “Love in C Minor” caused a buzz amongst local DJs. So Cerrone took a chance and flew to New York. “I rang the bell of the first record company I could find, which was Atlantic Records,” he told Red Bull Music Academy. “We signed a contract then and there, and ‘Love in C Minor’ sold three million copes and went to No. 1 on the U.S. charts.”
Cerrone
Cerrone 3
One of the greatest space disco records ever made, Cerrone’s “Supernature” still sounds like the future today. It was the record on which Cerrone went from sweeping orchestral music to heavy machine music. “One day I got an ARP Odyssey at home, and I tried to use it…and fuck! The first thing I heard was the sequencer,” he told Music Radar. “I started to hold the notes down, and I thought ‘Hmmm…’ And I thought of a bass part to go with it. I tapped my finger on a microphone for the beat, and I recorded that. I sang a melody over that, and Alain Wisniak [who went on to produce ‘Supernature’] said ‘Wow! What is this? Let’s take it to the studio.” “Supernature’s” prescient, ecologically concerned lyrics were written by a girl he had met dancing with a group of Hare Khrisha devotees outside Trident Studios. That same girl—Lene Lovich—later had a punk disco hit with “Lucky Number” and also penned “Give Me Love” from Cerrone 3, the 1977 album that boasted one of Cerrone’s most outlandish LP sleeves. It’s been remixed by everyone from Kevin Saunderson to Dimitri from Paris, but nothing quite touches the electronic disco madness of the original.
Cerrone
Brigade Mondaine (aka Vice Squad)
Having worked with many of London’s leading library musicians, and having a penchant for orchestral arrangements, it was somewhat inevitable that Cerrone would move into film scores. And considering both his erotic album covers and the saucy intro of “‘Love in C Minor” (“that ain’t no banana”), it was also no surprise that his first soundtrack would be for a sexploitation film by the name of Brigade Mondaine (or Vice Squad in English) (1979). Adapted from the novels of Gerard de Villiers, the first of the three film trilogies scored by Cerrone began after a meeting between composer and author. Their friendship blossomed, and de Villiers first asked Cerrone if he could use “Give Me Love” in one of his films, then suggested that he compose the whole soundtrack. Having just recorded “Supernature,” Cerrone was deep into the Arp. He used this project as an outlet for further experimentations, the spacey analog sounds mixed with his percussion and pre-recorded vocal tapes. This compilation brings together his three Brigade Mondaine albums, favorites of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy amongst many others.
Don Ray
Garden of Love
Raymond Georges Henri Donnez, better known to French disco aficionados as Don Ray, had been a regular musical companion to Cerrone. After playing keyboards on “Love in C Minor,” Cerrone invited him into Trident Studios in 1978 to record an album under his own name. A co-production between Don Ray on keyboards and sythns and Cerrone on drums (with writing input from Lene Lovich), the album featured some of the same musicians as Cerrone’s other Trident albums, including Madeline Bell, Sue Glover, and Kay Garner. “Got To Have Loving” and “Garden of Love” would become all-time disco classics, but perhaps the album’s real masterpiece is “Body and Soul,” a big favorite with Larry Levan at Paradise Garage in New York.
Cerrone
Cerrone IV: The Golden Touch
Working again with Don Ray at Trident Studios, Cerrone’s 1978 follow up to “Supernature” swapped the crazed electronic disco with something far more refined. In many ways, it was a companion piece to “Garden of Love,” thanks to the lush arrangements of Don Ray, the huge Trident Studios string section, and Cerrone’s regular female vocalists who soar high on the disco classic “Je Suis Music.” Then there was the 10-minute “Music of Life,” just one of Cerrone’s tracks that would send dancers into ecstasy at gay disco meccas like The Saint in New York and Trocadero Transfer in San Francisco. While Cerrone has been widely sampled by house producers, The Golden Touch is also known for “Rocket in the Pocket,” whose proto-electro made it a big breakbeat record, sampled by LL Cool J on “Rock the Bells” from 1985 and Run DMC on “Hit It Run” from 1986.
Cerrone
You Are The One
For Cerrone’s first album of the 1980s, he decamped from his beloved Trident Studio to New York for a series of sessions between May and September 1980 at Power Station. The studio had been used for such famous disco albums as Chic’s C’est Chic and Sister Sledge’s We Are Family. Now, Cerrone was ready to rub shoulders with the best, working with the cream of New York musicians and vocalists as he had in London. Fresh from her legendary vocal performance on albums with Inner Life, Change, and Dazzle, Paradise Garage icon Jocelyn Brown brought her gospel deepness with the help of backing singers Ullanda McCullough and Krystal Davis. With killer arrangements and instrumentation combined with some of the greatest voices in disco, it made for a major return to form after the misfire of Cerrone VI.
Cerrone
DNA
Thanks to the support of Emmanuel de Buretel’s French label Because Music, Cerrone has had something of a musical renaissance in the last few years. This has led to a number of collaborations, ranging from an Afrobeat project with the late Tony Allen to a disco house 12-inch with Purple Disco Machine to a cosmic track with Roga Roga of Congolese group Extra Musica. Cerrone went back to his roots in 2020 with the aptly entitled DNA, an album of pulsating electronic cosmic disco that continued the environmental themes of “Supernature.” Go to Cerrone’s Bandcamp page to dig into more recent releases.
