Fantasy Jukebox - 1. I Feel Love by Donna Summer

Imagine a fantasy jukebox that contained all the most influential, innovative, adventurous and just plain great music since the dawn of the recording era. OK, so the likes of iTunes, YouTube and Spotify have made this more of a reality than a fantasy, but setting aside their rather indiscriminating presence. What should it include?

Commencing a new series exploring some of the key musical statements of the recording era, Matthew Vizard picks a radical dancefloor masterpiece.

1. Donna Summer - I Feel Love (1977, Casablanca Records)

Writers: Donna Summer/Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte

1977 was about punk. It was also an important year in the development of electronic music. Kraftwerk's pioneering Trans Europe Express caught the imagination of young techno heads with its soulful synthesizer-driven European futurist manifesto.

Then there was I Feel Love.

Embracing the era's disco craze but adding a pioneering experimental drive, the record's robotic, sequencer laced, overdriven rhythm track provided a commercial hit for Donna Summer, but it was also a radical musical production statement.

Donna Summer had enjoyed initial success with Love To Love You Baby in 1975, a daring and sensual record that blended the emerging disco sound with a lubricious vocal that captured its sexually liberated times. Masterminded by a young Italian-born, German based producer and songwriter called Giorgio Moroder, it ran to practically 17 minutes and filled one side of an LP of the same name.

Two years on, Moroder created his musical masterpiece. A dizzyingly exciting, synthesizer-driven disco mantra with a perfectly realised ecstatic-minimalist vocal from Summer.

The single and album version runs to nearly six minutes, but it is not quite long enough to achieve the full-on out of body dance floor trance experience. The 12 inch version clocks in at a more satisfying eight. The later Patrick Cowley megamix (an early example of DJ inspired remix culture) - created by using loops and overdubs - notches up close to 16 and is well worth seeking out.

I Feel Love was too definitive and unrepeatable to unleash an immediate string of imitations. But it did burrow its way into the musical psyche and influenced both contemporaneous pop music and the house and techno scenes that emerged a decade later, as well as, arguably, every piece of future facing dancefloor R&B since. 

David Bowie described first hearing Summer and Moroder's finest collaboration while deeply immersed in his own teutonic phase that same year: "One day in Berlin ... (Brian) Eno came running in and said, "I have heard the sound of the future." He puts on I Feel Love by Donna Summer. He said, "This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years." Which was more or less right."

What song(s) or album(s) would you include on your fantasy jukebox? Sign up to The Plymouth Daily and write about it.