DJ Linus
I Love Disco Interviews DJ Linus on the ’70s
“But Milan wasn’t New York; there was no Andy Warhol,
there was no Broadway behind Corso 22 Marzo.
In reality, imitations are always just imitations.”
I Love Disco interviews DJ Linus about his work experience as a DJ in the ’70s and about disco music:
Memories:
“I was just a kid in the ’70s, when both free radio stations and clubs with disco music were emerging in Italy. In the first half of the ’70s, clubs weren’t really clubs, and free radio didn’t exist. In ’75, disco music took off in America, and the world of free radio began in Italy. In ’75, I was 17 or 18 years old, a long-haired kid who listened to the radio with his younger brother, Albertino, who was five years younger. I used to go dancing at clubs—that was the age you started—but my brother was too young to go. One Sunday evening I came home and he said to me: ‘Look, come here,’ and he let me listen to the FM radio of the ’70s—it was terrifying—a station broadcasting modern music, because RAI radio only broadcast modern music in two or three daily segments; the rest was news and radio plays, that sort of old-fashioned stuff. Instead, this station played music like Barry White all day long; it was Radio Milano International, at the beginning of ’75.”
The Radio:
“For a while, I was a devoted listener; I knew everything, even the details. It seemed like a wonderful but distant world because, besides being young, I lived outside Milan and wasn’t used to big city life, whereas this station was right in the center. In the spring of the following year, a classmate of mine met someone who worked at one of the first free radio stations, and he managed to get in. Once he was in, he told me: ‘Come and do an audition too.’ I went, and they practically did the audition live; they weren’t very formal in those years. After a month, they started making the first selections, letting my friend go and keeping me. And I haven’t stopped since. It was April ’76. I remember the first song I announced: ‘Wake Up Everybody’ by Harold Melvin, the one John Legend recently covered. It was the beginning of a story that I never thought would become my career. I remember when Studio 54 opened in Milan; at that time, Milan was trying to be a relative of New York. It was ’79–’80, with Tony Carrasco, who was one of the original DJs from Studio 54; he worked there and then stayed to live in Italy. I remember the Trammps, the ones from ‘Disco Inferno,’ were at the opening, and it was an event that made us feel like true children of ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ In the ’70s, there was a fairly clear divide; even the free radio stations were split vertically: those that were politically active on the left, and those that were lighthearted—which was the majority. I was somewhere in the middle because, musically, although I grew up with singer-songwriters like Guccini and De Gregori, I actually really liked this new American trend. However, at school, I was part of the student movement; in theory, I was the one participating in strikes and collectives. However, I liked the playful side of radio, the more fun part.”
Being a DJ:
“The term DJ is very vague and varied today. Under the same term, you can include everyone from an absolute technical club DJ like Ralph or Coccoluto, to someone like me, for whom music still has an important relationship, but is no longer the center of my world. In my way of doing radio, music is the soundtrack. If I were a director making a film, I clearly wouldn’t just put on the first record I found as a soundtrack; I still do research and try to be proactive, to have a ‘wallpaper’ that fits well. But radio has fundamentally lost the trend-setting value it had in the ’70s and ’80s, now with the advent of the internet and other forms like YouTube… I see my children: they listen to music on YouTube—or rather, they don’t listen to it, they watch it. On YouTube, there is every track from every album; even if there isn’t a video, there’s always someone who puts some images together.”
