Renzo Arbore

“We started playing the records ourselves, talking over the records, creating a real revolution for that era!”

I Love Disco interviews Renzo Arbore about the ’70s, memories, disco music, and his experiences as a DJ and great radio revolutionary.

The ’70s:
“I didn’t like them at all from a social and political standpoint because there was violence, laughter hadn’t been legitimized, you couldn’t laugh, even though some wrote ‘laughter will bury you,’ it wasn’t true, everyone was blind, you couldn’t, there was the so-called ‘commitment.’ Those were years of pain; every morning you’d turn on the radio and there was someone who had been kneecapped, someone who was gone, someone who had been struck. They were violent years, politicized in a rather unpleasant way. However, Boncompagni, Marenco, Bracardi, and I dared to violate this order with a radio program called ‘Alto gradimento,’ which had extraordinary success, perhaps precisely because people weren’t laughing elsewhere. It was just us and Totò’s films showing in certain suburban cinemas, and young people would go see Totò’s films, even though they were dated, just to smile a little, because it seemed forbidden to laugh. So those were not happy years.”

Radio and being a DJ:
“I created ‘Quelli della notte,’ the first nostalgia program in radio history with ‘Cari amici, vicini e lontani’ in ’84, dedicated to old singers nobody wanted anymore, and so before Paolo Limiti I had fun bringing back Nilla Pizzi, Gino Latilla, Carla Boni, Consolini, and then the singers of that time, Quartetto Cetra—it was a great moment. And then ‘Quelli della notte’ and so on, but let’s not make this a commemoration!
Radio used to be formal, then Boncompagni and I broke it down; we started playing the records ourselves, talking over the records, creating a real revolution for that era, not writing scripts but submitting cassettes with recordings of our work to SIAE, all revolutionary things for that time. Then the advent of independent radio brought real freedom; the model was somewhat like ours, the two ‘troublemakers’ who could say whatever they wanted on the radio, but for a long time it continued with dedications, new entries, record charts, letters.
DJs working in nightclubs are extraordinary geniuses, they’re avant-garde, people who curate. I know some of them, like Coccoluto—they’re excellent, they select records, produce records, modify records, they chart on the internet with these creations. Instead, the radio DJ is struggling; it’s a profession that’s becoming rare, very few remain who select records, and I’m very sorry about this because we did important work for record labels too, suggesting what the audience wanted, acting as a filter, and today’s radio DJs could do the same. But they don’t anymore.”

Disco Music:
“We started with R&B (that’s what it’s called now, but we called it Rhythm and Blues!), James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding. Then also disco music, early disco music, the great performers of that time, Gloria Gaynor, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding—that is, R&B up to Prince, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles—Black music that later generated dance, because that was a form of popularization of a very hard genre that began, I believe, with ‘I Got You’ by James Brown.”

An anecdote:
“We were truly the first DJs; the word didn’t exist in Italy. The term was coined by the radio director at the time who, returning from the United States, said: ‘Do you know that even those who select records on American radio talk and are called disc jockeys?’ I said, ‘We know that.’ He replied: ‘Then you be the disc jockeys!'”