9. Donna SummerI Remember Yesterday

I don’t own this album, I chose it for ‘I Feel Love’. Russell and I were at a period where we were trying to find a different way of doing things, but within the same sensibility of what we are. And we heard ‘I Feel Love’ on the radio… it just sounded so amazing to have that kind of cold, electronic background, but with a singer that was really not robotic at all, but very much a singer. It really struck us hearing this on the radio; we thought maybe it would be a really good way for us to go. It was produced by Giorgio Moroder, and he worked with another guy, Pete Bellotte.

And so we did an interview with a German journalist, and we told her, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to be working on our next record with Giorgio Moroder’, but we hadn’t made any contact with him at all. We didn’t know how to get a hold of him, and so the journalist said, ‘Oh, I’m good friends with Giorgio.’ She introduced us to him, and he was interested in working with a band. In a way we were kind of the perfect band for him, both for Russell’s singing – which we thought would really work well within that kind of musical context – and also that we were kind of loosely a band in a way. Russell and I are the central part of it, but we’re always adjusting the context musically of what we’re doing, with different musicians or or even a whole other way of looking at things. So it worked out really well with Giorgio with No.1 In Heaven.