Influential songs come in many shapes and styles, but making a track which goes on to universally transform music and culture is a rare thing indeed.

Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte produced a number of hits with Donna Summer, including the sublime Love to Love You Baby in 1975.

In the following year, while working on her fifth album, I Remember Yesterday, the production team decided that they wanted each track to reflect the musical flavours of various different historical decades.

They explored 60s girl groups and navigated 70s disco, but when it came to the last track on the album, they wanted to create something that looked ahead to a hypothetical, electronic-tinged future…

The result was the epic I Feel Love, which charted at number one in the UK for four weeks during the summer of 1977.

While its commercial impact globally was equally impressive, I Feel Love’s true legacy would be how it became a benchmark for electronic music producers.

Alongside pioneers such as Kraftwerk, the track acted as a green light for musicians and producers who wanted to produce music entirely electronically. So, by wildly envisioning the future, Moroder, Bellotte and Summer essentially invented it.

In fact – as recounted by David Buckley in his Kraftwerk biography Publikation, when Brian Eno (then working with David Bowie on his hailed Berlin trilogy) first heard the record, he raced to tell his creative accomplice.

“One of the songs which certainly impacted greatly in the summer of 1977 was a song which sounded as if Kraftwerk had gone potty and recruited a bona fide American soul singer,” wrote Buckley. “In fact, it wasn’t Kraftwerk, but Italian musician and producer Giorgio Moroder. ‘One day in Berlin,’ says Bowie, ‘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 15 years.”’ Which was more or less right.”

Many years later, the technical commonalities between this track and the explosion of electronic dance music, became impossible to ignore – and I Feel Love became regarded as a vital part of its birth.

(MusicRadar)