Peppino Gagliardi

This summer, dive with us into the often-overlooked sea of late ‘70s/early ’80s Italian Soul, AOR and Disco. Compiled by journalist, producer and digger extraordinaire David Nerattini (with a little help from our own Pierpaolo De Sanctis), PAISA’ GOT SOUL is the smooth and near-danceable soundtrack to a decade that is somehow still with us. A time of gentle grooves, summer loves and sweet escapism – one beautifully captured by Claude Nori in his photographs of Italian beaches and summer holidays. Welcome to the mood of an era.

While quite a few arena rock acts of the '70s found it difficult to sustain their popularity beyond that decade, several acts continued to flourish and enjoyed some of their biggest commercial success: Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and especially Foreigner. Foreigner's leader from the beginning has been British guitarist Mick Jones, who first broke into the music biz as a "hired gun" of sorts, appearing on recordings by George Harrison and Peter Frampton, and as part of a latter-day version of hard rockers Spooky Tooth. By the mid-'70s, Jones had relocated to New York City, where he was a brief member of the Leslie West Band and served as an A&R man for a record company. But it wasn't long before Jones felt the urge to be part of another rock outfit as he sought to put together a band that would be able to combine elements of rock, progressive, R&B, and pop into a single, cohesive style.