If you had to name the artist who officially kicked off the Italo Disco genre, it would be Gazebo. His 1983 track "I Like Chopin" set every core parameter of the style: a melancholy melody, a synth beat, English lyrics with an accent, melancholy in place of hedonism. Here's how a young Roman musician shifted the course of European pop music.
Paul Mazzolini: An Unusual Biography
Behind the name Gazebo is Paul Mazzolini - someone with a life story that was anything but typical for the Italian pop scene. He was born in 1960 in Beirut, son of an Italian diplomat and an American journalist. He spent his childhood across several countries - Lebanon, England, France, Jordan. He didn't learn Italian until his teenage years, when the family moved back to Rome.
That multicultural upbringing would play a key role in his music. From childhood, Mazzolini absorbed different musical traditions - British rock, American pop, French chanson, Italian estrada. When he started writing music, the result was a hybrid that didn't sound quite like anything else that existed.
Masterpiece: The First Signal
Gazebo's first track "Masterpiece" came out in 1982. It already carried the future traits of Italo Disco - electronic arrangements, a melancholy mood, English vocals. It was a local hit in Italy but barely got out of the country.
It did, however, catch the attention of producer Pierluigi Giombini, who decided to work with Mazzolini on the next material. That partnership would produce the artist's defining hit.
I Like Chopin: A Manifesto for the Genre
"I Like Chopin" came out in 1983 and was a sensation. #1 in Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Across Europe the track played on radio and at clubs for months on end. Total single and album sales for the song crossed eight million copies.
What made the track special was the paradoxical combination of a danceable rhythm and a candidly sad melody. Typically '80s pop was either upbeat or ballad-style. Gazebo did something third - a song you could dance to with tears in your eyes.
The lyrics are the classic Italo Disco simple English, built around the line "I like Chopin, love me now and again." The reference is, of course, to Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, though the connection to the real Chopin is minimal - it's a cultural nod that gives the track an air of refinement.
Lunatic and Telephone Mama
After "I Like Chopin" came other hits - "Lunatic," "Telephone Mama," "I Like... Chopin Part 2." All stayed within the master formula: melancholy melody, synthesizers, English lyrics. None of them hit the level of the first.
For Gazebo, that was fine. He never tried to be a pop star in the classic sense. He was interested in the craft, not the fame. He kept putting out albums, worked on projects that interested him, but didn't chase the charts.
Different from His Peers
Among Italo Disco artists, Gazebo stood out on three counts:
- He wrote his own songs - unlike many "frontmen" who had production teams working for them.
- He sang them himself - no studio swaps, no session vocalists behind the scenes.
- He was a trained musician - played piano, understood theory, used classical references.
That made him the "intellectual" voice of the genre. While most Italo Disco artists made simple dance music, Gazebo was closer to a singer-songwriter - just with electronic arrangements.
A Long Quiet Career
Gazebo is still working today. He's released more than a dozen studio albums, experiments with sound, collaborates with other artists. He never kept returning to his main hit as his single subject - he always wrote new material.
When interest in Italo Disco revived in the 2010s, Gazebo got the respect he deserves as one of the genre's founding fathers. He gets booked for festivals, his tracks appear in anthologies, young artists remix his compositions.
Sadness as Formula
Gazebo's main legacy is that he showed dance music could be sad. Before him, Italo Disco gravitated toward upbeat moods, just like American disco. After "I Like Chopin," it became possible to express entirely different emotions through the genre - melancholy, nostalgia, even depression.
That lineage was carried on by Savage, Valerie Dore, and many others. In the 2010s it became the foundation of the whole synthwave movement, where melancholy under synths is the default operating mode.
Samples from "I Like Chopin" show up in dozens of retro tracks between 2015 and 2023, from obscure Bandcamp synthwavers to official game soundtracks like "Hotline Miami" and "Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon." For a genre invented in 1983 by a Milanese teenager with a Beirut childhood, that's a staggering range.