February 1984, Milan: 25-year-old Raffaele Riefoli, performing as Raf, cuts his first major single - “Self Control” - at Mondial Sound. The lyric is half-English, half-Italian; the music is by Giancarlo Bigazzi and Steve Piccolo. The single drops in Italy in late February and in six weeks is #1 on the Italian chart. #1 in Switzerland. #1 in Austria. #1 in France. Raf's original sells about 1.5 million copies across Europe by summer 1984. Three months later the Laura Branigan cover rockets to #4 Billboard Hot 100 and becomes her biggest hit after “Gloria”. It is one of the rarest events in chart history: two different performances of the same song sitting in the top 5 on both sides of the Atlantic at the same time.
Who Raf is
Raffaele Riefoli was born in Margherita di Savoia in 1959. From 1979 he played in the Neapolitan punk group Cafè Caracas, where together with guitarist Steve Piccolo (an American, Steven Piccolo, settled in Italy) he began experimenting with synthesizers. Punk was not selling. By 1982 both had moved into session work, Piccolo as writer-producer, Raf as vocalist.
Producer Giancarlo Bigazzi brought them a ready-made melody demo - he had wanted to release it with Sabrina Salerno, who turned it down. Piccolo rewrote the lyric, inserted the English hook “oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, the night is my world”, Raf added vocals. Three days at Mondial Sound with arranger Mario Natale.
Gear on Raf's recording
- Roland Jupiter-8 - the “spacey” lead and pad
- Yamaha DX7 - electric piano texture under the verse
- LinnDrum LM-2 - rhythm bed at 119 BPM
- Oberheim OB-Xa - bass and chord stabs in the chorus
- Budget: roughly 18 million lire (around US$11,000 in 1984 money)
The single came out on 27 February 1984 via Carrere (Italy) and was immediately a hit. By late March it was #1 in four countries.
How Laura Branigan got it
The buzz spread through European radio. In March 1984 Laura Branigan's manager Sid Bernstein heard “Self Control” on French radio during a trip to Cannes. He contacted Giancarlo Bigazzi immediately and bought the US English-language rights for US$45,000. The re-record happened at Criteria studios in Miami in April 1984, produced by Robbie Buchanan.
“I heard Raf's demo and said: that song should be mine. There was a voice in there that was my voice - low, a little hoarse, dramatically taut. I rewrote the lyric into full English and added my own phrasing”, - Laura Branigan to Rolling Stone, April 1984.
Branigan's version came out on 23 April 1984 via Atlantic Records. The tempo stayed identical at 119 BPM. The key was lifted from Am to C#m for her voice. The arrangement skeleton was kept - same Jupiter-8, same OB-Xa - but every part was re-recorded with American session players.
The William Friedkin video MTV pulled
The video for Branigan's version was directed by William Friedkin - the man behind “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection”. Budget: US$300,000. Shot in New York in May 1984. The concept was a woman stalked through the night city by a masked man, hallucinatory club imagery, erotic tension. In individual frames: dancers in lingerie, kisses with strangers, bedroom scenes.
MTV played the video twice in May 1984 and pulled it: “too sexual for the daytime grid.” The clip moved to the post-10pm slot and, paradoxically, that accelerated sales: teenagers in 1984 taped the video off late-night MTV to VHS and passed the cassettes around. By late June the single was at #4 Billboard, the album Self Control at #23 Billboard 200, platinum in the US by August.
The numbers: two versions racing
- Raf (Italy, March 1984): #1 Italy, Switzerland, Austria, France; #3 Germany; #1 Spain
- Laura Branigan (US, May 1984): #4 Billboard Hot 100; #4 Canada; #5 UK; #12 Australia; #1 adult contemporary
- Combined sales by end of 1985: about 5 million copies
- Spotify in 2024: Raf 220M streams, Branigan 580M
In Germany, Raf's original ran alongside Branigan's version and both sat in the top 10 at the same time. That's the only instance in postwar German chart history where two distinct recordings of the same composition simultaneously held top-10 positions. The Italian press called it sfida a distanza - the duel at a distance.
What separates Raf's arrangement from Branigan's
Raf's version is built on low frequencies: the Oberheim OB-Xa bass sits at C1-F1 in the verse, Raf's voice stays in the lower register, the vocal almost whispered. That makes the original more “nocturnal”, clubbier, more hidden. Branigan's is the opposite: everything brighter by a third, the bass moved up an octave, Branigan's voice full of dramatic vocalism rather than whisper. American producer Robbie Buchanan added his signature “sheen” - an extra layer of DX7 strings Raf didn't have.
“We wanted the American listener to understand the song on first play. Raf's is an Italian dark ballad with a club beat. Laura's is straight American pop with a European flavour”, - Robbie Buchanan in Mix Magazine, 1985.
The authorship dispute
Official credits: Bigazzi / Piccolo / Raf. In 1991 the Italian composer Riccardo Cocciante filed suit, claiming the melody had been lifted from an unreleased 1981 demo of his. The case ran three years. In 1994 the Milan court dismissed the claim but ruled that Cocciante was owed 5% of Italian royalties. The ruling didn't apply to the US version.
Laura Branigan died in 2004 of a cerebral aneurysm at 52. Raf still records; in 2023 he released an anniversary album Self Control 40 with remixes. Both versions of the song keep showing up in film and television: Branigan's “Self Control” opens the first episode of Stranger Things season 4, Raf's version plays in Netflix's Mindhunter. For other Italian hits from the same winter, see “Maria Magdalena” Sandra and “Major Tom” Peter Schilling.