Miskatonic University PressI was surprised to hear Anthony Powell named as an inspiration for Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday album on the new episode of the BBC Radio Four show Great Lives: Jessie Ware on Donna Summer.
Pete Bellotte (who produced the album with Giorgio Moroder) is the expert witness, and says:
Donna’s next record was called Love Trilogy, and this was because I’d been reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. The third album, I’d been reading Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, and we turned that into Four Seasons of Love. Then the next album, I’d been reading Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, which is twelve volumes, and it gave me the idea of taking songs from the fifties, going through Tamla, funk, coming up to today, and then ending on a futuristic song, and that was how “I Feel Love” came about.