My Mad Music Corner: P4F - Hustle & Bustle: The Bootleg CD Edition

Of course Al Festa isn't the only Italo-disco producer I'm a fan of, but him directing this Italo-disco group's video for Winner led me to discovering them. The group in question is P4F, also known as Propaganda For Frankie according to the cover of their first single, which is a medley/cover of both Propaganda's song P: Machinery and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's song Relax. (I imagine litigation forced them to shorten that clever name.)

This project was spearheaded by Italo-disco producer Claudio Cecchetto, and most of the tracks on it are covers of pre-existing, obscure Italo-disco songs, when they aren't taking bits from Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Duran Duran or Chic. Cecchetto himself wrote some of these songs, such as the cover of Via Verdi's Diamond (while mostly stripped down of some of the original's bells and whistles, it keeps the female background vocals directly from the original), while he had seemingly nothing to do with the Roncuccy & Crazy song Winner, which is also covered here.

While it's certainly not uncommon for European pop or dance producers to reuse their compositions for newer projects (Al did this a few times, German producer Frank Farian reused a Boney M. song for Milli Vanilli, and Italian-French producer Romano Musumarra has done it several times with songs he originally did in the late 80s), it's odd to see a project predominantly based around this practice.

This album, like 99% of Italo-disco records, was issued mainly on vinyl throughout Europe, the sole exception being an official French CD through Polygram which is apparently expensive as hell. This CD of that album is not that version; rather, it is an apparent bootleg of the German vinyl through ZYX Records, which oddly credits the release through their heavy metal sublabel ZYX Metallic. The origin of the bootleg is completely unknown to me, but Discogs credits it as Russian, which makes sense to me. While these bootleggers were nice enough to add an additional B-side as a bonus track to this CD release, the track White Storm (In The Jungle) was removed, and Diamond has a noticeable audio dropout from a glitch in ripping the vinyl.

I have to give this bootleg some credit, though... it has more songs than the French CD has (the French CD also drops White Storm), and it's actually pressed onto an actual CD. I have to give points for that. However, I have to take points off for the faulty ripping of Diamond. The album itself is pretty good for late 80s Italo-disco, so if you're into stuff from that era, this is a good collection of it.