inthemix | News | Onelove's homage to Georgio Moroder

With onelove’s latest album now in stores – ‘Sound Machine’ mixed by Italian fidget house masters Crookers, along with local lads Grant Smillie and Matt Nugent – at ITM we came across a rather interesting discussion taking place in our Funk/Soul/Disco forum on the origins of the CD’s cover art. After doing some sleuth work, we felt it entirely necessary to give you the lowdown!

One crafty trainspotter had noticed the similarity between the design of onelove’s ‘Sound Machine’ cover and a 1977 self-titled release by Munich Machine, aka electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder’s side project with Pete Bellotte. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the onelove design team were looking to the cult disco album for inspiration. “It’s an homage to the works of its time and my era. I loved that style,” onelove’s Frank Cotela relayed when contacted by inthemix. “There where a number of albums that came out in the mid 70s that used the robots, everyone from Aerosmith to Munich Machine.”

The onelove album sticks closely to the theme set by Munich Machine; the robots obviously bearing a striking resemblance and even the album’s title carrying on the idea. “There were a load of Japanese airbrush artists who did the robot styles,” Frank explained, with Munich Machine’s artwork having been contributed by Shusei Nagaoka, the famed Japanese artist who also designed covers for other notable artists from the 70s like ELO, Deep Purple, Earth Wind & Fire and Jefferson Starship.

With Munich Machine hitting the streets a good 10 years before the bulk of onelove’s club kids were but a twinkle in the eye of their disco-dancing parents, it’s interesting to see them looking so far into the past for design inspiration. But, as the saying goes, ‘everything old is new again’. With the fluoro-clad revival of 80s fashion having well and truly run its course, perhaps onelove will lead the way in bringing flares and platform shoes back to clubland?

The original Munich Machine cover is on the left, with onelove’s ‘Sound Machine’ cover below. Party robots unit!