Valerie Dore – The Night
#quotefromthe80s
Let's get closer babe
'Cause we're dance and dance
All my friends are talking to me
What's this love I see?
#ValerieDore #TheNight
In the final part of 1983 a song was recorded and produced that could be defined as “a disco dream”, or maybe an Italo-disco dream. Actually, the first impression was that there was very little Italian in this song: the title and the lyrics were in English, the singer’s name sounded French, and in the biographies found in the newspapers of music of the time we read that the singer was even born in Monte Carlo or in any case in the principality of Monaco.
And in fact the great and beautiful Valerie Dore had a rather aristocratic fashionable attitude, and looking at her in videos or on television she could easily have been born in Montecarlo and have found some international producer who had written a truly fantastic song for her, The Night, with a dreamlike and sensual atmosphere. The Night, recorded and released at the end of 1983, became increasingly popular during the following year, also thanks to its participation in some music chows mostly in Italy, and just a year later, in December 1984, it even reached the top ten of some European countries.
Valerie Dore certainly demonstrated originality and a very particular style that she maintained throughout her career. Even with changes in style or settings of the songs, I would say that Valerie Dore never appeared dressed informally, casually, or in a contemporary style, which certainly gave her an aura of mystery, and took her out of every temporal context.
The lyrics of The Night are all in all quite simple, but definitely persuasive. Valerie essentially proposes to a man to spend a romantic night together, and it is probably not the first night, given that one verse talks about “together again for all the night”. Surely, what makes the song special is the sweetness of the voice, but here we must necessarily delve into the Valerie Dore mystery. Yes, because Valerie Dore was a stage character, at the center of a musical project, but in fact her career was the result of the collaboration of many well-known personalities in the world, now we can say, of Italo-disco.
The main creators and architects of this project were undoubtedly the brothers Pino, Lino and Rossana Nicolosi, great musicians and producers who became famous in those months with the Novecento group, in which the fabulous voice of Dora Carofiglio, stood out. She was the fourth member of Novecento, as well as partner and later wife of Lino Nicolosi. The Nicolosi brothers were true masters of Italo-disco, and as often happened, they had more ideas and songs than opportunities to sing them, so one solution could be to create parallel projects, and Valerie Dore was one of them.
Of course a face was needed for Valerie, and a girl in her twenties was chosen, Monica Stucchi, born in Milan, far from Monte Carlo. Monica had ambitions as a singer, but probably at the beginning of her career her voice must have been considered a little immature, because in The Night the beautiful voice we hear is actually the celestial voice of Dora Carofiglio; in other words, it’s the same crystalline voice we hear in Novecento’s Movin’ On.
In fact, over the years, Valerie Dore’s voice will change at least three times, because already from the next single Get Closer we will hear Rossana Nicolosi’s voice singing, and later, perhaps in the moment of greatest popularity of Valerie Dore, the voice will belong to Monica but will be supported by the choirs of Simona Zanini, another great queen of Italo-disco, who with her artistic partner Aldo Martinelli formed the group Martinelli, authors of the famous Cinderella, but also of other projects such as Moon Ray’s Comanchero, actually sang with Simona’s voice.
It must be said that after that phase, however, Valerie Dore’s songs will be sung by Monica herself, who had never really tried to only lend the image using other people’s voices, and this must certainly be acknowledged as a credit to her.
As often happened in Italo-disco productions, the video was really simple, little more than a TV performance, with new-romantic style dresses and laces (we could say a “Valerie Dore style”) and some supporting musicians, but nothing comparable to the videos of the great pop stars of the time, considering that we were about to enter the golden period of the 80s. After all, these were also the video standards of Novecento and of Martinelli and many others, for which it was much more important to break through and be played in discos and clubs on Saturday evenings, rather than being broadcast on Videomusic in the afternoon (I would say that thinking of arriving on MTV was unrealistic).
In any case, despite all these changes of voice, Valerie Dore still remains one of the most symbolic, recognized and loved singers of the ’80s in the world of Italo-disco, but also in mainstream pop, especially in Italy, Germany and Switzerland. Her clothing, somewhere between sensual and medieval, made her a unique character, a true star of musical broadcasts, and her ethereal and aristocratic presence made Monica, or Valerie, a real a star that lit up the nights of the 80s.
Valerie Dore on Wikipedia
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