Tozzi, Umberto

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Umberto Tozzi

Singer, songwriter

Singer-songwriter Umberto Tozzi is little known outside of Europe, but his song "Gloria" became one of the most successful singles of the 1980s when American vocalist Laura Branigan recorded it in 1982. Known for his ballads, Tozzi released nearly two dozen albums between 1976 and 2008, selling more than 45 million records. In 2006, he and another popular Italian singer and longtime collaborator, Marco Masini, released Tozzi Masini.

Born on March 4, 1952, in Turin, Italy, Tozzi was still a teenager when he joined a band called Off Sound that played in local venues. He moved to another northern Italian city, Milan, where he met Adriano Pappalardo, who would later achieve fame in Italy as a pop singer a decade later, and had a successful band that spent more than a year on tour in Italy in the early 1970s. In 1974, Tozzi co-wrote the song "Un corpo, un'anima" ("One Body, One Spirit") with Damiano Dattoli, which was a hit for a novel interracial singing duo, Wess and Dori Ghezzi, that year.

Tozzi's first solo album, Donna amante mia (My Loving Woman), was released in 1976. He had his first hit single with the melodramatic ballad "Io camminerò," and an even bigger one a year later with the more up-tempo "Ti amo" ("I Love You"), a crescendo-laden paean to a lost love. The song, which appeared on the 1977 LP È nell'aria … ti amo, spent seven months in the number one spot on the Italian pop-singles chart, was a hit in other European countries, and had some under-the-radar international success as a favorite in discotheques in North America. In 1978 his third record, Tu (You) appeared, but it was the next album, Gloria, which featured his most enduring song.

Tozzi co-wrote "Gloria" with Giancarlo Bigazzi, and the song was a tremendous success in Italy with Tozzi as the vocalist. Three years later, however, it was covered by a then-unknown American singer, Laura Branigan, who had some success on the stage and as a back-up vocalist for Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen before signing with Atlantic Records. Branigan was mentored by the label's famous hitmaking co-founder Ahmet Ertegün, who reportedly suggested she listen to some of Tozzi's hits to find potential material for her 1982 debut LP Branigan. Branigan teamed with the same arranger/keyboardist who had worked with Tozzi on the original, Greg Mathieson, on her version, which was released as a single in July 1982, four months after the LP's release. Branigan changed many of the lyrics about Tozzi's lament for a former or never-realized lover, but part of the appeal of her version was its almost nonsensical lyrics referring to an "alias/that you've been living under" and "the voices in your head/ calling ‘Gloria!’"

Branigan's version of Tozzi's hit, with its synthesizer-pumped hooks, was first a hit in gay dance clubs, then slowly climbed the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, where it peaked at number two later that year and spent a total of 36 weeks on the chart, 22 of them in the Top 40. Until the 1990s, it held the United States record for the longest hit on the Billboard Hot 100 from a female singer, and it reached number one in Australia and number six on the British charts. Though Branigan had other subsequent hits, and covered two other Tozzi songs-"Ti amo" and "Mama"-"Gloria" would remain her signature song.

Tozzi remained a dominant force in the Italian pop charts in the 1980s, either through his own releases or by writing songs for others. He collaborated with Gianni Morandi and Enrico Ruggeri on "Si può dare di più" ("More Can Be Given"), which won one of the country's most coveted pop prizes, the San Remo Music Festival (also known as the Festival della canzone italiana) in 1987. He and Bigazzi, the "Gloria" co-writer, also penned "Treti Galaxie," another version of which plays in a nightclub scene in the 2005 thriller Hostel.

Branigan re-recorded her biggest hit in 2004 as "Gloria 2004," but died of an aneurysm at age 47 in August of that year. Tozzi's disco-operatic song remains one of the most enduring sonic memories of the decade, though it was Branigan who "produced a song you could only sing with big hair, a disco anthem well beyond the time that disco had died. It was part of the pomp of the 80s," noted Simon Fanshawe in the Guardian.