Disco Project - Pink Project - 1982 - Disco Dance 80s

Disco Project - Pink Project - 1982

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Pink Project: Biografia | Biography

Source: Wikipedia

Pink Project is the name of a one-hit wonder dance/pop band (musically a studio-only project) within the genre of Italo disco. It was created, like its contemporary and equally ephemeral act Kano, by Italian DJ-composer-keyboardist-producer Stefano Pulga, together 

with guitarist Luciano Ninzatti from Naples, keyboardist-programmer Matteo Bonsanto and sound engineer Massimo Noè, both from Milan. Their only substantial hit single, which also 

provided them with their name (later the name of the track was changed to Disco Project), was a mashup – one of the very first such creations in Italy – involving the music of Pink Floyd and The Alan Parsons Project, entitled "Disco Project".

"Disco Project" was born out of the mixes that Pulga created during his club nights as a DJ. In early 1982, he and Ninzatti had realized that Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", which was a big hit in Italy in that period, and The Alan Parsons Project's equally 

popular "Mammagamma" had the same tempo and, in some sections, the same key. Plus, in light of Parsons' long-standing association with Pink Floyd – he is famous for having worked as a sound engineer on the band's historical Dark Side of the Moon album – APP's 

instrumentals (starting from earlier ones, such as "Lucifer" and "The Gold Bug") were often mistaken for Pink Floyd by Italian club goers and 'dance' fans in general.

Pulga and Ninzatti made a mix which started with APP's "Sirius" (another popular track from their 1982 album Eye in the Sky), then went straight into "Mammagamma" (avoiding 

Parsons' transition to his album's title track), over which an a cappella version of the children's choir from "Another Brick" was superimposed, with the octave bass and steady drums from "Mammagamma" running all the way through.

The vocals from Pink Floyd's song were a perfect fit on the Parsons piece, so Pulga and Ninzatti decided to officially release the mix as "Disco Project". However, copyright issues prevented the two musicians from releasing the actual original tracks; the final recording 

does not include any samples from Parsons or Pink Floyd records, but faithful re-creations, from scratch, of everything: the entire instrumentation was re-played by Pulga and Ninzatti with the help of two of Italy's top session players, namely Ellade Bandini on drums and Pier 

Michelatti on bass. In particular, Ninzatti played a nice rendition of David Gilmour's famous guitar solo. The vocals were performed by Italian-American session vocalists Linda Wesley, Rossana Casale (still unknown as a solo artist at the time) and Naimy Hackett; the voices 

were multi-tracked and slightly sped up to simulate a schoolchildren's choir. (As mentioned above, the need for doing re-creations rather than releasing the samples from the original tracks was justified by the fact that Pink Project had no authorization at all from any of the 

songwriters – indeed, they never asked for any.) The choir also followed the key shift in the music of "Mammagamma", which was not present in the original mix by Pulga and Ninzatti, and the full album version features another key shift toward the end, which was also not in the original mix and was arranged by Pulga especially for the (extended) album track.

"Disco Project" was a major[clarification needed] hit in Italy during the summer of 1982. Pink Project was meant to be a strictly anonymous act (no photos were featured on single or album releases, just futuristic-looking, vividly colored illustrations) and nothing more than 

a studio-based creation, similarly to Michael Cretu's 1990s project Enigma and to the Alan Parsons Project itself; however, the success of "Disco Project" implicitly obliged Pulga and Co. to put up a fictional band for TV performances. They did - the song was mimed various 

times on Italian TV by four people (on bass, guitar, drums and keyboards) dressed up in black monk-like robes and black pointed hoods, like the four characters featured in the cover artwork for the band's original 12-inch single. Although there was some speculation 

at the time that two of the mysterious individuals were actually Pulga and Ninzatti themselves (with the third and fourth "members" being Pier Michelatti and Ellade Bandini), this was never really confirmed or denied by anyone. The TV performances also featured a 

small group of children lip-synching the lyrics, although the vocals were clearly heard as belonging to older, experienced singers. A postal address for Pink Project, a P.O. box located in Hamburg, was occasionally superimposed on screen; this was also partly fake, as the box belonged to the German office of the act's label, Baby Records.