Part 2: The Voices You Never Saw: Italo Disco's Uncredited Female Singers

Part one looked at the three voices behind Fun Fun, Hot Cold, and Cleo. This second chapter moves to three more women whose voices defined some of the genre's biggest records while a different name, or no name at all, sat on the label.

Clara Moroni: The Sound of Radiorama

Clara Moroni grew up in Milan, played keyboards and drums as a teenager, and spent her early years singing in a punk rock group called The Kubrick before producer Giacomo Maiolini of Time Records brought her into Italo disco. From 1986 onward she became the female voice of Radiorama, taking over from Simona Zanini after the project's debut single and singing lead on the hits that made the act famous across Europe and Japan, including "Yeti," which sold past 500,000 copies. On stage and on record sleeves, the role of Radiorama's female face belonged instead to Antonella Ferri.

Moroni later described how rare women were in the genre's production rooms, crediting Mauro Farina with teaching her how to use her voice in dance music and how to build backing vocals in the studio, skills she carried into a long career as one of Time Records' most reliable session singers, recording under dozens of additional names for the label well beyond Radiorama itself.

There are not many female Italo singers. Guys were always in the advantaged position. It's better to have a few female singers, less competition. We are rare and precious, like diamonds.

Elena Ferretti: One Voice, A Dozen Names

Born in 1960 in San Donato Milanese, Elena Ferretti became one of the most recorded yet least visible singers to come out of the Time Records stable. In 1984, producers Giuliano Crivellente and Mauro Farina built a project called Deborah Haslam around a song titled "Let Me Trouble," released on Crash Records, one of the very first releases to come out of the team that would soon found Time Records itself. The voice on the record was Ferretti's, the cover photograph someone else's.

She also sang lead on Radiorama's "Vampires" in 1985, a different track from the ones carried by Zanini and Moroni, and recorded under further aliases including Rose and Sophie. None of these names were publicly tied back to her at the time. Decades later, music historians and former collaborators have pieced the catalog back together, crediting Ferretti with a body of work that runs into dozens of records across the mid 1980s alone.

Lorella Ghilardi: The Voice Behind Three Names

In Milan, the husband and wife team of Manlio Cangelli and Lorella Ghilardi built one of the more haunting corners of the Italo disco catalog. As Blue Russell, the duo released "I Wanna Fly Away" in 1984 on Discomagic Records, with Cangelli's analog synthesizer work, built around an Oberheim OB-X, an Elka Synthex, and a Roland JX-3P, framing Ghilardi's own powerful vocal. Unusually for the genre, this was one case where the singer's face and voice appeared together on the same release.

Ghilardi did not stay confined to her own name. She recorded lead vocals for B. Rose on "Hey D.J. (Give Me a Lot of Music)" in 1983, and wrote the lyrics for Wish Key's debut single "Orient Express" that same year, a track originally intended for Blue Russell before Discomagic insisted on a male lead vocalist instead. When Wish Key needed a new face for television appearances, the role went to Silvia Merelli, the wife of the project's new singer, while Ghilardi's own writing and earlier vocal work stayed in the background of a project that no longer carried her image.

Lorella's vocals are haunting and powerful. She oozes charisma as she sings about the loss of a lover and the sadness she feels, wishing she could escape this world.

Between Radiorama's shifting female leads and a husband and wife duo whose own record stands as the exception rather than the rule, the pattern holds: the voice on the tape and the name on the sleeve rarely matched.

→ Continue to Part 3: The Voices You Never Saw