I think he appreciated the fact that I had a real voice and wasn’t some gimmick, I remember him saying that I had so much emotion in my voice.” Sid Bernstein hada slightly different story to that.
Laura once explained in an interview with Todd Everett, “I was doing Barry Manilow songs and some Edith Piaf numbers as well as some of my own material and Sid put me in touch with Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic records.
It was when she was performing in a club in Manhattan that she got spotted by a promoter called Sid Bernstein. She had studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and got her first break when she joined Leonard Cohen on a European tour. In 1981, a Canadian songwriter called Trevor Veitch, who had worked with Toni Basil, wrote another English lyric for a version that was to be recorded, most famously, by Laura Branigan (although, bizarrely he wasn’t credited on the label) She was a New York-born singer who had a very academic approach to her music. His version stalled at number 65 in the chart. In the UK, the first version came in 1979 from Jonathan King, under his own name who also wrote his own English lyric which went, ‘Gloria, every time I see ya, but only when I see you, only when I’m dreaming, all my days are lonely so cloudy grey without ya and when they get too much for me, I only think of Gloria’ which are not a literal translation, but certainly more of a love song. The following year, two more versions were recorded, both with different translations, an Estonian version by Mait Maltis and a Czech version by Vítězslav Vávra under the slightly altered title Divka Gloria. In Germany, a rival version by Gerd Christian was released at the same time, but Tozzi’s got higher peaking at number eight. It topped the chart in Switzerland and Spain, went to number four in Austria and number three in both Belgium and France. The song was written by Turin-born singer/songwriter Umberto Tozzi along with the Italian composer Giancarlo Bigazzi and was originally a love song, although if you translate the original Italian lyrics into English, the song begins ‘I miss you in the air, I miss you in my hand that works slowly, I miss that lips that I don’t touch anymore’ which sort of works, but then it continues, ‘ Gloria on your wings the morning gives the sun, hatred comes in and love comes out with the name of Gloria.’ OK, whatever! The Italians obviously thought highly of it as it as it spent 16 weeks in their top 10 including six at number two. It’s the song that was a hit for both Jonathan King in 1979 and Laura Branigan in 1982, but let’s head to Italy to find out about its origins. In 1981, U2 recorded a different song with the same title but it’s neither of those that are this week’s subject. Van Morrison, with his group Them, recorded a song called Gloria in 1964 which appeared on the B side of Baby Please Don’t Go. The song has since been a hit twice and on both occasions had a different translation of its lyrics by two different people. This week, I look at a song that began life in Italy – as a love song which never charted in the UK.
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