The impact of “I Feel Love” on the sound of disco was immediate and immense. A spate of electronic dance hits swiftly followed: Space’s “Magic Fly,” Dee D. Jackson’s “Automatic Lover,” Cerrone’s “Supernature.” The song, says Moroder, received a particularly strong response from the gay community. “Even now, millions of gay people love Donna and some say ‘I was liberated by that song’. It is a hymn.”

The song’s gay anthem status was enshrined in 1985, when Bronski Beat covered “I Feel Love” in a medley with “Love to Love You Baby” and ’60s melodrama pop hit “Johnny Remember Me.” Frontman Jimmy Somerville’s stratosphere-shattering falsetto entwined with the high camp of guest vocalist Marc Almond from Soft Cell, and the video was impishly homoerotic. “Jimmy told me he became a singer because of ‘I Feel Love,’” says Moroder. “He heard that ‘oooh’”—he imitates Summer’s helium-high soprano—“and he said, ‘That’s my career!’”

Another gay musician propelled on his journey by “I Feel Love” was the producer Patrick Cowley. Described as the “American Giorgio Moroder”—a tag that certainly fits his sound if not his mainstream impact—Cowley’s work has been rediscovered in recent years by the hipster archival industry, with reissues of his Moog-rippling porno soundtracks. But his renown at the time came as a pioneer of Hi-NRG, the gay club sound that would dominate the ’80s and reach the mainstream with hits like Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record).” Based out of San Francisco, Cowley produced hits like “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” for trans diva Sylvester, co-founded the “masculine music” label Megatone, and scored solo on the dancefloor with anthems like “Menergy.” But his disco career actually started in 1978 with an unsanctioned 15-minute-long remix of “I Feel Love” that circulated furtively on acetate among select favored DJs on the gay scene. An inspired expansion, punctuated by hallucinatory breakdowns of swaggeringly inventive Moog-play and percussive delirium, Cowley’s “I Feel Love Megamix” almost eclipses the original. Finally released officially in 1982, it made the UK Top 30.

By that point Moroder and company’s innovations underpinned large swathes of contemporary pop music in the UK and Europe. For some, hearing “I Feel Love” was a life-changer. Phil Oakey told me that when Martyn Ware came round to his Sheffield flat in 1977 to recruit him into the Future—the group that became the Human League—Ware brandished copies of “I Feel Love” and “Trans-Europe Express” and announced, “We can do this.” The group instantly shifted from its early Tangerine Dream-like abstraction towards poppy and boppy accessibility, as heard on the manifesto-like song “Dance Like a Star,” which bears more than a passing resemblance to “I Feel Love.” Seven years later, and by then a pop star, Oakey would honor the debt by teaming up with Moroder for the hit single “Together in Electric Dreams.”

Another outfit who had a Damascene conversion to electronic disco was glam-era oddballs Sparks, who hooked up with Moroder for 1979’s brilliant No. 1 in Heaven album and its UK hit singles “The Number One Song in Heaven” and “Beat the Clock.” Originally from Los Angeles, the Anglophile brothers Ron and Russell Mael had become pop sensations in the UK in 1974, but by the time punk kicked off they’d lost their way. Looking for an aesthetic reboot, Sparks were the first established rock band to embrace disco at album length, as opposed to the one-off disco-influenced hits made by bands like the Rolling Stones. In interviews, Ron and Russell invented anti-rockism, loudly dismissing guitars as passé and deriding the very concept of “the band” as exhausted. They burbled about the thrillingly modern impersonality of the Moroder-Summer sound, in particular “I Feel Love” and its “combination of the human voice and this really cold thing behind it.” Electronic disco, Sparks proclaimed, was the true new wave, whereas most actual skinny-tie new wavers were merely retreading the ’60s.

The Maels probably had the likes of Blondie in mind when they made that swipe. But Blondie themselves were converts to the new sound. Talking to NME in early 1978, Debbie Harry praised Moroder’s sound as “the kind of stuff I want to do” and the group covered “I Feel Love” at a benefit concert later that spring. “Heart of Glass” was their slinky first stab at disco, followed by tracks like “Atomic” and “Rapture,” with its Summer-like swirl of a chorus. But “Call Me,” the Blondie track that Moroder actually produced, was brashly rocking in the Pat Benatar-style.

Alongside obviously indebted post-punk and synthpop groups like New Order, Visage, and Eurhythmics, the aftershocks of “I Feel Love” reached into all kinds of odd corners. Progressive jazz-rock veterans Soft Machine, of all people, released the Moroder-style single “Soft Space” in 1978. Apocalyptic Goth doom-mongers Killing Joke underpinned several of their singles with clinical Eurodisco pulse-work. And while they were later synonymous with stadium-scale bluster, early on Simple Minds fused cinematic post-Bowie art-rock with hypnotic sequenced synth patterns on “I Travel” and their Euro-infatuated lost masterpiece Empires and Dance.

Moroder took the “I Feel Love” template further with Sparks and with his Academy Award-winning score for Midnight Express, which produced the club hit “The Chase.” But surprisingly, he cut barely half-a-dozen tracks in the fully electronic vein with Donna Summer. 1978’s Once Upon a Time—another themed album, with a narrative updating the Cinderella story to the modern metropolis—dedicated the second of its four sides to synths. “Now I Need You” and “Working the Midnight Shift,” the first two panels in a seamless side-long triptych, ripple with a serenely celestial beauty rivalled only by Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights.” Also a double album, 1979’s Bad Girls shunted the synth-tunes to Side Four, frontloading the album with ballsy raunch and balladsy romance. But “Our Love,” “Lucky,” and the fabulous “Sunset People” (an inexplicable failure as a single) made for a fine swan-song finale for the electronic style that made Summer famous and turned Moroder into an in-demand soundtrack composer.

Summer was eager to transcend the disco category, though, and Bad Girls’ rock moves shrewdly repositioned her as a “credible” artist in America. For the first time she received critical plaudits from rock journalists who’d previously belittled Eurodisco with descriptions like “sanitized, simplified, mechanized R&B.” Now they were placated by Summer taking a more active role in the songwriting and by crossover ploys like the screeching solo from L.A. axeman-about-town Jeff Baxter that punctuated “Hot Stuff,” which reached No. 1 and remains Summer’s biggest hit by far in the U.S.

“Donna Summer Has Begun to Win Respect” announced a 1979 New York Times headline. Respect ain’t much use, though, when the magic vanishes. Breaking with the disco-tarnished Casablanca and signing to Geffen, Summer strove to become a radio-format crossing all-rounder, resulting in a series of increasingly barren albums: the confused The Wanderer; one last Moroder/Bellotte-produced album, I’m a Rainbow, that Geffen suppressed and that finally saw release in 1996; and the dried-up gulch that was 1982’s Donna Summer, a fraught and largely fruitless collaboration with Quincy Jones. In Britain, where popular taste preferred her clad in glistening synthetics, that self-titled album produced an unlikely hit with her last great single, a cover of “State of Independence” by Yes-man Jon Anderson and Vangelis. With Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, the latter was starting to eclipse Moroder in the Hollywood electronic score soundtrack stakes.

In the early ’80s, Moroder spent three years on his pet project: restoring Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic dystopia Metropolis and finding lost footage, only to spoil the silent classic with colorization and a score that recruited the unsuitable talents of Bonnie Tyler, Freddie Mercury, and Loverboy. After the movie’s hostile reception in 1984, he drifted away from music for many years, putting his energy and resources into quixotic ventures like the Moroder-Cizeta luxury sports car and a scheme to build a pyramid in Dubai. Meanwhile Bellotte had moved back to England, where he set up his own recording studio, but devoted most of his energy to parenting and to his literary interests: an unfinished biography of Mervyn Peake, a book of his own stories titled The Unround Circle, and a CD of prose-poem “rhythm rhymes,” The Noisy Voice of the Waterfall.

But then—just like a classic-era disco album—came the Reprise.

Moroder got a call from Daft Punk, then working on what would become their 2013 album Random Access Memories, a perverse vision-quest attempt to time travel back to the ’70s, the lost golden age when dance music involved shit-hot musicianship and heroic struggles to get results out of electronic technology crude and cumbersome by the standards of the digital today. Rather than collaborate with Moroder musically, though, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo had something more unusual in mind. They interviewed Moroder for three hours, discussing the length and breadth of his career, and then isolated two short extracts: a vignette from his very early days as a struggling performer, and a potted history of the making of “I Feel Love.” Sandwiching these soundbites between wedges of synth-burble modeled on the classic Munich sound, the result was “Giorgio by Moroder”: a poignant paean to the lost future that inevitably couldn’t be sonically futuristic itself (indeed the Eurodisco pastiche fashioned by Daft Punk is distinctly weak-sauce). Instead, the song is conceptually innovative, inventing a new genre: memoir-dance.

“One day I’m going to type out the whole of that interview, all two hours, and that’ll be my autobiography,” Moroder says, joking but half-serious. But rather than commemorate his past glories, what the collaboration with Daft Punk really did was restart his life as a producer. Since Random Access Memories came out, he’s released his first solo album in 23 years, 2015’s Déjà Vu, teeming with collaborations with contemporary pop stars like Sia and Charli XCX. The critical response was mixed, the commercial performance lackluster compared to his heyday (although the Britney-fronted cover of “Tom’s Diner” hit the Top 20 in Argentina and Lebanon). But Moroder is now an in-demand DJ: When we speak at his Westwood apartment, he’s just about to head off to play a string of dates.

“They pay for your flights, and the money is great,” Moroder enthuses. In his set, he always plays “I Feel Love”—a tweaked version in which he’s finally fixed the left speaker/right speaker fluctuation in the bass-pulse that always bothered him. DJing is something that he never did at the time, and as a result—in a final irony—this means that nowadays he spends far more time in the clubs, up way past his customary bedtime, than he ever did back in the day. For the first time really, Moroder also gets to feel the love of his audience—three generations of them now—in the flesh.