I Feel Love is so obviously the greatest disco song of all time that no others need apply for the title. But spare a moment for the song that gave Donna Summer her first international hit a couple of years earlier.

Like the later disco classic, the heavy-breathing epic Love To Love You Baby was created by Italian musician Giorgio Moroder at his Munich studio with his assistant, Barnet-born producer Pete Bellotte.

To add to the element of international cooperation, this Anglo-American-Italian-German collaboration was first released in the Netherlands, where Summer had already had a couple of hit singles.

She had moved from New York to Germany after appearing in a touring production of Hair in Germany and then Vienna, where she met and married her husband Helmut Sommer (hence her Anglicised surname, ‘Summer’) after joining the Viennese Folk Opera. Alternating between stage musicals and session work, she met fellow ex-pats Moroder and Bellotte while working on a Three Dog Night record at their Munich studio.

With its breathy gasps and moans and groans, directly inspired by the recent Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin chart topper Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus, and a lyric that would be considered too provocative for UK listeners – the filthy exhortation to “Do it to me again and again” – it became a moderate hit there in 1975.

It soon reached the ears of US label boss Neil Bogart, head of Casablanca Records, who liked it so much after it was a hit with his house party guests that he asked Moroder to make it longer in order to (TRIGGER WARNING) use it to soundtrack his nocturnal exploits.

He might have been the first but he would by no means be the last to enjoy what can fairly be called a seminal disco classic. In more than one sense.

On his instructions, the song was re-recorded as this 17-minute mini-symphony with Summer recording her vocals lying on the floor of a darkened studio and faking endless orgasms (23, according to the BBC), Moroder and Bellette stretching its length out to the entire side of an album with instrumental breaks – and adding the word “Baby” to the title.

Subsequently shortened again for single release and radio play, it hit the US charts in early 1976, but was held off top spot by Paul Simon’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, while it reached No.4 in the UK singles chart despite the BBC’s initial refusal to play it on TV or radio.

Meanwhile, a crowd of 5,000 Italian men became so overwhelmed by Summer’s sexy live performance in a tent that she fled the stage and locked herself in her trailer – but they pursued her and began to rock it so much that she feared for her life.