Fockewulf 190

Italian duo.

Fockewulf 190 was a New Wave group from Milan formed in 1980 by Vittorio Barozzi aka Victor Life and Dario Dell'Aere. In 1979 the duo met outside a cinema and began a lifelong collaboration of projects: Diamond Dogs, Ice Eyes, Demode Boulevard and Fockewulf 190, named after the model jet planes Dario fanatically built. Musically, the duo were inspired by the Human League’s “Reproduction” and John Foxx’s “Metamatic”, while they took visual cues from the New Romantics Visage and Ultravox. With the Fockewulf 190 moniker, they created their own dark blend of Italo disco and New Wave, and released two singles in 1984 and recorded an album’s worth of music that eventually saw the light of day in 2010.

By 1983, local DJ and guitarist Salvatore Nonnis aka Stan After was added to the group. The band were searching for a producer and found Giuseppe Mincioni of Market Records who serviced the local DJs at the Taxi Club where Stan worked. Mincioni immediately proposed to make a hit with the Italo Disco production team Miki Chieregato and Roberto Turatti behind such acts as Den Harrow, Joe Yellow, Stylóo, Flexx. Dario handed them a demo called “Walking Out” and Turati thought the John Foxx-esque vocals were not commercial enough so they suggested vocalist Fred Ventura. Fred accepted their offer and wrote lyrics for the song politically inspired by living in a world divided in East and West, the Cold War, terrorism, and street violence. The debut single “Body Heat” was released in 1984 on Market Records with the band’s name misspelled as Fokewulf and vocals wrongly credited to Dario.