Next time you hear Gala’s rave hit “Freed From Desire”, spare a thought for Danny Dyer. When the Rivals actor’s beloved West Ham won the Uefa Europa Conference League last year, the team’s star winger (and Dyer’s future son-in-law) Jarrod Bowen scored the winner in the 90th minute and sparked euphoric scenes all the way from Prague to east London. The stands were quickly reverberating with a crude folk anthem set to the song’s tune. “Bowen’s on fire,” sang the fans. “And he’s shagging Dani Dyer!” Luckily, Dyer was able to see the funny side. “I think there’s a bit of romance in it,” he told an interviewer later. “Think about it: it’s a compliment. They’re saying Bowen is on fire, which is unreal, and he’s also shagging Dani Dyer. So if you think about it, they’re saying it can’t get any better. So there’s a compliment in there. Listen, sometimes I’ll start the song off.”
Dyer isn’t the only one to get caught up in the irresistible surge of energy sparked by “Freed From Desire”. In the past few years, the song has become ubiquitous, from football terraces to darts tournaments and protest marches around the world. Last year striking teachers sang: “My pay’s no higher, Rishi Sunak is a liar…”, while countless football fans have adapted the lyrics to fit their favourite players, a trend that began in 2016 when Newcastle United fans sang it in tribute to Aleksandar Mitrović and a Wigan Athletic fan went viral after recording himself singing about striker Will Grigg.
The song, which has just been re-recorded and released, was an international hit and peaked at No 2 in the UK charts back in 1997. Its resurgence may have come as a surprise to some but not to its creator, Gala Rizzatto. “The people brought the song back,” she says over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. “People say to me: ‘How do you feel about it? It’s so random!’ It’s not f***ing random. It’s energy, energy, energy. You put in energy, and somehow it comes back.”
Much like Taylor Swift’s series of “(Taylor’s Version)” albums, the new recording is an attempt to reclaim ownership (and royalties) for a hit that had slipped from her grasp. “It’s been abused enough, this song,” she says. “A lot of people have taken a piece of it, so it’s hard, being the artist and the writer. It’s a difficult situation because you want a little ownership but within the music business you never have complete ownership. Re-recording it gives you a sense that you’re trying to do something. It’s a ‘tentativo’, we say in Italian. It’s an attempt.”
For Rizzatto, the song is a manifestation of her own resilience. She grew up in Milan determined to become a dancer, but by the time she moved to New York as a teenager, she had been told by an Italian doctor that a problem with her spine meant she would never be able to dance again. In the States, she took up photography, taking pictures of dancers, clubbers and DJs. While she was back in Italy for the summer, she told a DJ she would shoot his album cover for free if she could sing on a record, which led to her first single “Everyone Has Inside”, an Italian number one.
Inspired by the dancers she was photographing, Rizzatto started taking dance classes again and found herself reconnecting with her original passion. She was also falling in love for the first time, with a teenage dance teacher from Senegal. She says “Freed From Desire” was inspired by the disparities between rich and poor she saw in New York and the Senegalese dance community she found in Harlem. “It was about three things: Falling in love, realigning with my passion and talking about the disparity of life,” she explains. “It was putting those things together. It’s a ‘fight the power’ song.”
The song became an immediate hit around the world, but its success didn’t make life easy for Rizzatto, who quickly found herself out of her depth. “It was a very difficult time because I didn’t have management,” she says. “My record label was not my friend. I signed a very bad deal. I was alone. My parents weren’t reading what I was signing. I trusted this small group of people that I thought we were friends, and it was a really, really bad deal, which saw me being a poor independent artist for many, many years, up until now.”
Many people have profited from the popularity of the song, from her old record label to the brewery that launched a beer called “Trombolese” based on an oft-misheard lyric, but Rizzatto struggled to be fairly rewarded for creating her anti-materialist anthem. “The material is good!” She says with a laugh. “I need it and I want it. As a woman, a female artist in the music business, it is now a point of fighting the power because, in this moment of my life, I’m trying to get money because they never paid me!”
As much as Rizzatto is fighting to reclaim her song, she acknowledges that in some ways it now belongs to everyone. Its lyrics are constantly being reworked to create new versions in sports arenas and protest marches, but the tune’s boundless energy remains constant. Rizzatto says her proudest moment was when she heard it being sung as an anthem during the women’s marches.
“The intention behind the song was to break free, to go against the system, to inspire people and bring them together,” she says. “I was an only child, always alone, and I wanted to bring everyone together. I wanted a community. Now, to see that this song does exactly that… LGBTQ, women’s marches, sport… it brings everyone together. It’s a materialisation of my desire for unity.”
Gala’s “Freed From Desire (2024 Version)” is out now
