Jacques Morali
After a night at a gay disco in Greenwich Village he invented the Village People – and gave the world “Y.M.C.A.” and “Macho Man”.
Jacques Morali was born in Casablanca into a Moroccan Jewish family. In the late 1960s he began writing music in Paris, for orchestras, for the Crazy Horse cabaret and for other singers. In the early 1970s he met the producer Henri Belolo, and the two went to the United States to try their luck in the booming disco scene.
In Philadelphia in 1975 Morali created his first success with the girl group The Ritchie Family and their disco version of “Brazil”. Soon afterwards, at a costume ball in a gay disco in Greenwich Village, he had the idea for his most famous project: a group of singers and dancers, each embodying a different gay fantasy figure – the cop, the cowboy, the construction worker, the Native American, the biker and the soldier. With Belolo he founded the Village People.
Songs such as “San Francisco (You’ve Got Me)”, “Macho Man”, “Y.M.C.A.”, “In the Navy” and “Go West” became worldwide hits. With their campy humour and coded references, they brought gay club culture into the mainstream, often without the wider public noticing. Morali, who was openly gay, recorded more than 65 albums between 1974 and 1982 and wrote songs for artists such as Cher, Dalida, Patrick Juvet and Eartha Kitt.
In the mid-1980s he contracted HIV. He died of AIDS-related illness in a hospital in Paris in 1991, aged 44, and was buried in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.