"The greatest teacher and friend of all time is leaving. He gave culture to music in clubs as a DJ and an artist out of the chorus. He is always ready to put his face to the media both for the joyful aspects and for the problems of our sector. A part of me goes with him ", is the homage of his friend and partner Giancarlo Battafarano, aka Giancarlino, with whom he founded the Goa club in Rome. DJ Claudio Coccoluto died at dawn on Tuesday 2 March in his home in Cassino, where he lived with his wife and two children, Gianmaria and Gaia. He was only 59 years old. Coccoluto was considered a master of the console at national and international level. During the lockdown he tried to shake public opinion about the difficulties of his sector: "Whoever does clubbing is a cultural flywheel for youth movements, so far the institutions' approach has been simplistic," he told Corriere in May 2020. He played until the end: on December 21st the last DJ set in streaming on Facebook.
Originally from Gaeta, in the province of Latina, Coccoluto began to get passionate about turntables in his father's home appliance shop in Lungomare Caboto. He is 13 years old and he is particularly struck by the music of Raffaella Carrà. His career kicks off from the local radio Radio Andromeda (the first private broadcasting station in Gaeta), where he begins to be a speaker in '78. In the Eighties Marco Trani (another virtuoso of the dishes, who died prematurely at 53) called him to replace Corrado Rizzo at the console. It is on the dishes that Coccoluto finds his place in the world, becoming a creative and original DJ, a myth of what he himself defines as "underground electronics".
In the 90s he founded the Angels of Love with Francesco Furiello and Tina Lepre, which moved from the Zen of Sperlonga to Naples. "Francesco came from London and had participated in many happenings and brought with him a customer experience, with him Tina and Maurizio we thought of merging our experiences not in a club but in a traveling group that organized events in different places, so not with a definitive home », he says in a beautiful interview published in Zero. «We weren't sure how to appeal… I made a record on Maxi Records which was called that. I can't tell you why it was called that because I put the titles quite fucking hard and there was an almost operatic voice that reminded me of an angelic thing, so "angels of love" (...). It suited everyone and so we left. It was 1991 ». The pinnacle of his career was in that year, when he was called to play at the Sound Factory in New York (first European DJ): "On the track there were all the greatest, from Louie Vega to Tony Humphries". In addition to listening to his music, to remember him we can pick up the book he published with Einaudi in 2007, Io, DJ. Music, fashion, lifestyles. Why has the world become one giant dance floor?
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