Hot Press meets Nile Rodgers

It’s topped charts on all five continents; been viewed 24 million times on YouTube; broken Spotify streaming records and at last count inspired 224 cover versions, including a particularly soulful one by Ashington, Dublin 7’s very own Gavin James.

Like it or love it – I’m firmly in the pro- camp – Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ is the omnipresent feelgood anthem of the summer and about the gazzilionth hit to feature the funky guitar stylings of Chic legend Nile Rodgers who’s his usual ebullient “How you doin’, bro?” self when Hot Press catches up with him in his New York layer.
35 years after first conquering Planet Pop with ‘Le Freak’, did Nile expect to be back in the eye of the storm with a Daft Punk song?
“Yes, I expected it but not necessarily with a Daft Punk song!” he grins. “What I mean by that is I’ve never stopped writing, producing or playing on records. Because of how Chic exploded, there’s been no financial imperative for me to work since around 1980. I continue to do this for the simple reason that I love it. I have a fabulous time trying to solve these stupid problems that as musicians we’re always inventing for ourselves. I like to think I’m winning in that I’ve solved more problems than I’ve created, but it’s a close race!”
Rodgers triumphantly blogged recently that he’d written 10 songs in a fortnight. Does that spell a new Chic record?
“Yeah, it does. Daft Punk is a great mirror in that it’s actually a new old Chic record! Not only do I have a load of new songs that I’m really excited about, but I’ve also found tapes from around the time I was doing my first solo album [1983’s much-underrated and wonderfully-titled Adventures In The Land Of The Good Groove] and also working on Bowie’s Let’s Dance. I’d been scorched by the whole ‘Disco Sucks’ thing and was trying to figure out, ‘What next?’ I wanted a groove that was danceable but not instantly recognisable as being by the guy from Chic. It ended up being that staccato ‘dat-dat-dat-dat’ thing which house music went on to be, except I was doing it on guitar. I’ve a bunch of tracks from that introspective searching period – some almost complete, others just bits of ideas – which I’m going to finish off with a bunch of really cool artists. That reminds me; there are a couple of calls I’ve gotta make!”
Can we enquire as to who’s on Nile’s shopping-list?
“Man, I’m dying to tell you who I’ve got but the logistics are still being worked out. What I can say is that it’ll be a mixture of old friends and new songwriting partners who come from the most unlikely places. [Chic co-founder] Bernard Edwards was the highest standard of musician I could ever work with but, you know what, some of these people like Guy and Thomas from Daft Punk give me that same sense of awe and wonderment. Another one is Avicci; when we go into the studio and start writing it’s not just okay, it’s mega! People say, ‘How can a 24-year-old do that?’ and I’m like, ‘Guys, how old do you think I was when I wrote ‘Upside Down’, ‘I’m Coming Out’, ‘We Are Family’ and all that stuff? 25!’”
Like me, you may just have spotted a flaw in Nile’s “I’m not going to tell you who’s going to be on my new record” plan. One of the numerous advantages of co-authoring ‘Get Lucky’ and another of the Random Access Memories standouts, ‘Give Life Back To Music’, is that come the release of the new Chic record there’ll be sparkly-eyed hipsters eager to check it out as well as grizzled ‘70s survivors like myself.
“Really? I hadn’t thought about it like that, but I hope you’re right! Pop music seems to be a young person’s business and because I was never really well-known it’s almost like I didn’t exist in a way. Actually, Daft Punk and Chic are made from very similar DNA. The concept for Chic was a mixture of Roxy Music and Kiss. We wanted to have the high fashion element of Roxy and the anonymity of Gene Simmons and the guys behind all that greasepaint. Being the robots and now wearing the Yves St. Laurent clothing – it’s so Chic it’s perfect! You don’t get to see who’s behind the mask. They don’t age; they just become an artistic entity. New people getting to dig Chic because of Daft Punk would be really cool!”
Talking of Kiss, Justin Timberlake is as we speak at the Cannes Film Festival by dint of his starring role in Spinning Gold, the cocaine and hooker-fueled tale of Casablanca Records boss Neil Bogart who persuaded the Gods of Glam to go disco in 1979 with ‘I Was Made For Loving You’. Having read his 2011 Le Freak – An Upside Down Story Of Family, Disco & Destiny autobiography – possibly the only book to ever squeeze LSD, the Black Panthers and Sesame Street into the same chapter – it strikes me that Hollywood should also be looking to bring Nile to the big screen.
“I’m working on it now,” he reveals. “Or more precisely, I’m working on the stage play version of it that may eventually turn into a film. It’ll go way back because the musical motifs that became Chic songs and Diana Ross songs and Sister Sledge songs were written when I was a child. I sang that stuff on the street having no idea where they or I’d end up.”
Given his late ‘60s membership of the Panthers – a revolutionary socialist party set up to protect black neighbourhoods from police brutality – why did Chic decide to go the escapist disco route as opposed to fighting the power?
“Why weren’t we the Public Enemy of our day?” he smiles. “Because Bernard Edwards was my partner. He wasn’t in the Black Panthers! We were two completely different people but together we made each other stronger. There’s no way I wanted to do something that didn’t reflect his beliefs as well. Chic was a concept, a place where we met in the middle. We didn’t think of ourselves as stars. You meet a Bowie or a Sting or a Michael Jackson; they’re stars. Stars know they’re stars before they become stars. One of my favourite people was Madonna whose opening gambit when still an unknown was, ‘Hi, I’m going to be a superstar!’ We weren’t those guys. We were like, ‘Hi, we’re Nile and Bernard and one day we hope to have a hit record.’ That’s the best we could do.
“I’ve always been right-sized about who I am and when we came up with Chic we were actors playing roles,” Rodgers continues. “I came from a more hippy, beatnik-y political background and have stagefright. Bernard came from the South where when a white person approached him he had to walk in the street. Our lives up ‘til then couldn’t have been more different but they came together perfectly in Chic.”
Was Nile as surprised as the rest of us to wake up on January 8 this year and discover that David Bowie had dropped a new single?
“He totally flew under the radar with The Next Day. I mean, look at the people on the record – half of them are my guys, but they didn’t say anything to me! I ran into Sterling Cooper totally by accident and he was like, ‘Nile, what’s happening?’ A while after that we did three gigs together because when not working for David he’s the B-52s drummer. Prior to both of them he’d played with Chic and then I hooked him up with Duran Duran. Anyway, on none of those occasions did Sterling breathe a word of what was going down. It’s amazing with the internet and everything that they kept it secret, but they did!”
Seeing as the marketing men and women have decided that this is going to be the Second Summer of Disco, can Nile take us back to 1978 source and describe what a typical Chic night out in NYC would have been like?
“‘Le Freak’ had just become the biggest song in the history of Atlantic Records, so there was lots of celebrating in Studio 54 with Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, David Geffen, Deborah Harry, Cher, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Halston and all those other glamorous, glamorous people,” he reminisces fondly. “I’d gotten to know Michael Jackson and was about to get to know Diana Ross. It was fun, crazy and not to be taken too seriously!”
As anyone who follows his Planet C blog – available in no fewer than nine different languages including Indonesian! – will know, Nile has tried to help other sufferers by documenting his own battle with cancer. It must have really struck a chord last week when Angelina Jolie spoke of the pre-emptive strike she’s taken against the disease.
“Angelina saying what she did, the way she did was unbelievable,” he proffers. “I totally feel where she’s coming from because two years ago I was told, ‘You have the fastest-developing cancer there is…’ I hopped on a plane and did a concert, then came back and said, ‘Now, what were you saying doctor?’ Angelina and I are fortunate in that we’ve had access to the best possible information, which being in the public eye it’s our duty to pass on. If people weren’t aware of what an amazing lady Angelina Jolie is before last week, they are now.”
And so say all of us. Returning to matters musical; will ‘Get Lucky’ be getting an airing next month when Chic pay their Sunday night visit to Forbidden Fruit?
“If that moment’s to happen, I want it to be with Guy and Thomas up there with me. I played live when we did the video and the vibe was amazing. The dancers were asking us between takes, ‘What kind of music is that?’ and we’d be screaming out, ‘DISCO!!!!!!!’”
Enthusiastic at the best of times, Nile goes into rapture overload when I happen to mention that the Royal Hospital grounds will also be graced this summer by Ennio Morricone & Orchestra Roma Sinfonietta.
“What?” he yelps. “That’s my man! We became such great friends the last time he was in New York. When he played Radio City he put me right under the conductor’s podium, so when I stood up I could literally hear what he was hearing. Man, I’m going to have to come back to Dublin for that!”