Chic frontman Nile Rodgers on 'Chic mystique'

Aug 1 2008 by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

You may not know his name but you will have heard his music. Emma Johnson talks to Chic frontman Nile Rodgers.

SOME people make music. Some people perform music. Others are music. And those people don’t come along that often.

Nile Rodgers, without a doubt falls into that last category. Scrub that. He rules that category.

To many of you his own name will not be instantly familiar. But his band Chic will.

Along with Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson, as Chic, Nile created the disco favourites Good Times, Le Freak and Everybody Dance. They would go on to become three of the most sampled records in music history.

What you probably don’t know though is that far from just producing these seminal classics, if it were not for Nile many of the best loved records of the past 30 years would never have come about.

It is hard to know where to begin. David Bowie, Madonna, Sister Sledge, Diana Ross, Duran Duran, Luther Vandross, Debbie Harry – they have all been touched by his magic.

It is not for nothing that, in 1996, Nile was named the top producer in the world by Billboard magazine.

Mighty impressive for a guy whose first job was playing with the Sesame Street band at the age of 17.

You may not know his name but Nile, now 55, is not the sort of person who needs to be signing autographs every minute to know he has made it.

"I don’t need to have people walk down the street and go ‘God! There’s Nile Rodgers’," he reveals.

"I just love walking around and hearing our music pumping out of someone’s car or coming out of some club, it is the greatest feeling in the world it is not about me, it is about what we have created."

"That was the whole concept behind Chic, it was what we used to call the Chic mystique," Nile continues. "One day we were in the men’s room with the Bee Gees after this big songwriters event. They had gotten all these awards the year before for Saturday Night Fever and now a year later here we are. We had just released Le Freak and I Want Your Love and all of this and now the accolades that had been given to them are now going to us, these completely unknown guys.

"We are in the bathroom and they are saying ‘who the hell are these guys’ and we are standing right next to them."

One problem with that sort of anonymity is that people don’t always realise it is you, not some other, later artist who is largely responsible for a hit record. But laid back Nile, who was born to a teenage mother and grew up around New York City, takes sampling in his stride. He has certainly had enough experience.

"That part of my life I have cut my brain off from," he drawls. "A lot of times people send me stuff and want me to critique it. I have accepted we live in an era of collage art and it is fine. Any time somebody wants to take our music and do something with it I always let it go.

"In the beginning when it first happened with Rapper’s Delight (Sugarhill Gang sampled Good Times to use in the song which would become the first ever rap hit) we got very upset. It took a whole life’s experience to come up with a groove like that and these guys take that and make a record that is bigger than ours."

"It took us 25 years. It took them 25 minutes and it is amazing."