The Scotsman

All about the groove

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Janet Christie talks to Nile Rodgers about a lifetime making great dance music

Nile Rodgers, the master of funk and disco, with countless hits as a musician and producer to his name, talks to Janet Christie about a life dedicated to getting people to dance, working with the likes of David Bowie and Madonna and the return of good times ahead of Chic’s Glasgow gig

Music legend Nile Rodgers has his guitar strapped to his back. He’s about to get on a plane but the worn white Fender Stratocast­er with the maple fingerboar­d, on which he wrote best selling hits with his band Chic and produced some of the biggest-selling albums of all time with David Bowie, Madonna and Diana Ross, won’t be shoved in the hold. The Hitmaker, as he calls it, and which is integral to his funky ‘chucking’ style, won’t be out of his sight. He left it on a train once, luckily got it back, but yes, he did freak out...

The Grammy Award-winning musician, composer, arranger, guitarist and co-founder of Chic says, “I have a replica, and a plexiglass one and they sound really great live and on record, real close, but it’s not the same.”

Rodgers is about to fly out of Toronto when we speak, heading for London in his trademark dreadlocks and beret to put the funk into the

X Factor, replacing the touring Robbie Williams as a judge. He’s also collecting a humanitari­an award from the Global Gift charity for his work with his We Are Family Foundation, named for his Sister Sledge anthem.

Career-wise he’s flying high too, after releasing the first Chic album for more than two decades this summer featuring Elton John, Emeli Sandé and Lady Gaga, with another album due out in February and about to kick off a 12-date European and UK tour with the band that’ll make Glasgow Dance, Dance, Dance in December.

He’s the newly elected Chairman of the Songwriter­s Hall of Fame and as the recently-appointed inaugural Chief Creative Advisor for Abbey Road Studios, it’s time to celebrate Good Times.

Rodgers is responsibl­e for decades of floorfille­rs, after starting out as a musician on Sesame Street, playing clubs and bars before co-founding Chic in 1976 with bassist Bernard Edwards. There were Chic disco hits: Dance, Dance, Dance, Everybody Dance, I Want Your Love, Le Freak and Good Times, and hits he produced

for others: He’s The Greatest Dancer, We Are Family, (Sister Sledge), I’m Coming Out, Upside Down, (Diana

Ross), Like A Virgin, (Madonna), Let’s Dance (David Bowie). Then there are his collaborat­ions, with Daft Punk on the Random Access Memories album and single Get Lucky, global hits that won him three Grammys, with Avicii, Sigala Disclosure and Sam Smith,

plus the genre crossing talent that saw Good Times spark the advent of hip-hop when it was picked up as the base for Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s

Delight. In all, his work has sold more than 500 million albums and 75 million singles, but it’s been 26 years since Nile Rodgers and Chic released a studio album. Hence the title It’s

About Time.

“Yes,” he laughs. “For one thing there’s the obvious – it was about time I did this stuff and got it back out.”

It would have been earlier, but as Rodgers was working on the album the deaths of his friends and previous collaborat­ors Prince, David Bowie, George Michael and Chris Cornell hit him hard.

“What happened was I had got a large tape drop from Warner Brothers of masters that I thought were gone for ever and that made me feel so happy and nostalgic and I was about to release an album. But then people started passing away that I had written tribute songs about, and it made me feel like I’d be capitalisi­ng on Bowie and Prince’s passing, and it was just so wrong.”

The time is right now, however, and at 66, Rodgers has been thinking about mortality. He’s beaten prostate cancer once in 2013 and last year had a lump removed from his kidney. Today he declares himself fit and healthy, if a little tired from last night’s Toronto gig, but he’s determined to fulfil his mission to get everyone dancing to feelgood music.

“I know that our time on this planet is finite,” he says “and you know what, I want to spend the rest of my life making really great dance music. When I was producing Eric Clapton one day he came out of the studio and said to me that he was gonna play blues for the rest of his life. I said ‘Eric, you mean to tell me if I come see a Clapton show I’m not gonna hear Sunshine of Your Love ?Orany of those Cream and Blind Faith cool songs?’ And he said ‘no, you’re not gonna get that again, because I’m not going to play it again.’ I went home and thought about it for a bit and I said, ‘well, hell, if Eric Clapton is gonna play blues for the rest of his life, I’m gonna play dance music for the rest of my life. Right! I just wanna play music for ever.

“Not that I think I’m Eric Clapton, but you know, if you’ve put in all this time, you have the right to decide what you want to do and I decided that I like to make music that makes people happy, makes people want to dance. It really feels good to me to see people express themselves through motion.”

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