welcoming, were on the classy Chic and Sister Sledge records. And, no, they were never “just a disco band”.

Chic made dance records, for sure, in much the way that Motown, Philadelphia International and Stax, James Brown, The Isley Brothers and George Clinton all made music to dance to. Edwards’ bass lines were as intriguing and effective as those of James Jamerson or Larry Graham, Rodgers’ guitar phrasing and comping was the most distinctive of the decade and as influential as Jimmy Nolen’s in James Brown’s bands or Steve Cropper’s in Booker T. and the MG’s. Add to these weapons third member Tony Thompson’s emphatic, in-the-pocket drumming, plus deceptively complex arrangements, production that veers from bubble-bath lush to icicle crisp with an attractive array of vocal shades and you’ve got a genuinely hip band.

Of course, successful production partnerships are not uncommon in black American music and the R&B hits of the most successful – Detroit’s Holland-Dozier-Holland at ‘60s Motown, Philadelphia’s Gamble and Huff in the ‘70s, Minneapolis’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis in the ‘80s – routinely reached across commercial barriers and continents, their sounds relentlessly imitated as the style became a common pop currency. But, as collaborators, none were as appealing to white rock acts as Rodgers & Edwards.

The Chic story began, like so many in black American music, at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem where, in 1970, jazz-trained guitarist Nile Rodgers plied his trade in the pit band as a teenager, backing numerous stars in what was one of the most efficient boot camps ever for an aspiring musician. “We would come in on Saturday morning and you learned the show. That was it. The rehearsal was in the basement and after that we never did it until they went, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Maxine Brown!’ and we’d go into the song. And if you screwed up there’d be another guy sitting in your chair the next day. So I had to learn music right away, and more important than learning it, you had to make it sound good. So everything in my world is about instant gratification, immediacy and if a person’s hiring you, then you deliver.”

Sometimes, of course, a show would come through that had its own musicians and Rodgers had a week off. “During those weeks I would do pick-up gigs and on one I met Bernard Edwards.” A more serious man into family life, though they were the same age, Edwards was a postal worker studying at the New York High School of Performing Arts. The pair had spoken before. “I come from a very hippy, beatnik, fusionesque world,” Rodgers says, “and when I called Bernard to play bass with me, on my girlfriend’s mother’s recommendation, he thought I was so bizarre and off the wall he actually asked me lose his number and never call him again. And Bernard’s a nice guy so I must have really pissed him off.”

But Rodgers and Edwards met on another gig – it was a fate thing – liked each other’s playing and hitched up, not realizing until much later that they’d almost linked up before. They played in various bands, notably The Big Apple Band, the road band of New York City whose I’m Doing Fine Now, produced by Thom Bell, was a Top 20 US and UK hit in 1973. The band imploded at the end of a NYC mid-‘70s UK tour.

“It’s funny. I’m from New York, right? And I’ve been robbed three times in my life, twice was in England!” Rodgers laughs. The crime in question here came at the end of a UK tour in Nottingham. He lost everything. “I was just a working musician and would send all my money back to my girlfriend, who unbeknownst to me was spending it all going out with the percussionist from Al Green’s band.”

Stranded in London, he hooked up with a girlfriend of Chairman Of The Board’s General Johnson. “We started doing the whole London club scene and while we were out doing that, man, I saw Roxy Music.
Phew! Boy, did that ever change my life.”

Rodgers returned to the USA with news of Roxy’s stage presentation, and the concurrent emergence in the USA of Kiss offered the pair a framework for live performance. “The correlation between the theatrics and the anonymity to walk down the street as a regular person but then become Kiss or Roxy Music when you’re doing your thing was very compelling to Bernard and myself because we didn’t see ourselves as stars, we were always back-up musicians. So we thought we could pretend to be stars. And Chic was born.

The name and the concept was really Bernard’s. [He] would wear a suit and I kept thinking to myself that, well, the last thing I want to wear onstage is a suit. So for me to be in a suit was so hysterically theatrical we
felt cool, we had no idea people were taking it seriously.

The music was easier to work out. They’d wanted to form a black rock band, dabbled as a new wave act, Allah and the Knife Wielding Punks, with little success and went back to pop-soul and the musical potential of dance (after NYC they briefly toured in Carol Douglas’s band). Rodgers and Edwards had a huge pool of New York session colleagues and cherry picked the best. “Omar Hakim was the original drummer, but he was too young to play in bars. I used to play with Omar in the daytime at an amusement park and then we’d play with Tony Thompson at night,” Rodgers remembers. “He was really full of himself ‘cause he had been on tour with Labelle and he was more important than us. So we were like his roadies, which was really funny. Even when we did the Chic stuff, Tony didn’t realise that it was good. He used to say all the time, ‘People gonna buy this?’ Yeah, we even have a tour. ‘Great! What songs are we gonna play?’ Our songs, our songs. No one who was in Chic got it at all.”

And for voices, they were spoilt for choice and first used Norma Jean Wright and Alfa Anderson. Later, Luci Martin joined after Wright’s Chic-produced solo single, Saturday, took off. Edwards and Rodgers had also been in Luther, the band formed around Luther Vandross, who was signed to Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion. Now Vandross sang back-up on their early records while waiting for his own solo career to restart. “If you listen to that first Chic record, Luther is all over it, his voice just jumps out. So we made the records with our friends. That’s really what Chic records were, and what they’ve always been.”

Band and concept in place, the third element, the music, was easy. Rodgers had developed the unmistakable rhythm guitar sound of the late-‘70s in which accent was everything, “the rhythm that you hear and the implied stuff underneath. Bernard and I considered ourselves the ultimate over-players. And that’s why everybody else in the band has to play totally simple, ‘cause as soon as they start over-playing it sounds like a fusion band. As long as they just play the parts that we wrote, as long as they played the whole notes and half-notes, the band sounds funky. But once they start to compete, then we play simple.
It’s that delicate balancing act of rhythm.”

Rodgers and Edwards were also decisive and disciplined about what they wanted to do. “None of the musicians ever hear the music until they go into the studio ‘cause the last thing I want is people’s opinions and ‘Change this and change that’. I believe that people are gonna attack the music in a different way when they don’t know it. We’re trying to create art on the spot. When you don’t know [the song] there’s something incredibly exciting when a great musician learns a song for the first time. “

As the band and their ideas coalesced, the changes in the mid-‘70s music scene on both sides of the Atlantic, which have been very fully cataloged in these pages over the years, were well underway. “Everybody Dance is the very first song we wrote to put out there. Boy, is that the most complicated song, the bass line and the chord changes. It was beautifully compelling and exciting that we made complicated
music sound normal.”

Rodgers wrote it after an evening at the Nite Owl club where his friend, Robert Drake, was the DJ spinning records like El Coco’s Cocomotion and Let’s Get It Together. “It was all really cool bass line grooves so I thought, If we do a cool bass line but then I do my typical jazzy harmonic thing going to different types of
inversions and patterns it would sound compelling to people.”

Everybody Dance was, initially, the only self-written part of a “jazzy dance project” involving lush, sweeping arrangements to songs George Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess – Summertime, I Loves You Porgy, Bess You Is My Woman Now. Everybody Dance soon became the club’s most popular track, played for two-and-a half hours non-stop the night Drake summoned his bemused friend to brave the bouncers and watch the record fill the club’s dancefloor. “It was insane, just the most extraordinary thing.” Record companies weren’t as impressed. They couldn’t get a deal.

Undeterred, Rodgers and Edwards wrote another “accidental” dance-oriented track, Dance, Dance, Dance, which was again part of a side project. Edwards had recorded a song for the New York State tourism board, and the musical director persuaded him to put something down as a B-side. “They couldn’t get through it so [the MD] called me up and tried to write with me,” Rodgers says, “and instantly I recognised the bass player. I said, Man, this is Bernard’s song, right?” Edwards was brought back in and they finished the song. “There was all this jazzy stuff wrapped in ultra pop stuff and it somehow worked. It became the template for my writing style for the rest of my life.”

Atlantic took a chance on the band and Chic gave them three pop hit singles in a year from December 1977- Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah), which used native American war dance and ‘30s dance marathons as aural subtexts, Everybody Dance, and the number 1 hit Le Freak (all top 10 in the UK) – and after the 1977 album Chic, which had the first two hit singles, 1978’s C’est Chic was the first of two US top 10 LPs, with hits Le Freak and the creamy I Want Your Love. A year later came Risqué, the groups masterpiece, a set of songs – Forbidden Lover, Can’t Stand To Love You, A Warm Summer Night, Will You Cry, What About Me – about extra-marital relationships, gigolos, lovers’ triangles and so forth all introduced by Good Times, a hedonist’s anthem, the album graced by the legendary tap dancers the Nicholas Brothers ‘dancing’ the bridge on My Feet Keep Dancing.

Queues began to form. Atlantic group Sister Sledge, a second division soul act with one UK top 20 hit, Mama Never Told Me, in 1975, were given the glistening He’s the Greatest Dancer and anthemic We Are Family, both top 10 US and UK hits in 1979 and by 1980 Rodgers and Edwards were writing for Diana Ross as the clamour for their help increased in volume.

Naturally, there was backlash.

Rock critics were slow to hear the nuances in Chic’s harmonies, arrangements and performances. This was after all, ‘only a disco act.’ Many scribes later got on board the Chic train, but by then a more pernicious opposition had begun – the Disco Sucks campaign. When I first interviewed Nile in September 1979, the campaign, at the behest of US DJs and rock musicians in, predominantly, no hope bar bands, was gaining press inches. Very silly and not a little unpleasant, one was reminded of book burnings, Beatles’ records being smashed in the ‘60s, and all of it with a distinct whiff of racism and homophobia. The experience still rankles.

“All of a sudden this band, who never listened to anyone’s opinion because no one’s opinion was valid to us because no one knew what we were doing, all of a sudden people started playing the divide and conquer game. Talking to Bernard separately, talking to me separately, ‘Ah, do this’. And after Disco Sucks we became persona non grata. People who idolised us, that worshiped the musicianship, would now not even take our phone calls. They were afraid to be associated with us because they considered us like The Village People or something.”

There was similar to come, not from the retrogressive white rock caucus, but from the streets. “This new phenomenon, rap, hip hop started hitting. All of a sudden we have a guy as our opening act, like Kurtis Blow, who would come out, not even have his own equipment, just one or two turntables and sing a song with his turntable on top of our gear that said Chic! And the audience didn’t care. All they cared about was (sings) ‘Whoa, these are the breaks! Bring it up! Bring it up!’ (laughs) And we come on after that and we weren’t important. And then we played Good Times and it was great.

“We started to do a medley of Good Times and all the songs that copied us – Another One Bites The Dust, Radio Clash, Rapper’s Delight – and that would go over like gangbusters, the crowd was in the joke. But everything started changing. People’s standards of what was good and bad and what’s allowable was astonishing to us. I went to a show and Culture Club came on-stage and they had a tape recorder right next to the drum kit and the guy would push the button and every song would be the bass drum going ‘boom, boom, boom, boom’ and the audience didn’t mind. And I kept thinking to myself, I’m like my parents now. They watched the music go from big bands to The Beatles, now I’m watching it go from legitimate bands to fragmented pieces of a band. It does have to look like a band, but it doesn’t have to really be a band.”

Chic’s feelings about ‘disco sucks’, rap and manufactured bands informed 1980s Real People album, a US top 30 album but a significant disappointment. “Before we used to protest in a celebratory way: now we started protesting directly. That was the downfall of Chic. I’m not saying those subsequent albums [Take It Off, 1981: Tongue in Chic, 1982: Believer, 1983] didn’t have moments of brilliance, but the truth of the matter is, after Risqué it never returned.

The band split in 1982, and both Edwards and Rodgers recorded solo albums, but it was as writer-producers, together and apart, that Edwards and Rodgers were busiest. Eventually, inevitably, Bernard and Nile regrouped as Chic, with new singers Sylver Logan Sharp and Jenn Thomas, to record 1992’s Chic-ism. They continued to work both together and on projects outside of the group.

Then, on a Chic tour in Japan in [1996], Edwards died suddenly after a show at the Budokan. Pneumonia. “There’s nothing before that’s been as traumatic and as devastating. But here’s the flipside, there’s also been nothing that’s been as spiritually rewarding. The Japanese way of looking at life and death was so spiritually on a different plane that it made Bernard’s passing and me having to deal with all the arrangements…. I just can’t tell you how beautiful it was. All my life, Bernard had taken care of me. He was always the big brother looking out for me because I’m this wild hippy guy that’s got weird colour hair or blahblahblah, and Bernard is totally straight. He’s always defended me musically and as a human being.

“So it was my honour to be able to care of him in death, to deal with the police and immigration, and they had put Bernard in a white kimono, a white coffin with a glass front and built an altar, in the police station, and I thought, Well, they’re not doing this because I’m in Chic. This is what they do. And they said, ‘Be with your friend’. And I was in there and I could say goodbye and thank him for giving me this wonderful life and sharing it with me and it was just incredible.”

“And all I kept thinking about was what happens at a police station in America, especially if a black person dies and it’s a musician. It’s ‘Aah, this guy’s gotta be a drug addict.’ And it would be anything but dignified.”

Rodgers is also aware that it could so easily have been him checking out in the white kimono – a vivid memory of three interviews I had with Rodgers in the late-‘70s and early-‘80s, each around noon, is Nile’s preferred breakfast of eggs and Lowenbrau. “I had just got sober and changed my life, so when Bernard passed away I hadn’t even gotten to my two-year part. The first year I spent basically in a hospital. Half the reason why I dropped off the music scene was because I spent a whole year trying to recover from my absolute crazy maniacal drug-addict, drug-driven life.”

Today he’s back in full Chic mode, touring and recording and playing guitar. “I’m a producer too, but I’ll never stop playing. Never. If I do a Chic record and I’m not playing on it, I don’t understand why I’m doing it, because the most fun I ever have is making the record.”