Dread heat: Chic are still hot one of disco’s hottest acts
Davina Morris gets down with the legendary Chic frontman Nile Rodgers on eve of UK disco revival tour
Ever wanted to boogie back to the days when hair was big, collars were bigger and every Saturday night was a disco inferno? Now’s your chance as the Best Disco In Town Live tour embarks on its annual UK round.

Now in its sixth year, the event features seven of the biggest artists from the disco era, including The Pointer Sisters, The Three Degrees, Candi Staton, Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King, The Emotions and Boney M.

Headlining is popular ’70s outfit Chic, featuring guitarist/writer/producer Nile Rodgers. Along with his musical partner, the late Bernard Edwards, Rodgers produced some of the hottest tracks of the era, including Good Times and Le Freak, and much of their music went on to be sampled by countless artists. Gearing up for the nationwide tour and the release of a new Chic album, Rodgers spoke candidly about his career to date.

Are you excited about the forthcoming UK tour?
Definitely. We played all across the UK last year and it was amazing. I thought last year’s line-up, with Shalamar, Kid Creole and the Coconuts and Rose Royce, was fantastic and I just didn’t think the show could get any better. But this year we’ve got some phenomenal acts, too, so who knows? Even though these shows have an almost corny image to them because they’re all packaged up, they’re real crowd-pleasers. It’s great to go to a concert and just hear hit after hit after hit. You’ll leave the show exhausted!

What are the high and low points of your career to date?
The high point was probably when Chic put out Good Times, but it was also the low point because that was the beginning of what they called the “Disco Sucks” movement in America. So, even though we had a No 1 record, we became sort of persona non grata. But people have since explained to me why the backlash was so devastating at the time. They say it’s because Chic didn’t exist before 1977 – before the whole disco thing. So, unlike other R’n’B groups like Kool & The Gang or Earth, Wind and Fire, who had existed beforehand and therefore survived the death of disco, we were so heavily associated with the scene that when it crashed and burned, it felt like we crashed and burned as well.

What do you think of sampling?
I love it. I’m a big fan of musical collage. I love the fact that you can take snippets of existing songs and use them to create something new. But in the beginning, I didn’t understand it. When we first did Good Times and Sugarhill Gang sampled it to create Rapper’s Delight – which wound up selling millions of records and making millions of dollars – they didn’t even credit us, let alone pay us. We started a lawsuit, we settled and that was the beginning of sampling as we now know it. People don’t realise what it takes to write and create a song – especially one that becomes a hit. There’s a lot of preparation that goes into a track like Good Times and when a person can just go ahead and snatch it, they should at least compensate the original creator. Not to take anything away from Sugarhill Gang, but if they’d had to write Good Times before they made Rapper’s Delight they’d probably have come up with a totally different record.

When did you first hear Rapper’s Delight?
It was at a club in New York in about 1979 – or maybe it was the early ’80s. At that time it was quite common for DJs to record instrumental tracks and then have MCs rap over them in the clubs. So when I heard this track, that’s what I thought the DJ had done. But when everybody in the club started acting nervous around me, I realised that something was different this time. I walked over to the DJ and he told me that he’d bought the record that morning. When I looked at the record and didn’t see my name on it, it was such a horrible feeling. I actually felt violated, as though I’d been robbed.

What are your fondest memories of Bernard Edwards?
The greatest thing about my partnership with Bernard is that he’d walk in while I was writing a song and he’d look at me and say: “That’s fantastic… but there’s at least five or six songs in there!” Then we’d start to take it apart. The essence of most of Chic’s music is over-writing and then taking away. We had a great working relationship.

What can we expect from the new Chic album?
The album will feature ten new tracks. It’s totally new material, with one or two mash-ups. As an experiment, we did a mash-up between Chic and Destiny’s Child and it was great. I couldn’t put out a record that didn’t have the presence of Bernard Edwards, who I lost in 1996; Tony Thompson, our drummer, who passed away a few months ago; and of course, Luther Vandross, who suffered a stroke last year. Not to say that Luther won’t make a record again, but if it weren’t for him, Tony and Bernard, there’d be no Chic. So I’ve taken the very first song we recorded, which was called Everybody Dance, and I experimented by mashing it with Destiny’s Child. It sounds amazing.

The Best Disco In Town Live plays Manches­ter Evening News Arena October 8; Wembley Arena October 9; Plymouth Pavilions October 12; Birmingham NEC October 14 and 15; Brighton Centre October 16