Nile Rodgers: The Hitmaker Remastered

This programme contains some strong language.

My name is Nile Rodgers.

You probably don't know my name

but I bet you know at least one of my songs.

# I want your love... #

# Oh, freak out... #

As the songwriter, guitarist and producer of Chic, Nile Rodgers was

one half of a partnership that had the world caught up in disco fever.

I think it's one of the most brilliantly devised

guitar-bass situations in music, period.

# Good times... #

They were determined to get you out of your seat.

Maybe you didn't want to get up, but you had to get up.

# Leave your cares behind... #

Together they would create the hits that helped define the disco era

and beyond.

Those bass lines are iconic. The Good Times thing, you know,

became the foundation for modern hip-hop.

We Are Family is the best record you can ever put on a turntable

to get people dancing in a room.

It makes you feel good and it brings people together.

And it's just so positive that it has to be more than the music.

But the music that made them would also break them.

'Between games, as planned, a huge box containing thousands of disco records was blown up.'

We were done. "Disco sucks" completely shut us down.

What could have been the end for Nile Rodgers would actually

be a new beginning.

He defined the sound of pop in the early '80s.

The excitement of buying that record, and Bowie's back, and Bowie's looking great, and look! He's doing funk!

He knows and understands artists.

# Let's dance... #

The grooves of Nile Rodgers have filled dance floors for nearly 40 years.

People love so many of his songs.

They've played them at their weddings

and at their births of their children,

or they've fallen in love to them.

It's like he's just born to just make music and just do it perfectly.

It's just sickening.

This is the story of the man behind the hits.

From New York's mean streets to the drug-fuelled excesses of the '80s.

Meet Nile Rodgers, the Hitmaker.

Er, my man, you know this shit is happening.

MUSIC: Get Lucky by Daft Punk

In 2013, Nile's distinctive guitar work

helped French dance music duo Daft Punk to one of the year's biggest hits.

The success of Get Lucky

reenergised Nile's career and helped introduce a brand-new audience

to his back catalogue of hit music.

# She's up all night till the sun

# I'm up all night to get some

# She's up all night for good fun

# I'm up all night to get lucky

# We're up all night to the sun... #

Now Chic are back, with a new album nearly 40 years

after Nile's career was launched on the streets of New York city.

Nile was born in New York in 1952.

His mum Beverley was just 13 when she became pregnant.

Together with his Jewish stepfather, they would

move around some of the city's toughest neighbourhoods,

from the Bronx to Alphabet City and Greenwich Village.

It was a far from conventional upbringing.

My mom and dad were beatniks

and they lived the whole Bohemian, cool, beatnicky lifestyle.

I mean, they were heroin addicts, too.

It was sort of weird to come home

and find your parents sleeping standing up as they would

always do - they'd nod and fall asleep mid-sentence.

That was a little weird, but I got used to it after a while.

Despite his parents' habitual drug use, his Bohemian home-life

was intellectually and creatively stimulating.

The greatest memories are of the music that was

always around my house.

I mean, there was just constant jazz, um,

Nina Simone, Oscar Brown Jr, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk.

I grew up with modern jazz all the time.

MUSIC: Blue Train by John Coltrane

Music was a constant in Nile's childhood. At home, it was jazz.

And he tried his hand at a few classical instruments in the school orchestra.

But it was a teenage crush that led Nile to pick up the guitar.

It was actually a really pretty girl who had a band,

and because I was relatively proficient at the symphonic music,

I just thought for some reason that

when this girl said she needed a guitar player, that

I was smart enough to just pick one up and somehow know how to play it.

Or at least play it on a level where I could impress her. Oops - wrong!

I picked up the guitar, and it was a completely different language.

And the girl was like, "You certainly aren't good enough to play in my band."

I knew I was a good musician, I just wasn't a guitar player.

Had she asked for a clarinet player, I'd have said, "I'm your man!"

Undeterred, Nile taught himself the guitar.

Picking up a Beatles song book and strumming the opening chords

to A Day In The Life, he soon realised this was the instrument for him.

# I read the news today, oh, boy... #

He went on to study jazz and classical guitar

and was soon playing in his first bands.

By the time he was just 19, having been playing guitar for less

than three years, Nile landed his first job as a professional musician.

He joined the touring band for recently launched children's TV show Sesame Street.

But it was in his next job that Nile truly began to hone his craft.

He joined the house band at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theatre

and played behind some of R&B's biggest names.

# Don't play that song for me

# Cos it brings back memories... #

The Apollo theatre was the premier performance house in R&B music.

It was James Brown, it was Aretha Franklin, it was The Supremes,

The Temptations,

any of the big black artists in our music were at the Apollo.

He would play with artists like Aretha Franklin.

Aretha's shouting out, "This is in B, two flats, off you go."

And you know, you have to work quickly,

because these people are incredibly professional.

They're used to working with a high calibre of musician,

and if they didn't cut it, you know, you wouldn't last in that gig.

As well as playing at the Apollo,

Nile worked as a jobbing musician throughout the early '70s,

playing R&B, funk and some rock tunes

on the East Coast club circuit.

But one show, where Nile played as a last-minute stand-in,

proved to be life-changing.

The band was pretty good. But the bass player was extraordinary.

I mean, just playing a song that everybody knows,

he had a feel that just was something incredible.

The bassist was Bernard Edwards,

and this meeting was the start of a friendship

and musical partnership that would define the rest of Nile's career.

Before the night was over,

it was clear that even though he and I were pick-up guys,

Bernard and I were the guys who sort of brought everybody together.

After we meet that first time, we became inseparable.

So he was my bass player, I was his guitar player.

In 1973, Nile's new musical partner,

Bernard Edwards, took a job

as the musical director for vocal group New York City,

who had a top-20 hit with I'm Doin' Fine Now.

He called on Nile to be the guitarist in the touring band.

# I'm doin' fine now... #

The New York City gig was huge for me

because Bernard was the band leader and New York City had a hit record.

And because they were identifiable with that song called

I'm Doin' Fine Now, we then came up with our own identity,

which was the Big Apple Band - New York City and the Big Apple Band.

# Without you, baby... #

Together they toured extensively, supporting acts

like The O'Jays, Parliament, and The Jackson 5.

But the Big Apple Band would also perform as a separate act to

New York City, and soon developed their own following.

We played a lot of small clubs around the north-east area. We'd do our

top-40 stuff and occasional original, and people would say, "Oh, look!

"Black men! They must be one of those disco bands! We love that!

"That's great! Come on in!" And we'd come in, and we did some disco stuff.

We also did The Boys Are Back In Town, and like, jazz-fusion stuff.

But then Nile and Bernard, I guess they figured,

"Well, if people think we're a disco band, let's write some disco songs."

In the early '70s, America was engulfed in political scandal,

financial recession and a prolonged war in Vietnam.

Young people wanted an escape.

The disco phenomenon that had emerged in Philadelphia

was exploding in New York's clubs.

Disco was the right music for the right historic moment.

People wanted a happy style of music,

and a place to escape due to these difficult things that were

going on in the decade, you know, the Watergate, the Vietnam War,

this kind of cynicism about the country, about the world.

The music, from the beginning, was associated with black clubs,

with gay dance clubs,

and so there was this whole underground element to it,

and as the music became popular, people wanted to experience that,

that energy of these underground clubs.

To walk into a club, and hear this continuous music phenomenon,

I'd never felt anything like that.

I don't think that I ever wanted to be

a part of anything as much as I wanted to be a part of that.

# You should be dancing, yeah

# You should be dancing, yeah... #

The Big Apple Band were now starting to develop their own stripped-back

funky, disco sound whilst continuing to play

the hits of the day, like the Bee Gees' You Should Be Dancing,

which had topped the Billboard Charts in the summer of 1976.

# ..My baby moves at midnight

# Goes right on till the dawn... #

But another song reaching number one would be a turning point

for Nile's Big Apple Band.

MUSIC: A Fifth Of Beethoven by Walter Murphy

Walter Murphy's A Fifth of Beethoven featured his own Big Apple Band,

forcing Nile and Bernard to find a new identity.

Their inspiration would come from an unexpected source.

My girlfriend at the time took me to see Roxy Music.

# Do it on the tables

# Quaglino's place or Mabel's

# Slow and gentle... #

It was the hippest thing I'd ever seen.

They were dressed impeccably and Bernard said, "Why don't we call

"ourselves 'Chic'?" So we changed our name to Chic, and that inspired me.

I wrote our very first Chic song, which was called Everybody Dance.

Armed with Chic's first songs,

Nile and Bernard headed for the recording studio.

Their friend, engineer and DJ Robert Drake, sneaked them

in to the studio where he worked.

Our full cost to record this entire session was 10 to pay the elevator

operator to ferry us up to the tenth or twelfth floor of the studio.

Robert engineered the session but Nile and Bernard

took on the role of directing the musicians,

marking their first foray into the world of record production.

# Everybody dance, doo-do-doo-do

# Clap your hands, clap your hands... #

In the studio, Bernard had some reservations

about the song's lyrics.

He said, "But...what does doo-do-doo-do mean?"

I said, "What do you mean, what does doo-do-doo-do mean?"

He says, "What does doo-do-doo-do mean?" I says,

"It's like la-la-la-la."

He says, "Why don't you go, Everybody dance, la-la-la-la,

"cos I know what la-la-la-la means," I said, "But that's not hip."

"The la-la era is over. We gotta do doo-do!"

# Everybody dance, doo-do-doo-do

# Clap your hands, clap your hands... #

Everybody Dance was recorded, but was unfinished.

Unknown to Nile, Robert mixed the tracks

and took them to the club where he DJ'd.

The Night Owl was popular with the buppies,

New York's emerging young black professionals.

The moment that I put on Everybody Dance,

it's like everybody's head turned, and they said, "What's that?"

And then suddenly the floor just like, was consumed with people.

If I attempted to play another record, they would boo.

So I had to just keep playing the record.

We had no idea he was playing it for people.

When I walked in, I saw these beautiful buppies screaming at the top of their lungs,

"Everybody dance, doo-do-doo-do, clap your hands..."!

When Bernard was asking me "What does doo-do-doo-do mean,"

I got thinking to myself, "THAT'S what doo-do-doo-do means! There you go!"

As Nile and Bernard were starting to develop the Chic sound,

disco was already evolving.

One of the biggest hits of 1977 was Donna Summer's I Feel Love,

which featured Giorgio Moroder's futuristic synthesisers and drum machines.

But for Chic's first album,

Nile and Bernard wanted to keep the live feel of their club hit and

gathered together in the studio with some of New York's finest musicians.

The core of the band was Nile, Bernard and Big Apple drummer, Tony Thompson

with Norma Jean Wright on lead vocals.

I thought they were an amazing band.

I mean, they were an incredibly, incredibly tight band. For recording

you'd put down a click track, which keeps everybody in time.

They never used any click tracks.

It was always... Tony was such a steady drummer.

Nile and Bernard had a clear vision of the sound they wanted,

but the musicians were allowed to have their own input.

We were just given, you know,

E minor, A 11, D sharp 9 on a napkin or a rudimentary chart,

and then there'd be suggestions...

I would suggest something and say,

"How about this? It should just be two bars."

Maybe I played something I shouldn't have, and it was, "That was good! Do that again!"

They kept everything very simple.

If you hear the keyboard parts, they're not doing very much,

they're just very sort of holding it down, just basic, um...

most of the movement comes from, well, the bass, drums, guitar.

Those three guys.

Also essential to the sound was the Chic choir,

which included the then-little-known singer Luther Vandross.

Luther helped them produce those vocals at the beginning because he

had such a tremendous ear for what worked vocally

and how to put voices together, and so I think he was helping Nile

and Bernard to develop the vocal sound that's on all the records.

Most songs when you sing R&B,

and in pop, there are a lot of harmonies,

and working with Nile and Bernard,

it was more percussive, and it was unison singing,

and I'm saying, "OK, so when are the harmonies coming?" But there

are very few harmonies, but the unison singing was brilliant.

# Everybody dance, doo-do-doo-do

# Clap your hands, clap your hands

# Spinning all around the floor just like Rodgers and Astaire

# Who found love without a care... #

They wanted the lead voice to really work with the rhythm and the music.

It was almost...it supported the music, it wasn't necessarily

where they were looking for a lead voice to dominate.

# Come on, everybody get on your feet... #

They couldn't let the singers go wild,

cos they knew exactly what they wanted to produce.

So you couldn't have some singer carrying on all over the place -

that wasn't what they did.

Their thing was the nucleus of that bass and that guitar, and that beat.

# Dance, dance, dance, dance

# People dancing... #

Completing the sophisticated Chic sound were the strings,

played by some of New York's top classical musicians.

At the helm, Nile himself.

He got the A-list string players - always.

These guys don't put up with anybody that isn't at their level.

They're very...a bit of a snob thing, cos they're so good.

And er... And so I was thinking,

"Boy, how is he going to pull this off?"

You know, he's this kid that's sort of this street kid,

conducting the strings, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

He was so good with them and he won their respect immediately.

Nile had a very clear vision of what the strings should add to a track.

It added that little bit of sophistication

that made it not just a street band.

Always underpinning the band's sound were the metronomic guitar

and pounding bass.

Nile and Bernard were the beating heart of Chic.

I think it's one of the most brilliantly devised

guitar-bass sort of situations in music, period.

The two of them are like a riff machine.

It's a hard thing to do, to let the bass line just back up the track

and back up the accents that need to be backed up

and to make it such a hook at the same time.

And I think a lot of that and Nile's guitar playing, and just keeping a groove.

Such a good groove and such a good feel.

Those tunes, where the singing stops, you hear this guy's

super-energetic, and idealistic, and off he goes.

It's got real life force in it, and then behind that you've

got this guy who's just backing him up all the time.

You really hear two friends, playing together.

It's a very beautiful thing, I think.

It's like Lennon and McCartney and Jagger and Richards,

um, it's um, together it just gelled, you know.

As well as having a clear musical vision,

Nile and Bernard also wanted to create a distinct image for the band.

Having taken their stylistic cues from Roxy Music,

another very different act would provide the final

ingredient in the Chic concept.

# I wanna rock and roll all night

# And party every day

# I wanna rock and roll all night... #

We went to see Kiss, and it was amazing. It was like "Whoa"!

It was like this whole theatrical thing.

When I met Ace, nobody knew that I was talking to Ace Frehley.

I mean, he's standing there, we're all just talking,

and meanwhile, the crowd was going crazy for him 20 minutes ago,

but once they came out of their make-up,

and you're sitting in their room, having drinks,

people are going, "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" And he's sitting right there. Wow!

You know, we had always been back-up musicians for stars.

We didn't know how to be stars.

So we thought that anonymity was going to be our key.

We made the music the focus,

and this Chic mystique, this concept, was the star.

Like Kiss, Chic hid their identities on their first album.

Echoing Roxy Music's album artwork,

they featured two models on the cover rather than the band itself.

There was a strategy to put the two models on the cover.

It opened the door for, um,

the group not to be pre-judged as an R&B group,

because I think if they had seen the four of us...

It's... We're all black, and at that time, I think that some

programmers may have said, "Oh, this is just another R&B group."

Released in 1977, Chic's debut album reached number 27

in the Billboard chart, later going gold.

It was released when disco culture was at its peak,

and New York's fabled Studio 54 was at the heart of the disco universe.

It was the place to be seen.

John Travolta, Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli

were just some of the celebrity names on the club's guest list.

Studio 54 from the time it opened in the spring of 1977,

just became literally the hottest club in the world.

It was the gathering place of the hip, the beautiful, the wealthy.

It kind of epitomised excess - the drugs, the sex,

the best music, the best lights - everything.

It really was the best of everything.

Steve Rubell, the co-owner of Studio 54, would hand-pick the people

they would let in, who would contribute to the image,

and the energy for a particular night.

It was all very conscious.

You know, Steve and Mickey Ruskin before him invented

the concept of keeping people out, you know - "You, you, you.

"Not you."

So it was about exclusivity, very much.

Everybody Dance and Dance, Dance, Dance,

both top-40 hits from Chic's debut album,

were regularly played at Studio 54.

But Nile and Bernard's carefully constructed anonymity meant

that on New Year's Eve 1977,

they fell foul of the club's strict entry policy.

Despite being invited by Grace Jones,

the star performer that night, they were refused entry.

Even Nile's best Grace Jones impersonation couldn't

convince the doorman.

Knock, knock, knock.

"Yeah, what d'you want?" "Er, we're personal friends of Grace Jones."

It was like, you know? And the guy like, slams the door in our faces.

"Oh, man! Fuck off!"

It was like... Cos this was New Year's Eve at Studio 54,

the centre of the disco and nightclub universe in 1977, going to '78.

So it was pretty obvious

we weren't going to get in with that story, or period.

Studio 54 just happened to be around the corner from my apartment.

We had enough money to buy two bottles of champagne,

and after we downed the first bottle, we started jamming,

and we just started singing,

# Ohhhhh! Fuck off! Diddle-dee-dee-oh, fuck Studio 54!

# Fuck off, diddle-dee-dee-oh, dah-dam, Ohhhhhh! Fuck off! #

Finally Bernard looked at me and said, "My man, you know this

"shit is happening. All right, how we going to get this on the radio?"

This was way before hip-hop.

No-one used profanity on pop records...

was like, that's impossible. And then Bernard said,

"Yeah!" And then my kids are doing this new dance, called the Freak.

Hello!

# Ohhhhh! Freak out

# Le freak, c'est chic

# Freak out

# Ohhhhh! Freak out

# Le freak, c'est chic

# Freak out

# Have you heard about the new dance craze

# Listen to us, I'm sure you'll be amazed... #

Le Freak became Chic's first number-one single in the US,

and went on to sell over seven million copies,

making it the biggest-selling single in Atlantic Records' history.

It was the first hit from their second album C'est Chic,

and featured two new lead vocalists, Luci Martin

and former Chic backing singer Alfa Anderson.

# Ohhhhh! Freak out

# Le freak, c'est chic

# Freak out! #

1978 saw disco dominating the charts,

and its place in mainstream musical culture was confirmed.

The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack

spent months at the top of the album charts on both sides

of the Atlantic and spawned a string of hit singles for the Bee Gees.

Chic were riding high on the disco wave

and their record company, Atlantic, wanted them

to apply their winning formula to other artists on the label.

Rather than opt for an established artist,

Nile and Bernard chose to work with a relatively unknown act.

# You know I'm there and that I care

# Boy, I'm crazy about you... #

Sister Sledge, who'd formed in 1971, had already had a number

of minor hits in Europe but had failed to break through in the US.

Atlantic Records President Jerry Greenberg hoped Nile and Bernard

could make a hit record for the Sisters,

who were like family to him.

He was describing us, and Nile and Bernard started writing

it down, what he was describing, "They're family.

"They stick together like birds of a feather."

He went on with this long diatribe that basically, er, dictated the

lyrics to the song We Are Family, and we just moved a few things around.

# We are family

# I got all my sisters with me

# We are family

# Get up everybody and sing... #

Once we were charged with producing Sister Sledge, we did it our way.

We'd sit down and we'd come up with an actual real story,

just like reporters.

So then we superimposed the Studio 54 and the bottle of fairy dust

on to it, and created this new entity of four young girls, who were

hipper than hip, and on the leading edge of fashion and art and music.

# Everyone can see we're together

# As we walk on by... #

A crucial part of the Studio 54 fairy dust

was the distinctive Chic sound.

Who better to create it than the Chic musicians

and singers themselves?

A lot of times they'd use the Chic singers instead of using

the sisters, so politically it was difficult.

They knew our sound, they trusted us, and we would sing background

on all of their productions, so we went in to sing background.

I don't think at that point Sister Sledge was extremely

happy about it, and I mean, I understand.

# Get up everybody and sing... #

Like We Are Family - that's Luther Vandross, and the Chic sound,

and the sisters did record with them,

but they had a formula and they knew it worked,

and they had a process of how they worked, and they knew that worked.

And now, in retrospect, I feel like, well, I was along for the ride.

Nile and Bernard wrote,

produced and played on all the songs in Sister Sledge's album.

This was the Chic hit-making formula applied to maximum effect.

# Oh, what, wow

# He's the greatest dancer

# Oh, what, wow

# That I've ever seen... #

I remember going to Nile and asking him, you know,

"Do you think this is going to be a hit?" And I remember

the confidence that he exuded, he didn't even think twice.

He said, "Oh yeah, sure it's going to be a hit."

And I said to myself, "Well, we'll see."

We took Sister Sledge, who probably had a very minor record deal,

and we delivered one of the biggest records of the entire organization.

With their first major success as producers for other artists

behind them, Nile and Bernard headed

back into the studio to record Chic's third album, Risque.

With its Agatha-Christie-inspired retro artwork, it would spawn

Chic's most iconic groove.

MUSIC: Good Times by Chic

Good Times was centred around

doong-doong-doong, doong-doo-doo-doong...

So the thing is, it was such a laid-back kind of groove.

# Happy days are here again

# The time is right for making friends... #

The day that we got in the studio and heard this, it's like,

"Oh, this is something important going on here."

We didn't even know why.

# Tomorrow, let's all do it again... #

I was sitting at this very desk, and I'm listening to this bass line,

and Good Times is just... like, what's that?

It's like, where did that come from?

# Must put an end to this stress and strife

# I think I want to live the sporting life... #

And I turned to Bernard, and I said,

"Where the hell'd you get THAT bass line from?

He goes, "Why d'you say that?" "That's amazing!

"That's like one of the most amazing things I've ever recorded,

"or even heard, come out of a bass!" He goes, "Oh, d'you like that?"

You know, it was kind of like he didn't even know!

In 1979, New York clubs like Studio 54

and Xenon were at their decadent peak.

Chic were singing about Good Times whilst the US economy was in tatters.

The media came after us.

How could we do these hedonistic, celebratory songs when we're

going through the greatest financial recession

since the Great Depression, and we says,

"Because that's what they did back then when they had the Great Depression."

All those songs that we're referencing are from that era.

We were writing about things that had happened years ago

as if they were current events, because we could see

the mirror between the disco era and the speakeasy era.

When they got rid of prohibition in America and everybody

was...now it was legal to drink again, what was the popular song?

HE SINGS: "Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again."

So Good Times goes, boom...

"Happy days are here again..."

Clear as a bell!

Despite the criticism, Good Times shot to number one in the US,

Chic's second chart-topper of the year.

Risque was Chic's third success in a little over two years,

the album adding to their growing collection of gold and platinum discs.

Disco had been the dominant musical force around the world

since the mid-'70s. It had fought off punk in the UK charts

and kept rock music at bay in the US, but whilst Good Times was riding high,

an anti-disco storm was brewing.

On 12th July 1979, disco-hating DJ Steve Dahl

fronted a promotion at a Chicago White Sox baseball game.

Admission was just 98 cents

if fans brought an unwanted disco record with them to destroy.

ARCHIVE: 'Between games, as planned,

'a huge box containing thousands of disco records was blown up.'

The stunt got out of hand and a near-riot ensued.

A few months later, disco music had all

but disappeared from the US charts.

It was never really against the music so much -

it was against the lifestyle -

white...rockers saw their substance fading away.

Disco's associations with gay people, with black people,

with the underground, and then of course

it became associated with this very hedonistic kind of lifestyle, and I think that sort of

white, red-blooded American males in particular were threatened by that.

We never had a Chic hit after 1979.

Good Times was it, we were done.

"Disco sucks" completely shut us down.

The "disco sucks" movement could have spelt the end of Nile and Bernard's careers...

..but before that fateful night in Chicago, pop legend

Diana Ross had committed to making her next solo album with them.

# I said upside down you're turning me

# You're giving love instinctively... #

This was their opportunity to further establish themselves as producers.

# Upside down, boy you turn me... #

We decided we would interview Diana Ross before we wrote a word of music.

We wanted to know who she was as a person.

She sat there and told us everything.

She told us that she was going to turn her world upside down.

That's her title. Those are her words. We turned it into a song.

Diana Ross would have producers sort of presented to her

on silver platters, and she'd worked with many great producers and

she had sort of gone disco already,

but it was the fact that these guys, you know...they'd been going

for a couple of years, really, they were sort of young upstarts.

This was, you know, Miss Ross.

Nile and Bernard put everything they had into the project,

once again writing, producing and playing on every song,

but Diana and Motown Records weren't happy with the album.

When we finished what we thought was our most amazing work ever,

they turned it down and said, "It's not a Diana Ross record."

And we tried to plead our case by saying, "You're right, it's not

"an old Diana Ross record, it's a new Diana Ross record."

# I'm comin' out

# I want the world to know... #

Nile and Bernard's work was taken away from them

and remixed by Motown.

One day, this test pressing shows up, and it's almost our record,

but we thought it was a weaker version.

And we thought that er,

what had happened to it is they sort of Motownized it.

I said to Nile, I said,

"Look, man, the songs are so... You guys wrote great songs.

"No...no mix is going to destroy those songs, you know,

"the songs still come through. And so I wouldn't really worry about it,

"because it's going to be a smash."

And sure enough, it was a big smash for Diana.

# ..coming out, I'm coming out... #

The Diana album sold six million copies, reinvigorating her career

and introducing her to a new broader audience.

But it hadn't been easy for Nile and Bernard, and thanks to

the disco backlash, there were more difficult times ahead.

# You should have seen by the look in my eyes, baby... #

In the early '80s, America was changing.

A new Republican President was tasked with turning

the economy around, and musical tastes were becoming safer.

Disco's hedonism was being replaced by middle of the road rock and pop

that played to the white American heartland.

Nile and Bernard were struggling to find their place in this post-disco world,

and their musical projects weren't hitting the highs they'd achieved in the '70s.

But this didn't stop them enjoying the trappings of their earlier successes.

Because my parents were heroin addicts, and drugs

were just a normal part of our family life, I guess I was...

wired to be an alcoholic or a drug addict.

So when the drugs and alcohol hit me in the '80s,

that's when it really started to take effect.

Erm...

it didn't feel that bad to me. I was actually having a great time.

Cocaine and alcohol were part of life for Nile and Bernard,

but whilst Nile was partying hard,

Bernard was spending more time with his family.

Their relationship started to suffer.

I think the drugs had a lot to do with it.

They drifted apart out of that third person that was in there

and that was kind of moving their lives in different directions.

I don't think either of them had that much control.

Through the early '80s,

Chic released four albums but none delivered the hits.

In 1983, the band split up

and the producing team of Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards was no more.

Both went on to release solo albums and whilst neither sold well,

they were highly regarded, particularly by other musicians.

One musician who heard Nile's album was David Bowie,

who was looking for a hit to follow up his 1980 album Scary Monsters.

After a chance meeting in a New York bar,

they embarked on a project together.

Bowie had no record deal. Nile had no record deal.

I mean, a string of platinum records, but I couldn't get a record deal.

I couldn't get arrested. We were so desperate in a strange way.

And also because he told me that he wanted a hit.

And I was like, "Whoa! No, please, David. I got hits.

"I got a lot of hits, I don't want a hit.

"I want an art record that makes me...just the record producer."

With the project under way,

they started to write at Bowie's home in Switzerland.

I came over to his house

and he proceeds to play a folk song called Let's Dance.

I was, like, "If we call this song Let's Dance...

"I come from dance music. Man, we better make people dance."

So I scribbled together an arrangement.

We went to Queen's studio and we had these jazz guys come in

and read down the charts that I had written to Let's Dance.

And David could not believe

how I transformed his guitar thing into... You know, duh-duh-duh!

HE MIMICS BEAT

MUSIC: Let's Dance by David Bowie

I was looking at him and I said to him,

"David, did I make this too funky?"

# Let's dance... #

And he looked at me and he went, "Nile, is there such a thing?"

I was, like, "Absolutely, brother, I hear you."

# Let's dance

# To the song they're playing on the radio

# Let's sway

# While colour lights up your face... #

To help deliver the hit album Bowie was looking for,

Nile called on many of his former Chic team,

including recording engineer Bob Clearmountain.

I was setting up the session, I was setting up the microphones

and the headphones and everything, and he came in

and he's like, sort of following me around the studio.

I was, "Wow! David Bowie's following me round a studio!"

And he's going, "Look, do you know the musicians?"

And I said, "Yeah, I know most of them. Don't you?"

He goes, "No, I only know Nile.

"They're all Nile's guys and I've never met them."

I said, "Really?! OK, well, this ought to be fun." You know.

-# Never gonna fall for...

-# Modern love... #

Let's Dance was finished in the studio in just three weeks

and became the biggest selling album of Bowie's career,

producing hit singles on both sides of the Atlantic.

Parts of it are a Chic record.

You look at the credits and Bernard's on there, Tony's on there.

Yes, it sounds a product of the '80s,

but it really helps both of them.

It gave Bowie his biggest album,

it gave Nile that absolute credibility

that, "If Bowie's using him, OK."

And then the productions sort of tumbled out after that period.

# You might know of the original sin

# And you might know how... #

Nile was now carving a successful path as a producer in his own right,

moving further away from his disco past.

Ever present was his signature funky sound, which he applied

to Australian band INXS, handing them their first number-one single.

We heard Original Sin, a track Nile had done with INXS.

And I heard that and that just really knocked me out.

And then I knew that Let's Dance wasn't a fluke.

By 1983, Duran Duran had already had a string of hit singles in the UK,

but the first two singles from Seven And The Ragged Tiger

hadn't made the impact the band wanted.

The Reflex, which was a song we'd written on the third album,

which we all felt was...

We all felt it was a commercial sounding song,

but we just didn't have it quite right.

There was a feeling that we could adjust it a little and get it right.

And that's when we thought Nile might be the man to do it.

# The reflex is an only child

# He's waiting in the park... #

I reconstructed the record. I rewrote it, basically.

You know, I reproduced it from my point of view.

Cos, like I said, I'm not a mixer per se, I'm an arranger.

I don't know what the hell he did to it.

He, like, dipped it in the funk jar.

He trimmed back the fat, he made it all meat.

And then he added this really spicy sauce to it.

He made the flex-flex-flex, all of those sampled parts,

which were completely new at that time. Nobody had done that before.

# So why-y-y don't you use it... #

Nile started what would become a long working relationship with Duran Duran

when they were already a global sensation.

But his greatest commercial success was the result of a collaboration

with an up-and-coming artist hungry for worldwide domination.

# I made it through the wilderness

# Somehow I made it through... #

She used to say that she was going to be the biggest star in the world

and I loved that about her. I absolutely loved it.

I would introduce her to somebody who was really famous

and Madonna wasn't, and she would say,

"Oh, hi, I'm Madonna, I'm going to be a superstar."

# I was sad and blue... #

To record her second album, Like A Virgin,

Nile took Madonna to New York's legendary Power Station Studios

and brought in his old Chic band-mates once again.

I think that Nile made a conscious departure

from the more sequenced techno-sounding style

of her first album.

# Like a virgin... #

I was able to say to her, "If we just programme your record,

"we'll just sound like any other synth-pop thing

"and you could be replaceable.

"But if Chic plays your record, no-one sounds like Chic.

"We're the only ones that sound like that.

"Cos no-one can play like Bernard, no-one plays like Tony.

"That's how we play."

# Cos we are living in a material world

# And I am a material girl... #

That could almost be seen as Chic's last album,

because most of them are on that record.

That's what Chic did next.

The Like A Virgin album

was to become Nile's biggest selling production,

moving over 21 million copies worldwide.

# ..You know that we are living in a material world... #

It just gave Nile at that point that absolute invincibility.

This is the guy you go to who is going to make you a big star.

As the '80s rolled on, Nile's talents not only as a producer,

but as a composer and guitarist, continued to be in huge demand.

MUSIC: Roam by The B-52's

Everybody wanted some of the Hitmaker's magic.

Whenever Nile plays guitar for you, he's producing what he's doing.

He's producing himself, and helping to produce the record.

# Bring me a higher love

# Bring me a higher love... #

He would go into the studio and do a take

and come back and we'd say, you know, "Fantastic! Great!"

And he'd have a listen and say,

"Yeah, well, I just want to go and just change that

"and do that bit again."

"OK. Fine. It sounds great to us."

So for me he had a big production influence on the record.

MUSIC: Don't Stop The Dance by Bryan Ferry

We were doing an album called Boys And Girls.

He came and ended up playing on every track,

always finding a space... No matter how much stuff we had on tape,

how many musicians were already recorded,

he'd find something which would make it sound better.

And he is a genius...at just improving a groove of a song.

# Don't stop

# Don't stop the dance... #

He's one of the few signature musicians left

that can play eight bars, and everybody that hears that song

are going to hear Nile Rodgers, they're going to hear that feel.

There's not many people that can do that.

I can't think of anybody else, actually, that can do it.

Throughout the '80s, Nile's former Chic partner Bernard Edwards

played on many of his productions.

Bernard also had a successful career as a producer in his own right.

Chic would reform in 1992 with a new line-up for one more album.

They went on the road

at a time when Nile's excesses were starting to catch up with him.

I realised that I was living a lifestyle

that I couldn't sustain very long.

It was obviously going to crash and burn.

At that point my heart had already stopped eight times,

I had already been in God knows how many coronary care

and intensive-care coronary units.

And all sorts of stuff, acute alcohol poisoning three or four times.

At that point I had diabetes...

I mean, I was just killing myself.

And... And that was it.

Drugs and alcohol had been part of Nile's life since his childhood,

but in 1994 he would check himself into rehab

and quit once and for all.

Two years later, a clean and sober Nile Rodgers

was invited by Japanese television

to play at an event to celebrate his work as a producer.

# I want your love

# I want your love... #

The concert would see Nile

back on stage with Chic, and musical partner Bernard.

When we showed up for the show, Bernard had taken sick.

The doctor examined him and said, "Whoa! You can't go on stage.

"You got to go to hospital right now."

And Bernard refused to go.

'So we go on and we do the show, and everything was going great...'

We got to bring it down. He can't talk tonight.

Yeah, I'm a little sick tonight.

-I got the Tokyo flu.

-THEY LAUGH

But we're still here.

After that concert, we all hug and we're thrilled.

You can see the jubilation on our faces,

cos we killed it, it was a great show.

Erm... And Bernard goes back to his hotel room.

I actually was on my way out to go to a restaurant, and I called his room

to check on him and I asked him if he wanted me to bring him any food back.

And his last words to me were...

"No, I'll be all right. I just need to rest."

And that's what he did. He needed to rest

and I never heard another word from him.

On the 18th of April, 1996,

Nile found Bernard in his hotel room.

He had died from pneumonia.

His sudden death brought to an end a friendship and musical partnership

that had survived good times and bad

and had changed the face of pop music for ever.

Chic's musical legacy lives on.

Nile and Bernard's music has been sampled hundreds of times,

continuing to make hits for artists to the present day.

In 2010, Nile was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer

but rather than slowing down, he threw himself into a hectic schedule

of touring and recording.

Less than two years later,

French electronic dance music pioneers Daft Punk

were looking to change their sound and create an album using

real musicians that paid homage to '70s disco.

Instead of sampling Chic, they would call in the Hitmaker in person.

Random Access Memories was Daft Punk's first studio album,

because every other record they did at home in their bedroom, or whatever.

Daft Punk never did a pop record with live musicians and people playing.

# Lose yourself to dance... #

Daft Punk also brought in frontman Pharrell Williams,

drummer Omar Hakim and bassist Nathan East.

The collaboration would result in a track that would become one of the biggest hits of summer 2013.

We recorded a bunch of tracks in Los Angeles

and Get Lucky was one of those tracks.

It went back to Nile and I had a listen to it with the new guitar part

and it was a different song.

I mean, Nile just took the song to another level.

# Like the legend of the Phoenix... #

He just put the signature funk thing that nobody else does but him

and for me I was just really thinking a lot about what, you know,

what that would be if it was a Chic record.

# ..The force from the beginning... #

People who didn't know who Daft Punk was thought that Pharrell and I were Daft Punk

and that the robots were props in our cool little video.

# ..all night to the sun

# I'm up all night to get some... #

So a lot times people would call me Daft Punk

or am I Punk or am I Daft?

We were shocked with that whole Get Lucky thing.

It changed that anonymous part of my life

while retaining their complete anonymity.

I wound up getting my first Grammy

because of Daft Punk.

Get Lucky would go on to sell nearly ten million copies worldwide,

helping thrust Nile back into the limelight.

Chic, meanwhile, had been building their reputation as a great live band,

their heavy touring schedule taking them to the Glastonbury Festival

at a time when Get Lucky was at the height of its success.

From the time when we were booked, to the time when we played,

Random Access Memories comes out, and Get Lucky becomes a huge record.

35,000 was the capacity, supposedly, of that particular stage.

But we had 55,000

so there was people as far as the eye could see.

It was one of the biggest crowds of the weekend.

It was just incredible.

I remember people like texting

kind of like their friends who were in other parts of the site,

saying, like, you've got to get over here.

And people were moving from all corners of the site,

it was just such an amazing moment.

# Good times

# These are the good times

# Leave your cares behind... #

It was a real mixed crowd and I think people that wouldn't necessarily normally

go to a Chic show suddenly had discovered it

and been, like, this is just incredible, so a really young crowd

as well as the older fans.

# Chic, Chic

# Chic, Chic

# Chic, Chic... #

The way we ended our show was we have all these people come up on stage and they dance with us and they party.

# Good times. #

And the very first time in my life,

people were chanting, "Nile, Nile, Nile!"

AUDIENCE: Nile! Nile! Nile!

I was trying to hold back the tears cos I was overwhelmed.

What does that do to a composer who's anonymous?

Now all of a sudden there's 55,000 people

that are confirming we like your compositions

and we're going to let you know by just chanting your name.

It was like going, "Ludwig, Ludwig!",

and like, Beethoven's going, "All right!"

As a result of the hits with Daft Punk and Chic's success as a live band,

Nile's career has been reignited, and in 2015

he is releasing the first new Chic material for 23 years.

The album takes inspiration

from the music that gave him his big break in the '70s.

It was important for me to, to pay tribute

to the music that gave me my start,

but I didn't sort of look at it as a retro thing in a way.

You know, disco was not just something that was part of a fad that went away.

It's part of my life, it was the music that changed my life.

# When a single DJ dropped the needle on our vinyl

# Everybody dance... #

The starting point for the new album was the discover of some early Chic

and Sister Sledge tapes that Nile believed were lost.

The reason why I didn't make it just an album of these found tapes

is because time has become very important to me.

You get terminal disease, cancer, the time that they diagnosed me

it wasn't looking very good.

The outcome was fairly grim

and, thank God, I did well, I recovered well,

but all of a sudden time takes on a new dimension.

And I realised that most of the people on the lost tapes

have passed away. Luther Vandross, Tony Thompson, Bernard Edwards,

Raymond Jones.

-# And if you come along

-I'll be there there... #

You know, Bernard has been dead almost 20 years now

but I've been making music ever since.

So, I wanted the album to be a true reflection of

what Chic would be if Bernard were still alive.

'Music evolves, it's just a natural process,

'and that's what that's about.

'Paying homage and tribute to the music that changed my life

'and also evolving and liking modern music.'

# ..it's a nice place to visit... #

Chic's new material, his work with Daft Punk,

and Nile's passion for playing live have introduced him to brand-new audiences,

audiences that are now meeting the Hitmaker, the man behind nearly 40 years of hit music.

One, two, ahhh...

# Freak out!

# Le freak, c'est chic

# Freak out!

Come on

# Ahhh, freak out!

# C'est chic

# Freak out! #

I think Nile's musical legacy is that he made very, very successful pop music

that had some class in it,

songs and records you'd have to be made of stone to not react to.

You can talk to people who are knowledgeable about music

and you'll say Nile Rodgers and you'll be shocked they don't know who you're talking about

and then you mention Upside Down and We Are Family and so on, and, "What? He did all of that?"

He never had his own name in lights particularly because he was always behind other names like Chic

or Diana Ross or Sister Sledge.

When you get all that music together, and say, "I know this guy!"

I think people have been looking at the body of work

that he's produced and gone, "Wow!"

# All that pressure

# Got you down

# Has your head

# Spinning all around

# Just come on down

# To the 54

# Find a spot Come on

# Ahhh, freak out!

# Le freak, c'est chic

# Freak out

Everybody, one time, come on!

# Ahhh, freak out! #

Thank you.