Nile Rodgers talking Chic, Bowie, Madonna, and the roots of disco

11th November 2011 was one of the happiest nights of my life. I was in a theatre in Hulme, Manchester, sitting just a few feet from Nile Rodgers, co-founder of Chic, producer, hit-maker. The following night he was headlining the Warehouse Project, but on the Friday, he was with me and the two hundred lucky people in the audience, talking about his extraordinary childhood, his hits, his music. In an incredibly open-hearted and engaging way.

Just as with the archive interviews with the likes of Sonic Youth, Jamie Reid, and Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens, this archive interview is for PAID subscribers only, so for other readers a paywall comes down near the beginning.

80% of the content on my Substack is free; I feel bad not giving it all away free, but I do think my writing has value and I need to be looking for ways to make the whole project financially viable.

So here we go; I hope you enjoy the chat. But first an intro…

Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were the co-founders of Chic, one of the most successful acts of the 1970s. They were also the writers and producers behind hits by the likes of Sister Sledge, Sheila and B. Devotion, Diana Ross, and others. Around the time Chic broke up in 1983, Nile had become an established producer, working in that era with the likes of David Bowie on his Let’s Dance album, with Duran Duran, and with Madonna (Nile produced her Like a Virgin album).

Rodgers and Edwards reformed Chic in 1992 but, in 1996, Bernard Edwards died (a few hours after performing a show in Tokyo. Although Nile continued to work in the studio, producing albums and film soundtracks, his profile dropped a little in the 1990s, In recent years he’s been very much back in the public eye, with Chic in high demand for tours and festivals. This renewed recognition owed something to a new appreciation of 1970s disco music in our current era, and also owed something to the quality of his new work, especially his collaborations.

A year after this interview, Nile announced that he was working with Daft Punk; he co-wrote and played guitar on several tracks, including ‘Lose Yourself to Dance’, and ‘Get Lucky’. The latter was one of the biggest hits of the year – in the UK alone, it sold over 1.3m copies.

But going way back, the life Nile led up to the release of his first records was extraordinary; he discusses this in depth in his autobiography - Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny - and in the interview. We also discuss the beginnings of Chic, the evolution of disco, and the death of Bernard Edwards. Nile also talks about his cancer diagnosis, which came in October 2010. By the time of the interview, November 2011, he was optimistic but wary. He is currently cancer-free.

When I met with Nile he wasn’t yet riding the wave of rediscovery, but his autobiography was well received and served to remind people of his distinguished career. There are insights galore. I loved reading about his first encounters with David Bowie. In 1982, after Bowie had asked Nile to produce what would become the Let’s Dance album, Bowie took out a photo and said “Nile, this is what I want my album to sound like,” and showed Nile a picture of Little Richard in a red suit getting into a red Cadillac convertible.

Having been asked by his publishing company to set up and host an onstage interview to mark publication of the book, I chose to do the event in the theatre at Z-Arts, Stretford Rd, in Hulme, Manchester. I provided refreshments in the dressing room; Nile requested some sushi and some bottles of Perrier.

Nile was so very warm and engaging. I’m exasperated that our culture pushes the notion that to be successful, to be top of the tree, it’s necessary to push down rivals, be a rude and/or ruthless operator, and to leave your humanity behind; ideas propagated in TV shows like The Apprentice. Nile is probably the most commercially successful musician I’ve ever met but that night – and on other every other occasion when I’ve been in his presence – he treated everyone with such courtesy and friendliness.

We talk a little about his biological father, Nile Rodgers Snr, and his mother’s husband Bobby Glanzrock (they married when Nile was seven), and a lot about Nile’s mother, Beverly Goodman. Sadly, she died nine years after this interview, in December 2020.

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Thank you for being here Nile. I want to say how much I enjoyed the book, and learned so much about you. First, off I had no idea about your childhood – just how young your mother was when you were born, and that your mother and Bobby were heroin addicts; you’d only just started school and you’re already used to picking your way across the cigarette-fogged living room stepping over comatose junkies - it’s such a vivid, troubling, picture of your upbringing.

You know, as difficult as it was, the worst thing about my childhood was just the feeling of being lonely. As you explained very well, my parents were both junkies. All the adults around me were heroin addicts, but I didn’t find that peculiar because that’s all I knew. My parents were great, really loving, super intellectual, very stylish - my mom and Bobby were killer dressers - and music and culture, theatre, and literature were around me all the time.

I was born very sickly. After being in an oxygen tank over and over again I was sent off to an institution; what they called a convalescent home, where they specialized in respiratory diseases. In those days, tuberculosis and things like that were a really big deal. And they shuttled me off to this place. And the great thing about it was that they had an early childhood development programme; it was that old-fashioned setting where kids who were as young as me - I was five and a half - and kids as old as fifteen or sixteen, were in the same room. And me being the inquisitive kid that I was, after I learned my lesson, instead of sitting on my hands or playing with blocks or something, I was mesmerized with what the older kids were learning. On account of this, when I moved into a proper school, I was ahead, I had learned to read at an eighth-grade level. The first day I checked in the proper school - it was a Catholic school - the nuns were amazed I could read so well; they actually told my mother that I was touched by the hand of God. My mom’s denial of that was incredible, she was an atheist. She was like, “What are you talking about?”.

She was fifteen when you were born…

Yes, she gave me up for adoption, but as soon as I was born, what happened is her maternal instinct got better of her, and she went to retrieve me after a few months. In those days, parents had powerful custodial rights, and even though the state would have probably wanted me to stay with my foster mother, my mom convinced them to give me back. She had to drop out of school. My mom was too young to go to school with a little baby, so she dropped out of school and got a job.

Your mom and Bobby had something of an open relationship, shall we say?

Oh, yeah, that’s true.

She had multiple boyfriends and a lot of junkies coming in and out of the house.

Absolutely.

At one point she was declared emotionally unfit to look after you.

Yeah, it’s before they understood something that we now call postpartum depression. But my mom used to contemplate killing my little brother. My brother and I are six years apart and when my brother was born she used to do this ritual every day; she would prepare a lunch for me – sandwiches, in a brown paper bag - and take a big butcher’s knife and stand up in the middle of the table and would tell me that she was gonna kill my brother. She went to bash his head in because he wouldn’t stop crying. It didn’t take very long before the psychiatrist that she was seeing on a daily basis, convinced her that she wasn’t fit for motherhood and I was sent off to California to be looked after by my family.

I just felt that my mom didn’t like me. And I thought that because I was always being left at different hospitals, different institutions, different peoples’ houses because, you know, they were having financial problems. I just thought that my mom hated the way I looked because they’re also beautiful. (pause) Which is an entirely different subject. But I just felt alone and unworthy. My entire life has been in pursuit of my mom’s love.

You became rich - rich enough to kind of buy her a house and a car and so on - but did that ease her troubled soul, seeing you grow up and your success and also having that kind of material wealth which obviously she didn’t have in those early days.

Well, first of all, my mom certainly doesn’t see herself as a troubled soul. My mom is probably the most fun-loving, happy-go-lucky person you ever want to meet. My mom is beautiful. She’s at 70 something years old, she’s drop dead gorgeous, and she still thinks of herself as this hot babe, and she is! You see our family was dysfunctional, but they thought they were just fine. They had a flair, and my mom still has flair.

So, as sad as it may look from the outside looking in, I actually had a pretty good time. I was just lonely; that’s the problem. As my parents became more and more self-centred, because when you become a daily heroin user - especially back in those days - and you run out of money, the pursuit of the drug is just as important as actually getting high. The getting high is the end of the process, it’s tracking it down. When I