W INTERVIEW
L
Brian and Simon with Nile
NILE RODGERS, THE HITMAKER
ON GETTING ‘LOST IN MUSIC’.
Grammy Award winning producer, guitarist, arranger and
composer Nile Rodgers is in the North West this month with a
gig at Manchester Arena. Earlier this year he was appointed as the
Chief Creative Advisor at none other than Abbey Road Studios
which will now be his creative base in the UK.
The three time Grammy award winner and 'Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame' inductee has written, produced, and performed on records that
have cumulatively sold more than 500 million albums and 75 million
singles worldwide. As well as being the co-founder of Chic, he has
written and produced hits for some of the world’s greatest artists such
as David Bowie (Let's dance), Madonna (the Like A Virgin album),
Diana Ross, (Upside Down/I'm Coming Out) INXS (Original Sin) and
Duran Duran (The Reflex/Notorious) Daft Punk (Get Lucky).
Our friends, the writers Simon Barber and Brian O'Connor sat down
with Nile at Abbey Road Studios to get some insights from the Chic
maestro about his life, love of music and talk about how he works
his magic…
The main challenge for you, given this great appointment at
Abbey Road and becoming the Chairman of the Songwriters’
Hall of Fame must be just getting the time to lose yourself in the
writing process?
Yeah, the fortunate thing for me is that I don’t sleep much!
You’ve also been through a lot of big changes and upheavals in
your life since this decade started, does that mean you have to wait
until you're feeling inspired to write, or can you just kind of make
progress, no matter how you're feeling?
Yeah, I can write all the time, I just don’t confuse writing with good
writing, [laughter], it’s just writing, it could stink, but it’s writing,
nonetheless.
We were completely captivated by your creative partnership with
Bernard Edwards and fascinated by this concept of the Chic
organisation. That must have been kind of a great framework for
writing songs?
It was fantastic, not only for writing songs but also for the way that
we carried ourselves, the way we treated people and the way that we
acted. Throughout our entire history, I mean, we've been doing this
for more than 40 years, since the beginning of the whole disco scene
and you’ve never heard of a Chic scandal. That’s because we treat
people with kindness, you know, we’re always cool with somebody.
Every now and then, especially right now, there's so much stuff going
on in America with the Me Too movement. We just lived in a time
where the people that I hung out with were just cool and the people
in the Chic organisation were really just exceptionally nice people
and if you follow their careers as individuals you’ll see them after
they go on from Chic, like Luther Vandross, I mean, unfortunately so
many of them have passed away, but they all did great things. Bernard
Edwards wound up doing great things with the Power Station and
Duran Duran. Only one person has ever gotten a number one record
from the James Bond franchise, that’s Bernard Edwards and Duran
Duran with A View to a Kill, not Goldfinger, [laughter], not Live and
Let Die, none of those records, they only went to number two, only
Duran Duran and Bernard Edwards went to number one.
We've heard you talk about how your ideas were typically quite
complex and Bernard was like a master of distilling them down
into strong hooks, so you'd have, like, multiple songs in one idea?
Oh yeah. He was famous for saying things like, ‘yeah, brother, I really
love that, but you’ve got three or four songs in there, my man.’ And I
would say, ‘Oh, what do you mean?’ and he’d go on to explain ‘Well,
this could be a song, that could be a song.’ A really great example of
that in the modern world is Daft Punk, Get Lucky. Get Lucky was
the beginning of another song and it became its own song.
Your rhythm guitar player or the chucking, as it’s known, I
suppose it’s considered your kind of signature, but it seems to
us that it’s your knowledge of sort of chord inversions that really
helped kind of define that classic Chic sound?
Yes, Bernard actually taught it to me. When I first started playing, it
was really mainly about soloing. I became popular because I could
play pretty fast and it was the fusion era, so John McLoughlin and
people like that had come up. On all my early recordings, you know,
before Chic, people would call me to play either classical guitar, you
know, which I could really play that fast, or to play on jazz records,
where I'm playing some really fast kind of licks that are going with
the big band or what have you. I've always loved the way my Strat,
the way my Hitmaker sounds when I put it in the out of the phase
position and just lightly touch it.
wirrallife.com 31