Lost in music

Nile Rodgers has had a long and extraordinary career. Ed Power talks drugs, disco and Madonna with the Chic frontman ahead of his Irish gigs

NILE Rodgers should be dead. “There’s a picture of the Chic organisation in the early days and if you look at all the people in it I was the one most likely not to make it,” says the producer, arranger, songwriter and band leader. “And you know what the strange thing is? I’m the only one still alive. Isn’t that amazing?”

This, he will tell you, is mostly down to good luck. Through the ’80s and early ’90s, when he was minting hits for Madonna, David Bowie, Duran Duran and others, Rodgers’ recreational drug use was ferocious.

At a Beverly Hills party in 1994 he collapsed in front of Mickey Rourke, blood streaming from his nostrils. Over the next five hours his heart stopped eight times. Doctors had filled out his death certificate by the time he regained consciousness.

“It was only when I came around that they told me, ‘technically you were dead eight times’. I was like, ‘oh…”

Rodgers isn’t your everyday drug casualty. He bubbles with joie de vivre. He doesn’t, you suspect, have a self-destructive fibre in his being. The singer blames his over-indulgence on his parents, hippies who openly took heroin in front of him as a child. Rodgers grew up thinking of drugs as something regular people used, just to get through the day.

“I was raised by beatniks. Both of them heroin addicts. I came up as a hippy. I dropped acid with [LSD guru] Timothy Leary at 15. I didn’t know who the hell he was. I didn’t even know what the hell acid was.”

Being around drugs made him fearless, dangerously so. “My parents took heroin. I figured if they didn’t die, I wasn’t going to die. Part of the hippy culture was that you were always experimenting with new drugs. I started taking everything I could get my hands on. It went on and on.”

His substance abuse never got in the way of his ability to pen a knock-out tune. Emerging in the dog days of disco, Chic were one of the most influential pop groups of all time.

With irresistibly funky hits such as Le Freak and Good Times, they showed that mainstream music could be both sonically adventurous and shamelessly catchy.

For Rodgers it was merely the beginning. Behind the scenes, he masterminded the rise of Sister Sledge, penning smashes such as Lost In Music and He’s The Greatest Dancer.

“Chic was only part of what I was about,” he says. “One of the most successful records of my life was with Sister Sledge. We Are Family was the third LP I did, and it was the perfect album.”

He was for a time also the biggest name in music production. Rodgers collaborated with Diana Ross on I’m Coming Out, and Madonna on Like A Virgin, and then hooked up with David Bowie for Let’s Dance. After that there were records with INXS, Cyndi Lauper, Peter Gabriel and others. Just last month he finished a session with enigmatic Parisian electronic duo Daft Punk.

Music aside, Rodgers’ greatest talent, arguably, is his ability to get on with people. In his 40 years in music he’s never had a bad falling out with anyone. To this day he remains close to Bowie and Madonna. During our interview he receives a call from Johnny Marr from The Smiths, who christened his son Nile in Rodgers’ honour.

“I adore Madonna, I really do,” he says of perhaps his most famous collaborator. “We had the best relationship. And it was a little tricky for her because, after we’d done Like A Virgin, she wanted me to tour with her as her band leader. The thing is, that album earned more money for me than I’d ever made off anything in my life. I’m talking millions and millions. And now she wanted me to go on the road as her band leader? But why would I do that when she couldn’t possibly pay me what I’d just made off Like A Virgin?

“She would always ring me up on tour. ‘Nile… you’ve got to come out here and help me. I’m in Egypt…’.

Though they remain on good terms, he has strong thoughts about Madonna’s current musical direction.

Playing in Dublin on Tuesday, she re-imagined Like A Virgin as an artsy dirge. This, says Rodgers, goes against the spirit of what he and Madge were trying to achieve in the ’80s.

“Personally I think getting arty with super pop songs is not the coolest thing in the world,” he says. “Is that really what a person wants to see? We play Like A Virgin in our set now sometimes, in the original style. And let me tell you, people go crazy for it. What’s funny is that all these years later she isn’t the one delivering it the way people remember. It’s me. We also do Let’s Dance. And you can see people’s reaction, ‘Oooh…so he did that song TOO!’.”

Chic have been in semi-retirement since Rodgers’ musical partner Bernard Edwards passed away after collapsing on stage 17 years ago. Several times a year, the producer dusts the project down and takes it on the road. Spending most of his time in the studio, the opportunity to bring his music to the public is too tempting to resist, he says. He wouldn’t give it up for anything.

“If you ask any musician, they’ll tell you that they always want to do the thing they aren’t doing at that moment. Whatever you aren’t working on — that’s what you love the best. I’ve just written a memoir that took four years. I’m writing some Broadway musicals and have a couple of film projects on the go. All of that stuff is semi-solitary. I’m living in seclusion and, eventually, I have the itch. I get the bug and I want to go out there and bring the music to people. Chic allows me do that.”

* Chic play Button Factory, Dublin, Thursday, Aug 2 and Liss Ard festival, which runs in Skibbereen, Co Cork on Aug 4, 5.