Nile Rodgers is making his own luck with Daft Punk and Chic

DISCO mastermind and guitar legend Nile Rodgers has garnered a new generation of fans.

Nile Rodgers of Chic

WORKING with pop stars who like to remain anonymous has its benefits; Nile Rodgers knows that. In the video clip for this year's ubiquitous hit Get Lucky, the 60-year-old American guitarist, songwriter and producer takes centre stage with guest singer Pharrell Williams.

 In the background the members of French duo Daft Punk form the rhythm section, dressed as what could be described as cabaret robots, their faces hidden by space-age helmets.

Those few minutes of footage - not to mention his hypnotic Get Lucky guitar parts - have introduced Rodgers to a generation of fans who may not have known he is one of the masterminds of 1970s disco, co-founder of the band Chic and producer of hits for an eclectic bunch of artists ranging from Madonna and Diana Ross to David Bowie and INXS.

"I guess they were wondering 'who's the dude with the dreadlocks playing guitar?'," says Rodgers, who co-wrote, played on and produced Get Lucky as well as Lose Yourself to Dance and Give Life Back to Music - from Daft Punk's latest album, Random Access Memories.

It's an acknowledgement of Rodgers's credentials as a disco pioneer that Daft Punk, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, asked him to work on their album, keen as they were to give their electro-pop a disco makeover.

The album's success in turn has been a fillip to Rodgers's and Chic's 21st-century renaissance, one that continues in Australia in December when they arrive here to tour, armed with a swag of 70s dance-floor favourites that includes Dance, Dance, Dance, Good Times and the classic Le Freak from the Chic catalogue, and more from Rodgers's prestigious production career. It also does no harm to his reputation as a musician that Rodgers has never had a hit record on which he did not play.

He's grateful that his Daft Punk experience has boosted his profile and connected him with a younger audience, although Rodgers describes the DP factor as just part of a convergence that connects his past, present and future.

Last month saw the release also of Nile Rodgers Presents the Chic Organisation: Up All Night, a double album that contains the cream of his disco-era hits alongside others he created for Carly Simon (Why), Debbie Harry (Backfired), Diana Ross (I'm Coming Out, Upside Down) and Johnny Mathis (I Love My Lady).

"The Daft Punk fans started to focus on me and then Daft Punk started to say how important Chic was to their record," he explains. "Now I release Up All Night and it connects the dots. People say: 'Oh, I didn't realise he did Diana Ross and Sister Sledge and so on.' "

In 1979, Sister Sledge's We are Family, written and produced by Rodgers and his Chic partner Bernard Edwards, provided the songwriting team with one of their biggest and most enduring successes. Rodgers's curriculum vitae stretches across hundreds of recordings spanning five decades, many of them not in the dance music sphere. Mick Jagger, Peter Gabriel, Duran Duran and David Lee Roth have benefited from Rodgers's studio wizardry, while just in the past few months he has been working with Swedish DJ/producer Avicii and British electronic duo Chase & Status.

In the past few years Rodgers has stepped up Chic's touring commitments, which brought them to Australia early last year and took them to England's celebrated Glastonbury Festival a few months ago. He likes to be busy, although he's never sure about how he should be spending his time.

"The way it works for me is that I always want to do what I'm currently not doing," he says. "When I'm on the stage all I want to do is be in the studio. We've been touring recently more than we have done in our entire careers, so I've been in the studio for the past few days, and I'm in heaven."

Rodgers, clearly on a roll, isn't ready to meet his Maker, but he has had a few scares along the way, notably in the 90s when he took a tumble into drugs and alcohol addiction that threatened to end more than his career, as he explains in his 2011 autobiography, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny.

In 2010 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. During his Australian tour last year, he had to be rushed to the emergency unit of a Melbourne hospital to receive treatment for what he tweeted as being "cancer aftermath bullshit". He was able to leave hospital a few hours later to attend a book signing and says he is in the peak of health now. The illness did make him rethink his career strategy, however.

"Right about the time I was diagnosed with cancer I said to myself: 'Since I don't know how long I've got, I'm going to do as much as I possibly can.' I went on the tear doing all these shows. Once that started we got this great reputation as being some wonderful party band."

LIFE hasn't always been a party for Rodgers. His mother gave birth to him when she was 13. Like her, his biological father and the stepfather he had from an early age were drug addicts. As a young teenager he spent time in hospital and a convalescent home being treated for asthma, in between moving house on a regular basis to different parts of New York and also for a period to Los Angeles. He ran away from his troubled home environment in New York when he was 15, taking with him the guitar he had learned to play, and taking refuge in a hippie commune. He stayed with his mother only occasionally from then on.

Rodgers spent the following few years developing his guitar skills and got his first break as a session player in New York's Sesame Street touring band.

From there his reputation as a gun player spread and he became part of the house band at the famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem, backing some of the 60s' biggest black artists, including Aretha Franklin and Ben E. King.

In 1970, he met Edwards, a bass player, and together they formed the band New York City. The group's only hit, I'm Doing Fine Now, opened doors for the two musicians, but when their second album flopped the band dissolved. The two musos, joined by drummer Tony Thompson, formed Chic in 1977.

Somewhat surprisingly, Rodgers says Chic was inspired by soul and R&B but image-wise also by exposure to English art-rock band Roxy Music. "If there had been no Roxy Music there would have been no Chic," he says. "They were wearing different, stylish couture clothes and not the typical rock star thing. When we saw them we said, 'Let's do the black version of that.' "

The Chic Organisation soon became a hit factory, with Good Times, Everybody Dance, Dance Dance Dance, I Want Your Love, Le Freak and My Forbidden Lover all making the charts.

The secret to writing a hit song, Rodgers believes, is honesty. All his material has some basis in truth. Le Freak, for example, was originally called F . . k Off, and was written about the band being refused entry to New York's trendy Studio 54 nightclub.

"Every song I've ever written in my whole life ... they're all nonfiction," he says. "They are all based on real stuff. Absolutely there are many, many fictional elements, but usually the ideas come from something very real. That's why, if you look at the body of work, no two songs sound the same. Upside Down doesn't sound like Let's Dance or He's the Greatest Dancer. It's because all of these songs come from real life. The song I'm Coming Out comes from me being in a bathroom full of transvestites who were Diana Ross impersonators. That ... was a great thing because I would never have thought of that idea had that real-life situation not happened."

As the 70s ended and disco faded from the musical zeitgeist, Rodgers turned his attention to writing and producing for other artists. He and Edwards wrote and produced Diana Ross's album Diana (1980), a project he says was one of the hardest of his career.

Litigation ensued between the producers and Ross's label, Motown, when the album was remixed and Ross's vocals re-recorded without Rodgers and Edwards's knowledge.

"I thought that, working with her, we would be embraced by [Motown boss] Berry Gordy, the head of a black record label that finally understood us," he says. "Instead it turned into a legal battle just to get the record out. At the time it was avant-garde and it sounded like a complete flop to them. They were put off because it didn't sound like anything else."

The producers lost a suit claiming they were owed money for the original recordings.

Following that album, Rodgers arrived at a previously unknown aspect of his career - failure. Suddenly he wasn't having hits.

What saved him was Bowie, who asked him to produce his album Let's Dance (1983).

It's his proudest moment as a producer, he says. "Not because it is the best record I ever made - it's not - but because prior to that I'd had six failures in a row. Prior to those six failures every record was a hit. Then after the Disco Sucks movement in America my whole career was derailed and every record was a flop. I wouldn't even put the word 'dance' in the title of a song, I was so scarred by the whole disco thing. Then Bowie calls the album Let's Dance and I think, 'Oh my god, I have to make another dance record.' "

Even through that lean spell, Rodgers wasn't discouraged from pursuing his ambitions or tempted to give up. He says the failures "are what makes life exciting".

"I'm happy that things happened the way they did. I'm happy that I was forced to fight again."

He won the fight with some style, going on to produce hits throughout the 80s for INXS (Original Sin), Madonna (Like a Virgin) and Duran Duran (The Reflex, The Wild Boys), among many others.

The past 20 years have seen Rodgers concentrate largely on producing and writing, either for other artists or for film and game soundtracks.

Sadly his original collaborators in Chic, Edwards and Thompson, died in 1996 and 2003 respectively. He's keen, however, to preserve the band's legacy by taking it out on the road.

And he's happy that some of the limelight he's enjoying now comes from those impressive, funky guitar chops on the Daft Punk singles. It's a technique he makes look easy.

"When you're making a record, especially a live record, you really want to stay in the pocket ... stay in the groove and get it right," he says. "The great thing about the Daft Punk records is that it's live musicians, which is pretty much what I do in Chic."

And such is his passion for guitar that he would like the luxury of playing it every day.

"If I had the kind of life where I had the time to play guitar every day, I would probably be the happiest person in the world," he says, " ... and I'm pretty damned happy now."

Nile Rodgers and Chic's Australian tour begins at Barrington Tops in NSW on December 6 and travels to Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Meredith (Music Festival), Victoria, and Brisbane.