Welcome back my friends to the flamboyance that never ends, as Fabulously Flamboyant Friday sashays up to the crease to deliver yet another light-loafered, lubed-up googly from the gasworks-end of musical magnificence.
This week’s missive finds me slaving away in the south of France. I’m currently in Cannes for the annual Festival of Fun and Frippery that’s actually called the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. It’s a 5-day shindig, held annually, usually in mid-June, that styles itself as the world’s premier event for advertising, marketing and creative industries.
Established in 1954, the festival initially focused on advertising, but has since expanded to cover pretty much all facets of creative communications, which of course pulls in all the big tech companies. Many of these big organisations like to erect custom installs on the beach at Cannes. These locations act as conferencing and networking venues by day and party venues at night; and that’s why I’m here: we install the AV (audio & visual) equipment that allows the communicators to communicate and the party-goers to party.
Some of these evening events can feature some pretty decent guest artists, so it’s always worth keeping your eyes peeled as you wander along the seafront in case there are any worthwhile performances to enjoy. And such was the case one evening last week as I was a-wandering along the Croisette on my way to Morrison’s Irish Bar for a pint of Guinness or three, or four…
Blimey! I thought – that there racket don’t ‘alf sound like Chic. On closer inspection, up on stage was none other than the legendary Nile Rodgers Jr. – the musician, songwriter and record producer who has written, produced, and performed on records that have sold well over 850 million copies worldwide. Yup, you read that right – over 850 records worldwide. It was billed as Nile Rodgers & Chic, but it was almost certainly Nile Rodgers and whoever he decides to hire for his backing band.
So I blagged my way in, grabbed a beer and settled in to watch the great man strut his funky stuff – and, oh boy, did he deliver, with what turned out to be an absolute cracker of a set that spanned most of his formidable career.
You see, Nile Rodgers is a genuine musical legend. He first rose to fame with his ’70s band, Chic, a funk, soul and disco outfit he formed with the legendary bass maestro, Bernard Edwards. The pair met in the early ’70 as both were battle-hardened New York session pros. Rodgers was actually working as a musician on the Muppet Show tour when our dynamic duo first took the plunge and formed their first band together. They named their band The Boys and then The Big Apple Band and finally, Chic as another outfit was already using the Big Apple name.
Rodgers and Edwards were apparently inspired by seeing Roxy Music play live and decided they needed to add some European style to the ideas they’d been developing and kicking around for some time; and by 1977 they had their first run of tracks in the can and released their self-titled debut album, Chic. The album charted, quickly earned gold certification and their first two singles (Everybody Dance and Dance, Dance, Dance) landed them with Top Ten hits on both sides of the Atlantic.
They followed up on the success of their debut album in late 1978 with the release of their sophomore album C’est Chic. There would be not the slightest hint of second album syndrome here. C’est Chic was an absolute cracker, containing the classic disco track, Le Freak. The track apparently emerged from a jam session after the band had failed to meet with Grace Jones at New York’s legendary (and very exclusive) Studio 54 nightclub. The original refrain for the song was a rather rude “**** off”, aimed firmly at the apparently truculent doormen at Studio 54. Wisely, the original lyric was replaced by “freak out” for the recorded version and the resultant single was an absolute whopper: a No. 1 in the US and a monster hit around the world. It sold more than six million copies in the U.S. alone, became Atlantic Records’ best-selling single of all time (until Madonna’s “Vogue” nabbed that title in 1990) and was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Not bad for a grumpy late night jam. Not bad at all.
To be fair, the critical reaction to this second album wasn’t great. The Los Angeles Times, for example, described it as little more than a collection of pedestrian disco pieces and plodding ballads. The punters, however, paid little attention to the critics and bought the album and singles by the truckload. The album was certified platinum and the single Le Freak topped charts around the world.
The band’s third album, Risqué, was another huge success and the lead single, Good Times, became one of the most influential songs of the era. By the early ’80s, sampling was starting to take hold and Good Times became the basis of Grandmaster Flash’s Adventures on the Wheels of Steel and The Sugarhill Gang’s breakthrough single Rapper’s Delight. It has since been sampled by countless dance and hip hop acts, as well as allegedly providing the inspiration for Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust, Blondie’s Rapture and Daft Punk’s Around the World.
The huge success of Edwards and Rodgers ensured they were in high demand as songwriters and producers and they produced a stack of highly influential disco and R&B albums and singles for a range of artists including Sister Sledge (We Are Family), Sheila and B. Devotion (Spacer), Diana Ross (Diana, Upside Down, I’m Coming Out, My Old Piano), Carly Simon (Why), Debbie Harry (KooKoo).
However, by the late ’70s, all was not well in the wild and whacky world of disco. We’ve already examined the Disco Sucks campaign of the late ’70s in some detail during a previous #FF missive (Why Are You Gae? – and I trust you were taking notes?) so we won’t dwell too much on the matter here. However, in short, disco’s tipping point probably came in 1977, with the release of Saturday Night Fever and its staggeringly successful soundtrack album of the same name.
The Bee Gees’ enjoyed a seemingly endless run of monster hit singles from that album and it felt like they were played everywhere, all the time. There was simply no escape from the high-pitched howl of the brothers Gibb, and familiarity, as we all know, can very quickly breed contempt. Nightclubs were filled with polyester-suited Travolta wannabes, and comedy singles like (the frankly terrible) Disco Duck climbed the charts.
Inevitably, disco began to be openly mocked and satirised – even the hugely successful Airplane movie series had a pop. Comedians ridiculed Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees in equal measure, and the cheesy aroma of naff began to fill the air. Then, in 1978, enter Steve Dahl – a rock radio DJ who lost his job when the station at which he worked switched to an all-disco format. Mr, Dahl was mad as hell and wasn’t gonna take it any more. He moved to another station and began plotting the now infamous Disco Sucks campaign.
To raise the profile of his newly-minted campaign, Dahl came up with a cunning plan: Disco Demolition Night. The plan was simple enough: gather a load of disco records, put ’em in a crate, blow ’em up and create lots of lovely publicity for both his radio station and his campaign. He decided to pull this stunt at a suitably high profile time and location: half way through proceedings at a top-notch, televised, Chicago White Sox baseball game – what could possibly go wrong?
On paper it probably sounded like a cunning stunt with larks-a-plenty. Nothing more than a fun radio promotion with a few pyrotechnic bells and whistles. However, come the day, the Law of Sod was invoked and things soon started to go horribly wrong. TV viewers were not treated to a splendid sporting event with an entertainingly harmless half-time publicity stunt – they were instead treated to a televised riot.
50,000 punters turned up. They screamed and jeered and chanted, they threw records like frisbees and lobbed firecrackers and glass bottles onto the playing field. By the time the crate of records was actually blown up, the crowd had gone ape – climbing over the hoardings, storming the field and rendering it entirely unplayable. As a result, the White Sox were eventually forced to call a halt to proceedings and forfeit the game.
Nevertheless, despite the carnage and the opprobrium that inevitably followed, the stunt was a massive success and produced significant results. Other anti-disco protests soon followed and the music industry’s reaction was swift: radio stations revised their playlists and began moving toward non-disco formats. By the end of the ’70s, most stars and artists in the disco genre were ruefully discovering their live gigs and TV appearances were really starting to dry up and their record sales were slumping badly.
As a result, disco outfits such as Chic struggled to maintain airplay and generate significant sales. Rodgers and Edwards noted the shift, temporarily disbanded Chic and focused their efforts on producing records for a variety of artists. And to say they made a good fist of it is something of an underestimation. Diana Ross ended up selling over ten million albums with Rodgers and Edwards at the helm. Rodgers co-produced David Bowie’s 1983 monster hit album, Let’s Dance, and also played a big part in the huge success of Madonna’s Like a Virgin album. Rodgers also worked with Duran Duran, Sheena Easton, Jeff Beck, Thompson Twins, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Earth Wind and Fire, Philip Bailey, Steve Winwood, Cyndi Lauper, and played with Robert Plant’s The Honeydrippers (an outfit I really wish Plant had done more with). He also co-produced (with Don Was) one of my favourite albums of the ’80s, Cosmic Thing by the B52s.
However, by 1989, Chic had began to attain legendary status, their old albums were as popular as ever, they had influenced a whole new generation of artists and their singles were now stone-cold classics and instant dance-floor fillers. As a result, Rodgers and Edwards decided the time was right and set about getting the band back together. They recorded a new single, Chic Mystique, and a new album, Chic-ism, both of which charted and did very well; but best of all they returned to playing live, all over the world, to great audience and critical acclaim and delivered some blisteringly good shows – a couple of which I am very happy to say I was fortunate enough to attend.
1996 was a tumultuous year for Nile Rodgers. He was named as the Top Record Producer in the World by Billboard Magazine, but sadly his long-time friend and musical partner Bernard Edwards died of pneumonia at the age just 43. Edwards final performance was recorded and released as Live at the Budokan (1999). As a fitting tribute to his old partner, Rodgers released the album in an entirely unedited form, with the bass maestro’s wonderful playing front and centre.
Rodgers continues to perform to audiences worldwide as Nile Rodgers & Chic and the band have been nominated for inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame an astonishing 11 times without actually being inducted. Nile Rodgers has been inducted for Musical Excellence, but Chic have not yet made the grade. Rodgers is still an in-demand and highly successful studio producer and his 2011 autobiography (Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny) is an absolute corker and one that I am happy to commend to the house.
Anyway, live, on stage, even at 72, I am happy to confirm that Rodgers can still rip it up with the best of ’em. As he wrapped up his tremendous set in Cannes, he left his audience howling and baying for more. I, however, had begun to notice the local mosquitoes were making merry and feasting furiously upon my flesh. So I downed my beer, high-tailed it to the nearest kebab house, stocked up with some deeply unhealthy but deeply delicious greasy comestibles and headed for my hotel room. Where, sadly, just a few short hours later, I would find myself besieged by the spectacularly effusive intestular travails of food poisoning. I shall not bore you with the gruesome details, but I was in no fit state for any #FF shenanigans and it was a most unpleasant end to the evening.
Anyway, that’s probably quite enough of my prattling for one evening. By the time you read this missive I will be heading back to Blighty for some well-earned rest and recuperation. So I shall bid you TTFN, Puffins. May all your passages be salubrious, your gardens inclined and your puddles well jumped.
Goodnight, and may your frog go with you – Not ‘arf!
Featured Image by the author
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