He’s in mourning for Donna Summer and Robin Gibb, but Nile Rodgers survives against all the odds

IBIZA is hosting its annual gathering of the great and the good of dance music and Nile Rodgers is due to give the keynote address – yet more evidence of his status as the king of disco. But at three o’clock on his beachfront hotel balcony on a sizzling hot afternoon he only has thoughts for disco’s queen.

“It’s Donna Summer’s funeral today,” he says. “It’s happening right about now 4,600 miles away in Tennessee. I should be there but the International Music Summit invited me a whole year ago. Giorgio Moroder, her wonderful producer, should be there too but he’s stuck here like me.”

Chic, the supreme disco ensemble for which he was joint CEO with Bernard Edwards, never quite got to record with Summer, something he deeply regrets. “But we did perform together and thank goodness there’s YouTube footage. We backed her on Hot Stuff and afterwards you can see us looking at each other as if to say: how come we never got a record together? I’ll never forget hearing Love To Love You Baby for the first time. When I set up my studio in Westport, Connecticut, I was so proud to be working in the same town as Donna. I have art in my apartment in New York that’s there because I knew Donna liked it. Her death was devastating and you could say the same about Robin Gibb’s passing.

“The Bee Gees were huge for us, too. Before we became Chic, trying for jobs playing high-school proms, our audition song was You Should Be Dancing. You can YouTube that as well. Ohmigod, we’re smokin’, though I have to say we never got a single job. That was just a few months before we recorded Everybody Dance and then we were on our way. And I remember being at an awards night where we got honoured, not just for Everybody Dance but also Le Freak, Dance Dance Dance and I Want Your Love, plus those songs we wrote for Sister Sledge, He’s The Greatest Dancer and We Are Family.

“But the funny thing was Bernard and I were still quite anonymous. We were in the men’s room and the Bee Gees – who’d won all the prizes the year before – walked in. Not recognising us, Robin said to the others: ‘So just who are these guys who’ve taken all our awards?’ He and I were still laughing about that the last time I saw him.” Those sadnesses apart, 59-year-old Rodgers is having a high old time on Ibiza and, given Chic’s towering influence on dance music, it’s only right that he’s here. Today’s most sophisticated R&B acts owe a debt to them, and the hip-hop community’s obsession with the perfect rhythm-guitar riff or snare-drum snap have ensured they’ve been the most sampled band in the world.

“I’ve got six projects on the go,” he says, “and I’ve been running into a million old friends. Here’s today’s big revelation: long ago I walked into a nightclub as Mr Jazz and heard music with a four-to-the-floor beat for the first time and it turned my life around. Bernard and I wrote Everybody Dance which had the boom-boom-boom-boom for the masses but something else besides, a deeper kernel if you wanted to really listen. And look now: doo-wop, pyschedelic rock, new wave, just about everything else has come and gone, but four-to-the-floor is still dominating the landscape. They tried to say that disco sucked but the world is still revolving to 120bpm.”

Rodgers is like an emeritus professor of disco, always popping up on these BBC4 documentaries – and the recent deaths should mean a few more – and in diverse locations. Last week it was Venezuela, today it’s the world’s most famous party island, next month it’s RockNess. Or he’ll be at home in Manhattan and dance music’s new royalty will come to him. “Daft Punk rang my doorbell the other day,” he says of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the French electronic whizzes you could call the Rodgers & Edwards of right now. “I can’t say much about this, other than we’ve been trying to work together for so long.”

Also among those six projects are two Broadway shows, one of which joins the dots between Chic’s music and jazz. “The first line of Good Times comes from a famous end-of-prohibition song. And do you know that I was never happier than when some old jazzer I respected would say to me: ‘Little brother, I hear what you’re doing.’ The great jazz trumpeter John Faddis reckoned his entire career came down to what he did on “I want your love, I want – bing! – your love.” And the other show, could it be the Mamma Mia!-inspired bio-musical he’s long fancied? “You’re a pretty good detective, pal!”

Rodgers has always worked hard, even when he was being self-destructive. “One of my doctors described it as ‘falling forwards through life’ because while I was killing myself with drugs I was still making hit after hit.” His heart stopped eight times after a cocaine bacchanal with Mickey Rourke.

Then, just as he was completing his fantastic memoir Le Freak, he was diagnosed with cancer. “My first thoughts were: what an un-rock’n’roll disease! But look at who’s just succumbed. I’m feeling pretty good in what I call my post-operative recuperation, but really I should have died a while back.

“Bernard went before me [in 1996] and that was a terrible blow. He had so many children, you know. An old American TV series used to sign off: ‘There are eight million stories in The Naked City. This has been one of them.’ We’d joke: ‘There are eight million children in The Naked City. Bernard fathered many of them.’ Me, I knew early that I wouldn’t marry or have kids because of my chaotic family situation, with my mom having me when she was 14 in a taxi crossing the East River in between three coat-hanger abortions. But I also swore I’d never drink or do drugs because my mom, dad and stepfather had all been heroin addicts and look what happened. We used to joke in Chic about who’d be the first to go and agreed it would be me, given all the wild sex in the toilets of Studio 54 and all the coke. But I’ve just stuck an old photo on Facebook of the original five guys in the band and I’m the only one who’s still waking up on this side of the dirt.”

These days, therefore, it’s Nile Rodgers and the Chic Organisation and that’s who’ll be playing RockNess. The man who, as we learned from his book, tripped on acid with Timothy Leary, toured with the Sesame Street roadshow, joined the Black Panthers, was hospitalised with Andy Warhol and jammed with Jimi Hendrix all while still in his teens must have a good story about playing Scotland back in the day. Oh yes…

“Glasgow Apollo, is it still there? Shame. We’d been told to expect trouble, that music was tribal in your city. Skinheads were going to throw bottles. I’d played Harlem Apollo so I shouldn’t have been daunted by Glasgow Apollo but I remember thinking: ‘Hell, I take music seriously but isn’t that thugism?’ You’ll remember the high stage. Well, it wasn’t so high that we couldn’t look down at the first two rows and see nothing but shaved heads. But if they didn’t think they liked disco, they probably weren’t expecting to see so many beautiful women in Chic and they definitely weren’t expecting us to be smokin’. I know the Glasgow skinheads quite liked us because they joined the tour that night and were our roadies all the way down to Brighton.”

Nile Rodgers and Chic play RockNess on 10 June.