THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.123 - NILE RODGERS

Episode Date: May 17, 2020

Adam talks with American musician and producer Nile Rodgers about his unconventional upbringing, fashion and drug experiments, working with Bowie and much more. This episode was recorded at Abbey Road studios, London in November 2018.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Anneka Myson for additional editing.RELATED LINKSPRE-ORDER SIGNED HARDBACK COPIES OF RAMBLE BOOK AT WATERSTONES (2020)ADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (AUDIO BOOK AT AUDIBLE) (2020)KIDS WRITE JOKES (WATERSTONES)LE FREAK: AN UPSIDE DOWN STORY OF FAMILY, DISCO, AND DESTINY by NILE RODGERS (2011) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rosie, mum's watching Hustlers. I think now would be a good time for a walk. You up for it? You want a scratch first, is it? Come on, let's go. some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing podcats? Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a farm track in East Anglia, UK. It's the middle of May 2020. I'm on my late afternoon lockdown exercise walk. Very nice to be out with dog. It's a very beautiful evening. it's good to be out of the compound everything's okay in Castle Buckles I'm glad to say

bit of stir craziness only what you'd expect after two months without having seen anyone else of course I'm still in the middle of my tether but I think the teenage boys might be getting to the end of theirs and I'm beginning to feel there's a slight possibility that one of them might murder us in our beds but other than that

you know, absolutely cannot complain I hope you and those close to you are doing alright anyway, time to immerse yourself in someone else's life for a little while. And this was a conversation, well, more of an interview, really, with someone who has led a fascinating life and is able to talk very engagingly about it. As you know, I'm referring to the legendary American musician and super producer, Niall Rogers.

Here's a smattering of Niall facts for you. Though if you've read Niall's 2011 autobiography, Le Freak, an upside-down story of family, disco and destiny, you will know these are just the very tip of his amazing anecdote book. you will know these are just the very tip of his amazing anecdote, Berg. Niall, aged 67, as I speak, grew up in Harlem, New York, where in his teens he was a member of the Black Panther Party. These are just sort of random teenage Niall facts. He worked at Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles,

where as a young man he cleaned Frank Sinatra's private jet. Later in his teens, Niall lived in a commune, became a green-haired hippie, then moved back to New York to join the Sesame Street touring band, replacing guitarist Carlos Alomar, who was leaving to join David Bowie's band. Years later, of course, Niall would mastermind Bowie's smash hit 1983 album Let's Dance.

But in the late 70s and early 80s, Niall was best known for his work with Chic alongside musical collaborator Bernard Edwards. Together they created some of dance music's most enduring hits, including La Freak, Dance Dance Dance, Yowza Yowza Yowza, and Good Times. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, good times. You're welcome. The bass line of that song, of course, was sampled by New York's Sugar Hill Gang

for the track Rapper's Delight, itself recognised as one of the building blocks of hip-hop. Excuse me. Bernard and Niall applied their signature sound to the Diana Ross album Diana, which included the singles Upside Down and I'm Coming Out, and they also produced the We Are Family album for Sister Sledge that included Lost in Music, We Are Family and He's the Greatest Dancer,

sampled by Will Smith for his magnificent single Getting Jiggy With It. After parting ways with Bernard Edwards, Niall went on to do production work on hit albums like Madonna's Like A Virgin, Duran Duran's Arena and Notorious, the B-52's Cosmic Thing, which contained the massive hit Love Shack, and of course Let's Dance and later Black Tie, White Noise

by Xavier Bowie. Niall and Bernard reunited in the 90s and played together as chic until 1996, when sadly Edwards died suddenly from a lung infection. As for Niall, health-wise, he's had a couple of run-ins with cancer, most alarmingly a bout of prostate cancer in 2010, but happily he was given the all-clear in 2013. The same year, he enjoyed one of the biggest hits of his career with the single Get Lucky,

a collaboration with Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams. I met Niall at Abbey Road Studios in November 2018, back in handshake times. November 2018, back in handshake times. And he had a new album out, which was the reason I got to talk to him. And he was doing a lot of press at the time. And perhaps that's part of the reason I held the episode back a little bit. And then it fell foul of my eccentric scheduling system. So apologies, especially as Niall was extremely nice and we had a good chat, but I think I came out feeling a bit frustrated because we had less time than I was hoping for. And it was just a bit hard for Buckles to get as relaxed as Buckles likes to be. So, you know, afterwards I felt like, oh dear, that didn't go as well as I wanted it to.

But as has been the case a number of times on this podcast, when I finally listened back to the conversation, there was loads of interesting stuff, which included some amazing descriptions from Niall of his unusual upbringing, his love of fashion and the diverse combination of cultural influences that helped shape him as an adolescent. I should say, just so you're aware, this conversation does include some fairly frank drug talk. We also touched on Niall's adventures in the 80s with bands like the B-52s. And obviously, I asked about working with David Bowie, managed to get that in. and obviously I asked about working with David Bowie, managed to get that in. But I started by asking Niall how he came to be spending so much time at Abbey Road.

Back at the end for some brief waffle, but right now, here we go. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. right my complicated mic setup is yeah it's cool yes, I've just been watching a little bit of footage of you with the orchestra laying down a beautiful, lush instrumental for Let's Dance. What's that for? That's for a project called, what's the proper name? 80 Symphonic or something like that. It's the working title. Yeah. So basically the concept is popular pop songs from the 80s done with symphony orchestras.

Yeah. And what are you doing here at Abbey Road? Just another day in England. No, I'm the new chief creative advisor here. And I do lots of different projects all the time. I'm involved in many of the new technical innovations that are happening here and a ton of exciting projects. So I do basically most of my work here. Okay.

How extraordinary that one of the first songs you ever learned was A Day in the Life. I know. How funny is that? In the first songs you ever learned was a day in the life i know recorded in the big studio here yeah it was actually not one of the first songs i learned but it was the first song that i learned on guitar on the guitar right that is just one of a number of pretty bizarre bits of circularity and circumstance in your life? It's so crazy. You know, like I'm guest hosting for Robbie Williams on X Factor, and one of the artists that I was working with yesterday, they were doing a Michael Jackson song, and I said, wow, you won't believe this,

that the guitar that I play, I played when I was in a band and we were the opening act for the Jackson 5 way back in 1973 on the American leg of their first world tour. And ever since then, Michael Jackson and I were friends. And I said, I even played on the History album.

They were like blown away. And the guy says, God, I wasn't even thought of in America in 1973. I said, yeah, I understand. Which band were you with at that point? I was with a group called New York City. Oh, yeah. I'm doing fine now.

Do, do, do, do, without you. Which is a huge hit. And that enabled you to tour in the UK. Am I right? That's exactly right. And that is sort of the genesis of Sheik and the Sheik organization. That's so correct. Yeah. What happened was whatever piece of luggage that I happened to have my passport and my cash in was somehow stolen before it got loaded onto the coach. And I was stranded.

Fortunately, I was dating a girl who lived in London, and I stayed at her place over the next few days till I could get a new passport and scrounge up enough money to get a ticket to get back to America. But during that particular weekend she says hey uh you know let's go out and see my favorite group and i said cool who are they and she says roxy music now i'm brian ferry texting yeah exactly and i was sort of a little perplexed because i thought that her favorite group was a group at the time called chairman of the board oh yeah but i guess they

were sort of funky yeah yeah but you know you can like all kinds of music but yeah she was in the chairman of the board and she was in the roxy music so we went to see roxy music whom i had never heard of do you remember where you saw them you know it's all sort of fuzzy yeah but people tell me from the timeline it was probably the roundhouse I don't remember I know what the roundhouse looks like it didn't seem like it was the roundhouse

or the rainbow could have been the rainbow maybe it was, I don't know but I thought it was called the Roxy you didn't have a club in London called the Roxy? I think there was I think it was the Roxy or something. But anyway, I saw Roxy music at some club that I thought was called The Roxy.

And it was just so incredible to me because it was the first time, as I described it to my partner, that I had seen a totally immersive artistic experience in music. Which is maybe a little bit overdoing it. But that's how I felt because it was the first time I'd seen a band get dressed up to perform in front of an audience that was also pretty dressed up. And I thought, wow, this is weird. The audience looks beautiful and the group looks beautiful. There's this whole couture clothing thing going on, which I had never seen happen in rock and roll. Oh, really? Yeah.

Right, because it happened a bit in R&B music. And I'm thinking of the George Clintons and the Bootsy Collinses. George Clinton dressing up? Like what? They were dressing in baby diapers and all sorts of mothership had landed. Yeah. That kind of stuff. That wasn't couture clothing.

Oh, okay. I don't think of Brian Eno's outfits with his feathers and all the mad stuff as kind of couture. To me, that's the same sort of mad fancy dress. But you thought, to you, it looked more stylish. No, if you saw what I saw, they were very stylish. Yeah. No, they were incredibly stylish.

And especially because brian ferry as a front man and and the whole vibe seemed very styled compared to what i was accustomed to in rock and roll which was as i still say to this very day i always make a joke that whatever we wear in the morning is exactly what we wear in front of 50 000 people on stage um like tonight i'm playing with take that and i'm gonna wear this yeah i'm not gonna go put on another outfit you know it's like but you do look better than most people in their ordinary outfits thank you but you know the point i know i do i know. I do. I do. I'm not going to get dressed up to play one song. But anyway, it was just so inspiring.

It was like, man, this is the coolest thing I'd ever seen. And I remember calling my partner and trying to explain it to him. And even the explanation seemed ambiguous because he hadn't seen that either. And so I'm trying to tell him and describe it to him. And I said, the audience was so chic and beautiful. And then the next day I went out to buy what I thought was the Roxy Music album. And they had three albums out already. And I couldn't believe I'd never heard of them.

And they had Playboy Bunnies and Supermodels on the cover. And this was just when they were starting to coin the term supermodel, because prior to people like Lauren Hutton and stuff like that, the only model whose name that was known in the public was this one model named Twiggy. And that was it. So if you bought a couture magazine or what have you, you didn't know anybody's name. It was all about the clothing, except if Twiggy was wearing it, you knew Twiggy's name. But now all of a sudden they had these supermodels and there was Iman and Lauren Hutton and Beverly Johnson and all this stuff. Jerry Hall. Yeah, Jerry Hall.

And so inspired by Roxy Music. I mean, you were a hippie, though, for a long time, yes? Still am probably in my heart. If I could live a certain way and all was right with the world, that would probably be the way I'd choose to live. How would you define hippiedom then what did it mean to you when you were young um and we're talking like even now i like like i'm naked at home that's why people always say to me you know no how come you don't have a big mansion and so on i said because i'd have to have a staff i mean like i want to live

in a house where i can walk around naked all the time. I don't... Naked stuff you can have. I could, but I'm not that cool. I just, I think that when I'm in my own home, I could be as relaxed as I want to be. And I just like being nude. I don't know why. You know, it just feels better to me. So I never got a house that was too big to handle. I never wanted that. And obviously fashion was always very important to you. And that sense of fashion came from your parents? Yeah, my father, well, my stepfather was Jewish, and he was... White Bobby. Yeah, White Bobby, exactly. Because obviously, we grew up in a sort of black community. But

the Jewish community and the black community was very closely aligned in those days. Because a lot of black people worked in the clothing business, you know, rolling the coat racks from store to store to store to warehouse to warehouse. And my father was one of those. They used to call him a pilot for flying Jewish airplanes, which was the slang for those coat racks. He said he was a pilot for El Al. And my stepfather, Bobby, his uncle owned one of these sort of really cool men's clothing stores. probably all the way from the turn of the last century up until right after World War II. After World War II, Americans started to get into this leisurely kind of thing. It may have happened during the 60s, during the hippie years, during the surf years and things like that.

But up until then, I remember even when we went to the movies, to the cinema, we would get dressed up. I would put on a suit. People would go to sporting events in suits and proper hats and the whole bit. I mean, if you go back and you look at a film of somebody going to a baseball game in the 40s and the 50s or a tennis match, they're all dressed in suits. So I was born in that era and my parents dressed me like an adult while the other kids were starting to get into this sort of casual clothing. I was still wearing much more formal type of clothing and consequently kids made fun of me. But you had your little bow tie and yeah the whole little lord fauntleroy thing yeah it's really pretty funny to be in america in the ghetto dressed like that but it's really interesting because if you just go back 10 or 15 years prior

to that you would see all the black kids in the ghetto dressed like that and what were your folks dressed like oh they were fantastic my mom would be wearing the latest Carnaby Street fashion hip stuff. And my father, Bobby, would be dressed like a Hollywood movie star. I mean, all the time. They were very young, though, right? Your mother, correct me if I'm wrong, was only 13 when she was pregnant with you. Right, yes. The first time my mom had sex, she was 13.

It was around christmas day and uh she fell pregnant after that incident just the very first time boom right away nine months later you could you could count it from uh january to september next thing you know i was born september 19th and she made the decision to hang on to you because presumably everyone was assuming that she would not look after a child at that age. Well, actually, that's not quite accurate. She had put me up for adoption as soon as I was born. Baby boy Goodman is the original birth certificate because I was going to be given up for, I was given up for adoption the day I was born.

And even my father's name wasn't on there because basically what they did, it was a controversial program that's now been phased out. But they used to take these children off of the streets from the Lower East Side and send them to Western part of America to work on farms. And it was basically sort of like indentured slavery in a weird way.

And it was a lot of Eastern European kids that would come over, you know, their families would send them over. It's like the movie The Godfather, you know. And these kids would, you know, just form gangs and live on the street. And so this one, I guess, altruistic woman thought that she was doing a real service to these kids and would send them to the West and work on farms. But in fact, it was just cheap labor. And they phased out that program. But I was sort of the last group of those kids that was part of that program. but I didn't get sent to work on a farm. I was actually just sent to a hospital because I was born very sickly. And during that time,

my mom sort of got inspired to go reclaim me because of my father's mother, who was quite sharp and really a brilliant woman. She spoke Latin, super Roman Catholic. And mothers, birth mothers, had powerful custodial rights even back then. So she was able to manipulate the system and get me back. And then at that point, my mom was convinced. So it wasn't like she just, like she had her maternal instinct got the better of her. Okay, that's what I like to say. And so it's just easier and faster. But you got the real story. Right? Yeah. No, thank you. And how long after you were born? Did that happen? Then when

did she get get you back? It took a few months, because I was already used to the name Gregory, which is why I'm not really a junior, because the woman had named me Gregory. And when my mom went to retrieve me, it seemed like the only thing that would calm me down was the name Gregory. The woman would say, OK, Gregory, don't worry. I'll get you back soon. So then my mother would say, repeat the same thing. Okay, Gregory. Okay, Gregory.

It'll be fine. It'll be fine. But then my father's mother intervened and said, you know, we should name him after my son. And that's when I became Niall. But because my middle name was Gregory, only because the woman was calling me Gregory and my mom was used to it now, sort of similar to when you adopt a dog.

You know, you usually you keep the same name that they call them at the pound. It's funny that I put it that way, but that's true. You know, my mom continued to call me Gregory. And my father's name is Niall Erskine Rogers, but my name is Niall Gregory Rogers. Right. And it is one of many sort of heartbreaking stories that are in your book. But you're scrupulously nonjudgmental about all the people who are around you living very, what we would consider, what many of us would consider alternative lifestyles.

They're pretty alternative. Yeah, your parents, your mother Beverly and your stepfather Bobby were both regular heroin users. As was my father, my biological father. And my biological father actually worked for Bobby's family in the clothing business. So they were friends. for Bobby's family in the clothing business. So they were friends. As a matter of fact, all of my brothers are half-brothers,

and all of the men who fathered children with my mother are all close friends, which is weird. That's why in my book I call it Variations on a Mormon Theme because there's the central mother and all these different fathers as opposed to one man and all these different women. Yeah. It's a series of exercises in alternative experimentation that you have had throughout your life. No kidding. And you write brilliantly about, what's the line?

I wrote it down. Our living room would be filled with black and white hipsters suspended in time and space while I ran through the petrified forest of their legs. So this is you aged five, six? Now, at that point, I was a little older because that was when we were living on Greenwich Street in the village. And when we lost that apartment, we moved to East 8th Street. And that would have made me eight years old because I went into the third grade. Okay. So to you, you've grown up in this environment with your parents who are sweet to you and you love Bobby. Fantastic. Great.

But you're just used to the fact that occasionally they will speak very slowly and they will nod out. Mid-sentence. Well, so they were beatniks. And the beatnik culture was one of everybody spoke slowly because so many of them were heroin users. And then that just became a vibe. It was like, hey, man, how you doing, baby? So it was actually like, so in America, when we had jazz on FM radio, the FM radio DJs spoke that way. They would say things like, so now we have the latest record by John Coltrane. It's an experimental record.

You know, that kind of thing. So that's how my family spoke so if we sat down to dinner they would say um hey uh pud which is my nickname pudding pie yeah short for pudding pie hey pud can you pass me the salt my man so my parents spoke to me like that and the harshest discipline they ever doled out was one day I set the apartment on fire. Not the entire apartment, but just the windowsill, you know, just a very small portion of the pad. Accidentally. Oh, completely.

I was a Boy Scout and I was actually I was a Cub Scout. I was too young to be a Boy Scout yet, but building a little campfire out of stick matches, not realizing that when they would oxidize, it would go down as well as up. Well, I burned the windowsill. It was like, whoa. And I tried to clean it up. And next thing you know, I took off all the paint and they came home. And my father looked at me and he just stared at me for five long minutes and it felt like an eternity. And it's the harshest discipline ever because I knew this was heavy. He just stopped speaking, not because he was nodding either. And he went, put. Dig yourself, man. Dig yourself. Now, he was just like saying, you know, you're smart enough to be introspective. Look at your activity. How could you be so stupid to not know that when you entire life, my parents never, ever told me what time to come home?

Like in today's world, like I don't even know how you raise kids in America. But when I was a kid, typically we played outdoors. We couldn't wait to go outdoors. We go home. You do your homework as fast as possible so you can get outside and hang with your friends. And my parents never, ever, ever gave me a curfew. They never said, hey, put, come in when the lights are out or put, come home at 10 o'clock or hey, put, come home at midnight. Because somehow they knew that I instinctively knew that I'd come home when there's nothing left to do it was like he you know our kid is smart enough there's nothing left to do so he's gonna

come home and they trusted you to have a sufficiently developed instinct for self-preservation oh yeah and good judgment and know that I wasn't going to get into trouble I was not a bad kid at all I was not a troublemaker I didn't't steal. I didn't do anything, anything that was against the law. I didn't do, no, I was, I was socialized to care about people and help people. So if anything, I'd be at some kind of soup kitchen or the Salvation Army or feeding poor people or something like that. And, you know, it's hard for people to believe, but in 1960, elderly people were still not that accustomed to cars and the speed of cars if they had things like hearing aids or if they were blind. So they would stand on the corner. They don't have to be totally blind, but just say somewhat visually impaired. And they would stand at the corner and wait for somebody to come and grab them by the elbow

and walk them across the street so they wouldn't get hit by a car. This is how I grew up. So people would always wait. So I always say nowadays, like, whatever happened to those people? Like, there's no one ever stands there at the corner waiting for someone to help them cross the street. Did they all disappear? Or did technology become so sophisticated that even blind people and people who are hearing impaired have, like, no problems crossing the street? But when I was a kid, they were plentiful.

And so I always would do good deeds every day. There was actually a little television show, a kid called Good Deed Daily, the busy little boy scout who tries to do a good deed, a good deed every day. So I used to pretend like I was that kid. So I was looking for nice things to do for people. Right. You were like Mr. Rogers. Except I wasn't quite old enough yet. But yeah. Meanwhile, your cultural education is underway. And you're sort of educating yourself by just going to see all kinds of movies that you wouldn't expect a young boy to be seeing. Yeah. Well, the thing that's interesting is that I would love, in retrospect,

I'd love to go back and look and see when they instituted the rating system at the cinema in America. Because when I was a kid, if you could afford to pay for the ticket, you can go see any movie you wanted. So the movies were censored on a higher level. And once they were censored, then everybody could see it.

So there was no such thing as a rating. So I was able to see the most sophisticated, the raciest films that they would allow in public cinemas. And I loved them. I remember seeing movies like Mondo kane when i was really really really young i was probably seven years old la dolce vita and things like that i mean i was i i love seeing foreign movies and having to read the subtitles and stuff there was a guy that used to talk films with you talk about in your book harold the gentleman harold eastman yes coolest guy in the world we went to see uh alfred hitchcock's uh it was strangers on a train

and after the great scene with the uh the carousel and the guy going underneath it to try and stop the carousel that's now about to fly off the track i remember harold was a heroin addict and he was sort of nodding through half the film so he would just was a heroin addict and he was sort of nodding through half the film so he would just wake up every now and then to see these

really great scenes. And then as we were leaving the theater he just looked at me and went, wow, poor, Hitchcock

is a bitchcock. I just, I'll never forget that. It was like the coolest thing ever. Hitchcock is a bitchcock. That would be a good name for a band. Right.

Bitchcock. I don't know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. What was your first exposure to music then? Was it mainly classical or jazz? Yeah, classical and jazz. So jazz in my household and classical at school because the standardized U.S. curriculum when I was a kid was very, very, very, boy, I swear to God, I don't want to sound like some kind of age chauvinist or sound like, you know, your parents who always say, you it was when I was a kid.

Like when I was a kid, everything was about the unions and we're going to work together and fight for America. We all band together and manifest destiny, see the shining sea and blah, blah, blah, and this and that. So our standardized curriculum taught everything. I mean, we learned music, foreign languages, woodshop class, metal shop class, this funny class, which is called homemaking, was teaching girls how to be wives.

They called it home economics or something. It was like, what? How to balance your checkbook. It was like pretty sort of pretty sexist. It was practical for America in those days. It would be good if not just the women were taught that. Right, it's true. But I'm just saying, it was like they had carved out every aspect of your life.

Sure. Like you could be a scientist or you could just wind up being a metal worker or, you know, work as a mechanic. And I thought that was pretty cool because what they had in that standardized curriculum was they gave you at an early age the opportunity to gravitate towards something that really felt natural to you. Music felt natural to me. So in the very first grade, the subjects that I weren't good with, like penmanship is still horrible. You know, we had beautiful cursive writing that they taught so it looked like you could rewrite the Constitution. Well, you should see my cursive writing. It's horrible. I just never had that kind of thing that my brain would say

the letter P looks like this beautiful thing. But, man, I was good at reading music and I was good at writing music. And I was good at performing music at a very early age. And whatever instrument assigned to me, I took it quite seriously for the amount of time that I played it. And usually it was a really short period because I would move from school to school because my parents, being heroin addicts, weren't exactly what you call stable parents. So if they weren't able to pay rent at a place, we'd get kicked out in a few months. And consequently, I'd go to another school, or while they were in between housing, I'd stay with a parent's friend. It was my childhood. I was all over the place. So consequently,

I went to a lot of different schools, played a lot of different instruments. But the positive byproduct of that was that I learned how every instrument in a symphony orchestra functioned. And so I could write for every instrument, and I knew the clef that it was in. And this was an elementary school. So I knew how to write for the baritone horn or the tuba or the bassoon as well as the flute and the piccolo and the violin and the viola and the cello. Would you practice and stuff? You study. It wasn't necessarily practicing because I didn't play those instruments. But I would be assigned those instruments for a

couple of weeks. So I would practice for a day or two. And you just pick them up. Yeah. But the important point to me was to learn to write for them and to sort of stay on top of my game, because I would think, well, if I went to another school, I didn't want to be behind. Yeah. So it was in there waiting to be tapped, and presumably partly because your father was a very gifted musician. Some would say. Yeah. Others would say it was the environment.

I don't know. You know, the science behind that stuff is not necessarily proven. It's more romanticized, I think. But still, you are clearly someone with a lot of talent at a young age. And then you're also listening to the jazz music that your parents were into. Yeah. Bebop. I mean, it was.

But not just bebop. Mainly bebop, which they called modern jazz. But they loved everything. They loved. I remember my mom really loving, oscar brown jr and nina simone and mel torme so she liked vocalist but you would walk into my apartment and typically you'd hear charlie parker ahmed jamal was a huge family favorite they loved him i think he was a family friend too i don't remember ahmed jamal to our house, but I remember Thelonious Monk coming over.

I remember. What was he doing? Well, he probably came over many times. But the story I tell in my book is about him coming to buy a fur coat from my mom. Because, you know, when you're a heroin addict, sometimes you wind up becoming a heroin dealer to support your own heaven. And then once you start selling that, you'll sell anything. It was like a fence in a weird way. Because my mom was really fashionable because my stepfather, Bobby, was in the fashion business, the clothing business.

So he could either get stuff wholesale or he would steal it. I was a kid, so I didn't know how we always had all this beautiful clothing at our house. But it became known that... That was the place to go. Right. So Thelonious goes, yeah, okay. So Monk would show up and everybody. I mean, there were a lot of famous people. I remember Gloria Lynn had a crush on one of my brother's fathers and since all of the various my mom's paramours were all good friends their circle of friends became

part of this wonderfully interesting group including colin powell by the way really yeah he went to school high school with my uncle. He wasn't a massive heroin guy. No, no, no, no, no. So the thing is that they were mainly intellectuals, and they pursued very, very big dreams in a way. the way. Even though a lot of the pathways forward were restricted, it was still taught because it was a standardized education system in America. So you might have that knowledge and not necessarily have the opportunity to use it, but you still were taught. Colin Powell speaks perfect Yiddish, as does my mom, as does almost everybody in my family, just because of working so closely with the Jewish community. And then when did you start getting turned on to pop and rock and other sorts of music?

I was always around because that was AM radio in America. But what made the big difference in my life was the release of the first Doors album. Oh, yeah. I was on my way to the skating rink. I was living in Los Angeles at the time with my paternal grandmother a few months before she passed away. And typically we would hitchhike to the skating rink so that we'd have more money to spend on candy or soda or whatever. And the problem with hitchhiking was that you weren't assured of what time you'd catch a ride. So you'd have to just hitchhike until somebody would pick you up. And sometimes they

wouldn't take you all the way there. They'd only take you half the way there or whatever. But we would take the ride just because it would get us closer. So this one particular day, when we arrived at the skating rink, we were in between what they called sessions. So we decided to wait until the later session to attend. That way we could skate the full amount of time. That way we could skate the full amount of time. And whilst we were standing there hanging out, we saw these kids on the other side of the street with really long hair, and we never saw people looking like that.

They were like these early surfers and hippies, but they weren't called hippies, and they called themselves freaks. So you're thinking Todd Browning-style freaks as in the movie right exactly that's exactly right so when we walked over there now we were glue sniffers so we were pretty high and and as i said i was naturally friendly because i was just socialized that way um so i wasn't afraid of people I just thought if you were nice to people, they'd be nice to you. So we walked over and we said, wow, who are you guys? Because there were a lot of them. They were going to this thing called the teenage fair. There was a lot of them. Like, man, who are you guys? What's going on? And they were like, and they talked like, oh, wow. So

they were sort of talking like beatniks in a way. So we had that camaraderie thing, even though the guy who I was with, his parents were nothing like mine. I wasn't even living with my mom. I was living with my grandmother in Los Angeles, South Central. Most of the black people that were living in South Central had come from down South. My particular friend had come from Arkansas. And he had a very sort of, he didn't have a real sort of super intellectual background. But, you know, he was cool. We were both high on glue and we were lightheaded.

And the guy says, hey, man, we're freaks. And I said, freaks? You mean like the movie? Like, we accept them, we accept them. One of us, one of us. Goonie, gobble, goonie. And they were cracking up. They were like, wow, Spadecats, no freaks.

They thought that was amazing that us little black kid who was dressed, oh, so we would dress like the Temptations because that's who we liked. And so even as young kids, we got dressed up in sharkskin suits with ruffle shirts. Actually, I have a picture of me in my book somewhere right before I go out to the skating rink that day. They thought it was pretty funny and unusual that guys who look like us were into movies like Freaks. And they asked us if we wanted to take a trip.

into movies like Freaks. And they asked us if we wanted to take a trip. We didn't understand what that meant. So we thought that they wanted to just go to the beach and surf and stuff like that. And even though we didn't know how to surf, there was other things that we could do at the beach because there was a place called Pacific Ocean Park. And that pier is still there in Santa Monica.

But when I was a kid, it was a real amusement park. It was a whole thing. So we thought that's what they meant. Because then anytime we took a trip, we went to the beach or Disneyland. And Disneyland was too far. So we figured they were talking Santa Monica. So we said, sure. But instead, they took us up into the Hollywood Hills.

And we met this guy named Timothy Leary. Now, we didn't know he was Timothy Leary, and we didn't even know who that was. We certainly didn't know what acid was. We never heard of LSD. How old was he then at that point? In his 30s or something? Yeah.

So remember, I was always around adults, so adults didn't look weird or old or anything like that to me. So I was probably around 15. And it's easy to figure out my age. Because you just got to look whenever the Doors released their first album. Because it was that day. And that's what everybody was talking about. I remember the chatter in the room.

When you're on LSD, sometimes, especially your first time and you don't know what to expect, the things that you remember are sometimes very, very weird. So I remember the whole thing about the doors and the song, the end. Father, yes, son, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to kill you. And then the jam that happened, you know, so I remember the whole situation and the guy's name. And the only reason why I remember the guy's name, and believe me, Timothy Leary wasn't the oldest person there. So it's not, you know what I mean? It was a strange mixture of, it's funny, this is going to sound like I'm mixing the two things together.

And I easily could be because after I had tripped, there was a movie that came out a few months later called The Trip with, I think, Peter Fonda. And Jack Nicholson. And I sort of confused that film with what actually happened with me and Peter Fonda. And Jack Nicholson. And I sort of confused that film with what actually happened with me and my buddy David. Yeah. But we had sex with older women and stuff like that and it was cool. And our little temptation outfits,

when we came home, we were all dirty and tattered. And they had a swimming pool and everything. I don't remember. After we started tripping, the world got weird. Like, I didn't know what to expect. So I couldn't tell whether we were losing our minds or what have you. And then I couldn't depend on my friend. And then half of the time, I couldn't find him.

Or you just lost track of time time and you weren't frightened i wasn't frightened because i had never heard of it so i didn't know there was there was no expectations i didn't know anything about a bad trip i didn't know anything about a good trip i I didn't know anything about any of it. So it just happened. And also, maybe because of the fact that we were already high on glue, it just sort of

felt like part of the thing. And man, I'm 66 years old now. This was, you were talking like 50 years ago. Yeah. You haven't done it

recently. No, I haven't. I think that was actually the last time i did it it's just pretty these days yeah i i think a matter of fact you know what i bet you that was the last time i sniffed glue now that i think of it because the whole thing was no it wasn't oops it wasn't but it wasn't it wasn't once i got into it and nothing really bad happened, I somehow made my way home. Everything was cool, except the police were there looking for me because my grandmother couldn't find me for a day or two. It was like a roller coaster.

You know, you're afraid. But see, it's not like a roller coaster. I didn't know anything bad was going to happen in the first place. So I wasn't afraid. So the fear thing never happened. So I just said, wow, that was fun. And I probably associated LSD with beautiful older girls. And like, they were cool. And this is amazing.

And like, wow. And not only that that but this music made sense to you the music made so much sense it was ridiculous i came home of course i had the doors whole album remembered but it was the the end that i particularly like but um of course light my fire was on there and stuff but i remember the troggs wild thing um that's so basic though yeah but you still got something out of it oh yeah and uh so you weren't a snob no no no i loved it i had a blast i mean how could you not sure you have all these beautiful older women around you and they're treating you like you're something special because you're such an oddity that you were like et or something

it's like because we we were nothing like the people in that room we were so r&b'd out we were so silk suited and ruffled shirts and white shoes we had that we used to call italians you know we were totally different. So you were like celebrity guests. Yeah, exactly. It was like, hey, come on in, man. The water's fine. That was the beginning of my sort of deep, deep dive into surf music and psychedelic music.

Were you into the Beach Boys at all at that point? Yeah, everybody liked the Beach Boys. They weren't weird yet at that point? Yeah, everybody liked the Beach Boys. They weren't weird yet at that point, were they? Yeah, the Beach Boys were just regular American pop music, but it was great. It was weird. Like, America was a super singles-driven market. So instead of saying, I'm into Steppenwolf, or I'm into the Scorpions,

or I'm into something, you know, it's like, I'm into a song. I'm into ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, like the ventures and you hear that twangy Dwayne Eddy kind of guitar and stuff. But still, my junior high school was still in the hood in the ghetto. So at the same time that I was listening to that, we'd have our weekly dances where they were playing the Marvelettes and The Temptations and Chris Clark and Edwin the Star and so I had a very balanced diet and in the orchestra we played symphonic

music and our program was deep with Prokofiev with Beethoven a lot of avant-garde and cooler, newer composers a a lot of Russian composers. I said, like, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. Yeah, we were cool.

Yeah. We were cool. We were a good orchestra. We were pretty good for a junior high school band. Thank you. What was your first professional flute on a Jewish traditional song called L'cha Dodi. And I was like, wow, I'm a real musician. I got money for playing. This is cool. But then I quickly switched from woodwinds to guitar.

switch from woodwinds to guitar and i'm trying to remember the first time i remember getting paid money to play guitar i don't even know what the song was i just remembered the situation and it was clear that the guys who were in control of the money were gangsters and it was clear that we were going to write a song and they were going to to pay us, and we were just going to get kicked out of the studio, and they were going to keep the publishing and say that they wrote the song. But the other musicians on the date explained to me that that's just how the music business was, and if you want to make a living, you've got to do this all the time.

So I did a bunch of records where I would have, in today's world, I would have been the co-writer, but I gotwriter. Yeah. But I got nothing. Right. So I'm going to fast forward now to the 80s. You talk fondly in your book about the 80s. And, of course, that's a decade in which you worked with people like Madonna and the B-52s.

I didn't know that, actually, until I read it. That was an album that I really loved. It's great album cosmic thing it's wonderful it really is it's great but that doesn't immediately say nile rogers to me do you know what i mean it now now that i know it it does but it's weird there's a lot of stuff that you do so so think about this the B-52's albums before Cosmic Thing, Love Shack, Deadbeat Club, Rome. I was true to their sound, but vocally, I'm not trying to take credit here. I'm just giving you an example. Vocally, don't you think they sound better singing on the Cosmic Thing album than they sound on earlier records? Yeah.

Just quality of vocal. Sure. No, it's altogether a more lush and accessible production. Yeah. And it was something that we slightly argued over in the beginning. And I said, just try it. Just trust me and try it. Just try it.

Just trust me and try it. I said, this is an old rock and roll trick that people have been using since the beginning of time. Multi-track recording. Try this. And I try it. And when you believe that it's just Cindy singing, it sounds like it's just Cindy singing. But it's not. And when you believe that, well, well fred of course is completely undeniable yes and of course look at how much i featured fred on the on that album because i i thought that

as a hype person like which became really popular in hip-hop as a hype man fred was incredible became really popular in hip hop as a hype man fred was incredible and um what does that mean a hype you know the the guy who's going you know well i was getting ready to do it in fred's voice but in hip hop the person who's not necessarily the feature rapper has a hype person going yo this is my man so and so so so he gonna kick it tonight, come on, my man. And they're always the one doing the double or the accent vocal. They'll say something like, hip-hop, hooray, ho, hey, ho. So the hype men are back there going, hey, ho. And so the lead guy is going, you know, doing the main rap. But the hype man is, like, getting the crowd hyped up.

And typically before you go to a hip-hop show, you'll see the hype person come out first. Flavor Flav would have been Public Enemy's hype man. He was a great hype man in Public Enemy. Flavor Flav is like a great, great, great hype man, but he was also part of Public Enemy. Yeah. So you turned Fred.

So I turned Fred into the great hype man that I thought he was because he sounded like a carnival barker to me. I've seen a gazillion movies, so he sounded like, Deadbeat Club! Yeah. That's right. I wanted to have him do that thing. And most especially,

If you see a painted sign on the side of the road... That's exactly like the carnival barker. Exactly. Right. I love the idea of you going to parties at anthony michael hall's place with juran juran right i mean how you can't really get more 80s than that can you yeah and and that was easy because that was around the corner that's one block from my apartment that was super 80s um it's funny because we're still sort of friends

to this day even though we haven't seen each other for a long time. I still have clothing in my closet that he gave me on those wonderful coked out nights. Yeah. Right. So those were your coke years still. When did you sort of clean up? I got sober exactly 24 years ago on August 15th. And it was interesting because it was at Madonna's birthday party.

Madonna's birthday is August 16th. But her party was, I guess, on a Saturday on the 15th. She decided to throw it on a Saturday or maybe a Friday night. I can't remember. But I certainly remember the date. It was really horrible because I don't think just being carried out of Madonna's house back to my hotel would have gotten me sober. But what got me sober was that earlier that day, I had performed with a really brilliant Cuban musician named Nil Lara. And this guy is a genius.

He's a super, super genius. And I was going down to record him for the jazz label blue note and um and he asked me if i wanted to jam with him i was like of course are you kidding me get to play with nil lara live and i started playing and i knew that he was this sort of real cuban hero in miami beach so I had to do something more than just play cool guitar. So I was pretty high, and I started doing the Hendrix trick, playing the guitar behind my head and behind my back and the whole bit.

Showing off. Yeah, it was like being a little silly. And the crowd was going crazy. I was like, woo, I'm killing it. And the next day, I went to Neil's house to work on the record. And he said, hey, man, you want to hear what you played last night? I said, sure. And he played it back for me.

And it was pretty dreadful. Now, it probably wasn't nearly as bad as I think. But the fact is that it wasn't as good as I remembered. And that made me believe in one instant that I was going crazy because my memory was like, wow, I was killing it. But the tape doesn't lie. And the tape said, no, you were not killing it. You were at best average. And so that was all it took.

That was it. That was it. I called some friends of mine. I told them to come down to Miami Beach because I was hallucinating. I knew about hallucinations because I was an acid head when I was younger, but now I hadn't taken LSD and I was actually suffering from my very first, my one and only bout of cocaine psychosis. I thought the mob was out to kill me. I called some friends of mine who were detectives, homicide detectives, and said,

look, I'll pay for the private jet for you to come on down. I want you to come down and get me. Get me out of this hotel. We'll go back to the airport, fly back to New York. And it was all in my head. So what year would that have been? That would have been 94. So that's a good 11 years after you met and worked with Bowie.

Right. Who had, of course, been through all that himself. Did you ever used to exchange cocaine psychosis stories with him? No, no, no, never. He was all cleaned up by that point. He was clean when we were doing Let's Dance. He was clean in 82. He had the serenity prayer in Japanese tattooed on his leg.

I even asked him what that was when I saw it. I said, wow, that's cool. What is that? Kanji. He says, oh, that's the serenity prayer in Japanese. I said, what's the serenity prayer? And then he told me. He's like, oh.

I was like, uh-oh. And was there ever a discussion about, like, David's clean now, so you can't be doing anything around him? Or was that just you just assumed? Out of respect, I didn't. Right. And what was the initial approach then? How did he got in touch with you?

He just sort of thought, well, I want to work with this guy. I met him at an after-hours club. I walked in with Billy Idol. He and I used to go out a lot together. Billy, still a wonderful guy. I just saw him. We just played Coachella and i saw billy he's great man i love the dude uh but we used to go out together all the time we were really party

buddies and uh and when we walked into this new club called the continental billy and i were walking in together and he looked at me went bloody hell that's david fucking bowie and when he said bowie he barfed bow fucking david bowie anyway hello mate i was like billy is the coolest dude in the world man he's like so awesome didn't even like break a step, really. Nice little puke. Proper puke. Puke and a handshake. Yep. And but the thing is that because I didn't barf, I didn't slow down or anything like that. And I was already over talking to Bowie. Like right away, I saw him and I was just like, we were stuck together like glue.

I introduced myself, said that, hey, man, you know, you live in the same building with all my friends that I grew up with, which are all young Americans, Luther Vandross and Carlos Alomar and Carlos's wife, Robin, who sang on every Chic record in the beginning, as did Luther. So I was like, yeah, you know, we're sort of like family and don't realize it yet. But anyway, we just started chatting. Next thing you know, we were talking about jazz all night. And I was so impressed with his in-depth knowledge of jazz from like the most straight ahead to the most avant-garde. I was like, this is a real dude, man. He's like, he wasn't like just out stuff that people knew, like that was sort of popular in the hippie set, like Sun Ra, you know, because Sun Ra was out there. So people dug him.

But he knew like the deep stuff. He knew Eric Dolphy. He knew Cecil Taylor. He was into it. I mean, he didn't just know it. He was into it. He could sing the heads and all that sort of stuff because he played sax. I didn't really know that about him.

So he was fascinated because he didn't realize that I knew that stuff. And he didn't realize that I orchestrated and did all the Chic records. He was like, wow, you do that yourself? I went, of course. I says, there's never been a record I've done that anyone has ever stood on the conductor's podium except for me. I mean, never. I don't just do the arrangements and sit back and let somebody else conduct. I do the arrangements and I'm in the room with all the musicians.

It's like, wow, that's amazing. Yes, and that was a whole element that you added to the whole, well, no, to the genre, though. The way that you orchestrated those records brought something totally new and cinematic and exciting. And it just suddenly you got something different from a chart record that transported you somewhere else. Yeah, because I never treated the sweetening like they weren't part of the band. See, that's the difference between my style of orchestration

is that a lot of people who orchestrated, they wanted the orchestration to sort of stand out in a weird way. My style, you know, you listen to a song like Modern Love, and, you know, those horns are part of the band. I mean, you know, or even Let's Dance. Let's dance, put on your red shoes and dance, or do a babble, babble, let's dance to the song they play on the band. I mean, you know, they, or even Let's Dance. Let's dance, put on your red shoes and dance, do a babble, babble, let's dance to the song that's playing the radio. And they're part of the thing, you know. So to me, it was critical to orchestrate Bowie. He was so open to the idea. He wanted to be bigger. He wanted it, not necessarily a bigger star, but he wanted his

sound to be bigger and represent these other facets of music that he loves but didn't have people around him to do it yet right obviously this is one of the things that characterizes bowie is that throughout his career he had a real genius for finding exactly the right people the most talented people to help him realize whatever idea he had at that time. But then, of course, one problem, I suppose you could say, with that approach is that people often end up feeling quite used or maybe a little bit exploited. Right. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, oh, he'll pick you up and he'll be all excited about working with you. And then drop you. Right. Moves on to the next thing. Right. And he's got a stable of, and you were one of the people that he returned to and and wanted to work with again but were you always comfortable with that arrangement or did you uh no i was actually a little bit upset because after let's dance was so big he was now on the cover of time magazine and if you read that interview it's almost like

i'm not even mentioned and i'm like going dude you're on the cover of time magazine because of let's dance and modern love and china girl because he's not playing any all the music on there is you yeah yeah yeah yeah he didn't even know anybody the only person he knew was myself and steve ray vaughan whom he had only met once so everybody on that record were completely unknown to Bowie, and he took them as his band. See, that's like I said, those are the kind of records that I make, that my orchestration is now part of the band.

So he just took the guys who played that, and he figured, well, you guys could easily play my other stuff, but to play Let's Dance and have it sound authentic, I need the people who did the record. So when you see the Sirius Moonlight tour, it's everybody who's playing on the record. Right. Save for Stevie Ray Vaughan and myself. Yeah. Were you busy doing other things or did he invite you on the road or? Everybody invites me on the road. I'm a record producer. I don't go out as somebody's music director. Yeah. It's funny, man.

As a producer, I don't really find myself following the artist that I've just worked with. Right. It's just that as dedicated as I am to the last artist that I work with, that's how dedicated I am to the current artist I'm working with. So there's not a huge amount of room in my life because i get so wrapped up into what i'm doing that i'm like living for that record yeah you're focused on and the people feel like hey what happened man we were like hanging out together every single day and now i call you up and they go uh niles in the middle of a session he'll hit you back, that's really one of my biggest problems

because I get super crazy with whatever the current project is. So I know that I didn't really follow what was happening with Bowie much except I'd get a phone call every now and then from the guys on the road because they were all my guys, right? So everybody's calling me and telling me different stories, a lot of good and a lot of bad, but it's just rock and roll. That's just normal. And then David called me for a few other projects. So Dancing in the Streets with him and Jagger for Live Aid. And that was cool because it's like I had three cool things going on at the same time at Live Aid. I had the Thompson twins. I had just finished Madonna. I had Duran Duran in the middle of their stuff.

And it just shows you how close I was with Billy Idol because if you look at Live Aid, the guitar player I brought along with me was Steve Stevens, who was Billy Idol's lead guitar player. So I was having a blast. I was, the early 80s was really, I think, my time to shine. I had so many great relationships, so many great records, In Excess, Bowie, Madonna, a bunch of Duran Duran records, Paul Simon, B-52s. You work with such a diversity of talents and styles and all that, but you're sort of notably absent from the hip-hop genre. Why do you think that is? So after the whole disco sucks thing happened,

all of the black music that sort of happened after disco was sort of political. And when I say political, meaning you had to be part of that scene. So if you think about the way people dressed in the 80s, when you think about groups like Kid and Play and, you know, and Jodeci and Guy and all those kinds of bands, you had to sort of be in that scene. Well, we had already developed as a sort of stylish couture type of band. It would have been strange for us to go in the street direction when we weren't, even though we were from the streets, if you will, but we clearly established that we weren't. Right. You know what I mean?

So there was a word that they used to use in hip-hop called perpetrating and the last thing that we wanted to be were perpetrators even on run dmc they say voice of the 80s perpetrating a fraud your rock is cold whack keep the crowd cold bored you're the kind of guy that girl ignored i I'm driving Caddy's. You fix and afford. So we didn't want to be perpetrators. We didn't want to pretend like, oh, now all of a sudden we're in the hip hop and we're down. We're from the streets. We're drug dealers.

We're not. We're none of those things. But we did write Good Times. Yeah. And Good Times was. It's like the Rosetta Stone of hip hop. Of hip hop. Right.

That's exactly right. And that was because of writing Good Times, we became sort of like hip hop legends in a strange way. Because when you would go and see MCs, that was the joint. I mean, you never heard any other record. I remember the first time that Debbie Harry and Chris Stein took me to what they called going to a hip hop. The only record they played was Good Times. And it was about 50, 60 MCs just dropping their rhymes over Good Times. But even regular R&B after that, like New Jack Swing and things like that, which is why I have a cool New Jack Swing song on my new record.

Because now I don't have to be perpetrated. i don't have to be part of that scene i could do it just because i love the music perpetrating is not exactly the same thing as cultural appropriation though is it or is it on some level it's like you're pretending to be down with something just because it's happening uh-huh where it's not part of your dna it's just sort of like you're pretending to be down with something just because it's happening. Where it's not part of your DNA. It's just sort of like you're doing the hot thing. Like people, and it's well documented that I turned down a lot of people who wanted me to make disco records for them. And I kept saying, no, you're not a disco artist.

Why would I do that? It doesn't make any sense. I turned down really famous people. Somebody told me, Dolly Parton wants you to do a disco record. I'm like, why did I do that? Why don't I make a cool country record for Dolly Parton? That'd be great. They wanted us to make a disco record for The Stones. They wanted us to make a disco record for Bette Midler. Aretha Franklin, which is probably the sort of story that actually hit the streets, was she had written this song called I'm Gonna Be the Only Star Tonight down at the disco. We went out to her house for a meeting. We were excited.

She played the song and I was like, I'm not going to be the guy that goes down in history as the one who made Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Souls disco record. No way. That ain't going to happen. But the way she told the story was that she fired us. The truth was that we were like, no, let us write your song. Because this was when we were writing Diana Ross. We were like, right after we do this, we'll do your record.

It'd be great. But you weren't, it wasn't a sort of political statement. It wasn't like, no, this is inauthentic. Like what I'm getting at, I suppose, is that obviously now there's so much discussion about cultural appropriation. And when it comes to music, it's such a strange area because music is all about cultural appropriation.

Of course. As a matter of fact, Bowie, David, this was the greatest thing in the world. So when we were doing Let's Dance, we were listening to all these different records, I mean, from all sorts of genres. And when we listened to Twist and Shout by the Isley Brothers, which is how we start the record. We do that dominant seventh. Actually, go to a ninth, actually, pyramid. And we do the ah, ah, ah, ah. That bit. I said, damn, David, you know, like ripping off the Isley Brothers?

He says, no, not at all. It's not ripping off. It's what we call postmodern. What did he call it? Postmodernistic re-expressionism. Something like that. Postmodernistic re-expressionism. I was like, okay, I'll buy it. Re-expressionism. I'll take it. re-expressionism i'll take it um yeah i was like going okay like we're re-expressing it in a post-modernistic way we're not doing twist and shout we're doing let's dance yeah and so yeah so you weren't sitting there sort of getting worried about that amazing china girl riff because you felt that some people might feel that it was cultural appropriation and it wasn't it was like a parody of uh oriental sounds that wasn't yours to no i i uh i came up with that lick because i didn't think china girl sounded commercial and he wanted to hit i was like going well this is the only thing that i think links the words China Girl.

It had to have some kind of riff. I mean, it was interesting how I came up with that after listening to the progression of I was like, hmm, major to major seven to major six. Hmm, hmm, hmm. What does that sound like? And I thought about the Rufus song, Sweet Thing. Dee-dee-oo-doo-ee, doo-ee-oo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-ee-oo-doo-ee. And I went, oh, dee-dee-oo-doo-ee-dee-doo, dee-dee-oo-doo-dee-doo. And I was like, holy cow, I'm on to something here.

Yeah. And I totally did it because of chord changes and the Rufus song, Sweet Thing. And because it didn't have a hook to me. Do you ever hear covers of your own music and enjoy them? Oh, yeah. Have you ever heard, do you know the band The Fall? Sure. Did you hear their Lost in Music?

No, I don't think so. Oh, it's quite. The Fall did Lost in Music? Yeah. Sure. Did you hear their Lost in Music? No, I don't think so. The Fall did Lost in Music? Yeah. Huh. I feel so alive Interesting. It's be the out. They're going out now, right? No, this is the song. Yeah, this is it. You're in the middle here.

Hey, Adam Buxton here. Now, it was at this point in the conversation when Niall's team started looking at their watches and it became clear that his car had arrived to take him to his next appointment. But I had bought Niall a gift, a copy of one of my favourite books, and I wanted to see what he thought of it before I left. The book was Kids Write Jokes, a collection assembled by the moderator of a kids joke website who particularly enjoyed the odder and more nonsensical submissions and has since collected them in tumblr form and on twitter and in this book. People familiar with my stuff will have

heard me reading some of these out before. They make me laugh a great deal. But what would Niall think of them? The thing is that I'd spent several weeks immersed in the world of Niall, listening to his music, reading his book, and I felt that I knew him quite well and that we were going to get on like a house on fire and that he definitely would love kids write jokes. And I couldn't wait to give it to him and I just imagined us reading them out to each other and rolling around but then sat in one of the little studios in Abbey Road with people giving us the wind-up gesture. It just didn't go the way that I'd hoped. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't like the time I met Paul Weller. I don't think Niall wanted to physically hurt me, but as soon as I started reading the first one out,

I realised I'd made an error in judgement. But still, I persevered, and I even got Niall to read one out himself. Here we go for this last little bit. I have a voice that I read these in, Here we go for this last little bit. I have a voice that I read these in, in my mind. Go ahead. What do you call a sandwich with legs? Bread-y legs. Bread-y legs.

Yeah. What did the goat say to the dog? Nice buttock, you loser. So they're all like that. So that's yours to to um you know study on the toilet or wherever how are we doing are they yeah i think they said to wrap up wrap up yes you might come like any minute yeah yeah yeah it seems i mean i i thought as much which is why i unleashed the the book which is a bit of a conversation stopper. I once read out some of those jokes on Christmas Day when we were having family lunch

when my dad was sat around with us. I thought they were going to go down better than they did. There's a couple that work. Here, give us one. Knock, knock, who's there? The big bad wolf. What do you want? Colored eggs.

What color? Red. I think that's just the, in there, it's the DNA of all great comedy. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website I see success, yes success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop.

And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Why did the frog cross the road? To get a new tongue.

Why? Because its tongue was stuck in a velcro tree. Continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats. Niall Rogers, probably as I speak, walking around nude in lockdown, reading aloud from kids' right jokes and laughing and laughing. It was very exciting to meet Niall and I am extremely grateful to his team who were kind and helpful and friendly and it was a fun day. I just wish I could have talked to him for longer because he does have an extraordinary number of

fascinating stories to tell. I do recommend his book, Le Freak, an upside-down story of family, disco, and destiny. You'll find a link to it in the description of this podcast, as well as a link to the Kids Write Jokes book, also in the description. You will find links to another extraordinary book. It's called Ramble Book, and it is available in audiobook form. It's my book book in case you

haven't been listening to the podcast for a while anyway give it a listen if you haven't already bought it over 11 hours of uh great great stories from my adolescence, stuff about my relationship with my dad and having children of my own, arguments on trains, and then of course over an hour of waffle with corn balls at the end of it all, an exclusive podcast episode, if you get that audiobook. And by the way, if you're one of the people that have already bought it, thank you so much. I'm very grateful. It took such a long time to put it together, and I really appreciate all the nice reviews and stuff that people have left for it. It makes a huge difference.

And for those of you keen to enjoy the book in physical form, the hardback is going to be out at the end of August. But right now there is a limited number of signed copies, or at least they will be signed by next week, available for pre-order at Waterstones. Do you say Waterstones or Waterstons? Flintstones or Flintstones? Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support and to Annika Meissen for additional editing on this episode. Much appreciated both. Thanks to ACAST for their continued support of this podcast. And most of all to you. I hope you're doing all right

wherever you are and I hope you'll come back for another episode of this podcast. Rosie! Come on, dog. Let's head back. Like a tiny, hairy, thoroughbred stallion. Be well, podcats. I love you. Bye! Bye. Thank you.