The Louis Theroux Podcast - S1 EP7: Nile Rodgers on his turbulent upbringing and the stories behind his biggest hits

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, hello, hello. Hello, Louis Theroux here. Welcome to my Spotify podcast called The Louis Theroux Podcast. podcast called The Louis Theroux Podcast. Today we have a very special guest by the name of Niall Rogers, disco icon, incredible guitarist, business person and philanthropist. He raises a lot of money for charity and he's worth a lot of money but we'll come on to that. Nile's musical output speaks for itself. Collaborations with Duran Duran, David Bowie, Diana Ross, and many, many more. What's less well known is his incredible life story, his upbringing, which included parents addicted to heroin, a very chaotic education, homeless for a while and moving around between New York and LA,

Starting point is 00:01:08 becoming a Black Panther very young, I think like 16 or 17 in New York, though we don't actually talk all that much about that. And the ever-present experience of racism and discrimination before finding his feet as a musician. You'll notice we talk about someone called Bernard, which is unexplained. That's Bernard Edwards, who is the bassist in Chic and very much Niall's creative partner. The usual themes of a sensitive nature warning is hereby imposed. We talk about a lot of dark and personal stuff, drug taking, probably bad language. I don't know, just messy human events. You'll hear some warbling from me. Quite intimidating singing a song to the person who wrote it and recorded it, but that didn't stop me. All of that and much, much more coming up. Coming up

Starting point is 00:02:22 Hello Howdy Thank you so much for doing this Niall I'm a big fan and it's a real privilege to be speaking to you. How are you doing? I'm very, very well. And you're speaking to me from Connecticut, I believe. Are you at home? One of my homes, yes. One of my homes. I cannot believe it. You know, you can't say that without me then saying, how many homes do you have? This is horrible. Five. You've got one in Connecticut. Have you got one in Switzerland?

Starting point is 00:02:49 No, I have one in Connecticut, one in New York, two in Miami, and one in Turks and Caicos. But actually, the one that's in Turks and Caicos is actually five houses, which is insane. This isn't how I meant to start this interview, by the way. But one of the things I read in preparing for this was, forgive me, I googled your net worth and it gave me a figure of 300 million. Does that sound about right? Maybe it's a little low, is it? Yeah, it's a wee bit low.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Well, and by the way, I think the subtext for this whole conversation is that you are not just an artistic success story, but someone who's reaped some of the dividends of your creative genius. You know, there's so many bankers and, you know, people doing some kind of a purpose, but that you as a true creative have actually earned a decent income. You know, unlike so many other artists, musicians, I think is a great thing. Even if it's 300 billion, well, maybe that's a bit high. I don't know. So basically, we got off on a business footing.

Starting point is 00:03:57 I actually want this to be a creative conversation. One of the pleasures of preparing for this has been digging back into the archive and enjoying all the music you've made. And I should say, by the way, many will know you as one of the two great creative impulses behind Chic, but also that you've worked with many musical legends over the years, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Madonna, Duran Duran, and of course, Sister Sledge, Daft Punk. I mean, I could go on and on. But just to start slightly at random, as a hip-hop buff,

Starting point is 00:04:29 one of the things that struck me early on was how many samples I hadn't really realized were actually yours, and specifically, Chic Cheer. Right. After a very long question, I arrived somewhere concrete. Can you, I mean, I was going to try and do the riff, but I can't really. Do-do-do-do-do. Do-do-do I can't really. Do-do-do-do-do.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Do-do-do-do-do. Do-do-do-do-do. Sheep, sheep, sheep. Do-do-do-do-do. Sheep. That. And then. Fat Man Scoop.

Starting point is 00:04:56 Well, first Faith Evans first, right? Right. Did her take on it using the same riff. And then Fat Man Scoop then took it. Right. All of them selling millions of records. I sort of look at it, sometimes there's music that a composer hears or an artist hears

Starting point is 00:05:12 that just gets under their skin, and they wish they were a part of that music, and this is how they incorporate that into their sense of expression. Sometimes they just like the music bed, you know, like with Love Like This, same thing with Fat Man. They just like the track, and that was good enough to build upon. I'm really proud that, you know, you don't just sometimes interpolate my music, you actually just take the real thing and use it. Do you remember writing that? It's something so insubstantial and you could mistake it for

Starting point is 00:05:48 something evanescent or almost trivial, but it clearly isn't trivial because it's connected with millions of people over tens of years, right? Yeah. And not only do I remember writing it, I remember exactly writing it. The concept of Chic is we're an opening act for a really big star. And we have to come out and tell you and show you who we are. Every Chic album is exactly that format. It has never changed. So I mean, that's almost like a backstory to the band. Yeah, for every record, every record, we are completely unknown. So we're starting from scratch every time we put a record out. So on the first album, we had a song called Strike Up the Band,

Starting point is 00:06:35 and we would tell the people who we were. The second album, we had Sheet Cheer. Oh, and by the way, these are also the songs that we come out on stage with when we released a new album. So when we were doing the second album, which had the really big songs on it, Le Freak and I Want Your Love and Happy Man, we started the show with do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do, and you wouldn't see us. We were offstage because even on our first tour, we had wireless, one of the first bands that ever had wireless rigs.

Starting point is 00:07:11 We would start playing, and you couldn't see us play. You would just hear it. And then we'd walk out almost like a New Orleans second line, and we'd get to the microphone, and it goes, Sheik, Sheik, everybody strut strut and then we strut across the stage and then we kick into high gear almost right away and around this time you know you had a couple of opening singles that did extremely well i think dance dance dance everybody dance as well which is an amazing groove and then of course the legendaryak, which is probably one of the top selling singles of all time.

Starting point is 00:07:48 At Atlantic Records, it is the top selling single of all time. We cut off our sales on Le Freak at seven million plus. And the way that record companies operated in those days, if they accounted to us for 7 million, let me tell you, the actual real number had to be something ridiculous. What do you mean when you say that we cut off our sales? Because we were afraid. You see, the politics of being black

Starting point is 00:08:20 and being a white artist was built into the music business. White people are hired for their potential. Black people are hired for their accomplishments. So Black people are hired for what they've done. Like if you've already sold a bunch of records and people are excited, that's when you get a record deal. White guys go in and they just like look cool and they go, okay, great. We'll give you a million dollar deal. Believe it go in and they just like look cool and they go, okay, great. We'll give you a million dollar deal. Believe it or not, Everybody Dance was out for a year before we got a record deal. You could go to a club and see people like going bananas over the song Everybody

Starting point is 00:08:57 Dance and we couldn't get signed. Everybody dance, clap your hands, clap your hands. It was huge, huge. We couldn't get it signed. I'm sorry you had to listen to me do that. That's okay, you were close. Look, we knew that our style of music was a wee bit unorthodox. I was a jazz musician, and if the music didn't artistically and spiritually talk to my sense of being a jazzer, it didn't mean anything to me on a pop level.

Starting point is 00:09:31 So my music had to be pop, but it had to be jazz too. The very first Chic song I ever composed was Everybody Dance. Try and play Everybody Dance. It's got weird jazz chords. Oh, yeah. I studied it. Yeah, it's ridiculous. The virtuosity that it takes to play Bernard's bass is absurd. It's off the charts. Like Jaco Pastorius can play it, but not many people can play that. If you just tried to imitate it, your hands would bleed. It's not normal bass playing. But for Bernard, it was. But also the chords, because they're jazz chords, it has an emotional ambiguity. It's neither

Starting point is 00:10:10 squarely happy nor sad, right? It's some kind of ambiguous emotional experience. Thank you, brother. It's exactly right. We were living in the worst financial times since World War II. We were going through the greatest recession since the Great Depression. But we also remembered that during the Depression era, the partying, the roaring 20s, that whole thing was off the charts, like hedonistic and incredible. was off the charts, like hedonistic and incredible. And so that's what we did is we took that piece of history and we superimposed it on what felt like America was going through the same thing. So instead of talking about being poor and impoverished and what have you. We talked about the happy days. We even say, Happy days are here again. The time is right for making friends.

Starting point is 00:11:13 Let's get together about a quarter to ten. Come tomorrow, let's all do it again. So it's about party, party, party. Celebrate this hedonistic lifestyle that was happening in the clubs just like what was happening in the roaring 20s 70s new york was particularly grim was it would you say it could have been grim if you chose to look at it that way i looked at it as we were surviving and thriving regardless of the fact that we had no money so you being a j jazzer, as you put it, were you a fan of disco?

Starting point is 00:11:46 Yeah, we got popular because of disco. We played behind an artist named Carol Douglas, who had a huge disco record named Dr. Zordas. And then we had a monster disco record called I'm Doing Fine Now, which was covered by the Pasadenas. People in England think the Pasadenas did I'm Doing Fine. That was like years after ours. Our version of I'm Doing Fine now came out in 1973.

Starting point is 00:12:12 Disco is what put Bernard and myself on the map as studio musicians, because we could chuck. A song could have a certain groove, but once we started playing, all of a sudden you'd get that bounce, which now the machines can easily go, what we used to call telegraph music. I mean, that was my thing playing telegraph guitar. That kind of thing. Or like on a Michael Jackson record, like that kind of thing. This was our forte. We were really good at it. And Bernard and I could lock down a groove for an hour and a half if we had to. This term chucking, which I'd never heard before,

Starting point is 00:12:57 I guess it's like a choppy, highly syncopated, rhythmic strumming technique that involves muting some of the strings. Correct. So you get this really groovy... there's no other word for it. Well, there probably is another word, but that's a good word. And it combined with Bernard Edwards' bass playing. But that chucking, which I think had existed,

Starting point is 00:13:15 you didn't invent chucking, but you kind of took it into the realm of an art form, would you say? I didn't invent chucking at all. As a matter of fact, Bernard is the one who taught me how to do it. As a jazz guitar player, I used to comp. Comping really just means to play the chord changes along in a groovy way with the rest of the band. But my comping style before I met Bernard was the very typical, what we call Freddie Green type of guitar, chucking with the big band, which was... And then you do a little jump and a hop every now and then

Starting point is 00:13:51 to make a section sort of groovy. So you play... Whereas when I started to play with big bands, I was always going... Almost like I was a banjo player. But on guitar, it was like... You don't really need a guitar. That sounds pretty good when you're just scatting it.

Starting point is 00:14:28 But the band leaders would love it because it would give the band a bounce. I was basically locking to the hi-hat. So the drummer and I became a thing. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch- So all these 16th notes, which, as you well know, was a very solid foundation of disco, you know, like on 80 million songs. To be able to come up with really hip variations on those 16th note patterns was really important. As Bowie would say, the same but different. So I was always trying to be the same but different give you the same amount of bounce and happiness but make it a different groove or a different set of chord changes or give you the bounce in a spot where you wouldn't normally

Starting point is 00:15:17 expect it also on your I don't want to get too muso but it always strikes me that the phrasing of the melodies that the actual lyrics fall in unexpected places. They just wrong foot you ever so slightly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our main reason for doing that is because of the poetry. There's a concept that we've always used when we write, it's called DHM. It's the deep hidden meaning. And we write in a way where we believe that smart people go, aha, I get where they're coming from. And this is all just arty BS, if you will. This is just the artistic side of us trying to always do more with less. So if we have a stop or a space, it's to make you think of the next word that comes because it's

Starting point is 00:16:08 super important i want your love give me your love there's a little delay there yeah you sang the wrong lyrics but yes that's you sorry you picked a great one no no no you picked the fantastic you picked no but you picked a great one. So it goes, I want your love. I want. And then we play one note, pip, on the trumpet. Your love. Maybe you'll appreciate this story. But one of the greatest jazz trumpet players in the world is on that record.

Starting point is 00:16:41 And they were interviewing him for a jazz magazine back in the day called Downbeat Magazine. Well, man, you know, you've played on so many great records, Clint Eastwood soundtracks. What would you say is the most important one note you've ever played? Which is a stupid question to ask a person of John Faddis' caliber. He didn't waste a moment. He said, oh, I know. It's, I want your love. I want, bip, your love.

Starting point is 00:17:13 That bip, that one note, that bip is the most important one note of my whole life. And he said, because I remember when I looked at the chart and I saw this whole passage later on. I knew the guy could orchestrate. I got that. But I couldn't understand why there was just this one note on my chart. He said, my whole chart is empty. And I get this one part and goes. And the reason for that space is because, oh, man, I never talk about this. for that space is because, oh man, I never talk about this, but the story of I Want Your Love was I was going out with this wonderful woman named Nefertiti. She was just fantastic. Anyway, I fell in love with her girlfriend and I felt so bad because I really love Nefertiti and she's wonderful, but her girlfriend, I, you know, you can't help who you

Starting point is 00:18:07 fall in love with. I couldn't help it. It was just like, wow. And the reason for that space is because I wanted this girl, when she heard that lyric, to know how much I wanted her love. So that's why I go, I want your love. I want your love. It's such fine margins, but it makes all the difference in the world. It's extraordinary. Do you think disco, this sounds like a leading question, maybe it is, do you think disco gets the respect it deserves? Probably not really, but to me, it gets more respect than at least I thought it would have in 1979 when we had that whole Disco Sucks event here in America. Right. For people who don't know, disco was so popular. It was like a contagion. It was extraordinary. It was the biggest music form anywhere in the world, I'd guess. And even,

Starting point is 00:19:05 I read today, not just the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart were doing disco, Frank Sinatra put out a disco record. Let me tell you something. After I wrote We Are Family, everybody in the world, from Dolly Parton to Barbra Streisand, everybody wanted me to write a disco album for them. And I kept trying to explain to them that I'm not a disco artist. It's just we're taking advantage of the fact that this music that you can dance to, we could write this cool jazz stuff. And if Dolly Parton wants me to write a country album, I will write a country album that you can dance to. And they might call it disco, but that's not how I'm thinking of it. And when I wrote I'm Coming Out and Upside Down, I mean, come on.

Starting point is 00:19:54 That syncopated opening to I'm Coming Out, I wrote that for Ashford and Simpson. To perform? They were going to perform it? Because they write their own stuff, don't they? No, they hired me as an arranger. They had a hit record called, Don't cost you nothing, take a chance as you go. Don't cost you nothing. My version of it went, Don't cost you nothing, pop, boom, boom, pop, do-do-pop. Don't cost you nothing, pop, do- doo, doo, bop, bop, bop. And they hated it.

Starting point is 00:20:28 But that didn't mean I didn't like it. So we made up a name for that. We called it the Hesitation Waltz. We used this Hesitation Waltz many times, and it never worked. And when we were doing the Diana Ross record, Diana was such a big star we realized that we could get away with a piece of music that that was that complicated and she had earned the right to do complicated music so not only did we do that then I wrote a damn fanfare on top of it so I wrote, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da- And Bernard said, yeah, that's like the queen coming to our show. And it stuck in my head. Ah, the queen. The queen deserves a fanfare. out of a political background, you are a political person, a socially conscious person, right? And it strikes me that a lot of people saw disco as good time music, maybe slightly frivolous, right? Like party music. You made a comment, it's misunderstood and reduced, but it actually

Starting point is 00:21:55 represented a new kind of activism. They were even more expressive, political and communal than the hippies before them because they bonded through their bodies through dance. than the hippies before them because they bonded through their bodies through dance. Why do you think people sort of pigeonholed it or didn't see it for the subversive or conscious movement that it could be? Disco really just got a really bad rap because, you know, the rock bands at the time were playing gigantic stadiums and blah, blah, blah. They were dominating radio. playing gigantic stadiums and blah, blah. They were dominating radio. And then all of a sudden,

Starting point is 00:22:33 a nightclub, music that was played in nightclubs were dominating the radio. And it was messing with the revenue. This is weird. It's all upside down. And I remember when this band called The Knack came out. They pitted The Knack against Chic, and The Knack were like the saviors of rock and roll. Here's the part that's so completely ironic. The Knack made their record in the same studio that we made our record, and they were right next door to us. The girl, Sharona, who was the girlfriend

Starting point is 00:23:00 of the leader of The Knack, was my friend. We all went out to lunch together. We all partied together. And My Sharona was an amazing riff and a great song. How many records were as cool as... But they never had another hit record again. After they came out with that, we had come out with Good Times, which was After Good Times came out, there were a gazillion records that went

Starting point is 00:23:34 Matter of fact, if you sing the Good Times bass line into Goo, what's going to come up is Another One Bites the Dust first. And by the way, John Deacon was in the studio with me when I wrote Good Times, right? So it's not like... John Deacon, who was the bassist for Queen? Yeah, he was right there with me, sitting right in the studio. Do you get a share on that song? Of course not, because Another One Bites the Dust is not Good Times. Another One Bites the Dust...

Starting point is 00:24:03 It's different enough? Yeah, it's inspired by it, but big deal. One Bites the Dust is not Good Times. Another One Bites the Dust. It's different enough. Yeah. It's inspired by it, but big deal. I mean, Good Times is inspired by Kool and the Gang. That's what music is. We get inspired by other musicians and Kool and the Gang go, hey, hey, hey. Of course, Good Times doesn't sound like Hollywood swinging. Honestly, if you sing that into Google,

Starting point is 00:24:28 we did it two days ago, and believe it or not, even though we sang the exact bass line, Good Times came up third. So the first one was Another One Bites the Dust, the second one was Rapper's Delight, then third was Good Times. That brings us nicely to hip-hop, and I read a quote that said, oh, disco didn't die, it just changed its name and its address.

Starting point is 00:24:47 I think that's one of my quotes, actually, or a bastardization of a quote. Yeah, exactly. When people were listening to early forms of hip hop, the music was from disco records that had long breakdowns. And the song that had the longest breakdown was Good Times. I mean, think about it. Before Good Times, we had Le Freak. And Mark Ronson pointed this out to me. I never even thought about it at the time. After we do the second chorus, what normally is called a middle eight, and it's called a middle eight because it's usually eight bars long, we go, now freak.

Starting point is 00:25:24 Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I think that's my favorite part of the song, weirdly. Which is good. Because it's called this mounting chord changes. Right, exactly. So you're kind of climbing into heaven somehow. Exactly right, bro. So Mark Ronson said, I listened to La Freak and the middle eight play.

Starting point is 00:25:41 And eight bars went by. And the next thing I know, 12 bars go by. 16 bars go by. Hell, it was a middle 32. He said, I never heard a middle 32. He said, I couldn't believe it. And all you guys were doing was just jamming for 32 bars. And that was your bridge.

Starting point is 00:26:00 I was like, yeah, that's how a song goes. And it kind of opened the doors to hip hop which is a wonderful thing I think partly what happened maybe there were a lot of bad disco records as well that gave the genre a bad name in some quarters but also I wonder if middle America was threatened by the sexuality that was embodied in disco and also the racial politics I mean do you think that was part of the picture yeah Yeah, but, you know, think about it. Heavy metal was really pretty damn racy and sexual and way over the top.

Starting point is 00:26:32 But the gay side. Right, it didn't have the obvious gay side. But come on, some of the biggest artists, I mean, look at Queen. I mean, my God, I remember seeing Queen and I remember seeing the audience and the audience related to Queen just like you would relate to what would become the hair bands. But as we well know, Freddie was gay. I mean, Freddie was queer.

Starting point is 00:26:59 Yeah. I don't. Likewise, Rob Halford, the lead singer of Judas Priest and all those tight leathers. Right, right don't. Likewise, Rob Halford, the lead singer of Judas Priest, and all those tight leathers. Right, right, right. Which people thought was like a metal thing, was kind of a, a kind of queer kink thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast.

Starting point is 00:27:36 Hi, I'm Louis Theroux and you're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast. And now back to my conversation with Niall Rodgers. I could talk about music, but I want to also talk about you. And one of the many things that struck me about you and your journey is how difficult your upbringing was. And on paper, your upbringing had the hallmarks of, okay, this kid doesn't have a chance, right? Your mother and your stepfather and also your birth father all had issues with heroin. Issues. I mean, I'm trying to phrase it delicately.

Starting point is 00:28:07 They were hardcore junkies. Come on, man. It's okay. Hardcore. And let me tell you, when I wrote my memoir and I interviewed my stepfather because my dad had long since died, he said, I'm a proud junkie.

Starting point is 00:28:22 He was living in the VA hospital and he had to admit that he was an alcoholic to get residence there. Bobby Glansrock. It's a great name, Bobby Glansrock. Jewish, as it turns out. Your stepfather was Jewish. Absolutely. It was so hard for him to admit it, and my mom just kept begging him, Bobby, will you just say that you're an alcoholic?

Starting point is 00:28:42 I'm not a damn alcoholic. I'm a proud junkie. You know, they were heroin addicts for almost their entire lives. It's extraordinary. Well, your mom, I don't want to say this glibly, but she died only a couple of years ago, right? Yeah, exactly two years ago. Had she kicked it by then or what was her usage? Yeah, she stopped using then.

Starting point is 00:29:06 it by then or what was her usage? Yeah, she stopped using then. It's funny because the last few years of my mom's life, she became a sort of like health food nut and she was growing wheat grass and things like that in a windowsill. She had smoked all her life. She drank all her life. She shot dope all her life. And then now all of a sudden she was a health food fanatic. But also she had a huge personality change because she had Alzheimer's. And watching her personality shift was incredibly sad until I learned how to deal with it. And once I learned how to deal with it, we had so much fun. We had a great time. The last years of her life were not sad. She'd have that occasional bad day.

Starting point is 00:29:51 But for the most part, she was happy. She made other people happy. I had to finally institutionalize her. But in a strange way, that was cool for her because she could help other people. My mom was that kind of person. She loved to help people. She was very generous. She sounds like an amazing person.

Starting point is 00:30:10 And you write in your memoir, Le Freak, very movingly about him, very warmly. She had you when she was just 14, having, I guess, hooked up with your birth dad, Nile Rogers Sr., when he was 16, right? Yeah. He was a junkie too, if I can use that term. And then, well, the story's extraordinary, but he seems to have put his problems down to the fact that he was left at the altar, right?

Starting point is 00:30:32 Yeah, it's still hard for me to believe. As nice as my mom said that my dad was, absolutely the nicest man she ever met in her whole life. As a matter of fact, he was almost killed for her. Someone stabbed him right in the heart, in the aorta, and they somehow were able to stitch him up and save his life. What was he doing? Was he defending her? He was defending her. My mom was very pretty, very fashionable, but young, you know, so she was a real target for the gang members. And he was trying to protect her because she was quite naive when she was that young.

Starting point is 00:31:12 But she was overly sexy at a very young age. They were trying to take advantage of her. My dad was like protecting her. And these guys stabbed him right in the chest. It's really hard for me to talk about this because I just imagine it. Obviously, I wasn't around for it, but I've heard my mom talk about it so much. And after she felt pregnant by him, the parents wanted him to marry her. And she gets right to the altar and she just said she couldn't do it. She said she wasn't in

Starting point is 00:31:42 love with him. And she left him standing there at the altar and she just ran she couldn't do it. She said she wasn't in love with him and she left him standing there at the altar and she just ran out of the church and he was just destroyed. I think you say in your account of it that he's upset, overly emotional. He slaps her, I think. Yeah. Is that what happened?

Starting point is 00:31:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she's like, okay, we've crossed the bridge now. That's not happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for the rest of his life, every time I saw him, he brought it up every time. You know, your mom left me, your mom did this. And it was like, pop, get over it.

Starting point is 00:32:13 It's okay. It's cool. And he was increasingly incapacitated, indigent and kind of borderline just out of life. Yeah, he turned from having a really good job and was pretty cash fat for a person from the ghetto to a bum living on the streets. He was really pretty much the lowest form of junkie. In New York, we have a methadone program and he would take the methadone, which you could only take it orally, and he would drink half of it and hold it in his mouth and then spit it back into the bottle and then sell that

Starting point is 00:32:52 to other junkies. He used to call that selling spit back. My dad was like that. I mean, his whole life just revolved around getting high. So he sold spit back and then he would make booze in the bathtub. Every time you go to his little room, he would have a bathtub filled with, you know, bathtub gin, they called it. That's why they called him Splash. That was his nickname. Very few people called him Nile. They called him Splash. And when I came around him, they called me Little Splash. How old was he when he died? He was really young because I was 16 years old. I was in the Black Panther Party

Starting point is 00:33:28 and I remember the last time I saw my dad alive, well, the next to the last time was I had gone to Marx Brothers Film Festival and when we came out of the theater, this man was lying in the gutter and I made my way through the crowd, and I saw that it was my father. And I was with my girlfriend at the time,

Starting point is 00:33:51 and her family was, on paper, they seemed like the most perfect family in the world. And my family, he was my father, lying in the gutter. So I pretended to not know him. I'm not sure if he recognized me, but of course I recognized him. This was really traumatic for me. So I don't have really great details, but I was a real street kid, very, very street savvy in New York. And I really knew how to survive. I ran away from home at 14 or 15 and I could earn a living. I could see any concert I wanted to see. I can see any movie I wanted to

Starting point is 00:34:36 see. I could do everything. I don't remember having a bad life at all, even though I was basically homeless and lived on the street. I was a hippie and led the hippie life, lived in communes, or people would let me come and stay at their apartments. It was great. I had a good time. Well, I was going to say, because reading about it, it has all the trappings of what could be a kind of misery memoir, right? You're huffing glue at one point, you have a grandmother who beats you with electrical cables at another point, and you're being passed around relatives. For your asthma, you're put in a kind of residential institution where they're abusing the kids. I mean, there's a litany of horrendous experiences,

Starting point is 00:35:21 but you choose almost not to see it in an overly negative way. You know, it's funny, my manager says this about me and I never, damn it, I can't believe it. He says this about me and I never thought about it until just right now. He always says that my style of production is when I walk in with an artist and they play the music for me, I never concentrate on the bad. I only concentrate on the good. I only see the good in the composition. And that's what happened to me. When I was writing my memoir, I could have easily talked about this institution and talked about this man who sexually abused the kids.

Starting point is 00:36:07 But I appreciated the fact that they were known for their early childhood development program. And the fact that I learned to read at what they called an eighth grade level, even though I was just five and a half, six years old, when I first went to school and I went to Catholic school and the first book that I read was Moby Dick. And the second book I read was Treasure Island. I mean, Treasure Island is not on the level of Moby Dick, but the fact that I could read Moby Dick, they're blown away. They're like, whoa, this kid has been touched by God. And I was like, no, I just went to this really awesome school. And if you're in this one room classroom with 16 year olds, what are

Starting point is 00:36:53 you going to do? You know, after a while, you're going to start learning what they learn, even if it's just a sort of soaking up of the knowledge. They're not teaching it to you, but you can't help but learn it because you're right in the same room with them. And that was what saved my life because when I first went to school, they were trying to figure out if I belong there. And they were trying to see, well, has he missed enough school to start with other first graders? And the fact that I could read made them think that it was a religious experience. My mom tried to explain to them that I was in a convalescent home, but they wanted to believe that I was touched by God. So that was their story and they were

Starting point is 00:37:35 sticking with it. Wow. Do you think all that darkness, because this is a heavy question, but do you think, you know, being exposed to those experiences, presumably it's left its mark on you in various ways? Yeah, it did. The main negative mark was I was always afraid of the dark. Even to this day, sleeping is very difficult for me because I equate sleeping with death with dying I don't think that's all that weird though like the idea of a kind of creeping anxiety that comes in as you approach bedtime you know and I think a lot of partying going out all night you're sort of avoiding that moment where you kind of submit, you surrender

Starting point is 00:38:25 to the unconscious, right? Yeah. Well, with me, it really was the dark and the light because I would survive my entire childhood on like two or three hours sleep. Once the sun started coming up, I could fall asleep. It was like no problem. And I would then go to school after only sleeping a couple of hours and I would do great. And they couldn't understand how that could be possible.

Starting point is 00:38:53 Finally, my mom took me to a psychiatrist because she couldn't understand how when she was asleep all night, I'd sneak into her bedroom and watch television. And she'd wake up periodically and put me in bed. And every time she'd wake up, I'd be there again watching television. The late show, then the late, late show, and then the late, late, late show. And the next thing you know, it was morning and I'd go to sleep. She thought that that was a real problem. She took me to a psychiatrist. I remember being at this sleep clinic, which was a psychiatric center for about a week. And they kept testing me every day. And I would do really well on the test. I remember this one young doctor, I think on the sixth or seventh day, he said, you feel I said I feel great he said man go home you're gonna live a third longer than everybody else now what he meant was not chronologically

Starting point is 00:39:52 he just meant that fit more at waking hours in yeah and he's right in a way because I have done so much work I have written so many songs and you wouldn't know this because most of the stuff that I do are flops. They're all failures. But you know the hits. But to get those hits, I had to write 50 failures. Going back to your upbringing, just for a second, I don't want to get bogged down in like heavy kind of stuff. But this was something you said, which really jumped out at me. You said, from as far back as I can remember, I was consumed with feeling ugly. Yes, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:40:32 Because you see, a really horrible byproduct of racism is colorism. And in the black community, if you were light-skinned, you were more likely to have greater opportunities. You were more likely to be hired for any job that you applied for. And I don't say this in a weird way because I adore President Obama, but if both of his parents were black, he would not be president. I pretty much guarantee you that. The fact that he had one white parent and one black parent in America, that was about as black as one could be. And that's how my family

Starting point is 00:41:18 was. I was the darkest one, myself and my mom's sister. But my mom is very light-skinned as well as her brother, as well as her entire family. When you see family photos of us and we all get together, because my great-grandmother lived a long time, well over a hundred, and we all get together and take a photo, there would be mostly almost all white looking people. And it'd be like two or three dark spots. And my immediate family, they would say, you know, I'm the only spot in the lot. And it was a weird thing because you could see the benefits of being light-skinned in my world. I mean, I see it with my little brothers. My two youngest brothers are half white. In the hood, they are just, you know, hot as fire. All the girls love them instantly,

Starting point is 00:42:12 no matter what. They don't need to have jobs or anything like that. And they always have girlfriends taking care of them. I, on the other hand, had to be very responsible right from the word go. And I got my first job at nine years old. I've had an incredible work ethic all my life. Even when I was the most stoned out of my brains, I could get up and sometimes write a hit record. It's always been about work and performance, work and performance. Do your best, do your best, do your best, do your best. And it was because I had to. Then it just became natural to me.

Starting point is 00:42:52 Because that's kind of answered the question I was going to come on to, which was that I'm fascinated that, I mean, if we could take what you have and bottle it, like that work ethic, that drive to succeed, it would transform the world. And that you coming from a community that was chaotic in certain respects, your parents were on heroin a lot of the time, and you were homeless, and you were sniffing glue. You were truant from school for like a couple of months at one point, right? You were traveling between relatives. And yet somehow you emerge with this drive and focus.

Starting point is 00:43:23 It's like, how did you get from there to studying jazz and classical guitar? Because it looks as though you're about to just, well, you're not on the rails, so you're not jumping the rails. I was really intrigued to know how it was that you transformed yourself into this productive and creative person.

Starting point is 00:43:42 But maybe it was always there. It was always there. My mom, even though she didn't practice what she preached, she was a great coach, at least to me. My younger brothers, either she felt sorry for them, or I always felt like it's just all because they were light skinned. They were pretty. They were, pretty babies. So it was always nice to carry them around. But with me, it was different. But I only had that and I only suffered through that until I was around 15 or 16, because then all of a sudden people started going, black is beautiful.

Starting point is 00:44:28 on Black is Beautiful, Leroy Jones wrote a song called Black and Beautiful, Black and Beautiful, Black and Beautiful. We were into it. It was like really cool. And the fact that my name was Nile, was that a great coincidence or what? Everybody was changing their names to African names in the Black Panthers because they had names like, I remember one guy who was part of the Panther 21. They announced his name in court and his name was Jack Bright. And we all were like going, Jack Bright? Who was the Panther 21? Sorry, no, I don't know that reference. You said Panther 21? Yeah, yeah. The Panther 21. It was 21 Black Panthers put on trial for the murder of a guy named Alex Rackley that the police had actually killed, an informant. As a matter of fact, there's a great movie called Judas and the Black Messiah.

Starting point is 00:45:17 It's so unbelievably accurate. But anyway, so when we went down to the Panther 21 trial and we started hearing their, as they call them, their slave names, we were cracking up. It was so hard for us to not laugh because their normal names were so American. But meanwhile, they chose the most hardcore, revolutionary sounding names. And my real name was Nile, right? So I didn't have to make up an African name. But when I was a child, I used to go by my middle name, which is Gregory. Niall was very, it was a very uncomfortable name to have until Black was Beautiful. And then I was Niall Rogers. And it was cool. Like, oh, it's such a beautiful name, brother Niall. Like the river. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:46:04 just like the river, sister. As I speak to you, I'm thinking of like everything you've achieved. And at the same time, something you write about in your book, which is the idea that whether the music industry allows black artists to kind of ascend to the level of white artists. I don't know if it's still the case or not, but you referenced the fact that there was a time when there were David Bowie and there might be Elton John or Mick Jagger and these iconic artists for whom it somehow felt like even the top black artists, they somehow weren't allowed to reach that iconic status. Even someone like Stevie Wonder wouldn't be earning at the level of his white equivalent. And I'm just wondering whether you think that's changed and to what extent you think that might still be the case? Yeah, I think that's still the case. I mean,

Starting point is 00:46:49 Stevie Wonder is very much alive and he played with us with Daft Punk and was great. And we were on tour with Cher for the last couple of years before the pandemic. And I used to always say to Cher that I was thankful for the opportunity to play with her because she was giving me a platform that I wouldn't have. I'm not so sure who would the black equivalent be. It would be Smokey Robinson. It would be Stevie Wonder. It would be Diana Ross. Stevie Wonder, it would be Diana Ross. Sometimes, yeah, Diana Ross gets very big shows. But for the most part, Diana's playing private shows and smaller shows. And I know, because I made the tracks for her. Do you think this is a heavy question, but you're extremely wealthy and deservedly so. You're an esteemed artist and iconic musician. So I'm curious to know whether you are still aware of experiencing racism.

Starting point is 00:47:49 Oh, my God, of course. That has nothing to do with my earnings and what's in the bank. I guess my point is simply whether, you know, being rich, being known, being Nile Rodgers, whether that insulates you from the experience of, a daily experience of discrimination? Not at all, not at all.

Starting point is 00:48:07 The very last time that I had the cops pull guns on me, I was in a convenience store up in Burlington, Vermont. What happened was I pull up to this filling station and I put my credit card in and it started filling up. It was a car that had an absurd gas tank. I mean, like I think it held either 24 or 28 gallons, something ridiculous. So it takes a long time to fill up.

Starting point is 00:48:36 I went inside, I was going in to buy a caffeinated drink to get me to my destination. So while I'm there just contemplating, should I get the most caffeine, which is Diet Mountain Dew, or should I get Dr. Pepper, which tastes the best? While I'm looking and contemplating and also wasting time for my huge gas tank to fill up, these two police officers burst in and they scream, get on the ground. So I actually turn and look behind me. I'm trying to look at who the hell they're talking to because I know who I am as a person.

Starting point is 00:49:15 I'm not a thief. I'm not a criminal. I'm not a danger to anyone. I certainly didn't threaten the woman when I walked in. I went directly to the refrigerated department. I certainly didn't threaten the woman when I walked in. I went directly to the refrigerated department. I went directly there. But as soon as she saw a black face, she hit the panic button. Just black, hit the panic button. So I knew better than to get on the ground because once I got on the ground, I was going to be a victim. So I stood my ground and I turned to them

Starting point is 00:49:42 and I just said to them, do you want me to drop the sodas? Because if I do that, you know, once I open them, they're going to splash everywhere. So by speaking very clearly and sounding pretty bright, I could feel everything, the temperature start to even out. And I just kept talking and I kept talking, you know, get on the ground. Wait a minute. Hold on a second, guys. Let's think this through, you know, and things like that. So things got back to normal and manageable. And I said to them, I said, wow, guys, what was that for? Why would you ask me to get on the ground? All I'm doing is buying Dr. Pepper. And they said, well, she thought that this may be an incident. I said, but what gave her that idea?

Starting point is 00:50:33 I didn't do anything. Yeah, it wound up being okay, but it could have gone either way. As soon as I looked in the wrong direction, they could have shot. Hi, me again, Louis Theroux. Just to remind you, you're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast. And now back to my conversation with Niall Rogers. Niall, I know you've got other things to get onto, so I could talk to you for another hour or 10 hours, but apparently you've got other things in your diary. Yeah, I've got to run, man. I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:51:19 Can I just say thank you for having the conversation with me and thank you for some amazing musical experiences over the years. And if I could just zoom in on one, when I was about eight years old at the school disco, hearing Le Freak for the first time and having an almost ecstatic experience, not knowing it was chic, not knowing who you were, just lost in the ecstasy of one of the most amazing soundscapes ever created. And to think that I'm actually talking to you now all these years later is a real thrill for me. I just wanted to register that with you and to let you know how much your music has meant to me over the years.

Starting point is 00:51:56 Thank you. I'm honestly humbled by that. I've heard that story told by more people. heard that story told by more people you wouldn't believe the cast of characters that said man i was driving a tractor and this thing came on and went one two oh freak out and i was like whoa what is that there's something in it man it's mystical magical almost supernatural just keep doing it thank you very man. You take care of yourself. Peace. We're going to hang on, aren't we, guys? Yeah. I can't turn off for my phone. Trying.

Starting point is 00:52:35 Keep us in your pocket all day and I can just have like a mini pocket documentary. Oh, he's gone. He has gone. There it goes. I wanted to just hang in his phone and just see what was going to happen next. And so with that, Niall was pulled away. It was such a shame not to have longer with Niall. I mean, it was a great conversation, but I could have gone easily for another couple of hours. I mean,

Starting point is 00:53:00 I didn't even touch on Bowie, the Durannys. Having read his book and dived deep into his catalogue, he was kind of a hippie growing up, among other things, meeting Timothy Leary, getting turned on to LSD, sort of straddled two worlds, the world of the long-haired freaks of hippiedom and then the sort of tougher family in the black community. Just to clear a couple of things up, well, Judas Priest, I confidently said that Rob Halford, that his leathers was like a queer kink thing.

Starting point is 00:53:33 Rob Halford's commented on this. He said this theory was bollocks. You have to look at it with some humour because, okay, I won't do the Brahmi accent. Basically, Rob Halford said, well, no, it's nothing to do with the S&M world or other subcultures in the gay world. It has nothing to do with it. It just looks great. He says it's just a strong visual statement that matches perfectly with the sound of the music. Look, I'm not going to weigh into that, having just weighed into it.

Starting point is 00:53:58 The book Le Freak, Niall's autobiography, is worth a read. And like I said to him, it's got this extraordinary litany of punishing setbacks and just horrendous things that happened to him and his family. The levels of deprivation and addiction that they all experienced, but nevertheless, it's like unfailingly sort of bright and cheery. The material that would make up some kind of languishing, self-flagellating, vengeful and resentful, self-pitying chronicle is something uplifting and positive. Very much like the man himself. Some of the songs he's written and composed, you'll know many of these. You hardly need telling. Obviously, Freak Out, it's called Le Freak, but it's known as Freak Out.

Starting point is 00:54:43 Obviously, Freak Out, it's called Le Freak, but it's known as Freak Out. Get Lucky, much more recently, 891 million streams on Spotify, I'm told, with Pharrell and Daft Punk, and that's got his inimitable chucking guitar sound is on there. He produced Like a Virgin. He probably should, it's alleged, I think, by Niall, that he should have got a co-writing credit on Let's Dance by David Bowie, which he produced and I think changed the chords to ever so slightly. Well, ever so slightly. I mean, he changed them. Why am I being so careful? David Bowie is not available for comment. So we'll put some of those links in the show notes. Also,

Starting point is 00:55:25 maybe we'll put Am I Black Enough For You by Billy Paul. The conversation made me think about that, and I went back and listened to that track, which was a big one for me growing up because it was sampled by Schoolie D on his track, Am I Black Enough For You, and it deserves a wider audience. Leroy Jones, who he references, and a, Black and Beautiful. Leroy Jones, also known as Amiri Baraka, a writer and poet who died in 2014. I've linked to the track, Black and Beautiful. I'd never heard it before, actually. I should also say that in preparing for the interview with Niall, it's one of those things where, you know, if someone teaches you a new word

Starting point is 00:56:01 and then you end up hearing it in conversation. And knowing that I was going to interview Niall, I kept noticing that his music just was played all the time. And, okay, this is a name drop, but a few days before I interviewed him, I went to a party at Mick Jagger's house by a bizarre series of kind of events. And at the party, Chic was played, not exactly on a loop, but was played quite a bit. And it's just sort of just part of the soundtrack of our lives, isn't it? And the brief conversation I had with Mick, we can put this in or not, I didn't know what to talk to him about. And so I said, oh, I'm interviewing Niall Rogers in a couple of days.

Starting point is 00:56:38 And I know he worked with you on She's the Boss. I think it's that one. And he went, oh, Niall. Yeah, he was on the phone. He was on the phone a lot. That's not even an anecdote. He's's the Boss. I think it's that one. And he went, oh, Niall. Yeah, he was on the phone. He was on the phone a lot. That's not even an anecdote. He's on the phone. Yeah, man.

Starting point is 00:56:51 I wanted to work that into the conversation with Niall, but then I thought it sounded a bit like a diss, you know, because he might have been in his drug-taking days, spending too long trying to get drugs and not long enough on tweaking the reverb on mixed vocals. All right, credits. This podcast was produced by Paul Kobrak and Mahn Al-Yazari. The production manager was Francesca Bassett and the executive producer is Aaron Fellows. The music in this series is by Miguel de Oliveira. This is a Mindhouse production exclusively for Spotify.

Starting point is 00:57:34 Oh yeah, man, Niall, he's a cool cat, but when he produced my album, he was on the phone the whole time. I can only do three accents, and one's Michael Jackson, one's Jimmymy saville so there's only one left

The Louis Theroux Podcast - S1 EP7: Nile Rodgers on his turbulent upbringing and the stories behind his biggest hits

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