Nile Rodgers: ‘A lot of young kids think I’m Daft Punk and the robots are props’

Nile Rodgers co-hosted a special show on Apple Music’s Beats 1 yesterday (Monday, 25th June) with Matt Wilkinson and he had plenty of stories to tell.

The show coincided closely with the unveiling of Chic’s new single 'Till the World Falls', lifted from the band’s first new album in 25 years set to be released in September.

During the show, Rodgers told Wilkinson about his first encounter with Daft Punk in the lead up to their collaborations on ‘Random Access Memories’.

We couldn’t get together in France but they just happened to be in New York, so they called me up,” he said. “I was at my apartment and they said ‘Man we’d love to come over and play some demos for you, we have an idea for a new album’ and they came to my apartment and I have absolutely no independent memory of whether they even played the demos or not, all they did was tell me the concept. They said ‘We want to make the album as if the internet never existed’ and I was going ‘Dude, I’m down.’”

 He also mentioned that the young new wave of fans of the French robots often think that it is him and Pharrell Williams are Daft Punk, presumably owing to the fact that they both appear in the video for ‘Get Lucky’.

“It’s funny because a lot of young kids who don't know Daft Punk prior to that think that Pharrell and I are Daft Punk and that the robots are like some props!”

Throughout the show, Rodgers also discussed George Michael, describing the sadness he felt when he learned he had died on Christmas day 2016 and explaining that they had been planning on working on an album together.

He also described Madonna as “the hardest working person I have ever met in my life” and recent collaborator Vic Mensa as “the bomb”. Back in May, Rodgers spoke candidly about his working relationship Avicii, who tragically passed away the month before. He described him as one of his "favourite people in the world to work with”.

You can listen the excerpt about Daft Punk below or to the full interview here.