CHIC: GOOD TIMES AND RISQUÉ

In this extract from his book, Everybody Dance, Chic And The Politics Of Disco, Daryl Easlea looks at the group’s crowning glory, the 1979 US No. 1 Good Times and its parent album, Risqué.

C hic were formed in New York in 1977. To assume they were simply a product of the disco boom would undermine the years of hard work founders Bernard Edwards, Tony Thompson and Nile Rodgers had done slogging around the New York clubs backing fading dance divas and playing in a variety of bar room bands, taking in styles from jazz to heavy rock to soul. After hitting big in 1978, by the start of 1979 they had, with vocalists Luci Martin and Alfa Anderson, released the single Le Freak, which was to become the biggest-selling single in the history of Atlantic. Propelled by the glamour of Studio 54 and the world-wide calling card for disco, Saturday Night Fever, everybody was getting down to Chic’s urbane, sophisticated groove.

However, there appeared to be some dark clouds scudding across the blue sky: in early July 1979, the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement in America reached its apogee when, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, hundreds of baseball fans, spurred on by ‘shock jock’ Steve Dahl, set fire to disco records. It seemed that the movement was reaching its sell-by date... If Chic were going to ride out all the disco backlash pessimism, it would have to be with something very, very special. They were to have one last, huge, commercial and artistic hurrah with the album they had been working on …

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