13. ChicRisqué
I almost chose [Sister Sledge’s] We Are Family because the good songs on that might be a little better. But ‘Good Times’ is so quintessential on this record.
I bought this, I bought Isaac Hayes records, I bought Funkadelic’s One Nation Under A Groove, and I really tried to learn to start playing guitar in a different way that wasn’t just punk-based. I started listening to Steve Cropper. Have you heard Daft Punk with Nile Rodgers? It’s wonderful. I’m buying the Daft Punk album.
They had a couple of templates it seems like they had worked on. It seems like there’s a good version of all their template songs on this record. They’re minimalists. They’re not about virtuosity. They’re about taking simple ideas and arranging them in a way that they keep your attention while still being groovy, which is really quite difficult.
I think Nile is an absolute genius. He plays the guitar in [Betty Wright’s] ‘Clean Up Woman’. That was his first gig. He’s a bonafide genius guitar player. Daft Punk are unashamedly paying homage to Chic. ‘Good Times’ is the sample. The sleeper is ‘My Feet Keep Dancing’, a kind of piano-based song which is really groovy, so it’s an amazing record.
I tried to pick records that I bought at certain times that meant a lot to me. I think I might have bought this before Hot Buttered Soul, around the time I was buying the Stax compilation records. I discovered Hot Buttered Soul later, when I was about 17. We were bored with punk rock and looking for something else. My parents had moved to Glasgow and I was living in a house on my own which is a little strange at that age. There was a record store on the street and I could just go in and say, “can I listen to this, can I listen to that?” There was no internet so the only way to listen to stuff was asking them to play it.
