Nile Rodgers & Chic - BBC In Concert, Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Britain, 6-29-2025

Here's another album from the 2025 Glastonbury Festival. This time, it's Nile Rodgers and Chic.

I already posted two albums in my Covered series highlighting the songwriting of Nile Rodgers (and his now-deceased songwriting partner Bernard Edwards). So you can see from that that I already admire Rodgers' musical talent. But most of all, this is a fun listen that makes you want to get up and dance.

It's kind of redundant to bill this as "Nile Rodgers and Chic," since Rodgers was the main musical force in the band Chic ever since the 1970s. Probably this is credited that way for greater name recognition. Most of the songs are written or co-written by Rodgers, though a few, like the ones made famous by David Bowie and Madonna, were technically only produced by him (though I would strongly suspect he did enough to share songwriting credits on those too). 

As usual for this festival, the music is unreleased, and the sound quality is excellent. Also as usual, I converted a video file to audio format, and broke the music into mp3s. 

This album is one hour long.

01 Le Freak (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
02 Everybody Dance (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
03 Dance, Dance, Dance [Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah] (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
04 I Want Your Love (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
05 talk (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
06 I'm Coming Out (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
07 Upside Down (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
08 He's the Greatest Dancer (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
09 We Are Family (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
10 talk (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
11 We Are Family [Reprise] (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
12 Like a Virgin (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
13 Material Girl (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
14 Modern Love (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
15 talk (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
16 Get Lucky (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
17 Lose Yourself to Dance (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
18 Thinking of You (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
19 Let's Dance (Nile Rodgers & Chic)
20 Good Times - Rapper's Delight - Good Times (Nile Rodgers & Chic)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/PzHz5PLw 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/pcsTrb5rme02hvZ/file

The cover photo is from this exact concert. 

Covered: Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards, Volume 2: 1980-2015

Here's the second and final Covered album highlighting the talents of the songwriting duo Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards.

As usual, the songs here are in rough chronological order. At the beginning time period for this album, 1980, Rodgers and Edwards were in crisis. They'd had hit after hit in the late 1970s. In fact, the first song here, "Upside Down" by Diana Ross, would top the singles chart in the U.S. and many other countries in 1980. However, pretty much all their hits songs were in this disco genre, and the popularity of disco was crashing hard in 1980. "Upside Down" was one of the last gasps. They basically broke up their wildly successful band Chic, keeping it together only because they owed more records to their record company. Rodgers in particular was depressed by the changing musical trends and developed a bad drug habit.

Disco was so reviled due to overexposure that people actually organized the mass destruction of disco records. Rodgers and Edwards responded by focusing most of their energies on writing and producing songs for other musical acts. Unfortunately, I can only include songs in which they're writers or co-writers, not songs they only produced. But Rodgers in particular became one of the hottest producers in the music business in the 1980s. For instance, he helped produce David Bowie's smash album "Let's Dance" in 1983 and Madonna's smash album "Like a Virgin" in 1984. He also produced albums for Duran Duran, Sheena Easton, Jeff Beck, Thompson Twins, Mick Jagger, the B-52's, Grace Jones, Al Jarreau, Steve Winwood, Cyndi Lauper, and many more. In the 1990s, he produced for Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, David Lee Roth, the Stray Cats, and again many more.

Note that I've included the song "Let's Dance" by David Bowie despite the fact that the song is solely credited to Bowie. That's because in my opinion Rodgers, who produced the song, totally deserved cowriting credit. Believe it or not, when Bowie first presented the song to Rodgers, it was a folk song, with just Bowie's voice and an acoustic guitar! Rodgers utterly transformed the song with a new arrangement, changing the chords, the key, the rhythm, and just about everything else but the basic melody and words. It went on to be a Number One hit in the U.S., Britain, and many other countries. Bowie even later cited Rodgers as the main reason for the song's massive success. (Note that a demo of the song was later released, but this is already after Rodgers had transformed the song, not the original acoustic demo.) 

I would suspect that Rodgers often helped co-write songs as part of his production duties without getting official songwriting credit. One example where he did get credit was "Tick Tock" by Stevie Ray Vaughan (as part of the Vaughan Brothers), which he co-wrote with Vaughan. 

The songwriting success for this duo slowed down as they got older, as is common. That was magnified by the fact that they focused much more on producing. Unfortunately, the Rodgers and Edwards partnership was cut short in 1996 when Edwards died of pneumonia while on tour with Chic in Japan. As I write this in May 2025, Rodgers is still alive and is 72 years old.

By the 2010s, one would have thought that the biggest songwriting success for Rodgers was behind him. But in 2013, he collaborated on four songs with Daft Punk, and of them was "Get Lucky." This would go on to be one of the biggest hits of the decade. It reached Number One in many countries, though it stalled out at Number Two in the U.S. for several weeks. With this new popularity, Rodgers' 1970s band Chic released their first single in 23 years with "I'll Be There" in 2015, and it went to the top of the dance singles chart (though it didn't make the pop singles chart).

Note that nearly all the songs presented here are the original hit versions. But one exception is "Thinking of You" by Paul Weller. He had a Top 20 hit with it in Britain in 2004. However, it first was a hit for Sister Sledge back in 1984. The other exception is "Everybody Dance." I included a hit version by Evolution in 1993. But it was first a hit for Chic back in 1977.

This album is 47 minutes long.

01 Upside Down (Diana Ross)
02 Backfired (Debbie Harry)
03 Why (Carly Simon)
04 The Jam Was Moving (Debbie Harry)
05 Let's Dance (David Bowie)
06 Kissing with Confidence (Will Powers with Carly Simon)
07 Tick Tock (Vaughan Brothers)
08 Everybody Dance (Evolution)
09 Thinking of You (Paul Weller)
10 Get Lucky (Daft Punk)
11 I'll Be There (Chic)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ZPKXNq3N

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/k5MpBQsKfqqwW8O/file

For the cover image, I found black and white photos of Rodgers and Edwards in 1981. I combined them and moved their bodies close together. Then I colorized them using the Kolorize and Photoshop programs.

Covered: Nile Rodgers & Bernard Edwards, Volume 1: 1977-1980

With my Covered series, highlighting talented songwriters who often didn't find fame as performance artists, I still have lots of albums I want to post that go back to the 1950s and 60s. But just for fun, I want to go forward to the late 1970s and after to showcase a songwriting duo who are all about getting you to dance: Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. I have two albums of their songs. Both of them would make a great mix tape to play at a dance party, as they're filled with some of the biggest and best dance songs of all time.

Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards both grew up in New York City. They met in 1970 as touring musicians in 1970 when their music careers were just getting started. They formed a band in 1972 which would eventually evolve in Chic. Rodgers played guitar (in 2023, Rolling Stone Magazine would list him as the seventh greatest guitarist of all time for his massive influence) and Edwards played bass. They finally got their first big break in 1977 with the song "Dance, Dance, Dance," which they wrote for their band Chic. For the next few years, they repeatedly rode the disco wave to the top of the charts. "Le Freak" by Chic in particular was massive, selling seven million worldwide and becoming one of about 20 best selling singles of all time up until that point. "Good Times" also deserves special note. In addition to hitting Number One in the U.S. singles chart, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it number 68 in their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

"Good Times" also turned out to be one of the most sampled songs of all time. That's why "Rapper's Delight" is included here as well. Normally, I don't include songs in any Covered series albums if they are basically just prominent samples with rap lyrics on top. But I'm making a special exception for "Rapper's Delight." It's one of the first and most important rap songs of all time. It introduced the term "hip hop" to the world in its lyrics. Rolling Stone Magazine also put it in the last of the 500 greatest songs of all time. It also is so heavily based on "Good Times" that Rodgers sued for a copyright violation as soon as he heard the song. He and Edwards were quickly added as songwriters and received royalties.

But while Rodgers and Edwards wrote Chic's hits and also produced them, they didn't stop there. They also began writing and producing songs for others, and had yet more massive hit singles doing so. During this time period, they especially had success writing songs for Sister Sledge and Diana Ross.

Here are the Wikipedia entries for Rodgers:

Nile Rodgers - Wikipedia 

and Edwards:

Bernard Edwards - Wikipedia 

I don't think Rodgers and Edwards get the credit they deserve, probably because dance music isn't highly valued by music critics. But I'd argue they've had far greater musical impact on the world than most famous "serious" singer-songwriters. Keep in mind this is only Volume 1. Volume 2 will follow shortly.  

This album is 43 minutes long.

01 Dance, Dance, Dance [Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah] (Chic)
02 I Want Your Love (Chic)
03 Lost in Music (Sister Sledge)
04 Le Freak (Chic)
05 Rapper's Delight (Sugarhill Gang)
06 He's the Greatest Dancer (Sister Sledge)
07 Spacer (Sheila & B. Devotion)
08 Good Times (Chic)
09 I'm Coming Out (Diana Ross)
10 We Are Family (Sister Sledge)
11 My Old Piano (Diana Ross)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/uAdbwKHa

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/38L4D6zbNKGVsCA/file

I couldn't find a good photo of Rodgers and Edwards together. However, I found a photo of the entire Chic band posing for a French TV show in 1979. I removed the other three band members and moved Rodgers and Edwards together. Edwards is the one wearing glasses.

Various Artists - New York Children’s Health Project Benefit, Madison Square Garden, New York City, 12-13-1987

The first thing I want to make clear is that, while this is a star-studded benefit concert, it is also in large part a Paul Simon concert. Out of the 32 songs here, Simon sang lead on 11 of them, and backing vocals on another three. That's because Simon was the host and the prime mover behind the cause for this benefit.

I did a little research on how this concert came to be, and I think it makes for an interesting story. Apparently, when Simon was working on his studio album "Graceland" in 1985 or 1986, he was taking going to his recording studio in the heart of New York City most every day. Each morning, he would make eye contact with a homeless girl begging on a street corner. But eventually, after months, she didn't show up for a while. He asked around, and found out that she had died. Being homeless, she had no access to health care. Simon decided he wanted to do something to help.

Around this time, homelessness had greatly risen in New York City. Plus, many thousands of families were packed into squalid welfare hotels. Simon connected with Dr. Irwin Ledlener. a pediatrician, who was already working on the problem. 

Ledlener later recalled, "We went on a tour of some of the not-so-hot spots in the city. We went to the welfare hotels, to boarder-baby facilities where they had these infants whose mothers were crack
cocaine addicts, and we went to some of the infant H.I.V. programs. It was a hell of a day, just one thing after another." Simon and Ledlener decided that it was obvious many homeless children weren't getting any health care, so they decided to make that their focus. 

Ledlener told him it would cost about $90,000 for a mobile van to bring health care to where the homeless where. Simon paid for that out of his own pocket, and the van began operating in the fall of 1987. But it soon became clear that just one van wasn't enough. Plus, there were upkeep costs, and the need for a charity group (called the "Children's Health Fund") to keep medical records on the homeless kids no matter how often they moved. So Simon put this concert together. It raised about half a million dollars, which was doubled by a contribution from his record company. 

More vans were bought. The results were impressive, so the program kept expanding. By 2005, the charity had expanded far beyond New York City. They had 20 vans in 14 states. Simon followed up with two more benefit concerts (in 1993 and 2012) to help keep the charity funded. All in all, it seems like one of the best results of a benefit concert that I've heard of, although it's a shame the government wasn't performing this help already.

Anyway, getting to the details of this concert, keep in mind that Simon's most recent project was his wildly successful "Graceland" album, released in 1986. That sold 16 million copies worldwide. So perhaps it's not too surprising that Simon played eight songs from that album, while he still had support from the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo and other South African musicians that had gone on tour with him to support the album. I checked, and this was essentially the very last concert of Simon's Graceland tour.

Other than that, there were short sets by Lou Reed, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Dion, Laurie Anderson, Bruce Springsteen, Ruben Blades, James Taylor, Nile Rodgers and Chaka Khan. Apparently, Billy Joel wasn't scheduled to take part, but since he dropped in at the last minute, he did an impromptu song. I believe Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five played a song, but it got cut from the bootleg I found. I think you can hear him for about ten seconds at the end of the Nile Rodgers medley, introducing Chaka Khan. Paul Shaffer & the World's Most Dangerous Band backed most of the musical stars who didn't bring their own bands, like Bruce Springsteen. Debbie Harry and Grace Jones were there, but they only introduced Lou Reed and then helped sing backing vocals to "Walk on the Wild Side."

One special moment was that Dion was backed by some major star power on his song "A Teenager in Love." His backing vocalists were Ruben Blades, James Taylor, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed! You can see how that looked from the album cover. That's a sign of how much of a musical influence he was on all of them, since he came from an earlier generation.

There were some celebrity appearances as well. Springsteen was introduced by New York baseball stars Ron Darling and Don Mattingly. Whoopi Goldberg introduced Nile Rodgers. She spoke for longer, but I cut out some of it because she was just stalling for time while the band got ready, as she admitted, and it showed. Comedian Bill Cosby gave a speech prior to introducing Ruben Blades. But I cut out all of it except for a few words introducing Blades, since I can't stand to hear him due to his later revealed history of rape. Lorne Michaels, Kevin Nealon and Chevy Chase introduced James Taylor.

As far as I know, everything here remains unreleased. But the bootleg I found has soundboard quality.

This album is three hours and 13 minutes long.

01 The Boy in the Bubble (Paul Simon)
02 Gumboots (Paul Simon)
03 Whispering Bells (Paul Simon)
04 talk (Paul Simon)
05 Crazy Love, Vol. II (Paul Simon)
06 I Know What I Know (Paul Simon)
07 talk (Paul Shaffer & the World's Most Dangerous Band)
08 Treat Her Right (Paul Shaffer & the World's Most Dangerous Band)
09 talk (Paul Shaffer, Debbie Harry & Grace Jones)
10 Tell It to Your Heart (Lou Reed)
11 talk (Lou Reed)
12 New Sensations (Lou Reed)
13 Walk on the Wild Side (Lou Reed with Debbie Harry & Grace Jones)
14 talk (Lou Reed)
15 The Wanderer (Dion)
16 Runaround Sue (Dion)
17 talk (Dion)
18 A Teenager in Love (Dion with Simon, Springsteen, Joel, Reed, Taylor & Blades)
19 talk (Paul Simon)
20 Yinhle Lentombi (Ladysmith Black Mambazo)
21 Homeless (Paul Simon & Ladysmith Black Mambazo)
22 Graceland (Paul Simon)
23 talk (Paul Simon)
24 You Can Call Me Al (Paul Simon)
25 talk (Paul Simon)
26 talk (Paul Simon)
27 Babydoll (Laurie Anderson)
28 Let x = x (Laurie Anderson)
29 talk (Paul Simon, Ron Darling & Don Mattingly)
30 talk (Bruce Springsteen)
31 Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen)
32 talk (Bruce Springsteen)
33 Glory Days (Bruce Springsteen with Paul Simon & Billy Joel)
34 Cuentas del Alma (Ruben Blades)
35 talk (Ruben Blades)
36 Muevete (Ruben Blades)
37 talk (Paul Simon, Lorne Michaels, Kevin Nealon & Chevy Chase)
38 Looking for Love on Broadway (James Taylor)
39 Carolina in My Mind (James Taylor)
40 That Lonesome Road (James Taylor)
41 talk (Whoopi Goldberg)
42 talk (Nile Rodgers)
43 We Are Family - Le Freak - Good Times (Nile Rodgers)
44 I Feel for You (Chaka Khan with Nile Rodgers)
45 talk (Paul Simon)
46 New York State of Mind (Billy Joel)
47 Still Crazy After All These Years (Paul Simon)
48 Late in the Evening (Paul Simon)
49 Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes - Drums (Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo)
50 talk (Everybody)
51 Rock and Roll Music (Bruce Springsteen & Everybody)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/jKCnMBjU

alternate

https://bestfile.io/en/uLq5HEnWr1SO0XO/file

The cover photo was taken at this exact concert. It shows the moment Dion was backed by an impressive bunch of stars on the song "A Teenager in Love." From left to right, that's Ruben Blades, James Taylor, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, and Dion. Dion had been further over to the left by about ten feet. In fact, I took him from a different photo taken in the same sequence. Then I used Photoshop to move him close to Springsteen.