The Chic Organization Vol. 1: Savoir Faire

Given the personally enviable task of organising five hours of the best music that the disco era had to offer for a friend's party on Saturday night – to celebrate his 50 years on Planet Earth and at least 30 years of committed dancing – it got me thinking about any albums from those hedonistic times that have lasted the ensuing course.

I couldn't think of any. The nearest I came to pinpointing something specific were the four volumes of Phillybusters, but they're really just collections of singles and lack any kind of long-playing identity. And I suppose that's exactly it: the best disco music was cut as singles rather than albums. I used to spend my time in unlikely places like newsagents, in and around Brighton, sifting through boxes of ex-jukebox 7" singles, or hunting for 12" singles in street markets and record shops.

In any case, I hardly ever listen to disco music now – great as some of it is – unless it's at parties. Except for Chic. Numerically speaking, in terms of both formats of singles, Chic productions far outweigh any other band or brand in my collection. So I took an executive decision: this time I'd cheat.

I never saw the need to own any of the first three albums – Chic, C'est Chic and Risqué – because I had all the singles (along with their excellent B sides). The closest I ever came to owning a Chic album was a cut-out of Norma Jean's eponymous release for Todd Rundgren's Bearsville label. For some reason, I never kept it. Maybe, at a time when I was growing up and listening to more jazz, I got caught up in the 'Disco Sucks' backlash (not for any subconscious homophobic reasons) and felt that I shouldn't be seen dead with a disc by the band's principal female vocalist. Older now and wiser, I realise that the musicians included the likes of ex-Dizzy Gillespie stalwart Jon Faddis on trumpeter and Fania All Stars trombonist Barry Rogers, and I listen to the brilliant 'Saturday' and 'Sorcerer' with a certain regret.

During one summer sale at Cultura, a multi-media emporium on the edge of Brive that specialises in brilliant sales twice a year, I stifled a yell as I beheld a four-disc boxed set of the band's finest for the ludicrous price of €3,99. That's a little less than a euro per disc for everything you would ever want from Chic, Sister Sledge, Norma Jean, Sheila & B. Devotion, Carly Simon, Diana Ross and err... Johnny Mathis.

Now be honest. Who here knew that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards had tried to turn Johnny Mathis into a purveyor of funky things to play with? Presumably he (or his management) had hoped that the trendiest production team in town would revive the crooner's flagging career in the same way that they had already done for Diana Ross. The few tracks in question were never released and only go to prove that the Rodgers/Edwards partnership was not omnipotent.

Nevertheless, what a partnership it was while it lasted. These days, Nile Rodgers appears on almost every relevant music documentary as a bandana-clad talking head. The son of beatnik bohemian jazzniks from Manhattan, his wit, bonhomie and breadth of music appreciation are deeply ingratiating. But there's always a sense of Wise without Morecambe or one Coen brother without the other: a man shorn of his partner – in 1996, from a heart attack in his hotel room, during Chic's sell-out tour of Japan.

It was Bernard who named the band Chic. Apparently, he and Nile shared a love of Josephine Baker, who of course loved her adopted country of France. The boys must have loved it, too, even to contemplate an association with Sheila, a former French child-star with seemingly little discernible talent. Like the unlikely associations with Sister Sledge, formerly a rather humdrum family act without a unique selling proposition, and with Diana Ross, whose Motown glory days were fading fast, it worked. Maybe if I'd chosen 'Spacer' instead of 'Everybody Dance' or 'He's the Greatest Dancer', the French contingent at the party on Saturday might have joined the dance.

Each of these three killer tracks shows the brilliance of their production concept: of focusing on what they called the 'breakdown', or the reduction of a song to its basic elements. Ostensibly, it's characterised by Nile Rodgers' unerring ability to come up with a guitar hook that sucks you in and leaves you witless. How can you consciously override your feet, for example, when faced with an introduction like that to Sister Sledge's 'Greatest Dancer'? Im-possible!

Re-listening to my 33⅓ rpm 12" single version of 'Everybody Dance', though, really emphasises the irresistible propulsion generated by Bernard Edwards' nimble bass lines. I guess that's what a true partnership is all about. But it wasn't just the two of them. As Nile Rodgers writes in his notes to this boxed set, 'the CHIC Organization is an inclusive club'. Musicians of the quality of Faddis and Rogers and drummer Tony Thompson, backing vocalists of the calibre of Norma Jean and Luther Vandross, were 'all in [their] big CHIC tent'.

Given the instantly recognisable stamp of their collective sound, you might feel that four CDs is maybe two too many. But there are lesser known gems to discover and re-discover throughout: the almost throwaway Chic stuff like 'Funny Bone' and 'Savoir Faire', Norma Jean's unreleased but splendid 'Hold Me Lonely Boy' and Carly Simon's 'Why', which would be sampled and re-invented by A Tribe Called Quest as the sublime 'Bonita Applebaum' ('you got it goin' owe-onn...').

Most disco classics were one-offs and a single is quite sufficient. Groups like Slave and Kool & the Gang put together pretty impressive bodies of work that certainly warrant bargain-priced retrospectives, and Maurice White got somewhere close to creating a corporate sound with Earth Wind & Fire and the Emotions, but no one blended jazz, funk and disco like Nile and Bernard managed. Thus my feet still refuse to keep still every time I hear that crazy yowsah yowsah yowsah call to the floor and so I'll probably be listening still to this brilliant compilation way into my dotage, even if I have to use a stick to help me make the moves.

In The Land of Grey and Pink

Since, last time, we were on the subject of the Canterbury scene, let us now praise those stout-hearted music-men of Kent, Caravan. A friend picked up on my comment about Mike Ratledge and the reedy organ sound in which he and Dave Sinclair of Caravan specialised. He remembered a friend of his recounting with acute embarrassment how his father took him to a Caravan gig with the express intention of asking Dave Sinclair if he would kindly give his son piano lessons.

Apparently, Sinclair agreed, but didn't follow-up the wayward father's initiative. Probably the best thing for all concerned. The curious thing is that Dave Sinclair was known for his organ- and not for his piano-playing. When he left the band, his replacement, (not the) Steve Miller, played a lot more electric piano and thereby changed the entire character of the band.

In The Land of Grey and Pink is the final magnificent flourish of the original Caravan – Pye Hastings on vocals and guitar, Richard Sinclair on vocals and bass, Dave Sinclair on organ and Richard Coughlan on drums – the band that evolved with Soft Machine from the semi-legendary Wilde Flowers, a group that also included those hippy perennials, Daevid Allen and Kevin Ayers.

I bought the album in a record shop in Botanic Avenue, Belfast, a kind of arterial front line that separated the more genteel streets around the university and the botanic gardens from the uncharted seedier district that led down to the Ormeau baths. An area which our middle-class gang of party-seekers would penetrate at times to get drunk on Dick Turpin wine at a hostelry of ill-repute that sold 'Double Dicks' for very little money.

In fact, I didn't really buy the album. Being the oldest sibling, I somehow persuaded my younger brother to spend £2.20 of his pocket money on it, probably to keep me quiet. When he copied it by aid of microphone onto an early cassette tape and laboriously reproduced by hand the phantasmagorical cover in miniature, the record kind of seceded into my embryonic collection. I hope I did the decent thing and transferred some money from my pocket-money account into his by way of the ledger that our father placed in my safe-keeping. An arcane system reliant on trust and honesty.

Sadly, my brother was considered too young to go and see Caravan on the memorable evening when they appeared at Queen's University. I went with my sister. While we were queuing up the stairs that led to the auditorium, some Kentish characters in search of a dressing room passed us, looking lost and bewildered. I may be mistaken – for we all wore those little rose-tinted gold-framed glasses in those days – but I'm sure that at least two of them wore Afghan coats.

Sadly, too, it wasn't the band that made Grey and Pink, but the band that recorded For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night: a band that featured far too much viola for my taste. A splendid time was had by one and all, of course, and it was thrilling to see much-loved musicians in the flesh – and I remember thinking how disproportionately tall Pye Hastings seemed for a man with such a high singing voice – but Dave Sinclair was sorely missed.

The great thing about Caravan was that it wasn't a guitar-centric band. A little like Traffic in that respect. Like Traffic, too, the band spent a long time wood-shedding in that fabled cottage in the country. In Caravan's case, though, it was more a case of living under canvas and rehearsing in a church hall. They practised solidly for a year or so, which helps to explain why the band – on this album in particular – was so musically proficient.

Without a virtuoso guitar player, Dave Sinclair took the lead. Grey and Pink was both his swansong and his finest hour. Specifically, the 22 minutes and 40 seconds of 'Nine Feet Underground', the suite that constitutes side two. Everyone was at it in those days, of course. Everyone from Genesis to Yes by way of Egg, Jethro Tull and the Pretty Things, was busy writing and recording extended suites, as if to validate 'prog rock' and give it neo-classical gravitas.

Listening to it again for the first time in more than a decade confirms that it's possibly the only surviving suite of its kind without even a hint of pomposity. Like a good film noir, it gets straight to the plot-point in the opening scenes. 'Nigel Blows a Tune' is just that: an extended blowing session featuring Dave Sinclair's organ and a fine tenor solo from Pye's occasional jazzy older brother, Jimmy Hastings, which recalls Brian Auger and the Trinity at their very best. It segues seamlessly through 'movements' with whimsical titles like 'Dance of the Seven Paper Hankies' and 'Hold Grandad by the Nose' towards a final freak out built around a riff pinched from Cream's 'Sunshine of Your Love'. It ends as it beginneth – organ to the fore.

Side one features four, more recognisable songs. 'Love to Love You' is the kind of brief melodious ditty that Caravan would often use to break up the longer pieces. It is the only track that features Pye Hastings' alto vocals. The other three are all built around the lugubrious tenor voice of Richard Sinclair: 'Golf Girl' is a kind of love story on a golf course involving a golf girl who sells cups of tea. 'Winter Wine' is an ethereal narrative that allows Sinclair space to stretch out in an organ solo that includes a key change worthy of Marvin's What's Going On. 'Life's too short to be sad,' brother Richard sings poignantly, 'Wishing things you'll never have...'

The title track is a piece of cod Edward Lear processed for the age of mind expansion. 'So we sailed away for just one day to a land where the punk weed grows/ Won't need any money, just fingers and your toes/ And when it's dark, a boat will park in a land of warm and green/ We'll pick our fill of punk weed and smoke it till we bleed...' You can guess what sustained those boys when they were living in the tents of Kent.

Yes, it's whimsy, Jim, but not as we know it... In the Land of Grey and Pink is seriously good. One might even classify it as a lost masterpiece. Guided by the critical choice of the music press, Brive library certainly thought the re-issued CD was important enough to buy for their extraordinary collection. I don't know what became of Dave Sinclair, but I rate his organ playing right up there with the Jimmy McGriffs and Jimmy Smiths of this world. What self-respecting and enlightened father wouldn't wish him to teach his son piano?

(Soft Machine) Third

Having somehow eluded me for years, I finally picked up Robert Wyatt's first major solo album the other day. Going for a song in Cash Express. His sleeve notes make poignant reading.

He conceived the strange, angular songs for Rock Bottom while camped out on a tiny island in the Venice Lagoon. His wife-to-be, the artist Alfreda 'Alfie' Benge, was working on a film at the time, which just happened to be Nic Roeg's chilling Don't Look Now. Wyatt had recently left Soft Machine and was probably dreaming up material for his subsequent band, Matching Mole.

The theme of the film, according to its director, was that of we are not prepared – for life's unforeseen disasters. The following summer, on the night before Wyatt's next band was due to have its first rehearsal, he fell from a fourth-floor window and broke his spine. After three months spent lying on his back in hospital and after a long period of readjustment and rehabilitation, Rock Bottom came out in July 1974, and, as Wyatt puts it in his customary throw-away deadpan style, 'I married Alfie, and we lived happily ever after'. In Louth, Lincolnshire, of all places.

Musically, Wyatt became one of the UK's great unclassifiable eccentrics, concentrating on keyboards and those singular piping vocals that distinguish all his quirky songs. He wouldn't play the drums again, which was a loss. Listening again to the Soft Machine's double third album, packaged in mock plain brown paper and imaginatively entitled Third, it's clear that he was a pretty good drummer.

I bought the album in the year it came out, 1970, and remember how desperate I was to catch their performance that August at the Proms. In the end, for some reason, I negotiated watching it at the house full of Catholic girls, directly across the back alleyway (or entry as it was known in Belfast), that separated our two back gardens. I remember watching Robert Wyatt thrashing around on the drums, bare-chested if I remember correctly as befitted his anti-establishmentarian take on life, whiplashed by his flailing lank blonde hair.

On Third, the four principal members of the group are augmented to a core of eight for an album consisting of four extended compositions. Side 1 is Hugh Hopper's 'Facelift'. Given the studious-looking bass player's avant-garde jazz proclivities, it's not surprising that this live track starts with a long reverberating organ note followed by a terrible caterwauling. It has its moments, but doesn't really get much better. Its principal virtue really is to underline the luxury of choice. With one track per side, you didn't even need to lift the arm and then try to drop it with deadly accuracy on the single groove between tracks. You can just skip it altogether. It's the one musical blemish on an album that has otherwise passed the test of time with flying colours.

The first of two compositions by keyboards player, Mike Ratledge, follows. With his long dark hair, tatty jumper and miniaturised shades, Ratledge personified a 'head': one of those thoughtful, intellectual hippy types totally absorbed by his music. He certainly gave plenty of thought to 'Slightly All the Time', which in some ways, with its beautiful melody and audacious switches of time signature, is the most satisfying piece on the album. Jimmy Hastings, older brother of Caravan's Pye, pops up on flute to emphasise what a closely knit bunch of freaks was the fabled Canterbury Set.

Side 4 is the same composer's 'Out-Bloody-Rageous', the piece I remember them playing live at the Albert Hall that year. It features a long minimalist intro played on the organ, which would lead me quite quickly to American composer Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air – and thence to the wonderful world of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Then a couple of notes on an acoustic piano usher in an extended passage played at a jaunty trot that features a fabulous solo on the Lowrey organ, with the same distinctive reedy sound in which Dave Sinclair of Caravan also specialised. It then merges into a stately quasi-Mingus piece that features first Nick Evans on trombone and then Elton Dean on alto sax, before Ratledge's brisk repetitive piano refrain ends the piece as it started with a minimalist motif.

Robert Wyatt's 'Moon in June' is the filling between the Ratledge sandwich. Half of it is pure whimsical Wyatt – 'Before we go on to the next bar of our song'; 'Oh, but I miss the rain, ticky-ticky-tacky/And I wish that I were home again...' The other half is more 'conventional' Soft Machine instrumental material, ending with some extraordinary violin from Rob Spall that sounds like it's being played or recorded backwards.

Many, many moons in June later, I met a family from Louth, Lincolnshire, who were staying in a holiday home near here that I managed for some friends. I spoke to the pater familias about Louth and asked him whether he had ever seen Robert Wyatt. Yes, he'd seen him many times in his wheelchair. He was quite the local celebrity. I asked him if he would say hello to the local celebrity next time he spotted him out taking the bracing east coast air. Would he mind telling him perhaps that he had a fan in deepest rural France?

He said he would. I doubt if he did, though. And anyway, it probably wouldn't have been that surprising. The French revere Robert Wyatt. Is it perhaps because he might appear so quintessentially Breeteesh?

Can't Buy a Thrill

The fact that The Daughter has taken to the album's opening lazy Latin-tinged shuffle in such a big way testifies, I think, to the staying power of Steely Dan's debut, which first saw the light of day in 1972. 'Go back, Jack, do it again/Wheels turnin' round again...' Indeed.

I don't know how I came to hear all about it. I had given up reading the Melody Maker every week by then and I didn't listen to the radio. Working in fairly splendid isolation in a stately home in roughly the middle of nowhere, I certainly wouldn't have heard visitors to the Hall whispering about a great new band hailing from Brooklyn, New York, who took their name from a sordid novel by William Burroughs. No static at all.

And yet I picked it up early in 1974, the same year that the 'band' gave up touring and began the process of whittling themselves down to their co-founders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, supported by a host of golden session musicians. I picked it up in Stafford's only record shop for the strange price of £2.13.

Strangeness has always been a hallmark of 'The Dan': from the business of who they actually were to the subject matter of their clever, intriguing but ultimately mystifying lyrics. Subsequent albums would become increasingly opaque, even deliberately obscure, but 'Can't Buy a Thrill' is actually quite restrained: 10 songs, five per side, with strong melodies, memorable hooks and some excellent sheer musicianship. Mind you, even in the age of Prog Rock pomposity there weren't too many popular songs about a pair of royal brothers from the Dark Ages of history – 'Kings' celebrates or laments 'the last of good King Richard' and raises a 'glass to good King John'. Nor did many carry such perplexing titles as 'Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer under Me)'.

In my room at the end of one wing of the Hall, with only the occasional cry of a pheasant in the grounds to remind me that there was life outside the rarefied hermetic confines of the Earl's stately pile, I needed an antidote to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid, in which I had immersed myself during a long but temperate winter. And Steely Dan's first album gave me that. I've always studiously avoided overplaying records lest they outstay their welcome, but Can't Buy a Thrill was often on the BSR MacDonald turntable at the end of a day's hard indexing.

I wrote excitedly about it to my girlfriend back in Belfast. In those days, we wrote long letters on Basildon Bond notepaper in longhand rather than tapping out rapid e-mails to be delivered instantaneously via the ether. I would leave my letters with the secretary to be stamped and placed on a little table in the vestibule, by the Earl's stuffed Great War 'charger' and a collection of his floppy felt trilbies, for the local postman or post-woman to collect.

In those letters, I would surely have quoted liberally to show what a clever band they were (and probably to show what a clever fellow I was to respond to lines like 'The time of our time has been and gone' from 'Midnite Cruiser', or 'A woman's voice reminds me to serve and not to speak' from 'Fire in the Hole', or even 'You've been telling me you're a genius since you were seventeen/The weekend in the college didn't turn out as we planned/The things you take for knowledge, I just don't understand' from 'Reelin' in the Years').

Such a good job of conveying my enthusiasm did I manage that I'm sure that when she came to visit me in the early summer, she was every bit as excited at the prospect of listening to the album as she was about seeing her boyfriend. We would have thrilled, no doubt, to top session musician, Elliott Randall's incredibly electric guitar playing in 'Reeling in the Years', which sounded as if it were plugged directly into New York's central generating station. And 'Skunk' Baxter's coruscating guitar on 'Midnite Cruiser'. And the elegant horn section of jazzmen Jerome Richardson on tenor sax and Snooky Young on flugelhorn. And Donald Fagen's distinctive singing voice.

On this album, Fagen shared the vocals with David Palmer, whose slightly higher voice sounded a little like Jackson Browne's. On all their subsequent albums, though, Fagen would increasingly stamp his personality on the proceedings until it became hard to distinguish a Steely Dan album from one of his solo efforts. 'Skunk' Baxter would join the Doobie Brothers and I don't know what happened to drummer Jim Hodder and guitarist Denny Dias, whose electric sitar solo on 'Do It Again' segues into Fagen's solo on the 'plastic organ', whatever that might be.

Judging by the observation of someone I met at college, who saw Steely Dan in concert with Little Feat at the Rainbow or somewhere in London, to the effect that Feat blew The Dan off the stage, it's perhaps not surprising that the band became a mere enhanced studio partnership. It didn't really matter, given the uniform quality of the albums that followed this one (even if The Royal Scam is a slightly weaker hand). The key thing was that they produced literate lyrical music that continues to delight.

In fact, I keep vacillating when it comes to my favourite Steely Dan album. In view of my jazzer's proclivities, it's often Gaucho and sometimes Donald Fagen's Nightfly. For a while, it was the follow-up, Countdown to Ecstasy. But then I keep coming back to their debut, maybe as much for the associations as for the uniform quality of the songs. It was Can't Buy a Thrill that nudged me towards the down-home and dirtier Little Feat and thence to New Orleans R&B, and probably towards another New York band whose music has lasted longer than anyone might have thought at the time, Talking Heads.

'You wouldn't even know a diamond if you held it in your hand/The things you think are precious I don't understand...' In my book, there's no refuting that Steel Dan's first album is a precious commodity.