Nile Rodgers: 'I used to drink to cure stage fright' In January 1980 my band, Chic, was touring Europe to promote the song Good Times. This photo was taken on a French TV show. Chic was Bernard Edwards and myself; we hired everybody else. Bernard was the band leader and the bassist - he came up with the monster bass line for Good Times. I was the main writer, but he did the bulk of the arranging. When we released Good Times in the summer of "79, we had already had a string of hits - Everybody Dance, Le Freak, I Want Your Love - but we had the fight of our lives to get to number one. It was the era of the 'Disco sucks!" campaign, which had started as a prank by a local radio DJ who had been fired when his station changed the playlist from rock to disco. He organised a 'Disco Demolition Night," which morphed into a nationwide backlash against disco music. The music industry was quick to pit us black disco kings against the scrappy white rock'n"roll boys, and rallied round a band called the Knack to push their song My Sharona to number one. We spent a week in the top spot before they succeeded us. But it was a very successful time for Chic. We had written and produced We Are Family and He's the Greatest Dancer for Sister Sledge the previous year and were playing to packed houses, with people whipped up into a frenzy when we played Good Times. I had stage fright, so used to drink before and during shows - amaretto and orange juice, which was ridiculously dehydrating. And we would have 'tooted up" before the show, maybe even during the show while the girls were doing a costume change.We hired Luci Martin and Alfa Anderson to sing with us. Luci was the spunky personality of Chic. Alfa was more staid - she was a professional English teacher - and she had a fantastic voice. Bernard would tell us to 'Get live! Get live!," to make us focus. We'd all laugh at him, hollering like a sergeant major. I got the idea for Chic in the mid-1970s after watching Roxy Music play in London. I'd been playing a few final shows in England with the Big Apple Band (my first band with Bernard), and my then girlfriend took me to the Roxy and I was blown away. They were all so beautiful and had Playboy bunnies on their covers. I called Bernard and told him, 'What if we do the black version of Roxy Music? I stole that concept - our first album cover pictured two of the earliest supermodels. We were interested in our look; in this photograph I'm wearing a jacket by a designer called Billy Kaiserman who had a label called Rafael. Billy used a material he called 'polished cotton. It had a sheen and feel identical to leather, but it meant I could get through an entire concert without sweating to death. Bernard and I also used to wear Giorgio Armani and Nino Cerruti suits, and the girls wore Norma Kamali, Fendi or Halston - we liked to look fly, but a little anonymous, too. Nile Rodgers's autobiography, 'Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny" (Sphere, £9.99) is out now