“As soon as we played that, I screamed. I could tell right away that it was a smash”: Nile Rodgers breaks down how he and David Bowie made Let’s Dance

The new David Bowie Centre at the V&A East’s Storehouse contains a treasure trove of material about the man and his illustrious career. And in addition to the many thousands of Bowie-related artefacts, the V&A has now put online a revealing interview with Nile Rodgers about his working relationship with the great man, and in particular the making of Let’s Dance.

The track was the lead single from the 1983 album of the same name and, as Rodgers explains, was originally a very different beast to the hit version we now know.

“I was staying at David’s house in Switzerland, and frankly, I was asleep,” he says. “He walked into my bedroom and said, 'Nile, darling, I think this is a hit.' I went, 'Oh, cool, man. Let me hear it.' He was playing it on a 12-string guitar with only six strings on it. Ding ding ding ding…'

Rodgers was confused at first. 'He’d called it Let’s Dance. Huh? Why do you call it Let’s Dance? He said ‘Well, it’s a song based on the dance that people do when they first encounter another person – or they’re trying to impress them.’ I said ‘David, I come from dance music. Can I do an arrangement?”

David Bowie’s Biggest Hit: Nile Rodgers Breaks Down ‘Let’s Dance’ - YouTube

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Bowie’s original idea didn’t exactly scream 'hit'. “What we had settled on – or at least what I believed we had settled on – was this sort of cool mix of R&B-meets-funk-meets-dance music that would be of the current zeitgeist, if you will,” says Rodgers “But what he played was the antithesis of that concept. So I thought to myself: OK, he’s trying to test me. He wants to see if I’m going to go: ‘Oh, Mr Bowie, you’re so great, man. I’m really happy to be working with you.’ But in fact, everyone I called said: ‘No, man, he’s not that kind of person. If he says he thinks that it’s a hit, he’s being really sincere.’"

So Rodgers wrote out an arrangement for two guitars, drums and bass and hired three jazz musicians for the demo session at Queen’s Mountain Studios in Montreux. “I said: ‘David, sing exactly what you sang in my bedroom, but sing it over this music.’ I never played it to him beforehand. He only heard it for the first time when I heard it for the first time. I’d heard it in my head as an arranger, but I never really heard it until we were in the recording studio and we played it.”

“I counted the song off, and we did the little dominant pyramid thing… Dah… Daaah… Daaaaaaah. I started playing: dink dink dink dink… As soon as we played that, I screamed. I could tell right away that it was a smash, because if the first part of it sounded like that, I knew that what was coming up in the arrangement was going to be mega."

Indeed, although Bowie was pleased with what he heard from the session players, Rodgers knew that the best was yet to come.

“David was really happy, and I remember this like it was yesterday. I said: 'Do you think this shit’s happening? Wait till you hear my guys play it.' I knew once we got back home and it was the people that I played with, playing my arrangements, it was going to be killer.”