Sunday at 6pm is a point in the Glastonbury experience what you really need is something dependable. You are sunburnt. The heat is still brutal. You are exhausted. The state of the toilets is unspeakable, and you crave a certain straightforward reliability. And, despite his attempts to reboot the Chic brand with a new album a few years back and a handful of fresh production gigs,Nile Rodgersseems largely content to see out his days in the business of straightforward reliability, simply touring the world playing his old songs. In fairness, if you’d written the catalogue of material he has, you might be inclined to ensure people don’t forget about it.
The initial shock you may have felt at seeing a reconstituted version of the greatest disco band of all playing Glastonbury’s West Holts stage in 2013 has long disappeared – Chic have become a ubiquitous live presence in Britain in the ensuing years – but the meat of their set remains preserved in aspic, more or less the same as it was 12 years ago. That said, anyone who quibbles with the quality of said meat – Everybody Dance, I’m Coming Out, Upside Down, He’s the Greatest Dancer – is the kind of person who shouldn’t be allowed to express any opinions about music whatsoever: this is unequivocally some of the greatest pop ever made.
There’s an argument that it’s too good to be rattled out at such speed, crammed into medleys and interspersed with faintly corny interludes in which Rodgers encourages his vocalists to hit ever higher notes and discusses “maximum funkosity” – stuff that’s all a bit at odds with Chic’s original ultra-sophisticated image, the self-styled Black Roxy Music – and his triple-tested patter about his career (“You may not know that I also produced records for other people including Diana Ross, Madonna and David Bowie”: you’re joking, why have you never mentioned this before etc etc). It also might be nice if they didn’t cut out the breakdown from Sister Sledge’s Thinking of You – arguably the most exquisite 30 seconds of music in Chic’s entire oeuvre – in favour of a section where the audience is encouraged to clap along. But given the sheer frequency with which Rodgers and Chic perform live, becoming a little cavalier with your material is probably inevitable, even when your material is as good as this.
Besides, you can’t argue with the efficacy of what they do, or indeed the sheer profusion of hits, so many that you barely notice that they don’t play Lost in Music or My Forbidden Lover: this is a set in which Daft Punk’s Lose Yourself to Dance counts as a deep cut on the grounds that it was only the second single from Random Access Memories and shifted a mere 1.3m copies as opposed to Get Lucky, which sold 8m in America alone. The huge crowd go nuts, and understandably so: in the face of such widespread delight, it seems a bit off to nitpick. It’s the second time Chic have been played the slot immediately after the Sunday afternoon legend. Their appearance in 2017 was simply a matter of extending the elated atmosphere created by former Bee Gee Barry Gibb; following Rod Stewart feels more like a salvage operation. Straightforward and reliable, Nile Rodgers and Chic are clearly up to either task.