Nile Rodgers & Chic, Royal Festival Hall, review - An unapologetic freak-out of Studio 54 turbo-disco

Good times? The venerable chamber of the Royal Festival Hall has seen plenty of those. Everybody dancing, lost in music? Towards the end of the livelier recitals, possibly. But a total freak out, sheer dance, dance, dance from start to finish? That never happens. The average RFH audience is only up all night to get Verdi.

It has rarely, though, played host to the likes of the curator of this year’s Meltdown festival, Nile Rodgers. Most of his predecessors have used the honour to frame their music, their peers and their tribes of devotees within the realm of high culture, worthy successors to the classical greats.

Yet Rodgers was unapologetic in splashing his direct, unpretentious dance party groove across the opening night.

Listing his A-list collaborations like a world champion name-dropper, he even had the crowd singing along to the introductory Q&A, with its “drug memories” about jamming with Prince and a premiere of the jubilant first demo of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.

After the show, he recreated Studio 54 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, complete with nymphs riding mirrored moons and twirling disco acrobats.

“I work twice as hard for half as much,” Rodgers noted in his welcome address, and for all of his awards, staggering sales and two successful battles with cancer, this is the root of the affection heaped upon our host as Chic took the stage in matching wedding-party white.

Forty years after a US rock DJ led the Disco Sucks campaign that almost killed his career, Rodgers has triumphed by owning the classics he co-wrote or produced for pop’s titans.

An opening flurry of Chic hits – Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah), the turbo-disco Everybody Dance, a sophisticated I Want Your Love – were just warm-up fodder, giving way to a medley of number ones touched by the funky upswing of Nile: I’m Coming Out and Upside Down by Diana Ross melted into Sister Sledge’s He’s the Greatest Dancer and We Are Family, its broader message of human unity lost amid the hen party hysteria breaking out in the stalls.

As a conflation of Madonna’s Like a Virgin and Material Girl fed into Bowie’s Modern Love, Rodgers’ intrinsic influence over decades of post-disco pop music swam into focus, underpinning 1980s synthpop and later lashed with drama for Duran Duran’s Notorious and millennial R&B on Rodgers’ Daft Punk collaboration Get Lucky. These were no cruise ship renditions – drummer Ralph Rolle handled Let’s Dance with convincing Bowie panache, and the vocal acrobatics of Kimberly Davis, and Rodgers’ own firebrand funk solos, wouldn’t just rock the boat, they’d tip it over.

Following an exuberant Le Freak, Good Times saw a horde of dancing girls, plus The Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart in tracksuit bottoms, crowded onstage. Disco funk was flashing a mirrorball smile, shaking a bejewelled rump and shimmying into high art without a pass.

Nile Rogers’s Meltown continues at the South Bank Centre until August 11