Melody Maker - Unknown Pleasures - 20 Great Lost Albums Rediscovered - # 3 Chic - Risque

Definitely an apt choice for this kind of series. Chic are just the kind of artists who seldom get the consideration they're due for their albums. Here Paul Lester, who was one of Melody Maker's main journalists during this period tries to redress this balance. 

Lester is a writer who has gone on to carve out a considerable career for himself, working freelance for just about every national newspaper going over the years. He's also written rushed biographies on everybody from Gang of Four to Bjork, Kula Shaker, The Spice Girls, Wire and Robbie Williams. If this list seems haphazard to say the least and indicates that he's something of a career hack, rather than a writer working on a fixed agenda and set of priorities, it needs conceding that every paper needs a balance in terms of the profile of its team of journalists and Lester was the kind of writer who helped provide that for Melody Maker during the Nineties.

Risque was Chic's third album, released in 1979 at the peak of their career when they were the biggest and best black band in the world. They didn't always get the respect and acclaim they deserved in the music press at the time though, largely because they were classed first and foremost as a 'disco' band, and this was a scene and movement that was largely despised by the mainstream music press.

I don't particularly go for Lester's essay on the importance and sheer majesty of Chic. He tells us how he first fell for them at the time of Risque's release and the obsession he developed at the same time for a girl he saw on the bus he was taking to school. He was reading an article about The Undertones in a music paper when he first saw her.

He talks about Chic's career trajectory, how their music by contrast to most of their disco and dance contemporary artists actually sounded strikingly white in terms of the clinical, glacial way it was put together. He cites them as spiritual heirs to Roxy Music and the Bowie / Eno Berlin records. He makes a lot of good points but doesn't actually write very well for my tastes as far too much of the article is about him and is full of effusive gushing, not really a style of music journalism that does it for me.

Anyhow, the album he writes about, is well worth hearing. Chic were at their peak then and there was good reason for it. As Danny Baker, one of the few music writers making the case for them at that time wrote of them at in the NME, 'If disco should need to go on trial - well, with Chic, the defence rests its case.'