Bop-shoo-wa, bop-shoo-wa, bop-shoo-wa

Before Chic had a record deal, they had a dance floor. In October 1976 a DJ friend at the Nite Owl in Manhattan’s East Village put an early pressing of “Everybody Dance” on and the room wouldn’t let him take it off — when he switched to “A Fifth of Beethoven”, the number-one record in the country that week, he was booed until he put it back. By the time Nile Rodgers got there, the song had been looping for an hour and a half.

It was the first song Rodgers and Bernard Edwards ever wrote for Chic — before “Dance, Dance, Dance”, before the name meant anything — though it only surfaced as a single in April 1978, the second one off the debut album. Norma Jean Wright sings lead, a young Luther Vandross is in the stack of backing voices, and underneath it all runs one of Edwards’ great restless basslines, never sitting still for a bar.

Rodgers almost didn’t get into the club that night — wrong clothes. He talked his way past the doorman by explaining he’d written the song everyone inside was dancing to. Put it on and you’ll see why that worked.