this is bbc news, the headlines: ukraine says at least 50 people are dead and dozens wounded after a rocket hit a train station in the eastern city of kramatorsk, which had become a major hub in the war for civilian evacuations from the donbas region. it's now the focal point of russia's war effort. ukraine's neighbour, slovakia, has donated its entire 5—300 surface—to—air missile system to ukraine. the country's prime minister said it would save many innocent lives from moscow's aggression. the british prime minister borisjohnson says the uk will send another $130 million worth of military equipment to help ukraine. the body that hands out the oscars has banned the actor will smith from all its events for ten years after he hit

the presenter chris rock. the academy stopped short of revoking his best actor award. it called his behaviour unacceptable and harmful. now on bbc news, amol rajan speaks to musician nile rodgers. if i asked you who the most influential musician in modern history was, i reckon i could guess your answer. one of the beatles, perhaps, or maybe one of the stones, madonna, prince, or maybe my hero, bob marley. over the next hour, i want to persuade you that there might be a better answer. in fact, i want to go further and introduce you to him, because today i've been invited to get to know an icon and so have you. his name is nile rodgers.

one, two... # ah, freak out! # le freak, c'est chic. # freak out! # ah, freak out... just don't call him the godfather of disco. raised by heroin addicts and beatniks and coming of age in �*60s new york, it's true that with his ensemble chic, he wrote several of the biggest dance floor fillers of all time with his long—term musical partner bernard edwards. prepare to be astonished by the range of legendary tunes that he wrote or produced and on which you had no idea he was involved. many of the most celebrated songs by sister sledge, diana ross, madonna, david bowie, duran duran and, yes, daft punk are all part of his story. his genius is estimated to have created billions of dollars in worldwide sales, reinventing whole genres and artistic careers along the way.

and today, after several brushes with death, whether through addictions or cancers, he's more productive than ever. he's chief creative advisor at london's abbey road studios. but he's notjust a musician — he's a thinker, a global influencer and activist fighting for racial equality and a better deal for artists in the age of streaming. i feel genuinely privileged to meet him. hey, my man! how are you, man? you invite me to all the coolest places. how are you? i'm wonderful. thank you so much for doing this. what a place you've invited me to. this place has got the most amazing story of any studio, right? come on in. let's talk about it. let's do it. thank you very much. # le freak... camera a. b. c. d. e. god, you sound like my two—year—old daughter, man. mark it? lovely. some dude wrote on twitter yesterday — i thought it was hysterical — he says, "i'm thoroughly "convinced that nile has hundreds of hats

"with hair hanging." laughter. "hundreds of hats with hair attached to �*em." amol laughs. i was like, "no, that's actually how i'd look "if i didn't have - �* m yeah. it would be like... thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed. so, in preparation for this, i have done a lot of work. i've read your remarkable memoir and i've come to a conclusion, which you're too humble to say, so i'm going to say it, which is, i think you're one of the most influential musicians in modern history. how would you assess your influence? i look at myself, honestly, as a worker bee, and i walk into the studio and my onlyjob is to make sure that artistically, we wind up in a better place than we started. the hitmaker. yeah. tell me the artists that you've worked with, holding that guitar.

it's the main workhorse in my life and people, they laugh at me, they make fun of me because they think that i treat it poorly and i say, "you don't understand." i show up to work. this guitar is there to work. but that's probably responsible for what? it's over $1 billion worth of music you've made and produced and written on there. when, for instance, let's dance, the song let's dance comes about in switzerland. what's the process by which david bowie has an idea and you take it and you take it further and you take it to the next level and you turn it from what he envisioned, which is a sort of folk song, to something that would be a song that's sold a zillion records? so he walks into my room one morning and he was very enthusiastic — "no, darling, i think this is a hit." isay, "oh, wow. "cool," you know? "play it for me." and he does something like this. strums riff.

# let's dance. something like that. i just thought it was a nice little riff, whatever. i said, "david, what if i did an arrangement? "would you mind if i did an arrangement on this?" he said, "oh, man, i'd love you to do an arrangement." awesome! arrangement. got the right word in. so i went... strums funkier riff. ..which sounds a little more funky to me. and because i knew he loved jazz, then i put a 13 — a minor 13 chord in there. continues strumming. but it still sounded dark in the key of a minor, so i moved it up a half—step and all of a sudden, we got... strums riff. ..and then i thought

right away, "huh! "dark, dark, light, light. "what if i make it really bright?" and i moved it up a whole octave. and i went... strums riff. ..and then the minor 13 chord up here. continues strumming. then ijust said, "what else? "i'll do the voice leading." strums riff. and then back here. then i made it a little nile—like and went... strums upbeat riff. # let's dance! # put on your red shoes and dance the blues. # let's dance! # to the song they're playing on the radio... but, in a sense, you started with, materially speaking, nothing, because if we go back to a world before david bowie and daft punk and madonna and

sister sledge and duran duran and all the others, you've said to people that you were born into the underclass in new york city in 1952. you were born in segregation—era america but you were raised in the ultimate bohemian household. my mom was incredible. a really smart woman. she was the most open—minded, fun, loving person that you could imagine. we'll come on to your biological dad, nile rodgers senior, but she raised you with the help of this remarkable man, bobby glanzrock, ajewish beatnik. yeah. and thinking about the 1950s in america, a mixed—race partnership like that was pretty rare, wasn't it? it was extremely rare. but what's really interesting is that the jewish and the black communities were really closely aligned because of the garment industry... yeah. ..the food industry. you were raised

by heroin addicts — you know, both your parents, your stepfather and also your biologicalfather, nile rodgers senior, were drug addicts — so, for you, the extraordinary was quite ordinary. just give us a sense of what it was like in the household, coming home and seeing this amazing social and intellectual swirl of people, but also a lot of drugs. so, when i was younger, i didn't contemplate the concept of heroin right away. because it was so normal? and because i didn't even quite understand it. i mean, it was almost like... it was something beyond a child's mind to take in because you saw people drinking openly and i saw people getting high openly and, as a kid, i always associated injections and things like that, you know, with doctors, so i didn't quite know that that was part of the getting high process.

it was just there. as a matter of fact, i would come home quite often and seejunkies standing around the apartment and they were in deep nods, which were they were standing up but they looked like they were asleep. sort of group narcolepsy. yeah, yeah... amol laughs. and then every now and then, a sentence would come out. "yeah, man. "everything's cool." and, you know, they would just rock and nod. and i thought to myself, "wow, adults sleep standing up "and children sleep lying down." so i was seven years old and that's when i set the national truancy record. out of all the awards i've ever won, that's the one i'm proud of. but this was extraordinarily unusual. i mean, most people don't grow up in that kind of environment. you're such

a mixture of things. you're such a sort of — i would say contradictions, but that's got negative connotations. you're supremely literary. you're reading treasure island at the age of five or six. and moby—dick. moby—dick, which is this vast... amazing. ..i can't get through moby—dick now. it's a great book. you're playing chess and yet, you're setting the national truancy record, so, you've got this amazing jumble of emotions going on. tell me how you came to meet timothy leary and how that changed your life. so one day my friend and i, we were going to the skating rink and we saw these kids — and we had never seen any kids like this, these white guys, and they all had really long hair. like, super — like, it was in their faces. they almost looked like dogs because i was like, "how can these dudes see?" we go over and we talk to these guys and we say, you know, "hey, man. "who are you " you know? quy57, "what's your thing? "what are you all about?" and they said — they said, "hey, man," you know, "we're freaks, man. "we're like — you know, we're freaks." and i said, "freaks?" they said, "yeah, man, you know, freaks." so when they said they

were freaks, i went, "we accept them, we accept them, one of us, one of us..." # we accept her, one of us we accept her, one of us. # gooble, gobble, gooble, gobble... i "gooble, gobble..." isaid, "like the movie freaks?" they went, "wow," and they laughed. they thought it was cool. he said, "spayed cats. "do you guys want to take a trip?" and we thought, "sure," because we had time to kill. and they drove us up into the hollywood hills to a house that i remember with my childhood vision of a house that looked like it was all glass. and we went inside and people were having sex and partying and going crazy. and we'd never heard of timothy leary. we'd never heard of lsd. we didn't even know anything about that. i know that at some point, we ingested the lsd. we realised we were tripping...

nile chuckles. ..and then we sat there for two days. you're listening to this is the end by the doors... by the doors, right. ..and this is when you picked up a guitar and you heard a beatles song. and it was the beatles, a day in the life. yeah. well, that's how it started. i went out and bought a beatles song book and i kept playing the positions that i thought were the proper position. anyway, one of my mom's boyfriends comes home and says, "whoa! "what have you got that thing tuned like?" and i said, "i don't know. "i got it tuned so i could play something." and he took it and he retuned it to the proper tuning of a guitar — what we call standard tuning. now i go back and i play the first chord and it's perfect. you know, you're now 26, 27 years sober, no drink or alcohol. how's that going, by the way? fantastic. yeah? no drink, no drugs for 27 years? nothing. but you reached rock

bottom a few times. yeah. your heart stopped a few times. i think there was one incident where you were in a new york apartment and you pressed the number 1a, which was not the floor that you lived on, and that saved your life. why was that again? so what happened was i was out partying all night and i drove home safely and i got into the elevator and instead of pushing 28, i pushed 1a. when i got to the 14th floor, i fell out of the elevator and it was the classic alcoholic death, you know, where you choke on your own vomit and the whole bit. the only difference was that the janitors and the guys who work — the custodial staff in the building, they work their way down. it was the greatest stroke of luck. they were able to call the ambulance because the hospital was just right across the street. so the paramedics came,

they started my heart again, but my heart kept stopping. and they'd restart it and it would stop again and restart it and they would keep going through this process, so there was no physical damage to the organ, itjust was temporarily taking some time off. i've got to move on to david bowie. your partnership would produce, in the record let's dance, one of the — i think his biggest—selling record of all time, almost his defining music. and it started about because you wandered into a club, i think it was about 3am in the morning, with billy idol. a little later than 3am! across the room you see this... solitary figure. ..a solitary figure with a sharp nose from the suburbs of south—east london. what happened next? so, i noticed that he was by himself, drinking a glass of orangejuice. pretty unusual for an after—hours club. the whole point of going to an after—hours club was to be able to drink.

so, i walk over to him and right away, i say, "hey, man. "love your music." right away, the conversation veered into our love ofjazz. deep jazz as well, not justjohn coltrane. no, deep, deep, deep. he saw in me something that was attractive and i saw something in him that was attractive, so this relationship was going to be mutually beneficial, no matter what happened. i used to call him the picasso of rock and roll. it used to kiss him off but i think secretly, he dug it. but it was always, you know, a term of endearment. could i ask you to take me through the same progression when it comes to get lucky and daft punk? it's an extraordinary album. when daft punk, these two french dudes who are anonymous in their own way, came over to your house and they laid out a vision for an album, what was that vision? what did they sell you? they sold me on a concept.

they said, simply, "we want to do an album "as if the internet never existed." they laugh. and i'm, like, going, "ok?!" and for some reason, i knew exactly what they meant. as soon as they gave me that explanation, i said, "you don't need to play anything for me. "i'lljust come to the studio and let's do it." so where does a song like get lucky — how does it get born into a world? what happened was they had already been working on certain songs, so i go down to the studio and i started playing something to this effect. strums riff. so, after i play a part like that, then i would do, i start to map out a lick on it, because now i'm only

playing to drums, so now that part is down and then i play... picks counter part from get lucky. ah, right, so, iwant you to keep both things in your head, so... strums previous riff. ..so then i break out the plexiglass guitar and i play... picks counter part. ..and... picks notes. ..turned into, "to get lucky." # we've come too far. # to give up. # who we are. # so let's raise the bar. # and our cups to the stars. # she's up all night till the sun. # i'm up all night to get some. # she's up all night for good fun.

# i'm up all night to get lucky... that song actually represented a big moment for you and i would say it was almost a transformative moment for you, because there is this irony that you and pharrell williams, who did the vocals, a lot of people thought that you guys were daft punk. yeah, i know. isn't that amazing? so, the only two human beings you see are pharrell and myself and i cannot tell you how many times i've walked down the street and a young kid who didn't grow up with daft punk now is seeing daft punk for the first time and he thinks that it's me and pharrell. # if you wanna leave, i'm with it... but isn't there an amazing irony that you become, finally, after an incredible ao—year career, you become as globally famous as you are working with a group who are anonymous? right. did you struggle a little bit with the fact that as a producer, you didn't get the credit you deserved? no, man! but, see, this is the — if i may say — the famous humility. when i chatted to people and said i was going

to interview you, a lot of people said, "well, "nile, obviously he's an icon of music, he's an incredibly "nice guy and he's just strangely humble. "he always says it's not about him." but, if i may, iwatched back your performance at glastonbury a few years ago now, four or five years ago, and there was this moment on stage, you were playing good times and everyone was up there and the crowd was screaming... yeah. ..and they put two syllables into your name. "ni-le!" and you looked to me... i started crying. you looked — you did? you did start crying? i started crying, yeah. why were you so emotional? was it...? can i humbly submit, was it because maybe in bernard's absence — and we might come back to that — but — but you were finally getting the recognition that you deserved? no. i just thought that they appreciated it so much. way beyond... look, i go out there to try and make people happy. we're talking a bit about the internet era and i want to ask you a bit about one other aspect of it, which is whether or not the internet is working out for artists. and you've been very vocal about the deal,

or the lack of deal, that artists are getting in the age of streaming. what's the issue? why are you speaking out? there's a really, really big problem here. the music industry is built on songs. it's — the foundation of the house is in the songwriter. we haven't had a raise in 75 years because our deals, in effect, are governed by copyright laws. when streaming came into effect, the people who own the masters now had something that they can negotiate with that was very powerful, because without having that music to play, spotify doesn't mean anything. where's that gone wrong in the age of streaming? in the age of streaming, what's happened is that since we don't even know what the deal is, we don't know how much money they're making or anything like that, we don't know how that money

is being funnelled to help the new artists, to help the business. i've got some quick—fire questions. this is minimum one word, maximum ten, ok? i ask all my interviewees these. who's your greatest hero? wow. 100% honest, john coltrane. favourite sportsperson? nile exhales. muhammad ali. dickens or shakespeare? dickens. oh, man, you'rejoking? why do people always say dickens when i ask that question? that's the only question which has a right answer and a wrong answer, but i'll forgive you that. how much time do you spend in the gym each week? not enough. how much tea and coffee do you drink? not a lot. do you believe in god? no. do you eat meat? i do, but i try to avoid it. person from history you'd most like to meet? probably. . . harriet tubman. why?

because my great—great—grandmother was a slave. the concept of a person having the bravery and the ingenuity to design something that's nicknamed the underground railroad, i would love to meet that mind. the fact that it was a woman blows me away, and that she was so effective at doing it. thank you so much for being so generous with your time today. thank you very much. # these are the good times...

today wasn't quite as cold as yesterday, because the wind wasn't as strong, but we have still ended the week with temperatures below par for the time of year. we take that chilly arctic air into the start of the weekend with us. however, as we move into next week, a shift in the pattern — southerly winds delivering some warmer conditions across the uk. so, for this weekend, it will be chilly, particularly at first. some cold and frosty nights, often dry, just a few showers. next week, it will feel warm where we get some sunshine, but it won't be sunny all the time. there will also be some outbreaks of rain. talking of rain, we saw some heavy downpours across southern england and the channel islands during this morning. that clearing away, then some sunny spells but also, as you can see from the radar picture, lots of showers, some thunderstorms, some wintry showers, especially across northern areas. now, most of those showers

will slowly fade as we head through the night. clear skies overhead. that will allow for quite a widespread frost, temperatures even, in the towns and cities, down around or below freezing. we could see lows of around “1! out in the countryside in parts of northern england. so, into tomorrow, a cold, frosty, but bright and sunny start. through the day, we will see some showers once again but these most plentiful up towards the north and the east, where it will stay breezy. further south and west, lighter winds, not as many showers, more dry weather and plenty of sunshine. temperatures still a touch below the average for this point in april, seven to 12 degrees. now, as we move through saturday night, this little ridge of high pressure topples its way eastwards again. that will allow it to get cold and frosty but this frontal system pushing in from the west will start to introduce a little more cloud. so, temperatures out west, in belfast and plymouth for example, may stay above freezing. most places again having a cold start to sunday morning

but a bright start with plenty of sunshine. through the day, as that weather system approaches, we will see more cloud building in from the west. the majority will stay dry. a bit of rain could just splash into parts of northern ireland later on, but the winds starting to come up from the south, so temperatures will climbjust a little — a trend that will continue into next week. if we do get some sunshine, we could see highs of 18, 19, maybe close to 20 degrees, but there will also be some rain at times, especially in the north and west.

this is bbc news, i'm rich preston. our top stories: there's outrage after another atrocity in ukraine, at least 50 people are dead and hundreds more injured in a rocket attack on a train station. as you can see, the station, outside it, it is empty but this morning it was packed with people, many of them women and children, trying to lead this city to safety. —— trying to flee this city to safety. more help is on the way, with countries sending weapons including, for the first time, an air defence system. after hitting the comedian chris rock, the actor will smith is banned from the oscars for ten years. at least 13 people are killed following torrential rains and a landslide

in a mining area of north—west colombia.