Why is it important for you to maintain the Chic legacy in 2008?
Well, I don't think of it quite in those terms. I think of it like this: the night that my partner Bernard Edwards passed away – right before we were supposed to go on stage as part of a sell-out tour which also featured some of the people we'd worked with including Sister Sledge, Duran Duran and Steve Winwood – he had looked out at the crowd and said, "Oh my God, this is no longer about us – these people have come to hear the songs". We realised that very night that the songs of Chic were bigger than both of us.

Since then I guess you've come to terms that the back-catalogue will outlast everybody involved in their recording?
Sure. And now every time I go out, I'm committed to maintaining the integrity of the records that we made. I don't think about it before and I don't worry about it after, but when I'm on stage, it's important that I do those songs justice.

Did you ever consider ending Chic after Bernard's death?
Without wanting to sound too corny, I feel I have a responsibility to continue what we did. And, anyway, Chic was where we always went to have a good time. It still is. I probably don't have to tell you this, but I really don't ever have to work again. God knows how many hit records I've had with different people over the years but, believe me, I get plenty of royalties. But I'm still not 'a star'. Although Chic gives me the confidence to get on stage and pretend that I'm a star.

Pretend?
Well the thing with Chic is that it was always a concept right from the beginning. It became this place where we would go to hide from the real world. As black men in America, the real world wasn't such a great place to be. Chic enabled us to reinvent ourselves.

So do you think you'll still be doing this in another 30 years?
Those are my songs. That's like asking Paul Simon will he still be Paul Simon in 30 years' time!

No disrespect to Paul Simon, but you do have a lot of other things going on outside music, don't you?
A lot of people don't understand how this happened, but back when we were recording, we would work in studios that had no windows. Studios were all built like that; I guess record labels wanted the artists and producers to be unaware about whether it was night or day and just get on with getting their record made. Anyway, we would be working in those conditions and our brains would be going dead. The video game arcades had just become this new craze so we would take a break from recording by playing these machines. Over time, I shifted some of my focus on to video games and developed that as a business. For me, it was the same as disco: it was this brave new world and nobody knew what would be happening next. So one of the first things I ended up doing was the music for Resident Evil. After that I did Halo.

So you love new technology?
Yeah. It's great. How amazing is it for an artist to wake up every day and have a fresh challenge and not know how this latest project will turn out. For me – no matter what area I'm working in – it's always been about problem solving. That's the reason I became a record producer. Artistically I'm excited. Business-wise I'm excited. And then I also get to play as Chic and have that real release. I have the perfect life, I guess.

What do you make of the kind of contemporary artists who don't leave the computer to make music? Those people who have never picked up a traditional instrument? And those that sample?
I love where we are now. We're in the era of what I'd describe as audio collage. When my music was first sampled for Rappers Delight, I must admit it felt really strange. It must be like tasting some strange food for the first time. Like, an acquired taste. So I'd have been like "woooah, what is that?!" I recoiled. But I also couldn't figure out how someone had done that. Never mind how they had taken my record, made it their own and had an even bigger hit with it. The breakthrough for me was realising that the people behind these records were artists.

Sharing the Creamfields bill with you are the kind of contemporary talents that have stripped back that primal, hypnotic dynamic to the point that it's pure groove
That's truly primal. Isn't that a wonderful thing? When we first got our first record deal as Chic, we insisted that our bosses at the label come to a club with us as we felt that they had to understand what it was that was so fascinating about this music. And they were like "yeah – it's great but how is that gonna work on the radio?" So we made our first single and that was Dance Dance Dance which has that breakdown in it where it's just "dance – boom – dance–dance–dance" and they were concerned because there was this part where there was no music. They were worried that people would think that the radio station had gone of the air! They said "what if the listener changes the station?" and Bernard and I insisted that the audience would listen even harder. It was the primal response. Like when James Brown goes "wait a minute" and the band stops – you're transfixed. You don't choose that time to go to the bathroom.