Rodgers knows all about rock'n'roll. He may have achieved fame as the king of disco - first as one half of Chic, alongside Bernard Edwards with whom he churned out such dance floor classics as Le Freak, I Want Your Love and Good Times, and later as the composer and producer of We Are Family by Sister Sledge and I'm Coming Out for Diana Ross - but his heart is in rock and pop as much as R&B.

He proved it after David Bowie took a gamble on him to work on songs for his Let's Dance album, which became the singer's biggest selling album. Rodgers subsequently produced Like a Virgin for Madonna, which sold 23 million copies. He revived Duran Duran's career and has collaborated with everyone from Mick Jagger to Eric Clapton and, bizarrely, the Beavis and Butthead Experience.

For a man with such an illustrious back catalogue, Morrison Poe would appear small fry. But although describing the make-up girl moment (he tells the story three times) as the zenith of his life is no doubt something of an overstatement, Rodgers is at his most animated when he talks about his proteges. His sense of excitement about the music industry is undimmed after almost 30 years and he still possesses massive drive and desire to mould the next big thing. 'Will they be big? I don't know,' he says. But he's determined to bring them up in the old school of rock'n'roll.

'I'm highly critical of the kind of deals new artists get nowadays,' he says. 'Bernard and I split 3 per cent when we signed out first record deal. Do you think it's fair for a person to have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars just to see if the public like your record? I'm all for people being successful, but I think there should be some kind of apprenticeship.'

At Sumthing, Rodgers says he gives modest deals and makes no promises of high-budget videos, cashing radio play or massive promotion. 'I do all that, but that's not part of the deal,' he says. Instead, he uses his own career as a template, and says he can make money from acts and records that majors would consider 'flops'.

In a world of ubiquitous access to music and releasing records through the internet, Rodgers says some bands get it too easy, while others are given a premature glimpse of success they can never attain.

'Probably in today's world the big problem, because of things like MySpace and CDBABY and all that other stuff, is they get to feel like they may make it. Maybe the hope is what it's all about, but when I got signed to Atlantic records I felt I was part of a wonderful elite group that included the likes of Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Aretha Franklin.

'It wasn't common to get a record deal in those days and the problem with today's world is that people can put out their own CDs and have something that masquerades as a major album, because it looks the same and feels the same - and sometimes sounds the same. The let-down [if you don't make it] can be a lot more severe. When we were kids you couldn't make a record by yourself. It was impossible.'

Rodgers isn't convinced that the so-called democratisation of music through the internet is such a good thing. 'The main thing for artists beyond being able to do it, is to touch people,' he says. 'There were musicians in my day who killed themselves because they couldn't make it.

'It was really hard when I started out. The first time I heard my own band Chic in a nightclub, it was unbelievable ... there's no feeling in the world like it. You're sitting at home on the edge of you're bed writing a song and get a chance to record it. Then you go some place and people appreciate what you've done and then you see people dancing to it. It's amazing,' says the cool yet garrulous multiple Grammy Award winner.

Born and raised in New York, Rodgers began playing guitar at school and started out in a rock act called New World Rising, who opened for the Stooges. But as a black kid in New York's band scene he had difficulty making inroads. Trained as a jazz musician, he viewed the other sound of the era, disco, as 'boogaloo' music. But R&B roles were easier to come by, and by the time he was 19 he was working with the Sesame Street band as well as performing nightly as part of the Apollo Theatre's house band, backing the likes of Franklin, Parliament Funkadelic and Ben E. King, and playing with Luther Vandross at Radio City.

He decided he wanted his own band, and after teaming up with bass player Edwards, the pair formed Chic and released Dance, Dance, Dance in 1977. It was a top 10 hit and spawned a run of chart-topping singles - Le Freak became Warner's biggest seller - and three albums .

Edwards holds a special place in his heart. 'My music is absurd and overly complicated because I'm trying to prove to my friends at music school how smart I am,' he says with a laugh, describing how Bernard would pare down his compositions into several simpler tracks. 'He was harsh in a wonderful way.'

Itching to prove themselves further, the pair moved into producing. Rodgers says he turned down a chance to work with the Rolling Stones, the label's biggest band, in favour of Sister Sledge, and produced that classic disco song.

But as fast as disco rose, it fell - and hard. Chic's hit Good Times was initially kept off the No1 spot by the Knacks' My Sherona and was mercilessly bagged by disco's growing band of detractors. 'I don't know how many records are based on My Sherona, but I do know there are a lot based on Good Times,' he tells the Music Matters conference later that day. Nonetheless, he says, he never had a hit record again after Good Times.

Not with Chic anyway. After a period of depression, he met Bowie one night in a club while out with Billy Idol. The 70s rock star's career was in a similar funk. Bowie decided he needed Rodgers - but Rodgers needed him just as much. 'He saved my life,' Rodgers says. Some were dismayed at the idea of a disco producer working with the rock chameleon, but Rodgers was ecstatic to work with his 'all- time hero'. His influence, readily apparent in the uptempo hits China Girl, Modern Love and Let's Dance, helped Bowie reinvent himself as an 80s pop commodity.

Rodgers' work with Madonna cemented his reputation in the pop field and he again became one of the most sought after men in music. Asked to remix Duran Duran's The Reflex single he told them: 'I don't do remixes. I'll do the song the way I would've done it in the first place.'

His version freaked out record company executives, but it went on to become Duran Duran's biggest hit, staying at No1 in Britain for 15 weeks. He still works with the Birmingham band today.

Rodgers also helped craft hits for INXS, the Thompson Twins, Grace Jones, the B-52s and Paula Abdul. In 1996, he was named Billboard magazine's top producer in the world, and went to Japan to perform a retrospective of his career, appearing with Edwards, Sister Sledge, Steve Winwood, Simon LeBon and Slash. Rodgers also won Grammys for best rock instrumental for his collaboration with Jeff Beck on Escape and best contemporary blues recording and best rock instrumental performance with the Vaughan Brothers. In 2005, Chic were inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame, as was Good Times.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Rodgers launched the We Are Family Project, which involved musicians and filmmaker Spike Lee, to promote tolerance and multiculturalism.

Rodgers has continued to work at the cutting edge of music, becoming a major player in the gaming music industry. 'Video games and rock'n'roll go together like rock'n'roll and models,' he says. The repetition of music in games that players hear for hours each day is potent, he says.

For the popular game Halo 2, he commissioned original music from the likes of Hoobastank, Incubus and Steve Vai. A subsequent album became the best selling original video game soundtrack of all time. For the follow-up, Rodgers ran a contest for user-generated music. Of 21,000 tracks sent in, he says at least 30 per cent were amazing. 'These kids should have record deals,' he says.

Rodgers says his label's profits will double this year, whereas majors such as EMI are reporting record losses. 'I was a music fan before I got a record deal. The one thing I believe is that the boutique music business is about fans. It's just like jazz and classical music. It's something left of centre, and when you find somebody that's into it, they can appreciate it.'

Major labels have floundered because they became obsessed with money, he says. 'All of a sudden it became big business. What happened to the music industry is that those big numbers became the norm. That's what killed rock'n'roll.'

Nonetheless, Rodgers says music is alive and well and has a big future. Besides preparing a new Chic album, he works with many young acts, including laying down the funky guitar on Joss Stone's single, You Had Me, producing Maroon 5's Everyday People. And then, of course, there's Morrison Poe.