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Alfa Anderson obituary

American singer best known as a vocalist with the 1970s disco group Chic whose hits included Le Freak

Among the disco goddesses – the Donnas, Glorias, Evelyns, Gwens, Candis and Anitas – who serenaded the dancers of the hedonistic 1970s in such celebrated joints as New York’s Studio 54 and London’s Heaven, it seems likely that only Alfa Anderson’s destiny included leaving show business to resume her studies and eventually become a high school principal. On the sleeve of C’est Chic(1978), their second album, designed to look like the cover of a fashion magazine, it was Anderson who reclined in a white silk blouse and old-gold skirt against an expensive sofa in the garden room of a country house, while the other core members of the group struck suitably soigné poses. On another of their hits, I Want Your Love(like Le Freak, included in C’est Chic), Anderson took the solo lead, her voice finding a sinuous path between Edwards’s pulsing bass, Tony Thompson’s implacable drums, Rodgers’s flickering rhythm guitar, the cushion of strings, the syncopated trumpet figures and – in a typically imaginative touch – tubular bells prominently doubling the melody on the chorus.

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