Our inner Duranie is letting out an over-excited squeal as we wait nervously, humming the opening bars of ‘Rio’ under our breath, for a transatlantic call from Duran Duran’s ever dapper co-founder, Nick Rhodes. A 30 year career, 13 hit albums and 80 million records sold Duran Duran have never been a band to follow the crowd. Whilst many of their fellow 80s icons have retired to their mansions to sip decaffeinated green tea in front of Deal Or No Deal, Duran Duran are once again opening yet another chapter in their already illustrious career. Joining forces with producer extraordinaire, Mark Ronson, the band are once again commanding the airwaves with the release of their aptly-titled thirteenth album, All You Need Is Now.
“Duran Duran have always had a very maverick spirit about it” Nick Rhodes says in his eloquent tones down the line from LA, “ we like to do things differently and experiment, whether that is to do with music, with visuals, with graphic design, with photography, with film making, or technology they’re all an interest to us”. This unquenchable thirst to do things their own way has seen the band in the first past few years go it alone on a new record label, experience a rebirth with Mark Ronson and book their biggest arena tour in fourteen years: “I can honestly say for many years, probably for more than fifteen years, I don’t think we’ve had such a strong record and I’ve not looked forward to playing the shows so much because of that” Nick says.
However, things were a lot different a few years ago. On the cusp of releasing their twelfth album, original member Andy Taylor left the band for the second time leaving the band with one-less band member and one album’s worth of material scrapped. To salvage the record, the band decided to hook up with producer Timberland and Danja for what would be The Red Carpet Masquerade: a hybrid of Duran Duran’s classic pop and Timbaland’s heavy beat. It was a combination that ultimately failed to connect with their fans and their record label Sony who, as a consequence, released them early from their contract: “we’ve always had complete artistic control over everything we’ve ever done, so we’ve only got ourselves to blame if something doesn’t turn out like we’ve wanted it” Nick admits. But, what should have been a possibly disastrous footnote in their career was the start of fate beginning to work in their favour and the first step on the road to a new era: “when we got out of Sony I couldn’t have been more thrilled” Nick confesses, “it’s quite liberating, thinking: “You know what? We don’t need anyone to do these records anymore”. Rather than signing to another major, the band sought to have full singing to Nick and Stephen Duffy’s own label, Tape Modern: “when one door closes, another door opens” Nick laments.
Fate intervened once more two years ago when the band was introduced to superstar DJ Mark Ronson thanks to an unlikely guardian angel: vodka. “ A company in Paris, actually a vodka company….once a year they like to pull together a couple of unusual artists to collaborate and they had come to us and Mark Ronson and said: ‘We think you two should work together and do something cool and creative for a one-off show.” Mark, as a die-hard Duran fan, stunned the band doing a career-spanning mix of Duran Duran tracks, dropping other artist’s tracks from Blur to Charlotte Gainsbourg dropped into the mix, for the band to play live: “it was really eclectic and quite extraordinary what he did” Nicks recalls, “we’d all listened to it and said ‘this is really clever’ and it was something I’d never heard before…It went so well that we said ‘we should really do something new together.” Unlike when rumours of dream collaborations never materialise this one luckily came to fruition: “18 months later we were all in the studio in London looking at each other, starting the record, to see what we could do.”
Duran Duran found their home with Mark, a self-declared Duranie, who on All You Need Is Now plays to the band’s strengths: “I think he’d listened to all our things for so many years that he knew which things he liked the best, so it was more a case of him coming and saying: ‘Can we please do something a bit like that?”, Nick explains. Described by Mark as, “the imaginary follow-up to ‘Rio’ that never was”, All You Need Is Now takes you back to a time when Duran Duran were England’s Fab Five and dominated the charts with their boyish looks and synth pop hooks: “we really had created our own sound and then we started going off and experimenting elsewhere, because we were like: ‘we’ve done that now, we should try something else’” Nick recalls “and he [Mark] said ‘that was such a powerful sound you created then and people want more of that, but obviously you make a contemporary version of it now.’” The result is a record that has the same thrill of when you heard ‘Planet Earth’, but with the edge of 21st century production, something that Nick can only heap praise on Mark for: “Well, he’s up there with the best producers” he says “He really was a pleasure, an absolute pleasure to work with I think he’s probably as John Taylor said the other day, if scientists when into a laboratory and put every ingredient they could to come up with the perfect producer for Duran Duran.”
From opening screeching synths and Simon Le Bon’s purr of the title track, All You Need Is Now is instantly recognisable as a Duran Duran record. ‘Being Followed’ has the soaring Le Bon chorus and frantic energy we’ve all grown accustomed to, whilst Blame The Machines is an electro echo of Wild Boy. “What we were trying to do was create a classic Duran Duran album” Nick explains, “that you could listen to, if you wanted to, from start to finish.” The band draw from the same lyrical notebook they’ve always taken their influences from, but with extra shading of years of experience: ‘Leave A Night recalls the same lonesome longing of ‘Say A Prayer’ whilst ‘Run Away Run Away’ explores the more sensitive theme of a girl leaving home for the first time. “You start to see those things at a certain age” Nick says “and you kind of appreciate people going out into the world for the first time and trying to find their way, that was that song [‘Runaway, Runaway’]. Although, there’s a new added maturity, All You Need Is Now, is 14 hits of instantaneous pop that you can listen to again and again. “it just sort of has to feel that it’s in that moment when it comes out and then there’s something else about it” Nick explains “ you’ve got to feel that the song is going to last, unless it’s something that you just want to dance to for a few weeks. You want to feel that you’re going to pick the thing up later and go ‘Yeah, that was a good album’, five years later, ‘that still sounds good’. That’s the harder part.”
A whole host of collaborators feature on the record adding an extra layer of flesh to the raw bones of the tracks. And, if you’re Duran Duran you’re only get the best: “if we ever had a girl in Duran Duran it would have to be Ana, she’s fabulous” Nick says of Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic who added her sultry vocals to Blondie funk of ‘Safe’: “She just sang perfectly right for the song as we wanted someone with a real attitude and someone with a sense of fun and someone that just had the perfect tone for it, and she was all of those.” For the Bowie space odyssey of ’The Man Who Stole The Leopard’ the band had also had a very exact persona in mind :”‘[It] was a harder choice to make because we wanted someone who could almost play and role” Nick explains, “it had to be someone who had a real strength of character and at the same time someone with a beautiful, ethereal voice, and someone who wasn’t afraid of playing a part like that, someone who had a slight toughness to them as well. Very few people came to mind and right at the top of the list was Kelis”. The record is bathed in vintage strings something that was achieved by the band approaching a future Brit and Grammy award winning artist: “We’d been sort of obsessing about Scott Walker records about how beautiful the string arrangements were, how grand, and wacky unusual, but somehow rather magical. And we were like, no-one really does that stuff anymore, who would understand that we don’t just want a simple classical arrangement, we want something that’s edgier, and Mark was like: ‘We need Owen.” Arcade Fire’s Owen Pallett added the classic edge that the album needed: “we just fell in love with it” Nick says, “we were just like ‘perfect, perfect, perfect’.
The band is set to head out on their first arena tour in 14 years this May. With over 30 years of material to choose for, the shows are set to be an unmissable one-off pop spectacular. ”We’ll try to take the audience on a journey through Duran Duran land, we’ll touch on a lot of the different periods, they’ll be a lot of familiar songs”. Although, Nick is tight-lipped about the what he had in mind with the show, as ever with Duran Duran it’s set to be a visual feast, “my intention is to try and make the show a little more interactive this time” Nick says, I’m just finding out what we can and can’t do technologically; I thought that might be a nice twist.” Duran Duran themselves still look as stylish and cutting-edge as when they first emerged on the scene as fresh-faced boys from Brum. Fashion is still very much at the heart of what the band do: “we work with different designers for clothes for videos and for the tours and things like that, which is always a lot of fun. It’s an interesting part of what we’re doing” Nick says, “we’ve always had a close affiliation with fashion and we’ve used it again within videos and within album covers and photoshoots”.
All You Need Is Now has the band back on track and back at the top. “We were all fairly pleased with this one making a classic Duran Duran record, but in a very contemporary style where the songs are the strongest we’ve written in a long, long time.” Fate was truly on Duran Duran’s side putting another historic footnote in their acclaimed career as one of Britain’s finest pop bands. As our interview comes to a close Nick wisely says: “You always have to look at everything that it sort of happens for a reason, the one thing I believe is fate.”
- Marie Wood
(Psssst, we’ve also got 2 pairs of tickets to give away to see Duran Duran at Nottingham Arena. Click the link below to enter…
http://69-247.com/2011/03/win-tickets-to-see-duran-duran-at-nottingham-arena/ )
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