Hungry Like John Taylor

KEVIN RAUB

John Taylor is trudging along through an almost entirely new interpretation of "Rio," one of his former band's biggest hits. The cabaret-style Club Caprice in Redondo Beach, Calif., is only half-full, mostly with thirtysomething females trying desperately to relive that one moment in high school when Duran Duran -- or more specifically John Taylor -- were the only things that mattered. But to be honest, Taylor's no Simon Le Bon and Terroristen, his latest project, aren't Duran Duran by any stretch of the imagination. It's not that he's trying to sound like Le Bon, anyway -- it's just that Taylor is stuck somewhere between Former Bassist in Mega-Huge Pop Band and, well É John Taylor.

"It would be nice to come out of the box with a whole new thing," says Taylor after the show. "But those songs are a part of my story, and I never got to sing them before. I make no apologies for that. There might be a time when I just play a Duran song for an encore or something, but it's not gonna be yet."

Since his departure from Duran Duran last year, Taylor has struggled a bit with his self-reinvention. On one hand, he wants to distance himself from his former band as much as possible. On the other, going from bassist and occasional back-up singer to head honcho isn't an overnight transition.

"One has a dream about how you'd like things to be," says Taylor. "But it still has to evolve. From a very early age, I felt drawn to making music. But in order for me to be the best that I can be, I felt I needed to be in control."

On his current tour through a handful of venues in Southern California, Taylor is basing almost all of his set on his former projects. Obscure Duran tunes like "My Own Way" and "Hold Back the Rain" are actually quite well suited to Taylor's deeper vocal range, as is the strongest song in his current set, "Better Way" by the Neurotic Outsiders (a side-project with the Sex Pistols' Steve Jones and Guns n' Roses' Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum). While Taylor has been working on his second full-length solo album since last summer (Feelings Are Good and Other Lies surfaced in 1995), he needed these gigs to get back in the spirit again.

"To a certain extent, I've got beautiful music, but I didn't feel like I was really selling them as a singer," he says. "I thought, 'I've got to get out and do some gigs.' Hopefully I will be able to take this experience back to the studio and it will help me finish the album."

In the meantime, Taylor will continue working to establish a new musical identity, even if his former band's royalty checks still pay the bills and their music constantly comes beaming through the speakers on radio station flashback weekends.

"There was a long time where I didn't listen to any of our records. When you make an album over a long period of time, you tend to hear the fights, the arguments, the pain and the tears. As you get further away from it and listen to it out of the blue, you might hear a sleeper that was actually a good memory. I hear 'Hungry Like the Wolf' and 'Ordinary World' all the time."

Besides concentrating on the second act of his musical life, Taylor keeps busy at his home in Venice, Calif., raising his six-year-old daughter from a former marriage.

"Pretty early on, she got a sense of what her dad does for a living. When a song comes on the radio, she recognizes it. I feel it's a good balance because I'm not enough of a giant that she's going to be living in my shadow. She also forces me to behave decently."

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