Duran Duran

they're big, they're back, they're...punk rock?

"We'd been used to playing certain nightclubs and seeing old girls with feathers in their hair," Duran Duran's NICK RHODES laughingly recalls. "We thought the content of our songs was hardy something that was going to appeal to a teen audience. So, it was very unexpected.' When it happened with us, we were shocked, incredibly surprised," So, what was it like the first time you walked out onto an arena stage? "Deafening! I mean no-one was more shocked than us. That first show, we were just looking at each other, it got to the point where we actually stopped playing because we just didn't know what was going on!" Duran Duran. A band which began life as new romantic tops, then transformed themselves into the yuppie icons of the '8o's; Penthouse models big budget videos shot exotic locations, Armani suits on arena stages where the look was evething and fashion ruled the roost style over substance. Or so detractors would have you believe.

The flip side of the coin. Duran Duran. A band that rose from ashes of the punk scene and transformed the face of Britain's music wasteland with innovative videos, electronic experimentation a willigness to take musical risks. A group that broke electronics into the stream, and influenced an entire generation of programmers.

Find that a bit hard to swallow? Well read on and meet the real Duran Duran.

In their very early days, bassist JOHN TAYLOR liked to describe the group as a cross between Chic and the Sex Pestols; lit by punk's fire, but with a funky disco style seemingly at odds with punk. It was the ensuing musical collision that was Duran's sound. That's how he explained it to SIMON LE BON, when the singer showed up for his audition in 1980. The group took him into their rehearsal room, picked up their instruments, turned on the tape, and started playing the basics of their newest song, "Sound Of Thunder". Simon grabbed the mic and started singing along, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But back then, what Simon was hearing was not quite the Sex Pistols wallop Chic that John described but the funksters slam the Damned. "I thought they were more of an in between Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols," the singer explains. "The Sex Pistols, because the guitar was really big and brash, but it was more like the Damned than the Sex Pistols. 'Neat. Neat. Neat', that was the kind of punk I was hearing in it.

"The Pistols were much more straight on rock music, it came from Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop, but there was much more of a European flavor in The Damned. If you Listen to say something like 'Fan Club,' it had a very off the wall sound, the tonality of their songs was much darker."

And it was that dark aura which would define Duran's early sound and many other bands as well. Groups that dabbled in that gloomy aura of music, from the banshees to the Cure, were eventually dubbed post-punk, or contrarily enough, positive punk, and it was, in a way, a grafting of artschool experimentation onto punk's liberating fire.

The early line-ups of Duran more than proves this point. John Taylor's first band was Dada. and there's no prize for guessing what kind of group they were. SIMON COLLY was brou9gt in as both a second bass and clarinetist, then there was STEPHEN "Tn Tin" DUFFY, and we all know what he went on to do (and if you don't, go buy a copy of any Hits of the New Wave compilations).

Singer ALAN WICKEIT, who came on board after Stephen left, arrived via a punk band, and so did his replacement, JEFF THOMAS. Jeff's former group the Sex Organs, had a drummer named ROGER TAYLOR, and Roger replaced Duran's drum machine (a K Rhythm Unit, to be precise). Guitarist ALAN CURTIS previously played with Cowboys International, a seminal post- punk band, with an album to their credit.

Alan's replacement, ANDY TAYLOR, was also a pro. He'd formed his first band at 16, right after leaving school, and spent the next few years touring Europe, doing the circuit of air bases and strip clubs.

But it was Simon Le Bon who tied all these variant musical threads up into the proverbial Gordian knot. He'd formerly sang with the punk band Dog Days, a pub band a La Eddie and the Hotrods called Bolleaux, as well a Krafwerkian darkpop group named Robotrov.

At the time, Duran weren't unique in their wedding of artschool and punk. Groups like Echo and the Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs, Joy Division, and Bauhaus were all standing at a similar crossroad. What Duran had that those bands didn't was NICK RHODES.

He was the baby of the band, just 16 when the group formed in 1978. But for all his youth, he was the true experimentalist and innovator. He'd take Duran down paths that no band had ever thought to tread before. The group's earliest shows featured slides and film, but that, white unusual. wasn't a first. John's band Dada bad also included similar visual effects. No, what Nick brought to the band was something that nobody he knew had ever previously attempted, Nick recorded samples and used them within Duran's live set. To the best of his knowledge this was a first.

"I just liked the idea of it," Nick explains, "and it was all done live. I wasn't just sampling bits oft of TV and radio. I also went in and took things off albums. On 'The Chauffeur.' there's a bit taken from a nature album, I loved the sound of the guy's voice. took a bit about the grasshoppers in the grass off of that. 'Rio's another good example that was a sample of my girlfriend.

"But there were no samplers back then, I had to keep playing it over and over and over to get it recorded right onto the tape in time with the music. It I had the technology available now, back then, well...."

Well....their place in electronic history would have been assured. There again, if Duran had become as experimental as Nick would have liked, the Berrow brothers probably wouldn't have been interested.

In 1979, PAUL and MICHAEL BERROW opened a new club in Birmingham, Rum Runners. Duran went in and spoke with the pair, which resulted in several interesting developments. The Berrows decided to manage the band, and gave them a residency at their club. But they didn't like Geoff Thornas, so he departed. as did Alan Curtis who didn't like them. It was at this point that Simon joined the band. He was suggested by an old girlfriend who was now bartending at the club. As for Nick, well, he started DJing there. And that would have a dramatic impact on Duran's music.

But not Nick's finances, he was paid a mere 10 pounds a night for his efforts; this was obviously long before the days of star DJs. But even if the money wasn't great, the experience more than made up for it.

"We were all really into the dance scene back then. I had two turntables and worked hard on learning about rhythms, tempos and empty spaces. I began to figure out what worked with an audience rhythm-wise, what the crowd would respond to. In fact, I'd deliberately try to empty the floor to see what didn't work. I'd have to say that DJing was a very important element in my career. What was very disappointing was that nobody else seemed to attach any importance to it at all, or at least ask about it, or show any interest in interviews."

And perhaps that's why the press, even in the band's earliest days, missed the sheer brilliance and uniqueness of Duran's sound. and their subtle mix of style and moods went unremarked upon.

Some of Duran Duran's more experimental early work were to be found on the b-sides of their 12" singles, where they created extended versions and remixes of the A-sides. Capitol has just released Night Versions a compilation of many of these tracks, running from their debut singles "Planet Earth (Night Version)" through "Wild Boys (Wider Than Wild Boys Mix)". With sleeve notes written by Nick Rhodes, this is probably the best entry in to the more electronic orientated side of Duran.

It was on these songs that Nick was given the opportunity to really flaunt his keyboards and samples, and here that his creativity shone through, even within the restrictions of a pop formula. That's what made Duran special, an ability to create perfect pop songs from the very disparate, worlds of electro, punk, and disco.

"What we did," Nick elaborates, "was take the punk ethic together with the etectronic music of Kraftwerk, Moroder, and all that disco stuff as welll, which we sort of liked some of, and mixed it in with glam rock. All that together is what resulted in the new romantic ethics. I suppose. I think our music was greatly away from nearly everybody else, other than the punk side of it I suppose, which was there with the Likes of Depeche Mode, but perhaps not so much so with some of the others."

"Funny one that, the new romantic label. Looking back at it now, I think really what it was about was a style movement that came out of punk rock and qlam rock. Running alongside glam was techno rock - triple albums, concept albums, flying pigs."

Like Pink Floyd?

'Exactly, and Yes and alt those groups. The punk movement was against all that. They were fans of T Rex, Bowie, the stylized qlamrock, but nobody was that keen on ELP. Punk was a reaction against people who could play like virtuosos. It was more 'we can play three chords, stand up on stage, and everything's great.'

What Duran did share with the earliest bands in the embryonic new romantic movement was a love of keyboards and experimentation. Human League's debut, the Being Boiled EP, for exampte, received particular praise from Nick. In their early days. Human League was particularly innovative, a far cry from their Dare years With Visage, for example Duran shared a love of dark melodies, and it was only once the movement took off, that the band wagon clotheshorses jumped on and squashed what initially began as an intriguing experiment in musical hybridization.

Nick is right, even within the early movement, Duran stood apart. Rhythms were inordinantly important to their sound, and ofttimes mixed with a funk flair, but the band were never pacr of the polyester disco crowd, for grafted to the rhythms was a dark pop sensibility totally at odds with the disco beat. Playing through the band's debut self-titled album today, it barely sounds dated, for Duran really were that far ahead of their time. Darkwave melodies soar over four on the floor beats, John's funk fueled bass give some songs an almost modern jungle feel. Nowadays a hundred bands struggle to obtain that dancefloor darkwave pop sound which Duran created with such ease.

Duran's unquenchable thirst for innovation bled into other aspects of the band as well. Their videos are the most obvious example. Funnily enough, initially John couldn't even grasp why they needed to make such a thing!

'When we first did a video, I was like, 'What the fuck is this about!?!' 'Well, John, this is going to save us going to Australia.' We've got a hit record in Australia, and we need television presence over there, but we don't want to have to go there. That was how we got to do 'Planet Earth.' None of us understood, Simon perhaps got it, probably because it had to be explained to him a little more fully, but that whole concept of a video, I really didn't get it, it was certainly at odds with the whole punk ethic.'

There you go, it was merely down to the fact that "Planet Earth" was a smash hit in Australia, that Duran entered the exciting new world of videos.

When EMI won the bidding war for the band in Britain,. the Berrows insured that Duran signed an excellent contract. "We ended up getting ripped off left, right and center, just like every other new band does," Nick explains. "But the one saving grace of our early contract was that we got complete artistic control over everything we ever did; from music to videos, album covers, photos. I guess we got director's cut as they say, and so that way we've always been able to keep the integrity of our music."

Thus, even though they were working with a limited budget, the group made sure that the video for "Planet Earth" was still creative. What made it stand out was not the tact that the group were playing on a large podium in a pure white room but the factoids about the planet and its population that ran along the bottom of the screen. In a way, it was the vistial equivalent of sampling, and it was truLy groundbreaking for its time.

As Duran began to take off in Europe and the UK, the more money they had to play with, the more innovations they could add to their stageshows and videos. But that didn't mean all in the band were having a grand time. "I hated doing videos," Andy vehemently insists. "John and I used to get drunk and go and hide."

But you got to go all these beautiful exotic locations...

"Yeah, and get sick and get diarrhea. It was like Jungle to Jungle, I'm riding on elephants and swimming in the water they pissed in. I got really sick with a virus and had to go to hospital for four days once we got hack to the UK. That's my memory of making the videos.

"They pulled the same stunt on us again for the Rio ones. First of all I made sure the hotel was on the beach, and then I just lay there until someone called me. We were in the Caribbean, so we're doing okay now. We'd got out of Sri Lanka. That's when I started my video avoidance phase. People say to me, 'You know you stayed out ot the way in the videos. Fucking right! I don't know why it intimidated me so much, but the camera being bunged up your nose, it used to really frighten me. They put me in a superman hipstrap so I could fily [for the 'Wild Boys' video], and hoisted me up in the air and left me there, chucked my guitar up and left me there for an hour.

"Well, that doesn't sound like much fun, but it was a hell of alot worse for Simon. At least you didn't get tied up and dunked for hours into cold water! 'Tie me to the windmill, please! I had much more fun standing there laughing at him. When we did that, he did actually go under the water, and the windmill did get stuck and he almost died."

So, be careful what you wish for. Exotic locals and beautiful modek Do come with a price tag. Today. MTV is given the credit for breaking the band in the States. The truth is a little different. "Without MTV," Nick begins. "it possibly would have taken us a little longer at radio. In the way it happened historically. it was interesting again with the media. They hook on to something. and then forever more that becomes gospel. That's the way they create history which, of course, is often fake history."

The real history, in contrast, was that Duran had already established a cult following here upon the release ot their first album and a club tour. Their following expanded further with Rio and another long national tour. A third outing opening for Blondie raised their profile even higher. At that point, radio was beginning to play their songs and, it was only at that point that MTV stepped in.

Back then, MTV was only available in three select locations New Jersey, Texas and Florida. Duran's manager had a meeting with the new station, and then another with the band's label. "I think that the conversations he had, and the kind of videos we delivered, for like 'Save A Prayer' and 'Hungry Like The wolf' were a direct result of those conversations," John states. "The directors saying, 'Yeah, we're going to do this thing, but quite frankly, all the d historical stuff we have is kind of tame, and we don't have anything that's exciting, new.'

"MTV had to be progressive because nobody wanted to watch Black Sabbath videos all night. there were no videos for 'Stairway To Heaven.' IF MTV had had its way, they would have simply reflected the most popular radio format, which was rock radio at that time, but they couldn't do that because the videos didn't exist. I think we were the first band to really give them something that was a turn on to the viewers because it was colorful, real, and fun. They evoked a kind of mood that Pepsi tries to evoke with tat every commercial they make - youth. vibrancy, energy.

Back then, the entire concept of videos was still alien to the rock industry. Previous to the advent of MTV, there was nowhere for them to be shown on a regular basis here. Even in Britain, they merely took the place of a band who didn't have the time or inclination to perform on the weekly chart show Top of The Pops. Why waste money on that?

The BuggIes "Video Killed The Radio Star" may have kicked off the MTV phenomena on August 1, 1981, but at the time the title seemed a very unlikely scenario. The airwaves were filled with something like a grand total of 20 videos; burlesque girls danced out of time to Led ZeppeLin, Judas Priest roared, and the viewing audience yawned.

But MTV was tenacious, and more bands began filming videos.One often wondered why they bothered. Watching the Rolling Stones going through the motions of "Start Me Up" in front of a white screen was far from attention grabbing. It's no wonder MTV was initially seen by the rest of the television industry as nothing more than moving wallpaper. After the first week, most kids turned the sound off, and just left the picture on as a revolving poster.

There again, what bands would have grabbed kids attention? The American scene wasn't just tilted with dinosaurs, it was suffering from an overdose of otiose dinosaurs. Arena bands still strutted their stuff, but for all their stadium appeal, their music was BORING, and there was no escape. for unlike Britain, punk hadn't arrived on a white charger to sweep the monsters away.

But across the water, a hurricane gale had swept through the music industry, opening windows to fresh, creative air. With the rise of the new romantic movement, style and elan became de rigueur. Thus, was it any wonder that bands, management. and labels put an equally creative effort into the videos.

MTV took one look at the results. and put them all into heavy rotation. Another six months of old groups miming in a studio to their single, and MTV would have become a forgotten footnote in the rock archives. But given 24 hours a day of cool, handsome young bands in the latest Brit styles, engaged in ever more exciting escapades, and American kids were glued to the channel day and night. It was the perfect symbiotic relationship.

So, it was no wonder the States experienced a second British invasion, and succumbed thankfully to the onslaught. In one fell swoop, the new wave at British bands, accompanied by a host of visually enticing videos, swept everything from their path. American bands went down without a fight. Interestingly enough, the exception was The Cars. Between 1978 and 1980, they put six singles into the lower reaches of the Top 40, but surprise, surprise, in late '81, they scored a Top Five hit. Was it merely coincidence that a brilliantly innovative video accompanied the single?

Another exception, of course, was Ministry. Long before Al Jourgensen ascended to industrial godhead, his synthi band, released a seminal Wave album, accompanied by several apropro videos. Although never attaining the success of the Cars, early Ministry highly impressed New Wave kids throughout the nation, who saw the band as America's great white hope.
In any case, the U.S was totally unprepared for the effects ot MTV and by 1983, the station had become the breaking ground for every act for the rest of the decade, and Duran were poised to take advantage.

"MTV obviously became a lot more helpful to us, when it grew all over the country." Nick recalls. "Because it was new, everyone was more obsessed with it, and thought it was really exciting. That was the time '83, '84, '85 - when I really do think that as soon as we put a record out, MTV was more influential."

But if MTV wasn't responsible for Duran's initial success, would MTV have achieved the success IT did without them? Nick laughs at the very thought. 'Somelody else would've been there' is the simple answer, but I think we did make the channel much more interesting, all the other videos were just people playing in front of a video camera.

Exactly, and that is where Duran literally changed the course of music, helping to establish MTV in the public's eye. The results were immediate, no longer would Duran drag their way up the chart. Now their singles would literally rocket into the top ten. But just as the new romantics would eventually become an albatross around their neck, so would MTV. As with every movement since rock began, commercialization and bandwagon jumping would turn a new sound and unique idea into a mass market commodity. Britain already had the bitter taste of this lesson with punk, which reached its nadir with $200 Zandra Rhodes dresses (a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a cotton dress ripped at the seams and held together by safety pins) and the Grear Rock'n'RoIl Swindle film (which swindled people into believing Malcolm Mcclaren's own perverted version of the Pistols's history).

Now, new romantics were about to experience the same disillusionment of their dream. Surprising as it may seem today. the dark denizens of the scene created their frilled and laced clothes themselves out of thrift store finds. This was how the fashions were able to change virtually every fortnight, and those fashions filled the floor of hip London clubs, which were started and run by scenester STEVE STRANGE, a refugee from the punk scene.

In the early days, the link between the old punk scene and the new romantics remained strong, but then the clueless arrived, and with them came the press. Today, lore no longer recalls the name of the bandwagon group that proclaimed that new romantics were the backlash against all punk stood for, nor the journalist who proudly printed it in one Britain's daily newspaper. But from that moment on, the lie became fact.

Initially the true new romantics just laughed at this stupidity, but the joke lost its humor as they round their entire history and ethos transforming before their eyes into a middle class, bourgeois lifestyle. Some bands, like Heaven 17 twisted it towards their own ends, turning the whole thing inside out in the process; Penthouse and Pavements indeed. It was that very sense of apotheosis, of punks using the system to form and succeed in the world of big business that was the appeal, but outsiders missed the insider joke entirely.

America Looked on in confusion. Having missed the boat on punk, the new omantics made even less sense. Removed from their punk context, the clothes and videos created an image of yuppie prosperity. The bands to dance to as the bomb dropped were severed from their punk nihilism, and misconstrued as Britain's answer to yuppies.

As the '80s partied on, much to their own shock, Duran found themselves feted as the flagship of corporatism and with no way to fight this mistaken impression. What the band members lacked was the Sex Pistols' ability to shock, the Clash's arrogance. and the Damned's ability for anarchy.

They didn't have a political agenda like Joe Strummer's, the acerbic insults of Johnny Rotter), nor even the pie in the face antics of Dave Vanian and crew. What they did have was charm by thc bucketful and a sense of British fair play. Which meant they walked into interviews expecting journaflsts to treat them with the same respect that the band showed them, and no matter how many times they were proved wrong Duran's optimism insisted that they just keep trying.

With time, most bands begin to attempt to control an interview, steer the conversation towards subjects they want to cover, and ignore areas of no interest, but Duran refused to be so rude. No matter how moronic the question, how ridiculous the subject, the group would carefully consider the question and answer it One of the saddest examples of this was a cover story Simon did with the premier fashion/music magazine The Face, in February. 1984. Fiona Russell Powell spent hours before their Wembley area show with the singer, asking such scintillating questions as Where did you get the nickname Muscles", "Would you consider seeinq a psycho-analyst?", and "What's your sexual fantasy?" Simon answered these all, amid many more equally stupid and insulting ones besides.

But Fiona's most telling question was her last one. "Can you think of any question which I've neglected to ask." The piece ends with Simon's answer. "Well, you haven't asked me any questions about our music."

It was no surprise really, for by then, the band had already been coopted by the teen press arid from that point on, none of the serious music papers would ever see Duran as anything more than a prop for tame jokes and press office pools (how many times do you think we earl embarrass them in this piece. which was the obvious exercise of the Face article).

But just how did an arty post-punk band get tossed to the teen scream mags to begin with?

"What happened was," Andy explains, "When The Japanese got a hold of the band photo, they saw the potential for the Japanese market. The little Japanese girls went for it straight away, and as we started going to other places, the female audience became very apparent. So the cynical marketing side of it said "Let's go straight downstairs to the Smash Hit market," and before you know where you are, you've encouraged it without knowing.

They know what they're doing, and it was all based on the reaction in Japan to John. Market a great looking boy with a pop hit, and you're gonna get a teen reaction. We didn't know that. We were flying here and there doing TV shows, playing the odd gig, we didn't realize the capability and the cynicism of the machine around us. The bright idea of the video all fit in with the marketing plan. There were some. pretty smart people doing what they were doing for us."

And by the time the band realized what was happening, it was too late, but what was perhaps most surreal about all the surrealism surrounding Duran was that the teen screamers never outgrew the group. In a way' the band's longevity was aided by the very youth of their fans.

By rights, as these youngsters moved into their mid to late teens, they should've turned their back on their puppy love, but Duran escaped the fate of most teen idols by the very reason that their music was never teenscream orientated. Thus, as their audience matured, they didn't outgrow the group. instead they were now able to understand the music and lyrics, and their love for the band would take on a whole new dimension.

Hooked by the band's good looks, their pop singles. and their ground breaking videos, the older fans eventually discovered the heart of Duran, their innovative music, assuming the fans survived the departure of Roger and Andy. Of course, the band's dynamics were dramatically altered at that point, the guitarist's departure was a particularly serious blow as Andy had been the only experienced musician in the band. At the time, as John states. "Holy shit, we're fighting for our survival. We're fighting to keep Duran in the hearts and minds of any audience. It seemed to me over the next five years, over the making of Notorious, Big Thing. and Liberty. we were trying to keep an identity and keep an audience, just fighting to stay relevant."

They weren't always successful. and both Simon and John claim Notorious as their weakest album, but they returned to form with Big Thing, an album that once again found Duran ahead of their time. "Big Thing was like Duran Duran and rave music," Simon enthuses. "there's acid house in that that funky piano thing, it's house music. We were really, really into that. We' were into the whole house scene, and a lot or that came out on that album."

But the US wasn't ready for house music. and so on Liberty, the group in a way took a step backward. Duran returned as a quintet with the addition of guitarist WARRFN CUCCURULLO and drummer STERLING CAMPBELL. "We thought we could be that band again, be that five piece," John explains. "It was very hard not to took backwards at that point. When we were in rehearsal it seemed like we had a great album, but we weren't able to parlay it into a great album in the studio."

The group had no such difficulties with the Wedding Album, which heralded a new Duran dawn. "We just knew there was no space for Duran Duran at the end of the '8o's," Nick explains. "so we got on making the next album I suppose, and that turned out to be very fruitful. That really relaunched things. and we went on to do a tour which went down really well. We were thrilled to find that a lot of the audience had come back, and there were people that had stuck there, and I think there was a very warm feeling towards Duran Duran."

The all covers' album: Thank You. followed, but it was on their latest album, Medazzaland, that Duran's creativity returned in full force. "We wanted to develop a newer sound " Nick explains, "and for me, really I wanted to make this album what Rio was' for the 1980's;. I wanted it to be something that symbolized where we were at reflected the times. and made certain statements about the atmosphere that we're all living in. Something that symbolized the decade from our point of view, and that's what Medazzaland is about to me.

And in that, Duran have succeeded, capturing the many threads of '90s music, from electro-pop to industrial that signify the decade. And after a career spanning two decades, Duran continue to define the times and the sound of a new generation.

-Jo-Ann Greene

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