DURAN DURAN
Welcome To Medazzaland
by Bryan Reesman


What, you might ask, is "Medazzaland," the title of Duran Duran's latest album? The group's lead vocalist, Simon LeBon, claims to have discovered it during dental surgery after being given an intravenous drug called medacilin, which he says removed all memory traces of the experience despite his being conscious during it. Upon LeBon's return to the studio, his bandmates listened to his tale and, observing his groggy state, remarked, "You're still in Medazzaland, buddy."

Medazzaland retains the British group's well-known pop sensibilities while building on them with some contemporary ideas and electronic influences. It's highly textural music, which keyboardist and band founder Nick Rhodes believes is tailor-made for the current musical climate. While Rhodes felt that in the early '90s there was considerable media resistance to their music, particularly with grunge and hip hop dominating the charts, he's seen the musical tide reversing since 1994's release The Wedding Album. "That's when I think things started to change again, and people were moving back more toward electronic music and toward beautiful, melodic songs," he says. "Those two areas are where Duran Duran feels very comfortable, and so making this album it was as if we could go right back to our roots."

Initially, the band wrote songs for this record in the fall of 1994, then took a hiatus to record and tour behind their covers album, Thank You. They returned to the studio in the summer of 1995 to cut 16 tracks with a live drummer. Afterward, guitarist Warren Cuccurullo and Rhodes went into the former's home studio to begin keyboard overdubs, while LeBon struggled with writer's block to come up with suitable lyrics. "And then [we were] reevaluating what we had even on just a musical level, saying, `A year's gone by, is this one still good enough?'" remarks Cuccurullo.

As they were stripping down material and focusing their efforts, longtime bassist John Taylor left the band. (Cuccurullo took over bass chores on the post-Taylor tunes.) While waiting for lyrics and vocal melodies, Rhodes and Cuccurullo started a new band and production company called TV Mania. They wrote and produced two songs for Blondie ("Pop Trash Movie" and "Studio 54") and began their own "cyber-soap-rock opera" called Bored With Prozac and the Internet? Working intensely in close quarters, they produced an average of one or two pieces of new music a week. "It was very rewarding," says Cuccurullo. "We were exploring many different avenues of our creativity through this TV Mania project because we could be humorous with it lyrically and musically. We could be very adventurous with it musically."

It also helped to provide an impetus for finishing the new Duran Duran album. "When Simon came in and heard what we had been doing and saw the way we were working, it was like we had this burst of creativity, and we wrote six new songs very quickly, between December of 1996 and March of 1997. So this record is the most current thing we've ever put out." The band recorded at their private Battersea Studio, which takes up the expansive living room in Cuccurullo's London residence, with engineer and programmer Mark Tinley behind the board. Tinley previously had worked with Adamski and various London DJs before hooking up with Duran Duran in 1995. Medazzaland was cut on a 24-bus DDA DMR12 desk and recorded to Tascam DA-88s, using E-Magic's Logic Audio editing and sequencing software and a basic 4-track version of Pro Tools. They used a variety of signal processors, including an AMS reverb and delay, Boss SE-70, various DigiTech, Eventide, Ibanez and Lexicon units, an EMS Synthi-AKS, Roland 501 space echo and TOMY voice changer.

The fresh electronic milieu of Medazzaland comes from a union of analog and digital gear. Rhodes says he was dissatisfied with the thinner sound of his digital synths, which he began using in the mid-'80s, and wanted to get back to warmer analog sounds. So he went out and bought some of his old favorites to use in conjunction with modern samplers. These older models included a Roland Jupiter-4 and Jupiter-8, Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, EDP Wasp and a Roland System 100, which he describes as "a big analog modular system which I'd used on the first and second albums. I got back to using that together with a lot of analog and digital effects.

"I played a lot of parts manually that I can probably never repeat without just sampling them and playing the samples, because it involved a lot of twiddling of knobs at the same time," he continues. "I very much looked at this album as I did with our earlier stuff, in the way that synthesizers are there to create atmosphere and soundscapes. I tend to play a lot of melodies on very simple harmonic sounds and things like strings and orchestration." He and Cuccurullo worked together to fill out the musical spectrum; if the guitarist played some higher parts, then Rhodes tried to create sounds in lower frequencies, often meshing their sounds. "Some of the things you may think are guitars are probably keyboards, and vice versa," Rhodes notes. "The keyboard parts by themselves for any one of the songs would make a really interesting ambient album," remarks Tinley. "The way the textures weave in and out and then simply change timbre completely from section to section is one of the things that makes Nick so interesting to work with."

Cuccurullo's dense sonic tapestries are also intriguing. The guitarist, who wields a Strat-shaped Steinberger GR, confesses to having nearly six feet of pedals on the floor in front of him at any given time, and he isn't shy about using a wide array of effects. "I use Lexicon Jam Mans as my main writing assistant," he explains. "I could just play a riff in there and then have it loop forward or backward perfectly in time with the rhythm machine. Usually, I'll just find different harmonic climates that will work around that riff and play a couple of different top-line things. I use it to assemble a track, basically. Usually, once I have that going, I save it to DAT." Then he works out different overdub ideas, with the option to go back and forth from an acoustic guitar to see how the song sounds in a more naked form.

"Be My Icon" was the first song Cuccurullo wrote with the Jam Man. He had it reverse a riff he wrote, then found a progression that worked over that. The tune, originally called "Butt Naked," featured spoken vocals by Taylor. "We loved that track," remarks Cuccurullo, "and we thought, `Well, John's left the band, we're not going to have his singing on the album.'" So after Rhodes wrote new lyrics, Cuccurullo improvised a new vocal melody to the year-and-a-half-old song, something he had never done.

Another way Cuccurullo used the Jam Man was to make loops that Rhodes would sample onto a keyboard, reprocess "and actually play different tunes with it," Rhodes explains. "A song where Warren used the Jam Man loops a lot is `Big Bang Generation.' The little motif thing that comes up at the choruses is the Jam Man loops with harmonies on them. He plays into one Jam Man and then plays the harmony into the other one and then fires them both off at the same time."

Because of the experimentation, Medazzaland is one of the more unusual Duran Duran projects. Listen to the eerie "Be My Icon," filled with gritty guitar and keyboard textures, which echo its ominous theme of stalking. Even LeBon's normally pretty voice is given a sinister edge. "It's one of my personal favorites," says Rhodes, "because I think it's achieved something that is quite difficult to do now, which is to sound totally unlike anything else while using elements of many things. It is definitely a different side of the record. But I am very pleased with the way the vocal sounds, the lyrics, the melody. And the sounds on the track all mesh to make a wall of sound that is different for us."

Although Tinley generally recorded bandmembers separately, he intermittently captured them teaming up, as on the delicate ballad "Michael (You've Got A Lot to Answer for)." "I managed to get Simon to sing and Warren to play at the same time, and we DI'd an acoustic guitar. That's actually a live performance between the two of them, and we built everything up around that. It really does have a nice vibe."

Following work at Battersea, the group recorded live drum tracks in London's Metropolis Studios with Steve Alexander, who will be their drummer on tour. The album was mixed by Anthony J. Resta and Bob St. John. Rhodes praises them, as well. "It's essential in making this kind of record to have a really great team. The actual sound of this album we wanted to be very cutting-edge and contemporary, and I think we've achieved that."

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