Duran Duran interview

Our music coverage began before we even became a magazine – and one of our very first interviews back in 2006 was with Duran Duran’s John Taylor, which we originally released as an audio podcast. The interview came at a time when the band didn’t have a new record to promote, which gave us the excuse to venture into just about any subjects we wanted, from the eighties to what was at the time still a debate over whether artists should make their music available through iTunes. Our sixth anniversary seems like the right time to give you a glimpse back into the past and hear from a founding member of one of the most influential bands in modern music history.

How do you feel about the eighties, looking back now?

It was a good time for me. The end of the seventies was a really dazzling time for music, I thought. You had very bone-crunching British punk movement happening at the same time as funk and disco coming out of the R&B scene over here, two very strong musical styles that I was very fond of. Then the beginning of the eighties saw really electro stuff start to take off, techno, I mean there was a lot of good music around. I mean it’s very hard to think in terms of decades and eras, because obviously there’s so much crossover. Unless you were to say, okay, from January the 1st, 1980 until… but obviously at that point there was a lot of influences that were carrying over. And I think we also tend to look back on the past with sort of rose colored glasses, you know, because we start to get more selective. Our memory gets more selective as time passes on. And you look at what’s on the charts today and you go My God, there’s so much crap around, it wasn’t like that back then. But that’s because you’re only remembering the good stuff. There was a lot of crap around as well.

Most or all of your music is available on iTunes for digital download. As an artist, how do you feel about that, that people can download individual songs rather than buying albums?

I’ve never had a very precious attitude toward what I would call delivery systems. It would only have been a little over a hundred years ago that songs were only available on sheet music and you’d have to play them yourself. I mean the recorded music has really only happened in the last, what, hundred and twenty years or something? So I am happy for people to want my music, to want to hear my music, in any way that they see fit. Whatever brings the music into your home, however it gets there, I’m just happy that it’s there.

So if someone just goes in and grabs Rio or Hungry Life The Wolf for 99 cents and doesn’t pick up the whole album, that’s cool with you?

We have featured tracks, but singles don’t play the same role that they did in the sixties and the seventies. And in the sixties and seventies, if you had a bit of cash, if you had a job, then you’d buy an album. If you didn’t and you were still at school and you were a little bit tight on money, you’d buy a single. I must have bought hundreds of singles, wishing I could afford to buy the albums, but I didn’t get that whole experience. As I got older and I started to make some money, then I started to buy the albums, and I was able to buy the whole experience, as the artist had intended it. It’s up to the consumer, and what level of experience the consumer wants to have. Is it a three minute experience, or is it a forty minute experience?

Duran Duran is performing a concert experience in the virtual world Second Life. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about, and how you feel about it?

I’m the worst person to talk to about this one. It’s really been Nick’s baby, and I don’t know an awful lot about it. I’m not really, you know, I heard an interesting phrase today, what was it, a techtard. I’m just about doing email. I’ve never gotten a habit for video games. I think when you’re a band as we are, you have your fingers in a lot of pies, and there’s a lot of things that we have, a lot of things going on around the band, and we don’t all have to be deeply into every aspect of what we do. There are some aspects of what we do that maybe Simon would feel and he would get involved in, there are others aspects that maybe I would, or combinations of us would. And in this particular deal, it’s not really my bag.

Where are you with your forthcoming album?

It’s taken a strange turn. We started on the album last year, but we were working by ourselves and we did quite a bit of material for it. We thought we had the album sort of finished, actually. And then we had an opportunity to work with Timbaland, and we’re all big fans of his and the albums that he’s made, particularly the Nelly Furtado album which he had just put out, and we were all very excited about that. So we went to New York to work with Tim, and he’d just finished working with Justin Timberlake, and Justin decided that he would like to involve himself in a song with us. So we ended up recording with the two of them, and it was quite a different sound than the music that we’d already recorded, so now we’re sort of thinking, sort of reconsidering the direction of the album. So I don’t know where we’re at with it, but we’re excited by what we’ve got. And it’s going to be a different album. When it comes out it’s going to be a different album from what any of us were thinking it was going to be when we started out.

When you start experimenting with new sounds like this, do you stop and ask yourself whether it sounds enough like Duran Duran that your existing fans are going to embrace it?

Obviously you try to make something that excites you and pleases you, but there’s a very tight remit for what people expect from us. But then I’m sure different people’s perceptions of what we are is perhaps different to what we think we are.

If you’re trying to write music that a maximum amount of people are going to connect with and like, it’s pretty tough, you know? We’ve been trying to do it for a long time. It’s been a few years since we wrote something that really connected with people on a massive level, you know? But you just go for it, you just do what feels like the right thing to do.