By Joseph Allen
09.03.97

Catchy songs and living room exposure secured Duran Duran's place on bedroom walls and singles charts for the better part of the '80s. But you know what they say about all good things...

"We got the bill for the '80s on January 1, 1990," chuckles a wistful Nick Rhodes. Devastated by lackluster interest in Big Thing and Liberty, a more mature Duran Duran got together in guitarist Warren Cuccurullo's living room studio to record 1993's Duran Duran, a.k.a. The Wedding Album. Lightning struck twice. Lauded as "the most dramatic reversal in pop history," The Wedding Album was the surprise smash of the year, spawning three Top-10 singles ("Ordinary World," "Come Undone" and "Too Much Information") and an 18-month world tour, and pushing the band's total catalogue sales close to a staggering 40 million.

Perhaps more surprising than Duran Duran's second coming itself was the fervent media support that came with it. "One of the great things that we've found happening with the media in America," explains Rhodes, "is that it is being run by people who were Duranies in the early '80s. The rock press was once pretty cynical about us, but now it's like they've brought us home."

Home for Duran Duran is London, England, where Rhodes and Co. had been tooling Medazzaland, their new Capitol release, for the past four years. Unfortunately, the wait was too long for an increasingly disillusioned John Taylor, who flew from the nest to start a solo career. Taylor's departure served as a creative catalyst for the three remaining members (Rhodes and Cuccurullo, music, Simon LeBon, vocals), and Duran Duran got down to business, wrapping up the album in two months.

Now, with their single "Electric Barbarella" catching on like a venereal disease in a brothel and Medazzaland hitting the stores this October, Duran Duran is once again poised to retake the top of the charts.

The album and the single are a nod to the original Duran Duran lyrically as well as stylistically. The band's name was taken from a character in the 1967 campy sci-fi classic Barbarella, and the album's arpeggiated synths layered over hard rock guitar riffs and a driving disco beat mark a return of sorts to the original Duran Duran high-energy sound.

JAMTV: Your new record is fantastic -- it's your best one yet!

Nick Rhodes: Yeah, I think it's the best one. I'm glad you like it. We're obviously very happy. It's making a good response, too, which is quite nice. We usually do well with the fans and the audience, but it actually seems to be going down reasonably well with some of the media, so far. An interesting little thing for us... it makes me a little nervous, actually.

Well, you guys have a certain street credibility now.

(Laughs) Yeah, with all these new sort of electronica things coming out, I suppose it's proved a certain point. We were right about something a while ago.

How do you feel about some of the Duran Duran-influenced bands like Elastica or Nancy Boy? Has that influenced this kind of return to your roots?

I think what's happened with the new sound that's around, particularly with some of the electronica stuff, with The Chemical Brothers and Prodigy and what have you, is that it's made people turn back towards electronic music, where we feel very comfortable.

The whole concept of Duran Duran from Day One was to cross over electronic music with dance music and rock music. And I think we've stayed pretty close to that ethic throughout our careers.

I mean we've meandered a lot. There's a darker [side of us] that likes to experiment with ambient things, and we always like pretty ballads. But ultimately, most of the albums have always had one foot firmly on the dance floor, in one way or another. And so what's happened with all the new stuff, is it's opened up people's minds to electronic music again. And it's opened up radio and the media and people are saying, 'Wait a minute, this is much more interesting than what we were listening to before.' It's helped awareness.

Certainly, when we put out a record in 1990, around the birth of grunge, we knew that songs from that record [Liberty], however good they were, were not going to get played on the radio. And we just accepted that when we put it out. It was just the wrong climate, and I don't really think that, sadly, it had anything to do with the record.

Do you find that to be healing in a way?

It's a relief more than anything else. I'm always trying to push new things. If I find a new band that's got a really cool sound or a great idea, I'm the first to tell somebody about them or to mention them or to try and help them if they're somebody I come across personally.

If something is of a certain standard or quality, there's always an audience out there somewhere. It's just that they don't know where to look for it because the radio tends to dictate what they're going to listen to.

I feel most for young bands who possibly have a new sound, who are trying to break out and there's no space for them, because most radio stations, other than perhaps some college stations, won't give them the airtime. They won't give them that opportunity, and I think that's really sad. There should always be, somewhere, an outlet for new art. I think that music sometimes gets a bit too corporate. That's my industry criticism for the day.

So tell me about Duran Duran 1997.

Well, we've turned into a butterfly again. John [Taylor] leaving was obviously very sad for us at the beginning of this year, particularly for me, having known him since I was a kid. But at the same time it was really the thing that made us finish the album. It left us at a point where we had to decide on what Duran Duran's value was, what we had between us, what was really good out of what we had created over the last couple of years, and how we were going to move forward. I suppose it was a catalyst.

When John said, 'it's not gonna work, is it?' it was more geographical than anything else. I mean he was based in L.A. and couldn't really be a full participating member of the band. So we discussed it, and he decided to depart, and it was then that this album got completed, compensating as you do when you lose something, and made it into what I honestly believe is the strongest album that we've made.

This was after Simon had suffered some sort of writer's block?

Mmmm! Terrible thing it was. I don't know what happened with him with this album. It's an unusual one, because usually he's full of ideas and he's traditionally written the majority of the lyrics on the albums. I've always contributed titles or choruses or whole lyrics or bits of things or ideas or concepts for songs...whatever it's been, but he's actually been quite precious about them over the years. I felt, well, as long as I'm happy with them, I don't mind.

Simon had written a couple of really beautiful lyrics, quite deep. I thought, 'Great it's all going well,' and he just hit a wall and said 'I'm not coming up with the kind of things that I feel are good enough for what we've got.' I suggested that I do some of them, and he was really thrilled, because it took a great burden off his shoulders, and it also gave us new branch.

Again, I'm totally into the metamorphosis of Duran Duran and I think that's what makes this band so unusual. Were not scared of change. Not only in what's happened with the lineups, but in music, in other people's music, in technology, whatever it is.

That's even your voice on the song "Medazzaland."

It is. You know, that was going to be an instrumental, but then one day I was sitting there with Warren when Simon hadn't arrived yet, and I think I just felt like freaking him out, actually. That's really what it was! (Laughter all around)

I just thought, "this would sound so cool if it had a voice-over on it," and I just started writing these words out about paranoia and fear of trusting people. I used the analogy of the operating theatre and slowly sinking into a world where you have no control over anything and you don't know what the hell is going to happen to you, or whether you'll ever come out of it and if you do you won't even know what's happened.

We took the title from a perversion of a dental drug called Medazzalin which Simon had been given intravenously one day. He sort of floated into the studio six feet above the floor, and we said, 'what on earth did you take now?' He kind of explained it and he said, 'It's the strangest thing... in Dentistry you need to be awake so that you can respond to commands to keep your mouth open and move your jaw and things. So they give you this stuff, and you go into this state where you are awake and you respond, but don't really know what's going on. Afterwards, you don't know what's happened at all. It's like losing three hours of your life. You don't remember anything.' That's when we said to him, 'Yeah, you're still in Medazzaland!'

Did you get him to record another album in that three hours?

(Laughs) I wish! Yeah, we should've got some lyrics out of him! Next time. But the trouble is he's at the dentist, got the thing in his mouth and so it would've been hard. We should've just given him a pen shouldn't we?

"Electric Barbarella" reintroduces some of your earlier themes.

It is the closest thing we'd done to those earlier things for a long time. Warren had a guitar riff and he said, 'Listen to this, check this out.' I said, 'Wow, that's really kind of cool, actually. It feels just right at the moment.' And he said, 'It's the most up thing that we've hit on since I've been in Duran Duran.

Warren came on during the Notorious tour in 1986, right?

Yeah, exactly. He's on a couple of tracks on that album, actually. The only track that exists with Andy Taylor and Warren on it is "American Science." There's some trivia for you. One guitar break is Warren's and one is Andy's.

Medazzaland was produced by TV Mania, a production team consisting of yourself and Warren Cuccurullo. I know you also produced the new Blondie track ["Studio 54"]. What else can we expect from TV Mania?

Well, we're working on a sort-of opera entitled Bored With Prozac And The Internet. It's written as a stage piece in the traditional format of the opera, but it's not like anything else really that's out there. I mean, certainly Tommy, being a rock opera, but the only similarities are that it has characters and it has a story which develops. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. But other than that, it's radically different. It's more electronic and modern and it's quite unique.

Rather than release it in one great big grand piece, we thought we'd release it as a trilogy. The first part of the set will be available on our own label, Lo-Fi Records, which we're just looking for distribution for in America at the moment. And that'll be coming out some time next Spring. It's a strange observation on modern life and how simple families deal with the technology enforced upon them.

I hear that John Taylor originally sang on the Medazzaland track "Be My Icon."

What happened is that John had a lyric that he sung on it and it was called "Butt Naked," believe it or not. With no disrespect to John, we kind of didn't feel it was right for the song and then when he decided to depart, it seemed wrong on a new album to have someone who'd left the band singing on it. So that is why we changed it, and I wrote a new lyric, which was "Be My Icon."

It's a really sinister song -- sort of a celebrity stalker -- very current, too.

Yeah. It's about overly obsessive people.

The Duran Duran Tribute Album had a working title of No! Thank You. Did you find that spiteful? It's kind of sardonic, in a way.

Yeah, the first time I looked at it and they said it's called No! Thank You, I thought, hmmm, what's that about? I don't quite get it. But then in fact when I realized that it was No! Thank You, I thought, oh yeah, well that's just bad grammar.

No, that's what they meant: it was literally "No," (exclamation mark), "Thank You," with the emphasis on the "you." I'm very flattered. What can I say? These people wanted to record our old songs, and some of the newer ones. It's a very strange thing. It makes you realize you've got history. You spend the first 10 years of your existence as a band trying to pretend that you're still a new band, and then I think you have to succumb to the fact that it's quite cool to have history. And, certainly, once you get people doing cover albums of your songs you know you've been around for a while. But I was really kind of pleased, and quite touched, that most of the bands on there were really new, young bands that hadn't had a lot of stuff out there yet. It's a pretty wide spectrum of stuff.

And a tour?

Tour is a possibility. I'm sure we'll do some dates sooner or later. We're trying to figure it out, 'cause we'd like to go and showcase the album before Christmas. We're just kind of thinking we're gonna start rehearsing next week and see if we can slot something in quickly. But it is not confirmed yet, and it may be that it'll be next Spring, alongside the second single or something. We'd love to showcase it before Christmas, though.

Probably a Chicago date [JAMTV is based out of Chicago] is a good idea.

It may well end up being, because I want to keep it really low key if we do go out before Christmas. It would probably be really small theatres and perhaps doing double-ups in some of them, where we could. Probably three in New York, two or three in L.A., a couple in Chicago and Miami. No sort of big production or anything, just playing the songs, and the new stuff, which I could get quite excited about.

We're going to be putting our Internet site up (www.duranduran.com) to coincide with the album in October, and that's taking a long time, because I want that to be extra-specially special.

What about another album after this one?

We've already got about 5 tracks, which I'm also dying to record. We certainly won't be going on any long world tours this time. That's absolutely out because we want to get the next album out a little closer to this one. It's far too long in between Duran Duran albums!

That's my new vow: To really tighten it up and make sure that we get albums out quicker. I'd like to have another one out next year.