Wild boys never lose it
Four working-class blokes from Birmingham, Duran Duran have now spent 30 years living the dream. They reveal all: the drugs, the models, the highs, the lows and the comeback.
Ensconced in a lavish armchair in his suite, Nick Rhodes is satisfied after the show the night before. The pits of his eyes enhanced with make-up, over-sized cuffs sprouting from the sleeves of a Yves St Laurent suit, he looks like a Georgian high-society raccoon.
"Last night was extremely satisfying," purrs Duran Duran's keyboard player and chief propagandist in a still discernible Brummie accent. "That was very much what we should be doing."
"Last night" was the second of a scheduled nine-night residency at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, a venerable 1920s playhouse designed to look like a Roman baths just off Broadway.
Fred Astaire made his final Broadway appearance there in the 1930s. Gene Kelly and Marlon Brando have danced and emoted on its small stage, too. In a slight departure, Duran Duran played their new album, Red Carpet Massacre, in its entirety to the 1,200-strong crowd, followed by a greatest hits epilogue that spans the best part of 30 years.
Few bands do "aspirational" like Duran Duran. Much of what is fun, posturing, narcissistic and frequently crass in pop today can be traced back to their mid-1980s pomp.
Like a bunch of over-dressed scientists conducting an ill-advised lab experiment, they placed the highly volatile ingredients of punk, glam rock, funk and electronic music into a test tube and gave it a good shake.
Astonishingly, the results turned these working-class blokes into one of Britain's biggest ever pop bands.
Their huge success was matched by their lifestyles: they dated supermodels, they hung out with Princess Diana and Andy Warhol, they bought Picassos on Amex, they capsized yachts.
"We came from punk," says singer Simon Le Bon. "We didn't foresee the 1980s. We had no idea we would be offered this commodity 'fun' in such big quantities. It seemed rude to say no."
Today, after a rocky 15-year period that saw their commercial clout plummet, Duran Duran are on an upswing. The new album features three tracks produced by man of the moment Timbaland, and two co-written by Justin Timberlake, while The Killers and Snoop Dogg have cited them as influences.
"The gratifying thing is there are young bands who are actually saying we're cool again," Le Bon says in a gruff, post-show whisper.
"Even my kids are saying it."
John Taylor begs to differ. "Oh, I don't know, the intelligentsia still hate us," sniffs the willowy bassist, born plain Nigel Taylor in Birmingham in 1960. "Who knows what makes a band cool anymore? Why have Q decided to cuddle up to us all of a sudden?" he asks.
Drinking coffee, drummer Roger Taylor - no relation to either John or recently departed guitarist Andy Taylor - looks back on it all with a pinch of salt. The tanned, fit-looking Taylor who famously walked out on the band at the height of their fame to become a chicken farmer, is able to look at Duran Duran with the awe and fascination of the outsider.
"I think it's great," he says. "And nothing short of incredible that we're still here."
Thirty years ago, Nick Rhodes met a bespectacled bass player named Nigel Taylor in the Hole In The Wall pub in Birmingham. What was the plan?
Nick Rhodes: I was 10 when I bought The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. I was quite happy to accept that David Bowie was from outer space at that point. I wanted the flash and style of glam, the energy of punk, the grooves of Chic and the electronics of Kraftwerk.
John Taylor: I wanted the full rock'n'roll menu. Changing my name was the first thing. Nigel was the name of all the twits on Monty Python. It was a very anti-Nigel era. Everyone in rock was a Johnny.
You all first met at The Rum Runner, the Birmingham nightclub owned by future Duran Duran managers Paul and Michael Berrow, in 1980. Can you remember what you first thought of one another?
Simon Le Bon: Roger had great style and was very good-looking. I thought Nick and John were quite strange. Nick was blond and very effeminate. John was arty and fey.
Roger Taylor: I'd seen an early line-up with Stephen Duffy [original singer, now Robbie Williams's co-writer] play at a club called Barbarella's in Birmingham. I honestly did think they were the next big thing.
Given your future excesses, the band's beginnings seem so unlikely: five lads from a bleak industrial city in the Midlands...
RT: But The Rum Runner didn't reflect that. The Berrow brothers thought it was Studio 54. The 1980s changed hands at The Rum Runner. You had UB40 in one room singing about being unemployed. Then you had us rehearsing this song about "girls on film"...
SLB: The Rum Runner was our HQ. There was a lot of competition for girls. We dated one another's girlfriends. You expected it. It was just a bit of fun. Like Pattie Boyd and George Harrison and Eric Clapton. We shared a few chicks, that's for sure.
You were quick to latch onto the new idea of the promo video. Was there a moment when you thought, "That's the key"?
RT: The video for Ultravox's [1981 single] Vienna came out and Paul Berrow said, "You can do one of those." Paul was very switched on and ambitious and so we did the Planet Earth video. [The promo for their 1981 debut single featured the band in flamboyant new romantic garb, playing inside a giant iceberg.]
But it was the risqué video for your third single, Girls On Film, that caused a sensation - with its girl-on-girl mudwrestling and shots of ice cubes on nipples, it was essentially soft porn. The first video jukeboxes had just appeared in America, and you cleaned up.
NR: I'm not sure "cleaned up" is the best term. Some people were shocked by that video. Having a girl with an ice cube on her nipple was actually a talking point. It seems quaint and quite tasteful now.
MTV launched in 1981, and your single Hungry Like The Wolf was an early sensation, especially in the Deep South where the channel was first broadcast...
RT: That was one of the first places our videos were seen. We'd go to Alabama or Texas and the girls would be screaming and the guys in cowboy hats would be looking at us with clenched fists. I don't suppose they'd seen many guys in make-up pouting before.
SLB: It worked for us, though. Video made it possible to create a cult of personality across the globe. You arrived on a tour bus and they'd already seen us on a yacht in a video.
Critics have said that your videos "sold a lifestyle"...
SLB: No! Rio [infamous 1982 video featuring the designer suit-clad band prancing about on a yacht in Antigua] wasn't a lifestyle, it was total fantasy. You don't wear a silk Anthony Price suit on a boat with some painted chick running around. It was a comedy video. None of us had boats. It was a greedy fantasy in reaction to the hard times that had gone before.
NR: I can see now that people think our videos were glossy. But as with many things, we were laughing through most of it. There was no "plan".
You wanted to be arty new-wave musicians. It must have been a shock when you woke up and found yourself teen idols.
RT: It was to me! Becoming teen idols was an accident. To be honest, it got in the way. I thought we were like Simple Minds or Japan. But our first time on Top Of The Pops it was obvious - it was the girls who liked us.
Duran Duran entered their imperial phase in 1983, with their third album, Seven And The Ragged Tiger, and attendant transatlantic Number 1 single The Reflex.
The next few years would see them living a life of conspicuous consumption that was excessive even by the standards of the 1980s: drugs (John Taylor), yachts (Le Bon) and supermodels (all of them) were on the agenda. They even formed rival supergroups. In 1985, Le Bon, Rhodes and Roger Taylor put together the arty Arcadia; at the same time, Taylors John and Andy opted to live out their rock'n'roll fantasies as Power Station, alongside singer Robert Palmer (who died of a heart attack in 2003) and Chic drummer Tony Thompson (who died of renal cancer the same year).
"Suddenly," recalls Roger Taylor, "we found this new level: insane."
Seven And The Ragged Tiger was recorded at great expense over a period of several months in a French château and on the island of Montserrat. Then there's the cryptic title. Were you starting to go up yourselves?
JT: I think so. I hated the procrastination of that album. It was approached like an old-school Dutch painting. Hours spent perfecting a cymbal sound. There was a lot of sitting around and I felt like a caged animal. I was drinking and looking for a way out, really.
SLB: The title was supposed to be about us seven [the five band members, plus their two managers] in this fairy tale, with the ragged tiger who was "fate" or "luck". I don't think anyone got it.
Nick, you founded and have never left the band. And you've always been relatively sober. Why?
NR: Simple. I like being in control. I don't like it if I don't know what is going on. In the mid-1980s we were moving at twice the speed of sound. I saw it as my job to keep the business side of things together. It was pretty overwhelming and if I hadn't been focused, we wouldn't have survived. At the beginning I was pretty silly. I didn't take any drugs whatsoever after my 21st birthday at Studio 54.
Simon says you're pretentious. Is that your "drug"?
NR: Rubbish. It's just I can enjoy myself immensely without losing control. My New York birthdays were memorable. The guestlists were, anyway: Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Debbie Harry, Quentin Crisp.
Around the 1980s Princess Diana said that Duran Duran were her favourite band. What did you think about that?
SLB: I was nonplussed. There have been times when I thought, "Great!", and there have been times when it's been the last thing we needed. She stood for the establishment. It was very uncool. Now it's fine. We did the tribute concert [2007's Concert For Diana, held at the new Wembley Stadium] because it made sense. Those boys lost their mother.
JT: I'm not sure it registered with me as a political thing. I think I was just a bit embarrassed that I clearly used more hairspray and had bigger shoulder pads than her.
Simon, it was also around that time you started dating model Yasmin Parvaneh. You had picked her out of a portfolio of models for 1984's Wild Boys video.
SLB: I was after a one-night stand, but Yasmin wanted a proper relationship, so she made me wait a long time. I took her to the premiere of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. That was hard for her. Two thousand people shouting, "Who's that mystery girl?" That relationship saved me. I have a taste for a regular family thing.
Rather than drink or drugs, Simon, your addiction seemed to be danger. In 1985 you nearly died when your yacht Drum capsized during the Fastnet race and you were trapped under the hull for 40 minutes, nearly drowning in the process...
SLB: Yes, I decided I needed to waste a vast amount of cash, and how better than to kit out an 80-foot boat. The weld between the hull and the keel just came off. The boat went to pieces and we had 25 people in the water. I laugh now, but I did think I might die. I was under the upturned boat and my clothes were caught on a post. The danger is you panic. One breath and that's it. But I managed to keep calm and get free. No one died. We were very lucky. And then I got into motorbikes and came off doing 90mph in a race [in 1992]. I remember thinking as I went down, "If I survive this, I'll stop for good." I broke my collarbone, and that was that.
In May 2001, the original Duran Duran line-up re-entered a rehearsal room together for the first time in 17 years. Three years later, they released a new album, Astronaut, which sold two million copies worldwide. They were honoured with a Q Lifetime Achievement Award and an Outstanding Contribution award at the Brits.
But in typical Duran fashion, chaos was lurking around the corner. In 2006, they recorded a new album, Reportage, featuring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a central theme, alongside "hard-hitting" social commentary about the UK. Their record label, Epic, heard the record and demanded hits, so the band teamed up with Midas-like hip-hop producer Timbaland and Justin Timberlake to record three new tracks. Encouraged by the results, Rhodes suggested they scrap Reportage and record a whole new album.
Once again, guitarist Andy Taylor didn't show for the sessions. He officially left the band for the second time on October 25, 2006.
Timbaland and Justin Timberlake are fans. The Killers have said they like you. Do you think it's OK to like Duran Duran now?
JT: Not that I have noticed. Have you seen the reviews for the new album? People begrudge us anything. The intelligentsia throws down the gauntlet to us every time we make an album. Well, we're picking it up.
SLB: Justin Timberlake was drunk when he agreed to do Falling Down. We were in a lock-in after he'd done his [Birmingham] show. He'd had half a bottle of malt when he said, "Let's write another song for your album." I think that says it all. People really discover how much they love Duran Duran after half a bottle of Scotch.
Today, Duran Duran are all about health and efficiency. Simon Le Bon's assistant arrives with details of his swimming session. John Taylor's sleek black bass is attached to headphones for a hotel room warm-up session. On the floor, a book about modern media lies open. It all feels rather grown-up.
"There's no two ways about it, I got what I ordered: the full menu of rock'n'roll fantasy," says Taylor. "I was Nigel, a teenager from the Birmingham suburbs, when we started. No one comes over and tells you when you cross the line into complete madness. You have to figure that out for yourself."
© Planet Syndication
"Last night was extremely satisfying," purrs Duran Duran's keyboard player and chief propagandist in a still discernible Brummie accent. "That was very much what we should be doing."
"Last night" was the second of a scheduled nine-night residency at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, a venerable 1920s playhouse designed to look like a Roman baths just off Broadway.
Fred Astaire made his final Broadway appearance there in the 1930s. Gene Kelly and Marlon Brando have danced and emoted on its small stage, too. In a slight departure, Duran Duran played their new album, Red Carpet Massacre, in its entirety to the 1,200-strong crowd, followed by a greatest hits epilogue that spans the best part of 30 years.
Few bands do "aspirational" like Duran Duran. Much of what is fun, posturing, narcissistic and frequently crass in pop today can be traced back to their mid-1980s pomp.
Like a bunch of over-dressed scientists conducting an ill-advised lab experiment, they placed the highly volatile ingredients of punk, glam rock, funk and electronic music into a test tube and gave it a good shake.
Astonishingly, the results turned these working-class blokes into one of Britain's biggest ever pop bands.
Their huge success was matched by their lifestyles: they dated supermodels, they hung out with Princess Diana and Andy Warhol, they bought Picassos on Amex, they capsized yachts.
"We came from punk," says singer Simon Le Bon. "We didn't foresee the 1980s. We had no idea we would be offered this commodity 'fun' in such big quantities. It seemed rude to say no."
Today, after a rocky 15-year period that saw their commercial clout plummet, Duran Duran are on an upswing. The new album features three tracks produced by man of the moment Timbaland, and two co-written by Justin Timberlake, while The Killers and Snoop Dogg have cited them as influences.
"The gratifying thing is there are young bands who are actually saying we're cool again," Le Bon says in a gruff, post-show whisper.
"Even my kids are saying it."
John Taylor begs to differ. "Oh, I don't know, the intelligentsia still hate us," sniffs the willowy bassist, born plain Nigel Taylor in Birmingham in 1960. "Who knows what makes a band cool anymore? Why have Q decided to cuddle up to us all of a sudden?" he asks.
Drinking coffee, drummer Roger Taylor - no relation to either John or recently departed guitarist Andy Taylor - looks back on it all with a pinch of salt. The tanned, fit-looking Taylor who famously walked out on the band at the height of their fame to become a chicken farmer, is able to look at Duran Duran with the awe and fascination of the outsider.
"I think it's great," he says. "And nothing short of incredible that we're still here."
Thirty years ago, Nick Rhodes met a bespectacled bass player named Nigel Taylor in the Hole In The Wall pub in Birmingham. What was the plan?
Nick Rhodes: I was 10 when I bought The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. I was quite happy to accept that David Bowie was from outer space at that point. I wanted the flash and style of glam, the energy of punk, the grooves of Chic and the electronics of Kraftwerk.
John Taylor: I wanted the full rock'n'roll menu. Changing my name was the first thing. Nigel was the name of all the twits on Monty Python. It was a very anti-Nigel era. Everyone in rock was a Johnny.
You all first met at The Rum Runner, the Birmingham nightclub owned by future Duran Duran managers Paul and Michael Berrow, in 1980. Can you remember what you first thought of one another?
Simon Le Bon: Roger had great style and was very good-looking. I thought Nick and John were quite strange. Nick was blond and very effeminate. John was arty and fey.
Roger Taylor: I'd seen an early line-up with Stephen Duffy [original singer, now Robbie Williams's co-writer] play at a club called Barbarella's in Birmingham. I honestly did think they were the next big thing.
Given your future excesses, the band's beginnings seem so unlikely: five lads from a bleak industrial city in the Midlands...
RT: But The Rum Runner didn't reflect that. The Berrow brothers thought it was Studio 54. The 1980s changed hands at The Rum Runner. You had UB40 in one room singing about being unemployed. Then you had us rehearsing this song about "girls on film"...
SLB: The Rum Runner was our HQ. There was a lot of competition for girls. We dated one another's girlfriends. You expected it. It was just a bit of fun. Like Pattie Boyd and George Harrison and Eric Clapton. We shared a few chicks, that's for sure.
You were quick to latch onto the new idea of the promo video. Was there a moment when you thought, "That's the key"?
RT: The video for Ultravox's [1981 single] Vienna came out and Paul Berrow said, "You can do one of those." Paul was very switched on and ambitious and so we did the Planet Earth video. [The promo for their 1981 debut single featured the band in flamboyant new romantic garb, playing inside a giant iceberg.]
But it was the risqué video for your third single, Girls On Film, that caused a sensation - with its girl-on-girl mudwrestling and shots of ice cubes on nipples, it was essentially soft porn. The first video jukeboxes had just appeared in America, and you cleaned up.
NR: I'm not sure "cleaned up" is the best term. Some people were shocked by that video. Having a girl with an ice cube on her nipple was actually a talking point. It seems quaint and quite tasteful now.
MTV launched in 1981, and your single Hungry Like The Wolf was an early sensation, especially in the Deep South where the channel was first broadcast...
RT: That was one of the first places our videos were seen. We'd go to Alabama or Texas and the girls would be screaming and the guys in cowboy hats would be looking at us with clenched fists. I don't suppose they'd seen many guys in make-up pouting before.
SLB: It worked for us, though. Video made it possible to create a cult of personality across the globe. You arrived on a tour bus and they'd already seen us on a yacht in a video.
Critics have said that your videos "sold a lifestyle"...
SLB: No! Rio [infamous 1982 video featuring the designer suit-clad band prancing about on a yacht in Antigua] wasn't a lifestyle, it was total fantasy. You don't wear a silk Anthony Price suit on a boat with some painted chick running around. It was a comedy video. None of us had boats. It was a greedy fantasy in reaction to the hard times that had gone before.
NR: I can see now that people think our videos were glossy. But as with many things, we were laughing through most of it. There was no "plan".
You wanted to be arty new-wave musicians. It must have been a shock when you woke up and found yourself teen idols.
RT: It was to me! Becoming teen idols was an accident. To be honest, it got in the way. I thought we were like Simple Minds or Japan. But our first time on Top Of The Pops it was obvious - it was the girls who liked us.
Duran Duran entered their imperial phase in 1983, with their third album, Seven And The Ragged Tiger, and attendant transatlantic Number 1 single The Reflex.
The next few years would see them living a life of conspicuous consumption that was excessive even by the standards of the 1980s: drugs (John Taylor), yachts (Le Bon) and supermodels (all of them) were on the agenda. They even formed rival supergroups. In 1985, Le Bon, Rhodes and Roger Taylor put together the arty Arcadia; at the same time, Taylors John and Andy opted to live out their rock'n'roll fantasies as Power Station, alongside singer Robert Palmer (who died of a heart attack in 2003) and Chic drummer Tony Thompson (who died of renal cancer the same year).
"Suddenly," recalls Roger Taylor, "we found this new level: insane."
Seven And The Ragged Tiger was recorded at great expense over a period of several months in a French château and on the island of Montserrat. Then there's the cryptic title. Were you starting to go up yourselves?
JT: I think so. I hated the procrastination of that album. It was approached like an old-school Dutch painting. Hours spent perfecting a cymbal sound. There was a lot of sitting around and I felt like a caged animal. I was drinking and looking for a way out, really.
SLB: The title was supposed to be about us seven [the five band members, plus their two managers] in this fairy tale, with the ragged tiger who was "fate" or "luck". I don't think anyone got it.
Nick, you founded and have never left the band. And you've always been relatively sober. Why?
NR: Simple. I like being in control. I don't like it if I don't know what is going on. In the mid-1980s we were moving at twice the speed of sound. I saw it as my job to keep the business side of things together. It was pretty overwhelming and if I hadn't been focused, we wouldn't have survived. At the beginning I was pretty silly. I didn't take any drugs whatsoever after my 21st birthday at Studio 54.
Simon says you're pretentious. Is that your "drug"?
NR: Rubbish. It's just I can enjoy myself immensely without losing control. My New York birthdays were memorable. The guestlists were, anyway: Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Debbie Harry, Quentin Crisp.
Around the 1980s Princess Diana said that Duran Duran were her favourite band. What did you think about that?
SLB: I was nonplussed. There have been times when I thought, "Great!", and there have been times when it's been the last thing we needed. She stood for the establishment. It was very uncool. Now it's fine. We did the tribute concert [2007's Concert For Diana, held at the new Wembley Stadium] because it made sense. Those boys lost their mother.
JT: I'm not sure it registered with me as a political thing. I think I was just a bit embarrassed that I clearly used more hairspray and had bigger shoulder pads than her.
Simon, it was also around that time you started dating model Yasmin Parvaneh. You had picked her out of a portfolio of models for 1984's Wild Boys video.
SLB: I was after a one-night stand, but Yasmin wanted a proper relationship, so she made me wait a long time. I took her to the premiere of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. That was hard for her. Two thousand people shouting, "Who's that mystery girl?" That relationship saved me. I have a taste for a regular family thing.
Rather than drink or drugs, Simon, your addiction seemed to be danger. In 1985 you nearly died when your yacht Drum capsized during the Fastnet race and you were trapped under the hull for 40 minutes, nearly drowning in the process...
SLB: Yes, I decided I needed to waste a vast amount of cash, and how better than to kit out an 80-foot boat. The weld between the hull and the keel just came off. The boat went to pieces and we had 25 people in the water. I laugh now, but I did think I might die. I was under the upturned boat and my clothes were caught on a post. The danger is you panic. One breath and that's it. But I managed to keep calm and get free. No one died. We were very lucky. And then I got into motorbikes and came off doing 90mph in a race [in 1992]. I remember thinking as I went down, "If I survive this, I'll stop for good." I broke my collarbone, and that was that.
In May 2001, the original Duran Duran line-up re-entered a rehearsal room together for the first time in 17 years. Three years later, they released a new album, Astronaut, which sold two million copies worldwide. They were honoured with a Q Lifetime Achievement Award and an Outstanding Contribution award at the Brits.
But in typical Duran fashion, chaos was lurking around the corner. In 2006, they recorded a new album, Reportage, featuring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a central theme, alongside "hard-hitting" social commentary about the UK. Their record label, Epic, heard the record and demanded hits, so the band teamed up with Midas-like hip-hop producer Timbaland and Justin Timberlake to record three new tracks. Encouraged by the results, Rhodes suggested they scrap Reportage and record a whole new album.
Once again, guitarist Andy Taylor didn't show for the sessions. He officially left the band for the second time on October 25, 2006.
Timbaland and Justin Timberlake are fans. The Killers have said they like you. Do you think it's OK to like Duran Duran now?
JT: Not that I have noticed. Have you seen the reviews for the new album? People begrudge us anything. The intelligentsia throws down the gauntlet to us every time we make an album. Well, we're picking it up.
SLB: Justin Timberlake was drunk when he agreed to do Falling Down. We were in a lock-in after he'd done his [Birmingham] show. He'd had half a bottle of malt when he said, "Let's write another song for your album." I think that says it all. People really discover how much they love Duran Duran after half a bottle of Scotch.
Today, Duran Duran are all about health and efficiency. Simon Le Bon's assistant arrives with details of his swimming session. John Taylor's sleek black bass is attached to headphones for a hotel room warm-up session. On the floor, a book about modern media lies open. It all feels rather grown-up.
"There's no two ways about it, I got what I ordered: the full menu of rock'n'roll fantasy," says Taylor. "I was Nigel, a teenager from the Birmingham suburbs, when we started. No one comes over and tells you when you cross the line into complete madness. You have to figure that out for yourself."
© Planet Syndication