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Duran Duran returns to the stage:
Duran Duran returns to the stage, minus one member but ready to rock
By Donna Isbell Walker
ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
When Duran Duran hit the scene in the early 1980s, the
band's impact was as much visual as audio.
The then-new MTV network put out the welcome mat for the five photogenic
Brits, whose slick and stylish music videos helped define the look of the era. The handsome young men cavorted through exotic
locales in Rio and Hungry Like the Wolf, fashionably dressed, perfectly tousled and sporting cheekbones that could slice a
tomato.
Twenty years later, Duran Duran bassist John Taylor acknowledges that aesthetics played a big part in the
band's success.
"It's easier if you're cute. It is, but that's only gonna get you so far," Taylor said recently, chatting
over the phone from New Orleans. "It was important, just like (it is for) anybody who's in the charts today. I remember when
Duran were really hitting it, and everybody was saying, 'It's just because of the way they look.' It's like, 'Hello, what
(bleeping) business are we in' And everybody else in the charts, it doesn't have something to do with the way they look? I
don't see too many Elephant Men in the top 20."
Duran Duran spent much of the 80s in the upper reaches of the music
charts, but the departures of three original members splintered the band in the early 90s. Five years ago, they reunited,
putting out an album called Astronaut in 2004.
But when Duran Duran comes to town Thursday, one of the original five
will be missing; longtime guitarist Andy Taylor left the band last week. The statement on the band's Web site called the problems
between Andy Taylor and his bandmates 'an unworkable gulf,' but John Taylor said it was a matter of irreconcilable differences.
"We've not been on the same page for some time," he said. "Since the reunion, there have been several occasions when
Andy had not been able to play, and we'd had to bring in a second man. ... I think we were just pulling in different ways,
and the way we were all choosing to spend our energies was different."
Guitarist Dominic Brown, who has subbed for
the departing Taylor in the past, will fill in for the remainder of the tour.
The decision was difficult, but less painful
by the time it was finalized, the remaining Taylor said, likening it to the divorce process.
"By the time you actually
get the divorce papers, it's all done. You're all worn out; the emotions were spent on this issue 12 months ago. ... When
you can come to that point, where you can actually make that decision, you're past the crying point. It's all about logic
and reason."
The band is working on a new album, its first since Astronaut. The disc will have a slightly different
flavor than classic Duran Duran, thanks to a couple of young collaborators, singer Justin Timberlake and hip-hop producer
Timbaland, but Taylor said he doesn't know exactly how the final product will sound.
It makes for an interesting balancing
act, updating a classic sound while staying true to the band?s core self, Taylor said.
"You have to hold on to who
you are," he said. "You adjust to fashion but you have to remain true to something, something that you were before you started.
... It's just one of those dances that you have to do when you're an artist and you want to be relevant in more than one moment."
Fans come out to Duran Duran's shows to relive all kinds of musical moments, and much of the audience consists of
loyal fans who made songs like Hungry Like the Wolf and The Reflex the soundtrack of their teen years.
They're "crazily
enthusiastic," Taylor said.
The fans, many of them now in their early 40s, are "getting back on the ride with us,"
he said. "It's like the Magic Bus. It's like a lot of people who had a great time with the band in their teens and then just
let it go. And now they're hooked again. ... I guess everybody's gotta have a hobby."
Courtesy Greenville News
Rio Return:
Hungry no longer, Duran Duran finds life appetizing again
By Lee Zimmerman
By his
own admission, John Taylor lives a charmed existence. Deliriously wealthy, strikingly good-looking, happily married to a successful
entrepreneur, and a founding member of Duran Duran, one of the most successful British groups of the past two decades, he
can claim the quintessential rock star existence. After reuniting with the other original members of the band some five years
back, he is now in the enviable position of being able to prosper from the past — made possible in part from sales of
some 70 million albums — while enjoying the possibility of further upping the ante.
"We've been very fortunate,"
Taylor says. "Once we made the decision to put the band back together, we haven't looked back. It's accepting that this is
your life, baby, and it ain't half bad."
Not half bad at all. Speaking on the phone from the balcony of his L.A. penthouse,
with the sound of frolicking children audible in the background, he exudes a palpable contentment. Following a critically
acclaimed comeback via 2004's Astronaut, an album that has much in common with the group's best work of the early Eighties,
the bandmates have outdistanced the pressures and strife that had nearly made them — to borrow the title of one of their
later hits — come undone.
Indeed there's a clear divide in the Duran Duran saga. The first phase encompasses
the early years, beginning with the band members' unprecedented rise to worldwide acclaim. It revolves around five lads from
Birmingham, England, barely out of their teens: three of them named Taylor (though all unrelated) — John on bass, Andy
on guitar, and Roger on drums — along with vocalist Simon Le Bon and keyboard player Nick Rhodes. Taking their name
from a character in the Jane Fonda sci-fi cult hit Barbarella, they meld the influences of David Bowie and Roxy Music with
hints of punk and disco, simultaneously seizing upon the so-called New Romanticism movement sweeping the UK in the early Eighties.
They then use their model-perfect looks and a cinematic sensibility to create groundbreaking videos in a variety of exotic
locations around the world. All of this happily coincides with the launch of MTV. As a result, the bandmates become the first
stars of the fledgling medium, which in turn leads to a string of hits — an astonishing thirteen chart-topping singles
in three years — and a series of platinum albums that scale the charts immediately upon release. By the mid-Eighties,
they conquer America, filling stadiums and unleashing a fan frenzy akin to Beatlemania. Their songs "Hungry Like the Wolf,"
"Save a Prayer," "Union of the Snake," "The Reflex," and "Wild Boys" become enduring radio staples.
Unfortunately
the rapid advent of fame and fortune would take its toll. "We were messed up emotionally," Taylor admits. "Things were moving
so quickly. We did a lot of drugs, got laid a lot, and got caught up in an immense amount of touring. We were all just kids
... in fact I was still living at home at the time. It created a bad dynamic within the band and an incredible amount of competitiveness.
It was extraordinarily rough.
"Unlike some groups, we're a real band," he continues. "Most groups have only one or
two individuals who get all the attention — Mick and Keith in the Stones, Bono and the Edge in U2 — but in Duran,
all five members had their fans, which made a very equal spread of energy and created a lot of friction. The ego is a very
fragile thing, and it's often bigger than it's meant to be."
That's where the second part of the story takes up, commencing
with a gradual descent as the band slowly imploded. After recording the title track for the James Bond film A View to a Kill,
the group went on hiatus, with Taylors John and Andy joining Chic drummer Tony Thompson and singer Robert Palmer in the short-lived
Power Station. Meanwhile Le Bon, Rhodes, and Roger Taylor formed their own ensemble, Arcadia. An attempt to resurrect Duran
Duran proved only mildly successful after Andy and Roger opted to exit in the late Eighties. Warren Cuccurullo, formerly of
Missing Persons, took over guitar duties, and in 1993 the reconstituted group released the self-titled Duran Duran. It spawned
the hits "Ordinary World" and "Come Undone" and reaped worldwide sales of four million copies.
That would be the band's
last taste of megasuccess for more than ten years. John parted company in 1996 during the recording of Thank You, a covers
collection that many critics claimed had torpedoed Duran Duran to a new low.
Subsequent albums Mezzaland and Pop Trash
failed to resuscitate their fortunes.
"We had a lot of luggage in our suitcases," Taylor says of the band's slow descent.
"After ten years, it had gotten pretty stinky. It was like a dysfunctional family in a way, all this locked-up resentment.
We felt we had to work, but it started to feel like Spinal Tap after a while."
At the same time, John's private life
became equally tempestuous. Despite having reaped critical acclaim for his first outside musical venture — the soundtrack
to the film 9 1/2 Weeks and its spin-off single, "I Do What I Do" in 1988 — his first proper solo album, the prophetically
titled Feelings Are Good & Other Lies, was all but ignored. A short-lived marriage to actress Amanda De Cadenet crashed
and burned; rumors of his infidelity and drug dependency added to the personal carnage. Looking for a new creative outlet,
Taylor turned to acting in the late Nineties (a decade earlier he had a guest shot in an episode of Miami Vice). He made occasional
lowbrow TV appearances and embarked on a tentative film career that saw highs (1999's Sugar Town under the tutelage of noted
film director Allison Anders) as well as lows (2000's The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas).
"When you're successful
in one field, people tend to come at you from other fields," Taylor explains. "I wasn't really interested in doing it at first,
but my management was telling me: 'You don't have to act, you won't have to audition ... all you have to do is turn up.' But
then I'd see all these young serious actors who took their craft very seriously, so I started to realize that if you know
the material, that really helps too. I spent a year where I went to a lot of auditions and learned about humility."
In
1999 John remarried, this time to Gela Nash, cofounder of the immensely successful Juicy Couture line of casual clothing and
accessories, for which he currently serves as a male consultant. He also overcame his drug habit and settled into a life of
domestic stability. However, it was the collective decision to reunite the five original members of Duran Duran that has Taylor
waxing effusively this particular afternoon.
Having resolved their old animosities via a series of phone calls, the
bandmates regrouped in March 2001. They would eventually sign with Epic Records, which released the critically lauded Astronaut
in 2004.
"I had reconciled to the fact that it was over," Taylor says. "But once we opened up to the possibility,
we all came on board.... We found a way back to each other, and that made us stronger than ever. We have a good time with
each other now, and we're all really loving it."
One factor that has definitely made a difference is that now they
have the power to choose when and where they play live, a decision Taylor says has had a significant effect on the band's
overall attitude. "The first time, we were doing nothing but touring, and it was too much, so we were determined not to get
caught up in that again. We don't have to go out on tour; we can limit our gigs to a few big shows. We're in control now,
and I'm in control over how I cope with whatever is happening."
In fact the group was initially apprehensive about
the prospect of doing any shows at all. Taylor has vivid memories of their first appearance after getting back together. "We
had been booked for a big reunion concert in Japan where Duran Duran's always had this huge following, and we had only one
day's rehearsal. They were expecting 100,000 fans, so it was significant for us to go there after all those years. I remember
right up until an hour before we went on, we were asking each other: Do you think this is really going to happen?' We really
weren't sure. But it was just fantastic; it felt just like the old days, and we all felt really good about it."
For
now Taylor and the rest of the band are looking ahead to finishing their next album, which, he reveals, will feature a track
co-written and produced by Britney Spears's ex-paramour Justin Timberlake. "After we recorded that, I left New York dazed,"
he enthuses. "I thought to myself, Wow, what's happened now? It's really that good."
Mainly, though, Taylor is happy
simply to be back at work and playing alongside his long-time colleagues. "I love my job. I love the creative process," he
gushes. "That's all it takes to keep me on the plane, to get me to that rehearsal. It's like, show up and keep the guitar
in tune. I'm actually petrified that someday I'll have to get a regular job."
Courtesy Miami New Times
[posted
11/8/2006 U.S.A.]
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