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But unlike most of their peers, these New Romantics never stopped making us dance.
Its a testament to decades of thinking like clever auteurs.
This was very nice, he tells me at the end.
Ive been listening toDuran Duranfrequently over the past month when I realized it hit the 40-year mark.
Why is that?Because theres so much more; theres so much stuff to do now.
I dont have a retrospective mind.
I tend to want somebody else to do all that stuff and then tell me how great I am.
Would it help you open up if I gave you some compliments?Probably.
Do you know Michael Penn, the singer?
Of course.He had a song from the early 90s called Long Way Down.
With a wonderful video made by the Brothers Quay.
He sings, Dont call me Highness because its a long way down.
I love that song.
Oh, beautiful words.
I relate to them.
Duran Duran has plenty of beautiful words, too, you know.I mean, I think so.
Weve done a lot, and sometimes it seems like such a long time ago.
Because your body regenerates over time.
Or is it everything except for your brain?
That just dies off little bit by little bit.
One tends to look forward.
Ive immersed myself very much in new music over the last year when lockdown happened.
My daughter suggested that I start listening to music again.
Although I was a big fan, but very much more of their 74 and 75 kind of sound.
Bryan Ferry, damn.
But, well, whenAvaloncame out … yeah, that was a massive influence.
It was just one of the records that was constantly on.
For me those records wereAvalonand Grace JonessIsland LifeandNightclubbing, which I could never let go of and still havent.
You know how quickly things change when youre a teenager.
There was a huge difference between being into Roxy Music in 1975 and being into Roxy Music in 1980.
It actually started as a song with lyrics.
Then I came to Birmingham and went to university.
I hadnt heard of Duran Duran yet.
It was one of the things that I had written down in my book of lyrics.
So it became a song.
We recorded it as a demo for a Girls on Film B-side.
But somehow it never developed from there, so it turned into a Middle Easternsounding instrumental.
I mean, its just … theyre their own thing.
If they want us, theyll have us.
If they dont, they dont.
Im not waiting with bated breath.
Theres life to get on with.
Were looking at doing an arena tour next summer in America.
Thats a big deal for us.
That means that theres a lot of confidence in us playing to a big audience.
I appreciate your perspective on it.
Musicians react in all sorts of ways to the idea of the Rock Hall.I totally get it.
I wouldnt even know what to say for a speech.
Id probably be like, Cheers, thanks for this.
Lets play some music.
Because its like, you know, Im done.
I thought they were incredible.
And that Def Leppard was great too.
Great, lovely boys.
No, its true, though.
We do cover some significant art forms.
Its almost like poetry.
Well, that might be pushing it a little bit too far.
Hey, Bob Dylan is a Nobel laureate now for poetic expressions.Yeah, thats brilliant.
And to happen after punk, it was just so unprophesizable.
Nobody would have ever thought thats what was going to happen at the beginning of the 80s.
It was just crazy.
And it kind of just grew up out of nothing.
Something you’re free to take the wife to.[Laughs.]
I think thats incredible.
And certain technology had sort of suddenly made itself available to us, like video.
Yeah, that connects well to the music-videology you all embraced from the beginning.
It was never about commerce, but artistry.We werent the first people to go heavy on artistic videos.
We saw that and we thought,Yeah, lets do something like this, like.
Before that, Queen also did a video for Bohemian Rhapsody.
That was the last clip of that sort I could even think of.
And then before that you had stuff from the 60s, like Paul Ryans Eloise.
He had somebody standing on the beach singing in front of horses at sunset.
It was incredibly powerful.
You have to agree that Duran Duran elevated the video medium, though.We did, yes.
It was a totally convincing technical innovation.
Well, I mean, matte filming has been around for a long time.
But from there, we went to Sri Lanka to shoot the next video.
Careless Memories was a broken love affair.
Hungry Like the Wolf was like halfway betweenRaiders of the Lost ArkandApocalypse Now.
We were taking influence from the cinema and we went on location.
And thats a huge jump.
You were making short films.We absolutely were.
We got up at five in the morning to start preparing and we would finish up after midnight.
Because it was the only way we could afford to do it.
Its funny to think about, in retrospect, because we went to Sri Lanka as a club band.
And by the time we got to Australia, we were massive stars.
We had to make one better than the last one.
We couldnt go,Oh, were going to take our foot off the gas for a bit now.
Thats related to technology, too.
The Wild Boys is a very significant video for computer graphics.
And obviously The Reflex is significant, since its a live video with an extraordinary effect called the wave.
Is it going to hit me?
So you did to waves what the Lumiere brothers did to trains.Thats a nice comparison.
Who did you consider your video contemporaries during this time?Not bands.
Michael Jackson and Madonna.
I find it fascinating that you all started out by pioneering 35-mm.
film for videos, and now youre the first to have a video made by AI, for INVISIBLE.
This is one that came from our manager, Wendy Laister.
She has a curious mind just like the band does, especially when it comes to the arts.
Shes always looking out for stuff that will work with what we do.
Like the studio drift thing with the dronesthat we did at NASA.
So she found this company and this extraordinary creation.
Somebody referred to it the other day as a software and I said, Its not a software.
Its so much more than that.
I mean, obviously its not sentient.
But it does create these images completely by itself.
Huxley didnt take footage of us and render it.
Huxley took photographs of us, and footage of how our mouths moved, and created the images.
Its so hard to get your head around, because it is so complicated.
Huxley has been designed to be as close to the imagination of the human mind as possible.
Thats what theyve tried to achieve.
What its done for us is incredible.
Its kind of asking for failure.
I dont want to jinx it.
You said you dont have a retrospective mind, so lets look ahead.
And then the pandemic happened and everything got put on hold.
In that time you get a chance to step back and look at what you made from a distance.
We were able to say, I think that could be better.
That part there, or that lyric there.A lot of that went on.
But because there was time, it wasnt such a daunting task.
It wasnt an anxiety-forming process.
We had a chance to find some really great featured musicians, like Tove Lo and Ivorian Doll.
I also starteda radio station last year.
It was all about finding new music for me.
I got into so many different styles, and so many different genres appeal to me.
I love English rap now, especially the female artists … the way the girls talk.
That, for me, is the state of the art.
How much of Duran Durans past influences its future now?I think it works on many levels.
We are the past and we are our own future.
So everything you do is a future past.
Its almost like saying the present.
Im obsessed with the idea of existence; of human existence, our consciousness.
Nothing specific, just anything about your hair.
So, whats the secret to it?I mean, its all right, isnt it?
Its more than all right.Ive got it.
Im very lucky, I suppose.
I think its because Im sort of a low-testosterone kind of person.
Thats what makes you go bald, isnt it?
Its how your testosterone decays.
I think my testosterone just doesnt decay in that particular way.
I like playing with my hair.
I like dying it and Ive experimented with haircuts.
I was so glad to move away from a short back and sides and go for an 80s mullet.
A 70s mullet, rather.
The 70s mullet is tighter.
Think of Johnny Rotten.
That was kind of a mullet, really.
A bit longer and thinner at the back and shorter and a bit spiky at the top.
