DURAN DURAN BY 'THE SCISSOR SISTERS'

[©DURANMANIA Board Team]

[glow=red,2,300]DURAN DURAN BY THE SCISSOR SISTERS[/glow]
THE BAND THAT ONCE ASKED "IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE" IS CALLING AGAIN!!!



Not only did Duran Duran define the glitz and glamour of rock 'n' roll in the 1980s, but they elevated it to the level of performance art, singing about topics like nuclear war wand the exploitation of women over some of the most indelible tunes to come out of the Me Decade. But as much as the group's rise from the post-punk foxholes of late-1970s Birmingham, England, was meteoric, their dissolution into a quartet, and then a trio, and then a mixed bag of rotating members was long and protracted-long enough, in fact, to draw the band's original members back together for Astronaut (Epic), their latest album, released last fall. With their American tour beginning to take flight, the original fab five-singer Simon LeBon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, guitarists John Taylor and Andy Taylor, and drummer Roger Taylor (all unrelated)-talk to Jake Shears and Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters about breaking up, coming together, and hitting the road.

JAKE SHEARS: So, guys, when you began work on Astronaut, how long had it been since you all had seen each other?

JOHN TAYLOR: It had been a long time. I mean, we probably all hadn't been in a room together since Live Aid.

SIMON LeBON: Since the party after Live Aid.

JT: But since we finished work on Astronaut, we've been on a bit of a honeymoon, really. It took us a long time to make it, you know.

JS: How long?

JT: About three years in all. We didn't have a manager when we started, let alone a record deal. It was like doing a first album in a way-you know, getting to know everybody again.

JS: Has the dynamic within the band changed since you all were last together?

SL: Well, Roger and I have become much more involved in the business of running the band. I think both of us are very easygoing people, and we've come prepared to go with the flow a lot of the time; but now we are asserting our personalities a lot more.

ANA MATRONIC: Do you find that you have more responsibilities now, though?

SL: I think you have a responsibility to yourself to know that if you don't speak up at the right time, you're going to have to live with it for the rest of your life. It's a very personal job, isn't it?

ROGER TAYLOR: Yeah, we're a real democracy. We go through a whole process where everybody is involved in deciding on everything from a drum groove to a guitar sound.

JS: Oh, God, I can't imagine. How do you ever get anything done?

RT: Well, it did take us three years to do the album [all laugh]

SL: I think the point is that if you're in it for the long run and you have five people who've got strong personalities and don't want to sit there and just go on a ride that somebody else is driving, then you're going to have to speak up. That's the kind of band we are. When somebody runs off and starts trying to make decisions on his own, four other people go, "Oh, hold on a minute! You can't do that!"

JS: Is that why you broke up in the first place?

SL: No, I think we broke up because people weren't speaking up.

RT: Yeah, there probably wasn't enough confrontation. A lot of stuff was just unsaid, festering anger that was held onto to the point that nobody was really communicating anymore. Some people even went off to form another band, Power Station. We are very confrontational about everything now, which keeps that stuff from building up.

SL: Yeah, I enjoy that we're more confrontational now. It has made more of a man of me, I'll tell you.

AM: That's good that it's all five of you and not five managers hashing it out. I've heard that that's how Fleetwood Mac operates these days: each of them have managers who all get in the room and decide by consensus. [laughs]

RT: Well, sometimes the problem is not the people in the band, but the people around the band.

AM: So, Roger, how do you find playing live now? You took a break for quite a while.

RT: I did, yeah. When I left the band, I bought a farm in Gloucester, England, up in the Midlands, a beautiful area of countryside, and just lived a really simple life for a few years. I had some kids and chilled out and kind of found myself again because, as Andy [Taylor] says, being in this band in the early 1980s made you feel like you were part of a pizza. You lost your individuality. We were always one of the band, one of Duran Duran, or one of the Taylors, and in that context it's very easy for your true self to disappear.

SL: I was just trying to figure out whether I was mozzarella or pepperoni?

JS: I'd be the mushroom. What about you, Ana?

AM: I'd be the sauce, honey. [all laugh] How do the rest of you feel about touring again?

SL: They work us like the dogs that we are. It's a heavy schedule. But it's great because it obviously means that a lot of people are interested.

ANDY TAYLOR: The British tour last year exceeded our expectations so much that we've stopped inctellectualizing about it. The shows at Wembley were fantastic. Everybody had gotten their whole thing back together, and that's why we really enjoyed it. We just hit go, and it all worked. That's the incredible bit.

[©DURANMANIA Board Team]

JS: I have a question about fans. After all this time, what would a fan have to do to really impress you?

NICK RHODES: It's Manolo Blahniks for me.

AT: Actually, I think my most interesting encounter with Duran Duran fans happened when I wasn't actually in the band. I went to a Duran Duran gig at the NEC in Birmingham, thinking I could sort of stand where I wanted. It was when "Ordinary World" [off 1993's Duran Duran] was out, and by that time I had quite a bit of hiatus. I sort of stood at the side, and I was okay until they put the lights on and this sea of people caught who I was. It was like, boom! All of a sudden I was running for the dressing room. It was quite scary.

AM: What it was like watching Duran Duran from that perspective?

AT: A bit strange. I went down to see John and make my peace with everybody. He and I were going to talk about doing another Power Station album. I was at a point where I was ready to say, "I've got to see what they're up to." The only thing that got me was that the drummer had changed the beats. I think he changed the groove on the high hat in "Rio." But it was also just about looking at it overall-watching the audience and seeing if they had the same sort of fever.

JS: So you're bringing the tour to States?

NR: We're going to take that show we did in the U.K.: and take it around America.

JS: Do you guys shop at Wal-Mart when you're in America?

RT: Oh, I like Target. I like the ones in the Midwest, personally. We don't really have those in England yet.

AM: Well, Nick, I always thought that you would be fantastic to launch a line of men's cosmetics.

NR: You know, I did get asked a few times. I don't know why it never really happened. I don't know that I would want to launch a line, but I could be the face of Lancome or something. I never wanted to challenge Isabella Rossellini's glory in the old days, though.

AM: I think there's a whole untapped market of men who enjoy cosmetics.

NR: We've been accused recently in interviews of being almost entirely responsible for metro-sexuals.

AM: I think that's really a compliment because, as a straight woman, I can't tell you how much I enjoy that expanded idea of masculinity. Most of the guys I've dated fall into the category of metrosexual.

NR: Beats the hell out of being retrosexual.

JS: I think Ana's a retrosexual, actually.

AM: Yeah, I'm one of those weird girls who don't take off their clothes. It's so retro.

RT: You don't take off your clothes?

AM: Well, you know, in front of everyone. Let's get some dirt here. How many people have you ever woken up in bed with at once?

RT: I'd probably be the guy walking in and finding them with the video cameras, saying, "You've got to be kidding."

NR: Yeah, Roger and I are the quiet ones. We're the discreet ones.

AM: Do you think that the music business itself has changed a lot since the 1980s? Is there anything people could do then that they can't do now?

NR: Well, it was definetely a much smaller business. It wasn't as corporate, and people were prepared to take much bigger risks. If you look at the bands from that era alone, you've got the Cure, the Smiths, Depeche Mode, INXS, U2-they're all radically different from each other and have very strong identities. Then on top of that, you ended up with people like Madonna and Prince. I don't know that the 1990s really produced so much diversity-a lot of it seemed much more rehashed to me. In the 1980s everybody wanted to stand out and be an individual, whereas in the 1990s it was all about fitting in and having the same trainers as the next person. Also, when we put out our first album, there was no Internet, which is the most radical change of all. It has given artists a completely different perspective on their fans. With the Internet, you start to understand people's likes and dislikes about the band more intimately and what turns them on and what turns them off.

AM: How do you think the Internet has affected their engaging in the sort of idolatry they sometimes do with the bands?

NR: Well, there are some pretty scary sites out there. I mean, when somebody told me there were over 50,000 pages up there on Duran Duran, I said, "Don't be ridiculous. You must be wrong." But actually, it gives everybody with even the slightest knowledge of computers the opportunity to put forward their views of their thoughts. It's the best and worst of everything. I just look at it like a huge encyclopedia or a phone book.

AT: But the power of the Internet-I mean, imagine if John Lennon were around, man. At its core, the whole thing about doing rock 'n' roll music is antiestablishment, it became performer- and producer-driven, so there was no rebellion in it. There was no "@#%$ you" to the A&R guy, like "This is the way we're doing it!" Instead, the A&R guy was saying, "This is how it is done." But most kids join a band because they don't fit in, or don't want to fit in. It was about rejection of the establishment. That's what I love about music, and that's why I still do it.

^{(taken from Interview Magazine, March 2005 issue)}