  Wild Boys Go the
Way of Pop Trash
An Interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren
Cuccurullo of Duran Duran
By Gail Worley
PART TWO
Does Duran
Duran as a band think about things like timing?
For example, thinking about how music can be very
cyclical, and how you guys hit big right after
punk sort of died out and everybody just wanted
to have fun and dance again. Then new wave and
big hair went away and we went through that whole
introspect grunge suicide thing, a very
dark but important movement. Now you’ve got
bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit all over
everything but you also have real rock and roll
and metal coming back, and now here's this great
new Duran Duran album. Timing could really be on
your side.
I hope so. The
thing is, this record was ready last year [and] I
wanted to get it out [then]. We were trying to
get it out for October of last year but then we
reached a certain point and we realized in order
to do that there would be so little set up. When
you spend eighteen months making a record the
last thing you want to do is wreck it by not
thinking about how you’re going to promote
it. By that I mean tour, speak to you, whatever
I’m doing -- I mean there wouldn’t have
been time to set up any of those things. So, we
resigned ourselves to the fact that we had to
hold it. And there was something I really did
like about the album, which is that it really
does sound like the first Duran Duran album of
the new millennium. I didn’t want it to get
stuck in that last century.
Then, when we
started doing the set up, we realized there was
absolutely no way we could have got it out last
year. It would have been impossible. You do need
a good six months to set up an album and
that’s what we did. There’s so much to
do, you don’t realize, because we
haven’t done a lot of promotion on the last
few albums really-- a little bit here in America
-- but we really didn’t even touch Europe
and this one I feel we should make an effort to
let people know it’s out there. Obviously,
to a lot of people Duran Duran have kind of
vanished because we haven’t had a hit for
awhile. People think, ‘Oh they must have
gone away.’
It really
doesn’t seem like it’s been six or
seven years since "Ordinary World" and
"Come Undone" were hits.
Well,
that’s a good sign.
It seems like
that just happened.
It sure does.
One of the
cool things about revisiting the old videos is
watching "Come Undone" and seeing John
wearing this gorgeous white ruffled shirt, just
like in the early days. You guys look so great.
It made me want to ask if you kept all of the
clothes and costumes you’ve worn over the
years?
Definitely,
I’ve got the goddamn lot. All of it. Most of
it’s in storage, which is kind of a shame
actually. I wish I did have all of them in one
room somewhere.
Well don't
you have this big house?
Yeah but you
know, you don’t want to keep things
everywhere do you? It’s sort of clutter,
isn’t it?
In a New York
apartment it is.
Yeah, in fact
somebody asked me this awhile ago in England and
I’d never really thought about telling
anyone about it because no one had asked.
Actually it’s David Bowie who is responsible for
me keeping the clothes. I remember when we’d
met him very early on in the early 80’s. He
said to me that he’d kept all the clothes
and I thought "WOW!"
From Ziggy
and everything?
Everything.
That’s
so cool.
Well,
that’s what I thought at the time and
that’s what inspired me to keep all mine, to
be honest. I just thought it’d be cool to
look back on them and think well, yeah, I do have
that Rio suit from on the boat or
I’ve got the Wild Boys
ridiculous leather jacket or whatever those
things are. They kind of take on a different life
of their own almost. So, I do [have all that]
apart from things used in photo sessions, [that]
just vanish off afterwards, so those are the only
ones missing.
Wasn’t
"Hallucinating Elvis" meant to be the
title for the album at one time?
It was for
awhile, yeah. We changed it because of two
things. One, we had that title for twelve months
already and we thought, ‘Well this is old
for us now. I like the song very much but it
didn’t seem right for the album title.’
Then one day somebody said, what about that song
"Pop Trash" that you’ve got? We
went, oh, that’s interesting just two words
that seem to belong together and that actually we
feel very comfortable with. As I said, what it
meant to me really was all of the things
we’re surrounded with. And it looks good on
a T Shirt. It just had that thing about
it.
It’s
pretty darn Glam, and Glam is so back.
Yeah! It was
something that made me smile a lot and I thought
in a way, while there was a very serious side to
the album too, there is lots of those [humorous]
things. I mean, writing a song about someone
hallucinating that they’re Elvis on an
airplane, it’s kind of a weird one, you
know? (Laughs) and "Lava Lamp" and then
you’ve got "Mars Meets Venus"
which I took the words for the verses from
Personal Ads in a newspaper. I just strung them
all together -- it was too irresistible. The
thought of people advertising themselves freaks
me out a little bit anyway, but trying to
advertise yourself in four lines to find the
ideal partner and then having three words as a
by-line, it was just too much for me to resist.
One of my
best friends met her husband through the personal
ads.
Well, there you
go. It obviously worked.
You never
know.
No no, I’m
not putting it down. I’m just saying
it’s the strangest phenomena. There are some
great lines, like "Frog Seeks
Princess," [that] was one of my favorites, I
have to say. You know, "Genuine
American" -- why? "Candle-Lit
Dinner," I mean the things that people use,
it’s amazing what they see. That’s what
I was fascinated by. It’s just human nature.
It’s, "What is it?" I just like to
scratch that surface off and have a little look
underneath for minute.
It’s a
fun song.
The sense of
humor in this album is very important,
particularly seeing as I wrote the majority of
the lyrics on this album.
That must be
why they’re so good!
Obviously!
(Laughs) Simon wrote a couple of really beautiful
ones but he’s been writing lyrics for a
long, long time and I think it took some of the
pressure off him, too.
Oh,
here’s a good question.
Go on then!
This is a
"What do you think about that?" sort of
question. I was speaking with some girlfriends
the other night at dinner and I told them I was
doing this interview so of course we all had to
share our personal Duran Duran memories. I
mentioned how everyone knows what John Taylor is
up to since he left the band but Roger and Andy
sort of got swallowed up by the earth. Then one
of my friends mentioned she’d heard of this
documentary called "Looking for Roger
Taylor" ...
I’ve heard
of it...
...which is
about trying to find all of these members of
80’s bands, sort of taking a different
approach to "Where are They Now." Do
you have any thoughts on that?
Well it’s
just one of those things isn’t it? Whatever
inspires people you know? I find inspiration in
the strangest places, so if that’s something
that someone feels is a legitimate enough subject
that they can make a sharp, intelligent witty
movie about it, good for them.
Do you ever
talk to them anymore, Roger and Andy?
Yeah! Roger is
doing some dance stuff I believe but I don’t
know how serious he is about it. I haven’t
seen him for probably a year or so but I usually
bump into him somewhere in London, or his lovely
wife, Giovanna. Andy I really haven’t seen
for a long time, but I did speak to him on the
phone last year regarding a few bits of business
we had to sort out.
As long as
they haven’t od’d.
Oh no, far from
it. I mean they’ve both got quite big
families, they’ve got lots of children,
don't ask me how many because I haven’t a
clue. Andy lives in the countryside and Roger
lives in London. More than that I cannot say.
Let us move
on. Songs like "Starting to Remember"
and the beginning of "Pop Trash Movie"
sound very much like John Lennon’s or George
Harrison’s stuff from the Beatles around the
time of the White Album.
That’s very
kind of you. "Starting to Remember" is
definitely, I would own up as a Lennon influence,
no question. It was just that sort of a song
where Warren had played on his guitar this really
beautiful, simple acoustic guitar figure. It
really did remind me of that stuff. I have to
say. When I wrote the lyric I didn’t think,
‘Oh let’s write a lyric like John
Lennon would write a lyric’ -- I wish,
I wish I could -- but I did certainly think it
had to be a sort of close up, personal lyric. I
think the music required that, the emotive
frequency demanded it. That’s how that was
written. So that [observation] is correct even to
the point where, I have to confess, we used Ken
Scott --the engineer who did a lot of the
recording on the album -- he recorded the Beatles
White Album. You hit it right on the head
there.
Also, he
produced Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Alladin
Sane and he was the engineer on "Walk on
the Wild Side." When I said to him on
"Starting to Remember," ‘Ken, you
know that dead drum sound they used to get
in the 70’s’ -- on all the records I
liked. He said ‘Yeah yeah, surely you
don’t want to ask me to do that? You know we
can get much better drum sounds now.’
And I said ‘No, no I want that
one!’ (laughs) And he just did it in a
second, you know, with having that wealth of
knowledge. It’s extraordinary.
That’s
very cool. Okay, "Last Day on Earth" is
maybe one of Duran Duran’s most
"Rawk" rock songs ever ...
Oh definitely.
...and the
riff really reminds me of Led Zeppelin’s
"Four Sticks" do you hear the
similarity?
I’m not that
familiar with Led Zeppelin stuff. I mean, I like
them, but Warren is the Led Zeppelin fanatic
amongst us. Actually, the guitar riff, that was
the seed for that one, and a sequence that I had.
We wrote it, actually, with a film in mind,
awhile ago, and we put it away because [the film
makers] decided to go another direction. They
didn’t want something with as much
‘action.’ We’d always kept it and
we dug it out and listened to it and said
‘Whoa! This one’s really
powerful.’ We pieced it together, the idea
behind it being that it’s called "Last
Day on Earth" but it’s not terribly
apocalyptic. It’s just the idea that we
often fritter our lives away and we don’t
think about the moment and what we’d like to
do. Then we look back and regret what we
haven’t done and what we could have done.
Really it’s a song about freedom I think.
But Led Zeppelin? Can’t help you with that
one!
Back-peddling
a bit, lyrically, is "Pop Trash Movie"
a comment at all on the past, as in the first
wave of your success? And I mean this is the
nicest way but isn’t Duran Duran’s
musical legacy often thought of as being more of
a pop culture phenomena than a serious musical
statement?
Yeah, I think
so. I love the word ‘trash.’
There’s actually a New York Dolls song
called "Trash" that I always loved, so
I often think trash is a good thing, not a bad
thing -- though we definitely had some confusion
over the word, particularly in foreign language
countries (laughs).
Actually, the
song "Pop Trash Movie" was something
that Warren and I wrote for Blondie, when they were first
talking about reforming. Debbie’s a friend,
you know, we’ve known her for a long time.
I’ve always been a big fan and thought that
she launched so many people’s careers.
People like Madonna, really, have got a lot to be
thankful for, that Debbie was around. I always
thought she was incredibly underrated. They
should never have really gone away, Blondie, it’s very sad, the
whole story. When we heard that they were trying
to put the [band] back together, Warren and I
were asked if we could write a song, a couple
songs. And we did, we came to New York and we
produced them, which was a lot of fun. I like
everyone in the band, I think they’re all
good spirited, Jimmy and Clem and Chris, you
know, has gotten himself together amazingly well.
We had a lot of fun doing it, but the song,
sadly, got tied up with a law suit. Blondie were on EMI America and
that label folded. Suddenly the songs were in EMI
Hell, and they never got released. Then [Blondie] moved to another label
and they had to redo the whole album. Warren and
I obviously own the song so Simon was thrilled.
He’d heard the song and said ‘I want to
sing that song!’ We thought about it and
said ‘Well, obviously let’s try
that.’
[Despite] the
fact that it was written for Debbie, it worked
equally as well for us because, in a way,
we’re from the same [place]. We like the
same things, the same movies and the same songs
that they like -- of course they have more of
that doo-wop influence than we have. But you
know, it’s still coming from the same place.
This is one
of those hindsight/historical perspective/present
day opinion kind of questions. Looking at this
kind of fan-mania that doesn’t happen all
that often really, you have the Beatles and the
Stones, that first wave British invasion and
Elvis. Then you have Duran Duran and to a much
more regional degree (and by that I mean in
England) bands like Kajagoogoo getting mobbed and
stuff by hordes of girls. Then it doesn’t
happen for like 10 years...then you have this
flood of teenybopper boy bands, Backstreet
Boys etc, and you see that same
hysterical mania showing up again. The thing I
noticed is, the music has changed so much...the
quality of the music just isn’t there
anymore. There’s no substance. Do you have
any comments or thoughts on that and why music
has become an afterthought to maybe the marketing
of these bands as a product?
Well it is [a
product] isn’t it, these manufactured
things. (Sighs) It’s sort of difficult, or
actually it’s really easy,to talk about it.
I think there’s probably a lot of talented
kids in some of those groups. I mean they’ve
got great voices. They can dance - god bless them
-- Duran Duran could never dance. We said to
someone the other day ‘We’re a Man Band
that doesn’t dance, what do we do?’
There’s huge differences, without a doubt,
in that our heritage and all our influences were
rock bands, really. We were influenced by the
Beatles and the Stones and the Doors, who were
the first people to experience that kind of
mania. I’m sure when we were standing on
stage singing "Waiting for the Night
Boat" we felt a similar sensation of ‘I
don’t quite get this, why they’re
screaming at us. It’s fine, but I don’t
quite get it,’ as Jim Morrison felt when he
was singing "This is the end, my only
friend" -- that I can relate to.
Musically, we
were coming from glam rock and punk rock and
disco and all those things. We grew up listening
to the Velvet Underground, I don’t know what
these kids listen to. I don’t know how much
it matters. It sure as Hell hasn’t affected
their record sales. I wish they weren’t on
the radio quite as much (laughs), but I do wish
them well. I don't know what will happen to them,
maybe something different will come out of it.
Something, perhaps, more interesting. The one
thing that drives me to distraction about it is
the fact that all the songs are written by the
same people and they’re all completely
interchangeable. You never know who’s who,
musically that is. They just take up a lot of
space and that’s the thing that people
don’t realize. The way it affects everyone
else is that they do clog up the airwaves,
that’s the problem.
Do you make
your own samples for your keyboards? Do you have
a tech?
I have a tech
that works with me very closely all the time, Mr.
Tinley, and he’s great. He’s
been with me for a long time, since just after The
Wedding Album. But yeah, I make things up. I
love him making things up too, because he knows
what my taste is, so we have a little factory
between us. Sometimes I just want to make a lot
of different noises and sounds and things and
then I’ll fit them all into the computer and
have him cut them up and make different things
out of them. It’s very important to make
your own sounds, though, I think it gives it a
little bit of an edge. Most keyboard players now
use string sounds that are in machines because
there’s no point in trying to make your own
string sounds. There’s about 200 Thousand to
choose from. But aside from that I do like to
modify sounds and use my own.
Did the
advent of all this digital recording software
make a big change in the way you approach how you
make music?
Yeah,
absolutely, but really all it is is that
it’s a much more adaptable tape recorder. It
just means that we can break things down into
segments, little tiny things and beats and bars
and move them around a lot more easily. Actually,
everything you can do with it you can really do
with analog tape. But it would just be a complete
nightmare because you’d be copying things
and cutting the up and moving them around and it
would take hours and hours. Now you can do it in
seconds.
It’s
beautiful isn’t it?
Yeah it’s
fantastic. I love technology.
--On to Part 3 of
Gail's interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren
Cuccurullo--
**********
Wild
Boys Go the Way of Pop Trash
An Interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren
Cuccurullo of Duran Duran
Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3
1998 Interview
With John Taylor
Gail Worley is
the author of The Worley Gig,
a Monthly Pandomag.com Column
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