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After 25 years, after selling 70 million records, after different band members coming and going, Simon LeBon, Roger Taylor, John Taylor, Andy Taylor and Nick Rhodes decided to get back together, with the original line-up, to create the whole new album ‘Astronaut’. Throughout the whole of South East Asia, Duran Duran chose Hong Kong to be the city to host the one and only press conference. More than a hundred media representatives from China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore etc. were joint together to meet the band. So why did it take so long? How did they manage to call each other up in 24 hours to reunite? What’s the new sound like? We bring you the in-depth conversation, right here on HKClubbing.com !
S: Simon Le Bon
R: Roger Taylor
A: Alyson for HKClubbing.com
A: Thank you so much for choosing Hong Kong to host this press conference, we’re all very glad to have you here. Being Duran Duran, such an icon, I reckon that you handle the pressure very well. Do you think you write the best music without the pressure?
R: Well actually the only pressure we had was from ourselves. We knew that we had to write and it’s got to be very very special. The earlier albums set a very high bar, and most the album was written before we had a deal. It’s all just internal pressure from ourselves really.
S: You’ve actually got to close the doors, it’s come to a point when you gotta go, you’re gonna say, “Ok, forget about expectations. Let’s go somewhere, close the doors, unplug the phone, plug these instruments in, and start playing, and see what you come up with.” And in that situation, the pressure doesn’t mean anything, you’re just trying to, as what you said, to please the band. And then when something magical starts happening, as it did very very earlier on in our writing sessions, then you follow it. It’s like letting this bird lose, it starts flapping around and flying, you just gotta try and follow it. Don’t worry about where it’s going, just make sure you’re with it when it gets to where it gets to.
Why Hong Kong?
S: Um, what do you reckon? Give something for Sony!
R: Well, it’s a great city, it’s an exciting city, in a way it’s a gateway to a whole number of nations, isn’t it? The whole China, Korea, India’s not too far away. So we thought we would communicate with a lot of different nations from here.
S: There’s a very interesting culture in here, isn’t it? There’s a very interesting mash of culture, you know, English and Chinese, and also all that brings with it. All these British kinda culture brought with it. And it’s a very interesting place because of it. It’s two cultures that don’t sit quite comfortably. And people quite aware of that are quite happy with that. It’s a vibing place. And it’s our language thing as well, I mean it’s easy for us to communicate here, because most of you speak English. And our Chinese is absolutely great!
What to expect from the new album ‘Astronaut’?
S: We weren’t just specific kind of sound, we weren’t thinking we might be hard, or soft, or like that, I think we wanted depth. And depth of sound, and I think we wanted some variety and scope as well. It seems to be the modern way. You look at the critics on albums, you often see that there’s quite a few producers and guys who work on things. I guess that’s just the way things go now. You gotta write a couple of songs, you work with somebody, and you think, “Yeah, that’s the work of somebody else, isn’t it?” I mean, you can! There’s five of us, we have a very strong musical stamp now, sound that’s very much our own. So it’s okay to work with different guys. It’s not gonna make us sound like another band, it just brings a different aspect to our sound now. So that’s really what we’re after.
R: I mean they came and kinda said, “Wow. You guys are great anyway, listen to those records! They’re great records! Don’t change it too much! Don’t make it contemporary!” That’s what they did. Some people say, “Is it gonna be RnB, coz you got Dallas Austin? Or is it gonna be like rock, coz of Don Gilmore?” But they both came and said, “What you’ve got is great, we’re just gonna add to it, and make it more.” So even if it didn’t sell more than 10 records, we’ll be happy. Because we love it, it’s just the music that pleases us. And if it’s successful afterwards, then it’s a bonus.
Why did it take so long?
R: It’s kind of the industry, it’s been a very difficult period in the music industry. And we thought we’re probably gonna get signed, and get a record out within six months. But we were down a lot of blind alleys with record companies. And we had to keep going back, and rewriting, get a bunch of material and presenting that, we thought we got a deal, but the company fold or something… So in the end we ended up with like thirty different tracks. Which in the end we home downed to twelve. So end up with a very very strong album, because we had to keep going back to drawing board, basically. And in the end we got the best deal that we hoped for, with Epic records.
S: We had a record that you could have put out, we had enough material that we could have put on our first record after ten days of writing together. But the fact is, because of other aspects of getting that record out took time, then we just carried on, carried on writing and recording. And because of that, the album is so much better. It’s really really benefited from the time. When you’re in your first band, and you make your first album, you have that great kind of wealth of material, that’s built up over the years, and you don’t really think about it. And that’s why, when you got to the second album, it’s often very difficult. We were lucky because we had so much left over for our second album. But a lot of bands, they suffer from what’s called “Second Album Syndrome”, it’s where they suddenly had run out of ideas. They got the short enough timing to put a new album together, and usually it’s not as strong as the first one.
R: We also did a lot of touring as well within that period. We didn’t just lock ourselves up for three years. We toured Japan, we toured the States extensively, we did a full UK tour, played in Australia, New Zealand. So there’s a lot of touring as well within that period. Coz it came upon where we had to get out, just being different for a while, and maybe we connect with the audience for a bit, and attract some of the new stuff live.
S: It’s a great experience, and we did everything that the band does. We got together, we found a lot of material, we managed to find a management company, we went on tour, we played shows, we went on support tour with Robbie Williams, we eventually got our record deal, went to the producer and finish the album, and put it out! It’s surreal, it’s the whole experience, second time around!
The new single, ‘(Reach Up For The) Sunrise’
S: It’s a very simple song really. It started with a Russian sounding guitar that Andy was playing, which is the chorus now. And I find it very exotic, that melody. He kind of used major and minor at the same chord in the chorus, and I always like that kind of thing, it’s a turn-around, it actually changes key in the chorus, if you kind of memorize it. It took a while to come up with the phrase “Reach out for the sunrise”, the one we did. Nick and I came up with the same idea at the same time. Once we had locked into that, suddenly the song just wrote itself. It had a great kind of… it seem to sum up what the band was experiencing as well. It seem to sum up with this new thing that’s happening to us, after such a long time in the darkness.
Is this gonna be your last record?
R: Oh, definitely not. No. We see this in the long run. A long term project now.
S: It’s actually gonna end up in two ways. It could be an absolute dismo, failure. And we’ll all go, “Sh*t, that wasn’t good enough, we’d better go and do another one!” coz I know we can do it! Or, it might HUGE success! In whice case, we’ll be going, “Come on boys! Let’s catch it on that one!”
"(Reach Up For The) Sunrise" has been the #1 most added song at Adult Radio in the US. And it’s been released as the first single off their highly-anticipated album, ‘Astronaut’.
Listen to them on HKClubbing Radio:
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