Then we did that six-minute-long video. The subject matter! Do you know how many guys have come up to me and are like, “I love that video!” I had somebody tell me recently, “In the early eighties, I was a thief. Me and my mate, we used to break into chemists’ shops, rip off all the pills, and go back to his flat with these piles of speed and just watch the ‘Girls on Film’ video over and over and over.”
There were not a lot of people doing videos, and we saw that opportunity in the rock clubs in America. We were in Memphis a week or so ago, and the guy who was driving me said, “We used to go to this club called Antenna, and they had this big video screen above the dance floor, and they would show your videos.” It was that little window before MTV. There was the Rock America circuit of dance clubs, of which the Ritz in New York was like the flagship. You could fit, like, 1,500, 1,600 people in there. There was a screen above the dance floor, and around the end of the seventies, beginning of the eighties, they started playing music videos. The “Girls on Film” video was laser-guided to reach that audience dancing at one o’clock on a Saturday morning at the Ritz.
Our managers drove the video agenda. We were like, “Oh, man, a video?” They were like, “Chaps, this is something we need to do.” The people who were getting MTV going had a meeting with [Duran managers] Paul and Michael Berrow, and they said, “We need content.” If there had been videos for “More Than a Feeling” and Journey, for all the music that was on the radio at that point, that’s what they would have played. But there wasn’t, so they were forced to look to the edge, which was all coming out of London. They had to play the Buggles, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Duran Duran, because they were visual. They said to us, “What we really want is something like a James Bond video.” That’s what put the seed into Paul’s mind that we should go to Sri Lanka [to shoot videos for the Rio album].
The “Girls on Film” video—Jesus, we did that in one afternoon! Everything was shot on this T-shaped set. There was a catwalk, with the band on a stage at the end and the boxing ring at the other. It was conceived with a combination, I would say, of jocularity and foresight. But I didn’t like that day. It was what I imagine it must be like to be on the set of a porno movie. It was exciting, on the one hand, having all these beautiful girls walking around without clothes on. But the band, we’re tripping out, showing off, and not being ourselves. It wasn’t comfortable for us.
“The ‘Girls on Film’ video… was conceived with a combination, I would say, of jocularity and foresight…. It was what I imagine it must be like to be on the set of a porno movie.”
RHODES: We wanted to make a sexy video, but we wanted it to be funny as well. It’s so ridiculous, the things that are in the video—the mud wrestling, the lifeguard, the [kiddie] pool. Some people may think it’s politically incorrect, but it wasn’t meant to upset anyone. It was made to make people smile, and there’s still something about that that really works.
LE BON: What do I remember most about that day? The one with the dark hair. Some guys like blondes, some guys like dark-haired girls, and I realized absolutely which one I liked and was going for. It was very sexy, and then, watching it back, there was some turnoff as well as turn-on. Like, the sumo wrestler guy—I think that is universally the great turnoff in that video.
RHODES: When it got banned, it didn’t do us any harm. When you get something banned, it throws a different light on it—like when the Sex Pistols were banned from everything in the U.K. The video became infamous. Everybody wanted to see it because they couldn’t. Eventually we made it available on a videocassette, and to promote it we did a signing in Times Square at a place called Video Shack, where there were riots and police horses. The irony is, a lot of the young girls coming in to buy the video technically weren’t allowed to watch it.
TAYLOR: After “Girls on Film” and the Rio album, the success was so huge in the early eighties that when we lost that in the second half, we thought, Oh my God, is that it? It was pretty terrifying. After Andy and Roger left in 1986, we lost a huge part of our firepower, and we had to try to find ways to get the chemistry back.* It wasn’t easy. We took such a bashing in our late 20s from the culture. There was this period where everybody said, “Okay, you’re out. Get out!” That’s when you need Nick Rhodes. He was like, “I’m not moving!” If it were up to me, I’d be in a hole in the ground somewhere.
* NILE RODGERS, producer: The only time I ever made an album that took a long time was Duran Duran, Notorious. The group had broken up—Andy and Roger had left. I had to figure out a way to keep these guys together. I absolutely loved them like brothers, and I couldn’t watch Duran Duran just fade away. It was the only time I ever spent a million dollars making a record—that was almost blasphemous to me. But what we got out of it was one of my favorite records of all time. With Notorious, I was able to shift the band from this cute boy-band sort of thing—and those [early albums] were great records, by the way. But I knew that, had they stayed in that area, their life span would be limited. I remember the NME review of [Notorious], and I never remember reviews. After working on that album and spending that amount of money and seeing how hated they were by the British press in those days, I was so proud. I actually have this memorized: It said, “Just when you thought it was time to count these jerks out, they not only make a record that’s good but one that’s worthy of respect.” Duran Duran are, at their heart, really a band. They really are like the Rolling Stones or U2, guys who struggled to get better at what they did, and they struggled together. That’s what makes a band, that sense of us against the world, and they have that.
** MARK RONSON, artist, producer, and DJ: John is quite modest as a musician. They got a lot of stick for being pretty boys—people forget they can really play. That amazing rhythm section being the backbone of “Girls on Film” is square one. Then to have that incredible guitar riff—there’s nothing light about it. It’s like a fucking Les Paul through a Marshall. It’s as Steve Jones as anything, which is such a juxtaposition to the slinky groove. Then you have this incredible wall of synth and [lyrics] that are all about sex—that is the home run. It’s not just about sex: The song is sex. Obviously, it wasn’t premeditated like they’re mixing it in a lab. It just magically came out. You just know when you put the record on—when that guitar and groove come in, it’s just alchemy.
RHODES: I don’t like giving in. By the early nineties we still had a lot of music left in us, so I wouldn’t have seen any reason to bow out. John bought into grunge a lot more than I did. The whole movement left me cold. It looked unattractive and, aside from Nirvana, it sounded like something I’d heard before but not as good.
There was no space for us in the media at that time. A lot of journalists would have very happily locked the door on the eighties and thrown away the key with Duran Duran in the vault. But I knew there would always be space for really good songs. By the time we got to making The Wedding Album [a.k.a. the band’s second self-titled album, 1993’s Duran Duran], I remember us sitting down and saying, “Okay, let’s write songs just like we used to.” So we really went back to basics and wrote “Ordinary World” and “Come Undone.”
TAYLOR: That was the turnaround. But by the time The Wedding Album came out, I’d really slowed down as a bass player. I remember spending a lot of time in New York, becoming aware of all those session musicians and a little ashamed of my own playing style because I wasn’t “the real thing.” It almost made me want to go and hide away. Whereas what you hear on the first few Duran albums—the first two, three—is that I was unashamed. I was like, This is what I can do! Listen to me! One of the worst things is when you get self-conscious. It became about playing less and less until my playing practically disappeared. It took somebody I respected, Mark Ronson,** to say, “Look, nobody does that better than you. The way you played on ‘Rio’—that’s your thing, JT.” I was like, “I don’t know.… Can I still do that? We need to fit into the culture.” But Mark said, “That’s how you fit into the culture.”
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THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
The original hit-making, multi-Taylor lineup reunited in 2003 to much fanfare. After shedding guitarist Andy Taylor for the second time, they collaborated with fans Timbaland and Justin Timberlake on 2007’s Red Carpet Massacre, an album that fans hoped would reignite the classic Duran sound. That didn’t happen, but they rebounded spectacularly with 2011’s Mark Ronson–produced All You Need Is Now. They continue to age gracefully.
“It seems absurd to me that we are now in our fourth decade of Duran Duran.”
TAYLOR: It was a really interesting time when we put the reunion together at the turn of the millennium. Not only were we trying to write songs; we were also trying to reinvent the sound of the band. Since Roger, Andy, Simon, Nick, and I had last played together on “A View to a Kill,” we’d had hip-hop, the Chili Peppers, Guns N’ Roses, trip-hop. Everybody was super self-conscious. Roger would be the first to admit it: He didn’t want to be Roger Taylor when he came back—he wanted to be [Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer] Chad Smith. I’m like, “But you’re Roger Taylor! I can’t play with Chad Smith!”
Also, we’d had this dark sense of our early years, because the culture, at that point, had not come back around to Duran yet. Nobody was giving us any props in 2000. But then Gwen Stefani came on board and Justin Timberlake. MTV acknowledged us with a lifetime achievement award, and suddenly there was a turn of the tide. Suddenly the NME is saying “Hungry like the Wolf” is the most important song ever written.
But the thing is, by the time it changes, it doesn’t matter. It’s actually not really important to us anymore. All the things that I was desperate to attain I don’t care about anymore. We’re not desperately trying to seek anything from anybody. We’re just doing our jobs as best as we can and trying to have a good time doing it.
LE BON: In the modeling world, [“Girls on Film”] has become Yasmin [Le Bon]’s song. No other catwalk girl could ever lay claim to it in the same way that she could. When we did the Fashion Rocks show in London [in 2003], we played the song, and she’s one of the girls on the catwalk, and you can see the sense of ownership that she had. That made me very, very proud.
RHODES: It seems absurd to me that we are now in our fourth decade of Duran Duran. The other day I watched a video of us playing the song “Friends of Mine” dressed in military uniforms, and it was alien to me. I have a very good memory of almost all the things we’ve done—even small German TV shows—but this I didn’t. I thought, Wow, they were an interesting band. Look at what they were doing then!
“BLUE MONDAY”
ou know how, when you graduated high school and went on to college, you got the chance to totally make yourself over? How you got new clothes, a new personality, and a new hairstyle, and you invented a whole new backstory to win yourself a cool new group of friends to replace all those losers you left behind? That’s what happened to the most prominent guttersnipes of British punk when they outgrew spitting and safety pins. PIL were nothing like the Sex Pistols. Big Audio Dynamite were nothing like the Clash. The Style Council were nothing like the Jam. New Order, though, were exactly like Joy Division … until “Blue Monday.” The first few records they made following the 1980 suicide of Ian Curtis sounded like the ghost of their singer was still haunting them. But “Blue Monday” changed everything. It turned New Order into a dance-floor mainstay, gave them a new, worldwide audience and the bestselling 12-inch single of all time, paid for the Haçienda (laying the foundation for their native Manchester to become Madchester), and kept them around for the next 30-something years. It also lit the spark for a simmering feud between creative collaborators Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook that would boil over more than three decades later.
LM: When I saw New Order at Jones Beach on Long Island in the late eighties, it was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy sees the real Oz behind the curtain. Unlike the other groups I liked, these guys wore regular-Joe clothes. Sumner was the most nondescript frontman I’d ever seen. No wonder they don’t put their photos on the record sleeves, I thought. Still, there was no denying Hooky’s rock-god bass playing. Also, New Order had risen from the ashes of Joy Division, inarguably one of the coolest bands ever. And think about this: The list of musicians who graduated from one successful group to another includes Paul McCartney, Ron Wood, Eric Clapton, and Dave Grohl, yet none of them have been in two consecutive game changers like Sumner, Hook, and drummer Steven Morris.
JB: This isn’t in my top-five New Order songs. I’d put it behind “True Faith,” “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “Subculture,” and “Age of Consent.” I’d probably put it behind “Regret” too. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know what a monster it was or that I underestimate its importance. “Blue Monday” utilized all the traditional components of an electronic-dance record, except it omitted any sense of liberation, any chance of escape. Sounding weary and desolate has always been second nature to Bernard Sumner, but hearing him moan, “How does it feel when your heart grows cold?” accompanied by the remorseless grind of machines was especially chilling. “Blue Monday” was a big black cloud hanging over the dance floor. It was the soundtrack to a bleak, dehumanizing future. And it sounded fantastic.
BERNARD SUMNER: After Ian Curtis died, we were all very upset and depressed and, obviously, in shock. When we started releasing stuff like Movement, we got a completely negative response from the press, and that sadness turned into anger. It was like, “Come on, give us a break. Can’t you just help us out in our hour of need instead of sticking the knife in?” Because the British press can be pretty sadistic. “Blue Monday” was kind of a response to that. It was like, “Fuck you! Here’s what we can do.”
“Blue Monday” came out, and the press really stuck the knife in—again! They said it was a pile of shit, and it was rubbish and that no one would buy it. And here we are, all these years later….
When we released “Blue Monday,” a lot of people who knew us were like, “That doesn’t sound like New Order.” But that was the point. It’s not really our best song, but it was designed like a machine to make people dance. I felt a bit uncomfortable doing music that was just like Joy Division. And as a singer, I felt uncomfortable stepping into Ian’s shoes, because I didn’t want to sound like an Ian Curtis impersonator. I think the first New Order album, Movement, was kind of pseudo–Joy Division but with a different singer. It didn’t feel true to me. I wanted to do something that had a different flavor. It was synergy, really, that electronic music—it wasn’t born but it blossomed then.
After the death of Ian, we recorded two New Order tracks, “Ceremony” and “In a Lonely Place,” in New Jersey somewhere, then every night we’d drive back into Manhattan and go out to nightclubs. So we were influenced by what we were hearing in New York nightclubs and by what we heard in London. I also had a friend in Germany who was sending me 12-inch singles from there.
And I was technically minded. You couldn’t buy computers then, so I built a music sequencer. You could buy a music sequencer, but it’d cost you the same as buying a house. So with the help of a scientist who worked with us, I built this synthesizer and music sequencer on the cheap, and we put the two together. Just at that time, the DMX drum machine came out, so we got the scientist to design us a little box that could make them all speak to each other, and we made “Blue Monday” with it.
“Blue Monday” spread because it’s a club record, and it caught DJs’ attention. It was at the vanguard of electronic dance music. We were on Factory Records, who had a promotional budget of nothing. Zero. They didn’t believe in promotion, we didn’t do many interviews about it, and somehow we ended up with this worldwide hit.
In England, it kept going in the charts year after year as it got through to a different crowd. People would come back from their summer holidays, and it had been played in places like Ibiza, and suddenly it’d go back up in the charts again.
PETER HOOK: We find that most people are either Joy Divisio
n fans or New Order fans. It’s very rare to find one who likes both, because they’re quite different. Joy Division and New Order existed during very different periods. When New Order came about, times were more fun—everything lightened up.
New Order’s way of coping with the grief of Ian’s death was to ignore Joy Division. And you must admit, it worked. New Order became successful all around the world, if not more successful than Joy Division. The trouble was, because we were so young, we were happy to avoid the grief. Looking back now, as a 56-year-old man, I realize, with all of the people I’ve lost, that grieving is a very important process.
“New Order’s way of coping with the grief of Ian’s death was to ignore Joy Division. And you must admit, it worked.”
When we did play the Joy Division stuff, Bernard didn’t like it. He felt it was miserable. It’s a bit of a crass way of putting it, but I understand what he meant. New Order is much poppier, much lighter, much more optimistic. Joy Division’s stuff is very dark—you could say gloomy. Plus, he wrote the New Order stuff, so I suppose that means a lot more to Bernard than the Joy Division stuff did.
“Blue Monday” was an experiment in seeing how much we could get the sequencers to do, and we did get them to do a hell of a lot. The fact that “Blue Monday” still sounds as good now as it did 30 years ago is incredible. I’m going to blow me own trumpet: We certainly have a knack for making fantastic music. Me and Mike Johnson, who was the engineer, worked really, really hard, along with Bernard and Steven, to make “Blue Monday” sonically exciting. Bernard and Steven, in particular, were very interested in experimenting with the new technology. I must admit, I wasn’t very interested in it. I preferred to rock out. It was that combination of me wanting to be in a rock band and them wanting to be a disco band that gave us our unique sound. We were listening to Sparks, Giorgio Moroder, Suicide, Kraftwerk. And also, in New York we were taken to many clubs: Tier 3, Hurrah. And you were like, “Wow, this is so different to England,” that it had an influence on you.
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