Post by Nick's Silva Halo on Mar 16, 2008 13:16:01 GMT -5
www.stuff.co.nz/4441561a1860.html
The flamboyant lead singer of Duran Duran survived a sailing disaster but he can't escape the 1980s.
A man with a slightly posh English accent is talking to me with an exaggerated sense of tolerance and patience. He speaks very slowly, as if I'm not very bright, and his speech has a lilting sing-song rhythm, as if I have a very short attention span and he's trying to keep me interested. It feels as though I'm listening to the presenter of a children's TV show, or perhaps a meek village vicar.
But I'm not. I'm listening to Simon Le Bon, front man of 1980s yacht-rock band, Duran Duran. You know, the guy that married the supermodel, the guy who sang the most excellent "Girls on Film" and the appalling "Rio", the guy who once wore red PVC trousers and Errol Flynn pirate shirts and sported a haircut that looked like a honey-blonde cat had gone to sleep on his head. That Simon Le Bon.
This man has scaled the heights of pop stardom, made lorry loads of cash, sold out Madison Square Garden and been mobbed by armies of lust-addled teenage girls. He should be confident in his achievements by now, surely. So why does he sound so docile, so condescending, so un-rock star?
My theory is that Le Bon hates journalists, and this manifests in him being impressively passive-aggressive in interviews. He's had nearly three decades of journalists patronising his band, so now he grits his teeth and makes himself sound so benign, so gentle, so polite that only a churlish swine would give him a hard time.
Unfortunately, I am that churlish swine. In my view, Duran Duran have always been a bit crap. Take away a few brilliant early pop songs and you have a band that sold more but mattered less than most bands of the post-punk era. Le Bon has often said that Duran Duran wanted to sound like "the Sex Pistols meets Chic" but, sadly, they never managed it. Lacking the raw nihilistic energy of the former and the coked-out elegance of the latter, it was more a case of A Flock of Seagulls meets Simply Red.
And, though the band are still touring the world and putting out records, their heyday was quite clearly the early 80s. Perhaps this is another reason why Le Bon sounds permanently defensive. He keeps putting out new albums that he's sweated blood over, but most people are more interested in the records he was making 25 years ago.
"Doesn't bother me, really," he says, sounding bothered. "It's natural that people would associate us with the 80s. I don't care about that. All I want to do is make records that excite people enough to make them come and see us live, because that's where we're at our best."
Now 49, Le Bon was born in Hertfordshire, England, in 1958. His burning ambition upon leaving school was to be an actor, and after a spell working as a hospital porter, he enrolled to study drama at the University of Birmingham in 1978. Duran Duran had been formed the same year by fellow students Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, and the departure of original vocalist Stephen Duffy left them looking for a singer. Le Bon showed up to the audition wearing a suede jacket, pink leopard-print pants and sunglasses, and carrying a book of poetry he'd written that he thought might make decent lyrics. Needless to say, he got the job.
The band released their first album in 1981 and were immediately clasped to the lace-shirted bosom of the burgeoning New Romantic movement, though Le Bon doesn't believe they were ever really a New Romantic band.
"I suppose we were just the sum of all our inputs, really. Nick was a fan of esoteric glam acts like David Bowie and Roxy Music. John loved rock, and disco acts like Chic. Andy Taylor was also a rocker, and Roger Taylor and I were both punks. We just threw all these things in together and tried to make it sound good. Fortunately, it worked."
The band released three more spectacularly successful albums in the next three years, toured relentlessly and were amazed to find themselves millionaires by the time most of them were 20 years old.
"Those were very strange times," he says. "We'd gone from playing in clubs around Birmingham to causing riots in New York's Times Square within a couple of years. We went from being nobodies to being as big as The Beatles."
But the main thing driving this band's success wasn't press attention, royal endorsements, or even their fairly generic pop-funk music; it was TV. With Duran Duran, video made the radio star. As luck would have it, MTV was on the rise, and Duran Duran exploited this new promotional tool like no other band before them.
Shot in Antigua, the "Rio" video portrayed them as the jet-setting rich boys they were fast becoming, while "Hungry Like the Wolf" cast them as brave adventurers, racing around Sri Lanka acting out a demented Raiders of the Lost Ark fantasy. The video for "Girls on Film", a song Le Bon said was a "powerful critique of the exploitation of women in advertising", exploited a lot of semi-clad women to advertise their record. Nice one.
There's no doubt that it was these early videos as much as the music that turned Duran Duran into teen idols.
"Yeah, that's probably fair comment," Le Bon says. "MTV needed a band like us that they could focus their attention on and make into the first `video generation' band. And we were right there at the right time."
And while these videos made Duran Duran stars among teenage kids, they also fuelled a backlash among the music press. Many rock critics of the day were strong supporters of the nominally working class sound of punk. The ostentatious wealth displayed in Duran Duran's videos got right up their noses.
"Yes, they hated us, and their hatred probably had as much to do with class as anything," suggests Le Bon. "Then there was the fact that we'd f---ed loads of their girlfriends. That can't have helped endear them to us either."
He allows himself a tiny snuffling laugh.
"But that image worked for us, and it worked for our audience, so who cares what a few jealous rock critics thought of us? We had more important things to worry about at the time."
One of which, as it happens, was love. In the middle of 1984, Le Bon saw a photo of young Iranian/ English model Yasmin Parvaneh and started to throb alarmingly with lust. He badgered Parvaneh's modelling agency for her number, and sent her roses every day until she agreed to go out with him. They were married late in 1985, and now have three daughters, Amber Rose (18), Saffron Sahara (16) and Tallulah Pine (13).
A few months after his wedding, Le Bon coughed up a few of his new-found millions to buy the racing yacht Drum, and almost died when it flipped over during the Whitbread Round the World yacht race. He couldn't get out because "my long johns were caught on a stanchion", but then the potentially fatal undergarments tore free and Le Bon lived to tell the tale.
In the mid-80s, exhaustion and over-indulgence in alcohol and cocaine were taking their toll and Duran Duran had a wee rest. They split for a short time into two rival bands, Power Station and Arcadia, then regrouped, though various Taylors have come and gone over the years. The band has released a new album every few years ever since.
Their 12th studio album, Red Carpet Massacre, was released late last year, featuring contributions from Justin Timberlake and super-producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosley. It's better than most of their post-80s efforts, but with its short-circuiting synths and stutter-beats, it sounds more like a Timbaland album than a Duran Duran album.
Le Bon's lyrics are terrible, as ever, but his voice sounds more animated and tuneful than it has in years.
"Well, that's great. I've been working on my singing now for 27 years, but I still have things to learn. Justin Timberlake taught me an awful lot about timing on this record, and about writing lyrics really quickly, while you've still got the excitement of the new music fizzing inside you."
What else gets Le Bon excited these days, besides music?
"Not a lot, really. Duran Duran's the main thing. But I have lots of friends. I go up to Manchester to watch the football. Of course, I'm also a family man. I've got a wife, three kids and a chihuahua. We're a great family, I think. You tend not to hear about the long-term relationships in the music business, but a lot of us have really solid marriages. It's just that nobody thought that I'd have one."
Le Bon lives in London these days, as do Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor, while John Taylor lives in LA.
"I love it here. It's not as celebrity obsessed as America. I don't have people going through my garbage. Actually, I might do, but by the time I throw it out, they're welcome to it. But overall, people in London allow you your privacy."
This is probably not indicative of the impressive maturity and restraint of the British public, but rather a sign of Duran Duran's diminished popularity.
"Well, you know, the record industry is in decline, and no one sells as many records as they used to, but if you're primarily a live act, you can still make a very good living. In Duran Duran these days, our recordings are very much intended to fuel our live career. Really, it would be wrong to suggest that we're a band that's still stuck in the 80s, but I readily admit that those early days were fantastic. You could have your pick of pretty girls, or get a good table in any restaurant. We had a lot of fun."
* Duran Duran play Auckland's Vector Arena on Wednesday, March 26. Tickets via Ticketmaster. Red Carpet Massacre is out now through Epic Records.
The flamboyant lead singer of Duran Duran survived a sailing disaster but he can't escape the 1980s.
A man with a slightly posh English accent is talking to me with an exaggerated sense of tolerance and patience. He speaks very slowly, as if I'm not very bright, and his speech has a lilting sing-song rhythm, as if I have a very short attention span and he's trying to keep me interested. It feels as though I'm listening to the presenter of a children's TV show, or perhaps a meek village vicar.
But I'm not. I'm listening to Simon Le Bon, front man of 1980s yacht-rock band, Duran Duran. You know, the guy that married the supermodel, the guy who sang the most excellent "Girls on Film" and the appalling "Rio", the guy who once wore red PVC trousers and Errol Flynn pirate shirts and sported a haircut that looked like a honey-blonde cat had gone to sleep on his head. That Simon Le Bon.
This man has scaled the heights of pop stardom, made lorry loads of cash, sold out Madison Square Garden and been mobbed by armies of lust-addled teenage girls. He should be confident in his achievements by now, surely. So why does he sound so docile, so condescending, so un-rock star?
My theory is that Le Bon hates journalists, and this manifests in him being impressively passive-aggressive in interviews. He's had nearly three decades of journalists patronising his band, so now he grits his teeth and makes himself sound so benign, so gentle, so polite that only a churlish swine would give him a hard time.
Unfortunately, I am that churlish swine. In my view, Duran Duran have always been a bit crap. Take away a few brilliant early pop songs and you have a band that sold more but mattered less than most bands of the post-punk era. Le Bon has often said that Duran Duran wanted to sound like "the Sex Pistols meets Chic" but, sadly, they never managed it. Lacking the raw nihilistic energy of the former and the coked-out elegance of the latter, it was more a case of A Flock of Seagulls meets Simply Red.
And, though the band are still touring the world and putting out records, their heyday was quite clearly the early 80s. Perhaps this is another reason why Le Bon sounds permanently defensive. He keeps putting out new albums that he's sweated blood over, but most people are more interested in the records he was making 25 years ago.
"Doesn't bother me, really," he says, sounding bothered. "It's natural that people would associate us with the 80s. I don't care about that. All I want to do is make records that excite people enough to make them come and see us live, because that's where we're at our best."
Now 49, Le Bon was born in Hertfordshire, England, in 1958. His burning ambition upon leaving school was to be an actor, and after a spell working as a hospital porter, he enrolled to study drama at the University of Birmingham in 1978. Duran Duran had been formed the same year by fellow students Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, and the departure of original vocalist Stephen Duffy left them looking for a singer. Le Bon showed up to the audition wearing a suede jacket, pink leopard-print pants and sunglasses, and carrying a book of poetry he'd written that he thought might make decent lyrics. Needless to say, he got the job.
The band released their first album in 1981 and were immediately clasped to the lace-shirted bosom of the burgeoning New Romantic movement, though Le Bon doesn't believe they were ever really a New Romantic band.
"I suppose we were just the sum of all our inputs, really. Nick was a fan of esoteric glam acts like David Bowie and Roxy Music. John loved rock, and disco acts like Chic. Andy Taylor was also a rocker, and Roger Taylor and I were both punks. We just threw all these things in together and tried to make it sound good. Fortunately, it worked."
The band released three more spectacularly successful albums in the next three years, toured relentlessly and were amazed to find themselves millionaires by the time most of them were 20 years old.
"Those were very strange times," he says. "We'd gone from playing in clubs around Birmingham to causing riots in New York's Times Square within a couple of years. We went from being nobodies to being as big as The Beatles."
But the main thing driving this band's success wasn't press attention, royal endorsements, or even their fairly generic pop-funk music; it was TV. With Duran Duran, video made the radio star. As luck would have it, MTV was on the rise, and Duran Duran exploited this new promotional tool like no other band before them.
Shot in Antigua, the "Rio" video portrayed them as the jet-setting rich boys they were fast becoming, while "Hungry Like the Wolf" cast them as brave adventurers, racing around Sri Lanka acting out a demented Raiders of the Lost Ark fantasy. The video for "Girls on Film", a song Le Bon said was a "powerful critique of the exploitation of women in advertising", exploited a lot of semi-clad women to advertise their record. Nice one.
There's no doubt that it was these early videos as much as the music that turned Duran Duran into teen idols.
"Yeah, that's probably fair comment," Le Bon says. "MTV needed a band like us that they could focus their attention on and make into the first `video generation' band. And we were right there at the right time."
And while these videos made Duran Duran stars among teenage kids, they also fuelled a backlash among the music press. Many rock critics of the day were strong supporters of the nominally working class sound of punk. The ostentatious wealth displayed in Duran Duran's videos got right up their noses.
"Yes, they hated us, and their hatred probably had as much to do with class as anything," suggests Le Bon. "Then there was the fact that we'd f---ed loads of their girlfriends. That can't have helped endear them to us either."
He allows himself a tiny snuffling laugh.
"But that image worked for us, and it worked for our audience, so who cares what a few jealous rock critics thought of us? We had more important things to worry about at the time."
One of which, as it happens, was love. In the middle of 1984, Le Bon saw a photo of young Iranian/ English model Yasmin Parvaneh and started to throb alarmingly with lust. He badgered Parvaneh's modelling agency for her number, and sent her roses every day until she agreed to go out with him. They were married late in 1985, and now have three daughters, Amber Rose (18), Saffron Sahara (16) and Tallulah Pine (13).
A few months after his wedding, Le Bon coughed up a few of his new-found millions to buy the racing yacht Drum, and almost died when it flipped over during the Whitbread Round the World yacht race. He couldn't get out because "my long johns were caught on a stanchion", but then the potentially fatal undergarments tore free and Le Bon lived to tell the tale.
In the mid-80s, exhaustion and over-indulgence in alcohol and cocaine were taking their toll and Duran Duran had a wee rest. They split for a short time into two rival bands, Power Station and Arcadia, then regrouped, though various Taylors have come and gone over the years. The band has released a new album every few years ever since.
Their 12th studio album, Red Carpet Massacre, was released late last year, featuring contributions from Justin Timberlake and super-producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosley. It's better than most of their post-80s efforts, but with its short-circuiting synths and stutter-beats, it sounds more like a Timbaland album than a Duran Duran album.
Le Bon's lyrics are terrible, as ever, but his voice sounds more animated and tuneful than it has in years.
"Well, that's great. I've been working on my singing now for 27 years, but I still have things to learn. Justin Timberlake taught me an awful lot about timing on this record, and about writing lyrics really quickly, while you've still got the excitement of the new music fizzing inside you."
What else gets Le Bon excited these days, besides music?
"Not a lot, really. Duran Duran's the main thing. But I have lots of friends. I go up to Manchester to watch the football. Of course, I'm also a family man. I've got a wife, three kids and a chihuahua. We're a great family, I think. You tend not to hear about the long-term relationships in the music business, but a lot of us have really solid marriages. It's just that nobody thought that I'd have one."
Le Bon lives in London these days, as do Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor, while John Taylor lives in LA.
"I love it here. It's not as celebrity obsessed as America. I don't have people going through my garbage. Actually, I might do, but by the time I throw it out, they're welcome to it. But overall, people in London allow you your privacy."
This is probably not indicative of the impressive maturity and restraint of the British public, but rather a sign of Duran Duran's diminished popularity.
"Well, you know, the record industry is in decline, and no one sells as many records as they used to, but if you're primarily a live act, you can still make a very good living. In Duran Duran these days, our recordings are very much intended to fuel our live career. Really, it would be wrong to suggest that we're a band that's still stuck in the 80s, but I readily admit that those early days were fantastic. You could have your pick of pretty girls, or get a good table in any restaurant. We had a lot of fun."
* Duran Duran play Auckland's Vector Arena on Wednesday, March 26. Tickets via Ticketmaster. Red Carpet Massacre is out now through Epic Records.