ROCK-SHOTS LEARNS EVEN MORE: The NICK RHODES Interview, Part Two!

ROCK-SHOTS LEARNS EVEN MORE: The NICK RHODES Interview, Part Two!

Billy Cioffi

(Last month, Nick Rhodes told ROCKSHOTS his side of the Arcadia/Power Station/Duran Duran story. Now—in a continuation of that interview—Rhodes discusses how the Durans work together in the wake of their supergroup spin-offs.)

The kids' point of reference, the 12or 17-year old reference in pop music, is different from an older person’s point of reference...say, the Beatles. How do you feel about that?

I take it as a compliment. When we started—it was almost like six years ago, in England—there were some kids who came to see us that were about 14 years old. Those kids are now 20 and I actually bumped into some when I was in England a while back. They said, “We’ve been following you for six years now.’’ They were about 20 or 21, they were a couple of girls and a guy. And they said, “Well, there hasn’t been much that’s come out since you, and we really haven’t listened to that many other groups. We kind of like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but they’ve only made one album.” And it really did seem like...well, it made me feel old. God, I’m only 23 and I was only a couple of years older than them, I guess. It was just strange for me to hear that for the first time. There were people that had been following us for six years, it was like, gosh. It certainly seems like we’d become history. I guess things do become like points of reference. My points of reference are David Bowie, Roxy Music, T. Rex, Sparks, and Be Bop Deluxe. Have you ever had a bomb in Duran Duran? Have you ever had a bomb-out?

Uh...no. In America we did. Well, you know, everything bombed until “Hungry Like The Wolf.” And that only took off on a re-release.

I didn’t realize that.

Oh yeah. We couldn’t get arrested here. We came over here and we toured the clubs. We really sort of slugged it out. We had a big tour of clubs and then we went back to England. This was on the first album. We went back to England, came here again for the second album. We did a huge tour of clubs again, slightly bigger because we had a real big cult following. We did from 300to 1,000-seaters and 500to 2,000-seaters. We did a tour with Blondie—that was our third tour. We left after the Blondie thing feeling very despondent, because the album was being very successful everywhere else in the world and we’d begun to do, I don’t know, 5,000-seaters in most places—and in America we couldn’t fill even 1,000-seaters in most of the cities apart from New York and Los Angeles.

Do you think it was the video?

I think at the stage, it was when America was realizing that they had to wake up a little bit because...it’s like when you’re this great big thing. It takes a little longer to spread out and get noticed everywhere. But when there’s pressure coming from just about every side, it wasn’t just us, there was Culture Club coming in, Tears For Fears. It seemed like other people were having the same trouble. We left and we thought we’d never come here again. We couldn’t get played on the radio, nobody would show our video on television. We had a few thousand great fans that would come to see us in clubs, but it always cost us— we had a dreadful deficit. Everything we’d earned from anywhere in the world, which at that stage was not a tremendous amount, we’d just throw back into America so we could afford to tour. And it just did nothing. There’s this myth about when bands tour, that it really breaks them and it just seemed to have done nothing at all.

In retrospect, now do you think it did something?

In retrospect, I think it did. It gained us a little bit of respect from the people who saw us at that stage and also from people who know we toured. The majority of people in America who now buy our records don’t know we ever toured here. In America, in the late 70s and 80s— at least among musicians—there was a great resurgence of “Let’s get back to songs. Let’s stop grooving for a while.’’

See, what we wanted to do was combine the groove thing with songs. Which I think we did pretty successfully from very early on. But that was the whole concept behind it. I grew up listening to songs, as opposed to groove. And then a bit late I started to become curious about things like Chic. I thought, “Well, this is really good but I’m not so keen on the lyrics and stuff. There isn’t much chord-changing.” Which is great, but we try to combine them a little. It worked— on songs like “Reflex” it worked best. With Arcadia, I love “Election Day.”

I do, too. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

It's right in the pocket. And Le Son’s voice is a lot more powerful—

It’s in a better range for him, you know. That’s something that makes a big difference sometimes. Writing things for people’s ranges.

Did that all of a sudden click for you?

A little bit. But really, it happened with that song. ’Cause “Election Day" was one of the first songs we started doing that with. He was moaning away in the studio when I was playing some chords and melodies and I said, “Wait a minute. There’s something about this.” I just realized; it just suddenly dawned on me that his voice was going to sound really good with this. And so I did it deliberately with some other songs on the album and it really does make a difference, because he’s not at the top of his range and he’s got room to expand over the top of the track without straining. Simon likes singing like that because, I guess, ifs more like Jim Morrison. It’s more that sort of stuff; he loves that sort of low melody. It’s darker. And less tiring, to be sure. It's exhausting to sing over the top.

It also allows him to put more expression into things, I think, because he has more control over his voice in those ranges and doesn’t have to strain for things. He’s got more time to think about how it’s gonna be phrased, and the intonation of it and everything. Whereas, when he’s trying to reach these notes, it’s like all his energy has to go into it to make sure it’s on-key, as opposed to the expression of it.

For Live Aid, I heard that you only had an hour to rehearse the day before.

We did.

I thought that showed you were a band.

Oh, we’re definitely a band. What horrified me was Simon’s classic bum note—it was the bum note of the year— a bum note is a bum note and everybody has to make them sometimes, it just doesn’t have to be in front of 250 million people. It’s difficult to criticize Live Aid and I’m really glad we did it; I really don’t care what we sounded like at the end of the day. About the event, though, it was important to do it. The fact that we were there was what mattered. But in slightly more critical terms of the performance—it was one of those things where it usually takes you two hours to set up your gear and get all your monitors right. You know, we have quite a complex sound with all the synths and things and you had 15 minutes, the same as everybody else. It was more difficult for us than, say, a more straightforward rock band with just a guitar, drums, and bass.

So we tried our best and that was that. I’ll tell you who really shone through, and that was Mick and Tina. That was wow\ Is music a medium of expression for you?

Oh, definitely. The question I always get asked is, “What would you do if you weren’t a musician?” And the only thing I say is, “Well, something in entertainment.” Photography—I already played around with that a lot. I guess I do it, anyway. But directing film or, I don’t know, acting, but something where you can express, definitely, and let something out. It’s a real privilege to be able to be creative and make a living from it. Or painting, or whatever. It’s really important.

So you think you have to choose to be an artist first and then your choice of medium is almost secondary?

No. My choice of medium was actually the first thing. But hadn’t I done that, then I would have looked at other things that really interested me. Something I want to do sometime in my life is direct film. But, when you’re 16 and you haven’t done anything, you can start in a band, you know...three chords. I guess you don’t start directing film.

Are you going to do anything with your own video?

It’s very difficult. If I did a solo thing, I could definitely do my own, but when there’s four other people with very strong ideas as well, we fight enough to make sure it all gets into the music.

How do you settle things with five people?

It’s democracy, really, it has to be. It’s a case of when three of us agree, then the other two have to be persuaded it’s right. And there’s often disagreements, musically. But they battle themselves out. There’s also a tremendous competition between all of us to create the best parts. It’s like John might come up with some chords; even though he’s the bass player, there’s nothing to stop him from playing a piano and say, “Hey, listen to these.” Or I might say, “Hey, instead of playing that bass, why don’t you play this?” And that sort of thing does happen, so everybody is constantly trying to improve their parts and make sure that theirs is the ultimate part.

How did you arrive at this kind of democracy?

It happened very naturally. I think the thing is, when you’re nothing—I mean, we all worked In nightclubs, I was the lucky one ’cause I got to deejay. I had a lot of records. But Andy was serving food from, like, in the kitchen; John was collecting glasses. We were doing this sort of thing just so that we could afford to rehearse for a few hours, to be able to get there. When you’re together for a while and then you go on tour together, you get very close. Or when you write together, you so desperately want something to work, to be able to put an album out, and get signed by a record company, you find yourselves not compromising each other, but forcing yourself into that position where everybody really wants the same thing. It’s not by a matter of discussion. You have to have that empathy or it doesn’t work as a group.

What’s the projected time frame for Duran Duran?

Well, Simon’s boat race is the major obstacle right now because he wanted to do it. And now he’s committed to doing it. He gets back from that, like, the second week of May. Which, after, we’re immediately going to go into writing the Duran album. Then hopefully, if we get together by April, we’ll have a lot of ideas and we’ll pull them together and see what happens.

What will you be doing till then?

Well, I don’t want to tie myself down too much because when I get into a project,

I tend to get so engrossed in it. I like to do things I can fit within a period of comfortable time; that's my new theory. So I’m going to do my first graphic exhibition, which I’ve been saying I’m gonna do for over a year now. I’ve developed that a little further and that’ll be good fun.