Bored with Prozac & the internet
Duran Duran do it for themselves

Duran Duran have been in and out of the headlines for nearly 20 years. Long after their initial splash on the MTV music scene as pretty young techno-pop stars, they have continued putting out remarkable records and demonstrating a great breadth of talent. Their return to the limelight came with 1993's Duran Duran (commonly called called "The Wedding Album") with hits "Come undone" and "Ordinary World".

Duran Duran now consist of vocalist Simon Le Bon, guitarist Warren Cucurrullo, and keyboardist Nick Rhodes. Their new album Medazzaland (Capitol Records) is a quirky and engaging collection of hi-tech glitz and lo-fi grunge, full of hummable melodies, wryly self-deprecating humour, and electronic thrash.
The new record was laid out and almost entirely created in Privacy Studio, a facility Warren built in his own house. It was produced by TV Mania, a name coined by Warren and Nick to describe a songwriting and production partnership that now extends beyond Duran to a musical direction all its own, as well as production credits for other artists (such as a recent Blondie release).
Warren has also done a series of ten ambient albums with material recorded since 1987, in which he performs all of the music live on processed guitar and recorded directly to DAT. We spoke by phone with Nick and Warren just before the release of Medazzaland in the fall of 1997, and they gave us a rundown of what a world-class band was doing recording it's latest record on a living room couch.

Our readers are always interested in the creative space an artist puts together to realize a creative process. Could you tell us a little bit about the overall process of putting Medazzaland together-what you had in mind and how you worked?

Warren Cuccurullo: We were looking at taking the next step after the Wedding Abum, which was released over four years ago, never mind when the tracks were actually written.
Nick Rhodes: Basically, we have a small studio of our own, and we've now customized the studio to all needs and requirements.

Is this something that TV Mania uses for all its projects or is it primarily for Duran Duran?

NR: No, we've used it for the TV Mania album as well. We actually did the Blondie recording in New York. The way the technology's working now, it's down to each individual to tailor-make the studio to his own requirements. Although the cost can get prohibitive if you're not careful. When we started off putting the studio together some years ago, I don't think we were quite certain what we were going to need with respect to hard disk recording, what kind of a desk we were going to need. We started off with a DDA desk that we're still very happy with. We've just moved to three Tascam DA-88 multitracks from Akai DR- series hard disk recorders. As the technology developed we've been able to upgrade where needed as we go. We feel very comfortable in that environment, because you're not at the mercy of the clock running and the money running out of the bank at the same speed. [laughs] You have the luxury of time, and we have it much easier (particularly now being a 3-piece) than if we'd had to hire a rehearsal room and play together. We can all work in headphones or quietly through the monitors, and it's worked out really well.
WC: The first thing was, of course, to pick a room, and it can't be anything else. The TV had to go, but fortunately the couches stayed. [laughs] It had to be a work room. As was the case for the Wedding Abum, we do the basic stuff here and then go to big studios to do the drums. We're not set up to do that here. I'm actually sitting in the studio right now. It's my living room.

The liner notes that I have for Medazzaland say that it's 'written and recorded around the world'....

NR: The skeletons of a lot of the songs go back to the time of the Thank You album and even back to the Wedding Album tour. When you're out on tour, you have time to work more acoustically, on melodies and lyrics. A lot of that got written while we were travelling.
WC: The way Medazzaland started was that we'd written a bunch of songs here using drum loops to start with and committed them to Digide sign Pro Tools. So we had a work tape, basic tracks with guide melodies. Then we went out to promote our Thank You album, doing occasional radio gigs for a few months and playing together. So I said, "Let's go into a rehearsal hall with the 16 songs on the work tape and the three or four we wrote on the road." Taking that live thing we had going, we spent three weeks in the rehearsal hall then went into the studio and cut rhythm tracks. We hit the usual lyrical brick wall-Simon lyrics, and he hit this wall, and things were stagnating. They weren't songs yet, just arrangements and parts. That brought about the TV Mania project, where Nick and I were overdubbing on the stuff we'd done in the studio. We were trying to find space for the keyboards among all the guitars I'd recorded-from the studio tapes we'd bounced down stereo drums and stereo guitars onto our Tascam machines, so we could take them home and work with them. Then we'd do overdubs. We had three machines so 24 tracks was usually our limit, but we'd go up to five tapes' worth on some tracks. The Duran Duran stuff was on the back burner with no lyrics, and Nick and I started working on stuff on our own, and it took on a life and shape of its own. And that became the TV Mania album. It was all done in here without any outside studio stuff, and it ended up having a drastic effect on how Duran Duran worked. Not too surprising, since TV Mania is two thirds of Duran Duran. [laughs]

There's a combination of live drummers like Anthony Resta, Dave Dicenzo, and [Indian tabla player] Talvin Singh, with a lot of pre-programmed drum machines on Medazzaland. Was there a conscious effort to say, "This song requires a live drummer, while that song should use a machine"?

NR: Most of the songs have live drums in them-I think the only one that doesn't is 'Silva Halo.' The rest of them are a combination or purely live drums. Anthony Resta, who plays most of the drums on the record, is like a machine anyway. He's remarkable, he has the most remarkable sense of rhythm I've come across in years. The way he breaks down polyrhythms and percussion and pieces things together in layers at a time...he's like a whole tribe of percussionists!

So when we're listening to a song like 'Big Bang Generation,' what we're hearing is actually Anthony playing live rather than a sample loop?

NR: It's both. We would record Anthony playing live and then import his track into the sampler as a loop. Then there'd be live fills over the top. There are certainly loops on the record, but the majority of them started out as Anthony's live tracks

A lot of the songs, like 'Midnight Sun,' have these massive textures, layer upon layer. Did you build those up piece by piece or put it all together at once so you could get a live feel?

NR: Every track on Medazzaland is different that way. We really didn't give ourselves too many constraints as to how we worked. That track in particular started out as a live jam. It was one of the ones John [Taylor] played on, and over the course of about a year, it kept cropping up and we would add to it. Then Simon had a title for it and wrote the lyrics. At the last minute it sounded like an outtake from the Wedding Album, and it didn't sit well with the other tracks. The synthesizers sounded pretty much as they are now, but we decided to change the entire rhythm track-Warren played the bass and Anthony redid the drums and we felt it fitted much better with song and also the album. It was like a jigsaw with bits missing that didn't come together until very near the production of the album.
WC: Another song we had to totally redo was rewriting 'Be My Icon.' It was originally done with John doing the vocals. It was cemented in place for over two years. It was one of the first pieces I did with the Lexicon Jam Man. I really wanted to do it, but how could we do it with a guy who'd left the band doing the vocals? Bassist John Taylor left the band to work on solo projects.) So I put on headphones, listened to the instrumental version, and sang melodies. On the third pass I felt that I nailed it. I yelled, "Run it back! Let's go with it!" And we dropped in a whole new verse and chorus, saving the old bridges. I'd never worked that way before, and it was great.

How were the guitar tracks assembled?

WC: Most of my guitars were played along to a click track. And by using my effects rack with my Jam Mans in it, which are basically [loop delay] samplers, I would create and write the song and come up with all the relevant parts and overdubs, including solos. We'd load them into the computer off DAT, assign them to keys, and I would literally play in arrangements to a guide drum track that we'd made. John Taylor had left the band, so I'm doing bass as well. So there's a whole rhythm track and then we'd screw around with keyboards. We had quite an array of different sounds. I'm very happy doing my guitars with speaker simulators, I have no trouble getting a variety of wicked sounds. Working at lower levels with the monitors in the studio doesn't seem to hurt my tone. I suppose that if I really needed that huge wall of amps sound I could go into a studio, but I bet I could get what I wanted right here with baffling and so on. I use Palmer simulators, the PDI-03, PDI-05 and -09. They work fine, especially with the heavy processing I'm using these days.

How do you record the bass?

WC: I go direct through a Soldano preamp into one of the Palmers, and it works fine. Occasionally I use a DigiTech GSP processor.

There seems to have been a conscious decision not to eliminate every bit of grunge and hiss on the album. You can hear washes of grit in some of the background textures of songs like 'So Long Suicide'....

WC: I think everybody's sick of the sterility. I think that so many over-produced albums came out in the latter part of the '80s, and let's face it - noise is good! As long as it's the right kind of noise.

NR: We went very analog. A lot of the initial tracking was digital, but we then transferred it to analog. The guitars were recorded analog and so were a lot of the drums.
WC: One thing we won't use again is Dolby SR. We didn't need it. And we had problems transferring stuff, getting the decoding to work properly was one of the big drags of the record. Forget it. Bring on the noise! [laughs]
NR: At the moment, I'm really on an "I miss vinyl" trail. I did a pretty frightening experiment only a few weeks ago. I played the CD next to the vinyl, and I was pretty shocked at what I heard. I mean, the warmth in the vinyl and the depth in the bottom end were very noticeable. So I think our conscious efforts to move back to the old analog sound were for all the right reasons. We wanted to bring back the warmth into the music.
WC: I think that someday they'll create a box or some integral software in CD players that will put back some of the warmth you lose. I'm into the convenience of CDs and MiniDiscs; you kick back with a remote and enjoy.
NR: Even from the standpoint of synthesizers, I went back to the ones I used on the first two albums. Literally the same ones-the ones I'd lost along the way I went out and rebought at synth auctions and the like. I used the Roland Jupiter-8, the Prophet-5, a Roland System 100 modular and a Jupiter-4. I've got a little Synthi AKS in a suitcase that I used on 'Silva Halo.' Ieven rebought a Wasp, which I have a lot of fun with. That's on 'Undergoing Treatment.' A lot of the percussive sounds are actually the Wasp.
WC: We basically dug up the synth graveyard. [laughs]

Will Medazzaland be released on vinyl?

WC: Yes, it will. ..somewhere. I hope it will in America, but....

Nick, are you playing live or sequencing with MIDI these days?

NR: Oh, that depends on what mood I'm in. We're usually running the computer anyway. I'll do several live passes and keep what I like. We might keep a whole live pass or pick out a section and loop it, do other passes over it.

Are you doing anything with computers?

NR: I used to do everything myself with the electronics, but when we got past the Fairlight/Synclavier stage I hired a chap named Mark Tinley to handle the programming side of things. I can concentrate on the music, and if I give him 20 things to do in one minute, looping samples or whatever, he's got them done by the count of 59. He really frees me up to play, to come up with ideas and not worry about the technology. We were using an Apple Mac on the album with the Pro Tools software and Emagic Logic Audio.
WC: We're now making the change to the PC. We have a 16-track audio system that we're using to prep our live stuff that's coming up. Mark runs the computer, and usually it's just Nick and me sitting on the couch, saying "Move that bit there" or whatever, occasionally jumping up to run and play something on the keyboards or the guitar rack. Nick has his Jupiter-8 on top of two of my 4 x 12 guitar cabinets, and his Crumar on top of another one.

One thing I noticed all over Medazzaland was the wide variety of vocal treatment. Simon's voice sounds different on every track. What mics did you use and how did you work with vocal lines?

NR: We used only one mic, a Calrec Soundfield MkIV It's quite remarkable, you can set its sliders to get a lot of different sounds. We recorded all of our samples with it, Simon's vocals, the acoustic guitars.. .anything that was done in our studio.
WC: It's a great mic. I think you need to have one great mic, one good valve mic in the studio, for what you do. It makes so many things come out better.
NR: Of course, we had a much wider variety of mics in the big studios where we did the drums.

Are there particular processors you like to use on vocals? You've got some really lovely tricks all over Medazzaland.

NR: Oh, yeah. It's just that time again, we've gotten back into processing. In the late '80s and early '90s we had concentrated on something more pure, and I've really gone totally back the other way. Simon has a really rich voice, and he can stand up to a lot of processing. For example, on 'Undergoing Treatment' there's a different effect on every line. The vocal morphs from line to line-we made it very schizoid. We have that little box that no one seemed to like, that Anthony and Bob St. John love, the Lexicon Vortex. It definitely has a feel all its own. Sort of a Roland Dimension-D for the '90s.
WC: I think that for guitar, though, it's absolute crap. When you bypass it, it brings in this horrible eq and it ruins your sound. I've talked to Lexicon about it, to try to get a way to truly bypass it and get it away from the signal. For vocals I love the Urei compressor/limiter, the [Eventide UltraHarmonizer] 113000 or H4000, AMS reverb and delays. For guitars I always use an H4000, I love the Sony HR-GP5 and the Zoom 9050, and of course the Jam Man's a key. I've gotten back into the old stomp boxes. Whammy pedals, the old ADA Flanger pedals-I have two of them tacked, one with a nice flange and the other I can tweak the knobs for the really radical stuff. I have an MXR Phase 100 that's really wicked....I must have 60, 70 inches of stomp boxes across my floor. [laughs] I do a lot of tap dancing. I need that range of tone. I use a Bradshaw switching system on my effects rack, and so there's no noise buildup from wiring them all together. Zero problem. He used to use [Rocktron] Hushes but now he doesn't need them any more. But the stuff on the front end is just daisy chained-the two ADA Flangers, the Phase 100, a vibrato, a Whammy pedal, three fuzzes, and a wah. I think they sound great.

I loved the Beatlesque vocal sound on 'Michael, You've Got A Lot To Answer For.'

WC: That was a guide vocal. Simon sat there and sang it to a click. I sat there next to him playing acoustic guitar to help him along, and he was singing to get the feel right. We couldn't ever get a better vocal. It was just perfect, the way he just sang it to the guitar. Once the whole track was there, nothing was as pure as that first pass. Vocals are the most important thing, the persona. You can't just sing, you have to be that person in the song. Simon's really learned a lot-it's pretty much a breeze for him now.

Does Simon like all the bizarre things you do to his voice? WC: [laughs] Oh, yeah! He loves it. We also really enjoy using the DigiTech Studio Vocalist. It's used on a couple of things on the Duran album, but it's a big TV Mania piece.

You briefly mentioned doing drums in big studios. Were the drums all recorded after the skeletons of the songs were done?

NR: The early tracks where Steve Alexander played were done more traditionally-we'd start with bass, drums, and rhythm guitar. But later, particularly for Anthony Resta's drums, we tended to work with our own track, computer drums. Then we'd add in his drum parts and loops, and depending on the song we might entirely dispense with our guide track. On 'Michael, You've Got A Lot To Answer For' Anthony played exactly what the computer had but with the live feel that it lacked, so there was no need to keep the computer's part.
WC: No reflection on Steve, but the stuff he did at the start, which we had on that work tape with those 18 tracks or whatever, really ended up sounding dated, and very little of it made it onto the album. Anthony, who with Bob is our mixing guy, has a great sense of rhythm, and I have faith in his ability and his choices. If I send him a guide track that I did here he'll take note of the feel I wanted and actually record and add drums while mixing. The stuff that Steve had done Anthony would modernize with looping triggering new samples, and so on. I like to be surprised. I like to let them process the drums and do whatever, and see if I like it. It's best if they're working in London-it's less than optimal if we're in London and they're on the East Coast in the States, because then you have to ship approval DATs back and forth. Occasionally we have fixes, but mainly it's right on. It took me a while to get used to working this way. If I'm in a studio with a band playing live I can whip something together very quickly, but I personally am much happier with the results of working the way we ended up doing the tracks, putting things together here and giving the drums to Anthony. It's much more homemade, much more modern, and I know I can get any result I want here. Imean, 'Ordinary World' and 'Come Undone' [from the Wedding Album] was done here, and you're not going to get any more slick than that. For 'Ordinary World' we put everything together here, and Steve Ferrone played drums along with it in a London studio-but on 'Come Undone' it was all done here, no live drums at all.

Can you tell us more about TV Mania, about their upcoming project?

NR: Warren and I were working together on some ideas-we were talking for some time about doing a completely different sort of project from Duran Duran. We started with electronic songs that turned out very well. It turned into an idea for an extremely modern cyber-soap rock opera. I came up with the title, 'Bored with Prozac and the Internet?' [laughs] And from that I built a whole story, and Warren and I pieced it together over the past year and a half. It's turned into quite a monster. It will be three single albums of music, and that will form the whole piece. The first album is done, and the second two albums we've been working on side by side, and they're a long way along. We hope to have the whole project done in the next year to 18 months. It's been very exciting. It has a story, a cast of characters, all kinds of strange observations about a modern family trying to deal with the onslaught of technology, designer drugs and the like.
WC: We do a lot of singing on the album, Nick through the Studio Vocalist, and I do the straight singing. Nick's girlfriend sings. Most of the stuff is samples from television. We've lined up a singer named Neil Corhill from a band called Delicatessen, who'll be doing some stuff for us on the later albums, and a couple of other guest singers.

Is there anything you feel our readership should think about for their own projects-somethingyou've learned in your recent work that's been a big help to you?

WC: Make sure it sounds good on acoustic guitar. Then you can dress it up however you want, but you have to start with something good. It's kind of good, if you can, to have someone else operating the computer. I prefer being able to operate the instruments and having someone else punch you in. It's a question of cost, of course, but if you're making a record in your house, I really feel you need an engineer and programmer. You can probably get someone for a really good rate, and if you think about what you save over what you'd pay for time in a studio, you're still way ahead of the game. It helps you concentrate on getting a song as good as it can be.
NR: I think that the most important thing about studios now is that you should choose your gear carefully and really customize your studio to suit your needs. How many tracks of hard disk do you need, how much sampler memory, how big a desk will do, which mics will do the job for you? What are you going to be recording? Can you bounce things around if you have to, how many machines do you need? For us it was crucial to have a lot of analog and a lot of processing power. I like mixing really expensive effects with really cheap, horrible flangers and wah-wah pedals. It's the experimenting and finding new sounds in the studio that really appeals to me. There's so much you can do in the studio, so many options. It's a pleasure to experiment, to move forward-the TV Mania stuff was a totally different mindset than the Duran Duran, and out of that we did the Blondie tracks, very different. That's the other wonderful thing about a recording studio: you can afford yourself those days to just see what you can achieve, to try things out. You can say, "Hmmm, I don't know if that's going to work," but you never know until you try.

One last question: Will the doctors ever cure these delusions of grandeur...?

NR: [laughs] I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it. I mean, DD's always suffered from extreme schizophrenia. It depends on how we feel when we wake up each morning. Every day's a new journey for us.
WC: Not if you're trying to keep bettering yourself. I don't think of them as delusions of grandeur. That was Simon's kind of outlook on things, that lyric. I look at your life as a musician and a composer should never be something you're totally satisfied with. As good as you think what you've just done is, there's always room for growth. It really is a lifelong journey.

© 1998/Recording Magazine