15th Anniversary Issue

This issue is out of stock, but here's a selection of some of the contents from this very special fanzine!

• 1990: Interview with Simon
• 1995: John's questionnaire
• 2001: Nick's questionnaire
• 2003: Simon's birthday wishes

TDGD's first ever interview with Duran Duran

What would you change on the album if it were still possible to change anything?
Oh, some sounds. You want to change just the sound of things, maybe the bass drum louder in this song... The list is as long as my arm by now. We've finished it in March, so it's given us so many months to listen to it and really pick it to pieces, then put it back together again. That's what you do when you have remixes, you're gonna get that second chance.

There are a lot of remixes. For example for Violence of Summer there must have been at least 5 or 6 different ones.
We hoped that we'd find something that really worked on the dance floor. And I honestly don't think we found the right thing, actually. I kind of liked the story-mix.

Duran Duran has played both the large stadiums and the small clubs. Which do you prefer?
I like both. I don't like one more than the other. I like playing in small clubs because you get a great sound and you really feel close and you get a great groove going on. Which sometimes when you play in a big place you loose it because the ambiance sound is coming from the back of the arena. You just get lost in a kind of mush. But it's tough because you're really confronted by individuals as well and that puts you in a spot. It tends to make me much more nervous when I am singing in front of the people this close rather than people who are thirty feet away. I'm quite shortsighted so I can't see people more than a hundred yards away. I can't see their faces that clearly. I can't see if they're pulling faces at me or if they're enjoying it. I don't think about that. I can only see the first twenty, no I can see further than that. I'd be falling off the stage...

Why is it that the last few albums didn't contain the lyrics? They are quite important, aren't they?
Yes, I know... We decided that for a number of reasons. John said he felt that we were opening ourselves up to criticism from the press if we put down lyrics in the album. I didn't understand that at all. I don't think that's true. I think really we just felt that they were unnecessary, we didn't think it was important. We felt that the words are there in the songs and you can understand them.

We can't.
You can't?

No, sometimes it is very hard to understand and sometimes we simply don't know the words and can't find them in a dictionary.
That's probably because I make them up.

But then it is very difficult for us to understand because English isn't our mother tongue.
Yes, I know. Okay, fine, we'll put the lyrics on the next album. I think we realised the mistake we made quite some time ago. You're not the first person to mention it, so we'll do something about it in the future... With Notorious it was definitely a graphic thing. We decided we didn't like to have kind of typed lyrics with the album. With Big Thing we did put lyrics with the album. On Liberty they're really straightforward and easy to understand. It is pretty confusing because I don't write proper English.

It must be very difficult to write proper English when writing the lyrics to a song.
It's not so much that, you just don't care, it just does not matter. You're not writing to have it parsed grammatically, it's just a question of communicating an idea.

Duran Duran have been promoting quite intensively for two months now. But someone like George Michael for example, who has decided not to do any promotions at all, gets at least twice as much press coverage. What do you think of that?
That's the way it goes, isn't it? I don't feel bitter about it at all. We are just doing what we've got to do to get people back into the groove.

Despite all the opposition and negative attitudes from press and others, a lot of people are still loyal followers of Duran Duran. How do you feel about that?
Great! I'm so happy that we've got people we can rely on. It makes us feel really good.... it's our security. That's a great thing. But having said that, we're not stupid enough to think that if we made shit music we'd be able to hold onto it, because I just don't think we would. We know why we have a following and that's because we've got something to offer.

Liberty gives rise to a lot of dissension. With this album the critics seem to have accepted Duran Duran as more than teen idols. But the fans are not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it.
The fans are not enthusiastic about the album?!

Not wholeheartedly, no. To some it's just too heavy. Some parts...
What I think it is, that's the way band is moving. We've got a new guitarist, a new drummer and they've changed the sound of the group.

The fans don't say 'I don't like the album', but they only like a few songs, like Serious, Liberty, Violence of Summer...
But not Downtown or Read My Lips.

Especially Read My Lips and First Impression we think. (...) Some fans told us that they thought First Impression was such a standard song, not original at all.
You can't make an album that everybody likes. If you think about that all the time you end up probably not doing anything. You've got to make music that you like. You've got to make it for yourself first.

Maybe some of the songs will make other people like Duran Duran music.
Maybe. I mean, I love Read My Lips and Downtown. But when you are talking about fans, most fans are not just fans of Duran Duran. Most people like more than one group. Maybe there are kids who like Duran Duran because they like the early Japan stuff as well, and the Cocteau Twins. They're gonna love things like My Antarctica, Liberty and maybe Venice Drowning and Serious. And you get people who like INXS who also like Duran Duran. They're gonna like stuff like Read My Lips and Downtown. Then there are some people who like Motley Crüe and love Duran Duran. They've got a different point of view. It's just a matter of taste. The important thing is that it is our taste that's on the album.

Very fan like the Big Thing album without question. But with Liberty that's different because the song one fan likes is the same another might strongly dislike. I think it's interesting to raise controversy like that. Funny, Big Thing was a very confused album to me. But that's me and I made it and I was confused. It was made in a confused way. We'd go down to the studio and play all day in the room and by the end of the day we'd think, 'What have we got? Where are we now?'. Whereas with this it was very straightforward: okay, we go in the room and we do it. We'd have something at the end of the day, or maybe two things or three things and that's great! We felt like we were getting on somewhere. It took us a third of the time to write this as it did to write Big Thing. A third! For us that's a big improvement.

The critics seem to have accepted Duran Duran as more than a teen idol group. The reviews are very positive.
I'll tell you what I think it is. I think it is a more mainstream album, it reminds you of a lot of other things. Although I say Big Thing was confused, it was way out there. If you were not into the group you just thought, 'what the fuck are they going on about?' With this I think it's more accessible to people who aren't Duran Duran fans because it maybe complies to more conventional standards. And maybe that's why some of the fans don't like it. That's what you are saying about First Impression. And that's true. I think it is more mainstream and I don't think it's a good thing. And I think we're heading way out there with the next one. In a way, because it was the first album of the new band... The most important thing was that we could work and actually make it work together, because we did not know, we never worked together. We didn't know if it was going to work. We were so pleased that we said about the songs we liked, 'that's great, don't touch it!' We didn't think about anything else. When we were all ready and listening to is we were thinking, 'we can go a lot further out there with the next one'.

How does a new Duran Duran song come into existence? All we see is the finished product.
Usually music first, like one riff, just one theme. Then we'll play around that and get together and I'll start singing 'blah blah' until a phrase comes into my mind. Or if it doesn't, I'll take a piece of paper and think about what I wanted the song to be about. We just develop them, we just grow them. It's almost like a little plant. You tend it and water it and you grow it. You grow other things off it. You graft on other bits like musical movement, like a bridge or maybe you have written a chorus for something, but you don't like the verse of that song, though you think the chorus is really good you'll see if you can stick it on to the other one. But on the other hand, sometimes you write a song from start to finish. I'll write a total song on my own. Violence of Summer was something that Nick and me did almost totally... actually, we wrote the verse and then Warren came in.

During the recording sessions, which band member is the most stubborn?
Most stubborn? Oh, we all get very stubborn. I know I do, I know John does. Did you ask John this question? What did he say?

According to John Nick was the most stubborn during recordings. But he later admitted he tends to get real stubborn too.
Yeah, we all do. Nick tends to make more noise about it. He gets real grumpy and goes 'grmm grmm grmm' (Simon demonstrated to us what a grumpy Nick looks like. Unfortunately this cannot be described in words.)

What would you like to achieve with Duran Duran in the future?
I just want a hit records for a start. That's a good place to start!

1995: John talks about working on his first solo album

2001: Nick & Silver Coloured Aliens

Simon's birthday wishes