

It must be a strange balance for them these days, I say: a band known for innovation, for often being at the forefront of technology, but vividly remembered for posing with feathered hair and pastel suits on a yacht in the Rio video, their success today resting on their 80s popularity. Photograph: Gunter W Kienitz/Rex/Shutterstock (from left) John Taylor, Roger Taylor, Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, Andy Taylor.
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“But then it was like: hang on, I’m free to walk down this street, and it’s kind of fucking great!”ĭuran Duran in 1982. I’m walking down the street – streets we’d never been able to walk down before, we’d have had to have minders – and I almost wanted to stop people and say: ‘Do you know who I am?!’” He grins.

“I remember walking out of the hotel and there being nobody there. He remembers quite particularly when things changed: doing promotion in Australia in the late 1980s. “How long do you want to live like that for? It’s fun for a minute and then it stops being fun.” “It’s interesting that almost everybody who finds themselves in a situation like Duran Duran sort of sabotages themselves,” says bassist John Taylor, when he arrives wearing a maroon and yellow baseball cap and carrying a book by the thriller writer Mick Herron in his blazer pocket. “But I could see what was happening, and I thought: ‘I don’t ever want to be out of control like that.’ But that was a lucky decision that other people don’t necessarily make I’m sure I made other decisions that weren’t as wise as that one.” It was not that he had a particular problem, he says. There was no single breaking point, no one moment of collapse, but Rhodes recalls making “a very conscious decision when I was 21 not to take any more drugs”.
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“When you’re 22 years old you don’t know how to say no,” adds Taylor, who these days exudes an air of tanned composure. You get to a point where you think: yes, it’s great to be ambitious and light on your feet, but you need to be slightly more sensible, because otherwise …” “Moving countries three times in a day, playing live and doing press conferences in all of them. “If you look at some of the early schedules you think: ‘Are they even physically possible?’” Rhodes says. “And once you go down that avenue, it’s hard to get back.”įor a while, life was crackers. “They looked at these five pretty good-looking guys and thought: ‘We’re going to put them on all the teen mags,’” Taylor continues. The record company clocked their commercial appeal: perfect pop heart-throbs for the dawn of the MTV era. In their eyes, they were more of an arthouse band, “a bit more underground,” says Taylor – something like Japan, with a strong aesthetic vision. The strangest thing was that Duran Duran had never seen themselves as pin-ups. It was just odd, surreal, because we were just kids from Birmingham who’d come up to London and started a band, and suddenly out of nowhere …” “But it was bizarre, because you’d go out shopping to buy a T-shirt or something and suddenly you get locked into a store and they’d have to call the police to get us out of a place. We’d look out the dressing room window, and you’d just see this sea – of mostly girls, I have to say, and it was the first time I think we really realised that it was going crazy.” “They never used to have gates at the back here, so there’d be a thousand kids in that alleyway at the back. “The early days here were something else,” says Taylor, recalling the five nights Duran Duran once played at Hammersmith. Musical biopics have proven to be big business in Hollywood over recent years.īohemian Rhapsody, about rock band Queen, grossed over 904 million dollars (£658 million) while Sir Elton John film Rocketman made about 200 million dollars (£146 million).Still, when drummer Roger Taylor arrives, the pair are happy to indulge in a little nostalgia. New wave band Duran Duran formed in Birmingham in 1978 and were one of the era’s biggest acts thanks to songs including Rio, Hungry Like The Wolf and The Reflex. The 61-year-old added: “It would have to be someone who’s on the cusp of their career, who’s got the right look, the right vibe and that’s going to take some time to find I think.” Taylor, who is part of Duran Duran alongside Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, said he would want a “really good Hollywood actor” to portray him. We would love to do something like that and I think something will happen in the next few years.” But there are things in development so we will see where they go. “We haven’t quite decided on the right one yet. It is being discussed and we’ve had different scripts and ideas put forward.

He told The Sun: “It’s something that is under discussion.
