Wild Boys Go the Way of Pop Trash
An Interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo of Duran Duran

By Gail Worley

Unless you’re at least 30, you’re probably too young to have witnessed the fashion-obsessed, New Romantic music movement that provided a brief-but-glorious segue between outspoken punk rock anarchy and the kinder, gentler new wave music revolution. Leading a pack that included now long-gone groups like Spandau Ballet, ABC and Midge Ure’s Ultravox were Duran Duran. Not only did Duran Duran expand their image beyond the flash-in-the-pan that was New Romance to top the pop music charts with hits like "Planet Earth," "Girls on Film," "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Rio," they also blazed a trail as pioneers of a then relatively new medium known as the music video. Owing to the pin-up quality good looks of the band members, Duran Duran’s fanbase consisted of a significant population of teenage girls who demonstrated the kind of hysteria previously reserved for the likes of The Beatles and Elvis. By today’s standards, one could say they were the British equivalent of the Backstreet Boys, only not gay, and with way better songs.

In 1984, as the band’s popularity reached critical mass, Duran Duran keyboardist, Nick Rhodes married his girlfriend, American model, Julie Anne Friedman, to the chagrin of many thousands of young ladies whose bedroom walls were adorned with posters of Rhodes’ likeness. I confess: around that time, I had a poster of the pouty lipped, ruffled-shirt-wearing, hair-color-changing, dead-sexy Rhodes on my bedroom wall.

Duran Duran (who, in case you don’t already know, took their name from the villain in the Roger Vadim-directed, Jane Fonda-starring cheesy sci-fi fantasy film, Barbarella) underwent its first roster change in 1986, when original members Roger Taylor (drums) and Andy Tayor (guitar) departed. Guitarist, Warren Cuccurullo, (who made a name for himself with Frank Zappa before forming 80’s electronic pop band, Missing Persons, with Zappa drummer Terry Bozzio), replaced Andy Taylor that same year. In 1997 bassist John Taylor left the band to pursue a film and solo career just after the group completed their 11th studio album, Medazzaland, leaving Rhodes and lead singer, Simon Le Bon, as the last of the original line up. Since then, Duran Duran -- who, despite rumors, never broke up -- have remained a solid trio. Considering the band’s rich history, maybe you can imagine what it was like to have a private audience with Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo, when the band made a stop in New York City to do promotional interviews for their first millennial release, Pop Trash (realeased on Hollywood Records, June 6th). Over the course of an hour, Rhodes talked about the making of this excellent new record, the history of the group, the most terrifying thing that ever happened to him, and pondered the answer to the question, "What exactly were all those girls screaming about?" And Warren was pretty cool too.

Posted Exclusively on Pandemonium Online, in three parts!

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What I like about Pop Trash is that it sounds like what a Duran Duran album should sound like in the year 2000.

That’s what we tried to do with it, sure. Every time you make a new record, it depends what your approach is. The Duran Duran approach is ‘Ok, what do we do, where are we going? Can we really put these two songs on the same album together?’ And we always answer ‘Yes of course we can. You know, the diversity is what keeps us interested. I think, with each album, we try and push it somewhere different to keep ourselves on our toes, really. I couldn’t be in one of those bands that just produce the same record time after time. It’d just drive me mad. For us, the joy of making a record is what can we create, what can we do, how can we do this a little different? (While we speak, Nick is building a tower out of boxes of matches sitting in a bowl on the table. He will continued to build and play with these match boxes for the duration of our interview.)

I got to talk to Simon a few years ago for the Medazzaland album and I pulled out a couple of quotes from that interview to get your opinion on.

Simon Said:

"We were definitely considered disposable at the time. But isn’t it funny how disposable things can hang around so much better than things that have been sort of designed to have staying power?"

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I agree with him, I think that’s fair enough. It’s true though isn’t it? I mean I do love our title [of the CD]. That really does have some great irony, which has always been one of my favorite games with the English language. The fact that it’s called Pop Trash, and we’re doing that after 20 years. When you look at what’s in the charts right now, it’s kind of funny I think.

He also said:

"I think we went through a really boring period when we took ourselves too seriously and forgot what we were really all about, which is entertaining people."

Do you agree with that?

Not reeeeally. I know what he’s trying to say, but it’s not the way I would view it. I think what he really meant was we didn’t play as many live shows for awhile and it all became a little more introverted. I think the other thing that really works about Duran Duran -- that definitely works on this album as well as it ever has -- is that it has a great sense of humor. Records that take themselves too seriously are always in danger of looking a little too pretentious. They’re not fun. I mean, I love pretentious things when they are a little tongue-in-cheek and when they’re coooool and it’s fun. Once you start trying to make all these grandiose statements about things...it is only pop music.

It’s only rock and roll.

Duran Duran has always had a great sense of irony, even from day one. I mean, how could it be that we were on stage singing songs about exploitation of women in films and nuclear warfare and dark things like "The Chauffeur" -- singing them to screaming teenagers? If one cannot see the irony in that then we should have given up then. I think that the one thing we’ve managed to do pretty damn well -- and I’d even stick my neck out so far as to say better than a lot of our contemporaries -- is to reflect the times. It sounds like an old cliche but it is what most art is about: looking forward certainly into something new and edgy and unique but at the same time, reflecting what’s around you. I think Duran Duran have successfully done that. I think the last album, Medazzaland, which certainly wasn’t one of our most successful [albums], it really did capture a moment. It got that sort of hyperbole of electricity and technology that was going on, that was just starting to happen there. I mean, the fact that "Electric Barbarella" was the first song to ever be digitally downloaded on the Internet and for sale, actually it’s quite something when you look at it now. At the time it didn’t seem like a big deal. At the time it was like ‘Wow, we’re using this Internet technology, this is fun!’ Now, it’s the future of the music industry. Interesting to me that it took someone like us -- who at the time had been around for about 17 years -- to go and do that.

It is kind of cool.

Yeah! It’s fun, but to me that’s what the whole thing is about -- the whole pop culture thing. Pop trash, to me, in reality, is everything we’re surrounded by. Its your pink hair, it’s my blond hair, it’s (indicating the towers he’s made of interlocking match boxes) my little twin towers here. Its the design of things in the lobby and the shop windows, and things on the Internet and the catch phrase that the guy has on the news tonight. That’s where we all draw inspiration from. I think Duran Duran has a legitimate claim to be one of the first sort of multimedia pop groups to have done that.

Oh, I agree absolutely.

A lot of other people have tried to wander into that area, some of them more successfully than others.

I was watching a videotape of all the Duran Duran videos yesterday -- I have one that has everything up to an including "Too Much Information"...

Wow!

And it was so much fun to watch everything from "Planet Earth" to "Ordinary World" and "Undone." It was really like seeing you guys go all the way and come back again. It brought up a lot of feelings of nostalgia. Which leads me into this question: Why did you choose to sequence the disc with "Someone Else Not Me" at the very beginning, which I think starts the whole thing off in either a melancholy or a very nostalgia-inspiring moment, depending on how you look at it.

That song, particularly, we all thought was a good place to start. It’s got that thing about it that really grows on you. When you hear it, if you like it at all, you want to hear it again, and again. You don’t really know why, and that is the effect it had on us when we wrote it. We thought ‘Wow, this is really good.’ It was very subtle, that song. The movement in it, it’s not that much, it doesn’t modulate much, which is unusual for us because we usually have a lot more chord movement. But I think it does set a mood. I mean, the album as you know goes all over the place. And that seemed like the right place to start. I dunno, I can’t say more than that.

Have you made a video for this song?

Yeah we’ve started making it. We filmed it.

Tell me about it.

I was looking for someone to completely redesign the internet site. I was going through all of these different design companies and I found this one that I was really quite taken with. I thought, ‘Hmmm, they got the funk, they’re a bit cooler than the other ones. There's something, I don’t know what it is, they’ve obviously got great designers working with them.’ Anyway, I met with them, they’re a west coast-based company, and I just saw some of this Flash video stuff they were doing and I just thought ‘Wait a minute, this stuff looks so new and I’ve seen it on the internet but I’ve never seen it on television. Why?’ So I started talking to them about it and I said surely we can transfer that to a video tape and it can be on television. I thought, that’s where we’re going to go, that’s the future, that really is the way forward. What we’ve done is we’re making a video which is a sort of internet hybrid, something people will be more used to seeing on the internet, but [will now be] within your television. It’s still images combined with moving images and digital manipulation and Flash technology for animation, all mashed together. It’s a very interesting look. It’s definitely going to be very different. We’ll see what people make of it but I’m pretty sure I’m gonna like it.

Once again, Duran Duran blazes a trail in video technology.

Yeah, you can just hear them on CNN.

Duran Duran have always made great and very ambitious videos. Which was your favorite video-making experience?

"All She Wants Is."

I’ve never seen that one.

I’ll tell you why. One, it was made by a dear friend of mine who’s a still photographer. Simon and I used him on the Arcadia project to make a video for a song called "Missing," which really was one of the most beautiful things. Then we wanted to introduce him into the Duran Duran thing a few years later because we just thought, well, we’ve made some great videos, maybe, but not many as creative as this one.

He had a photographic technique where he basically made the video a frame at a time with still photos. It’s extraordinary, I think, in just the look of it. Making it [was going to take] two and a half weeks and we didn’t have two and a half weeks, so I had this idea that we’d have dummies made of us and we’d have them dressed exactly in our clothes and with our hair, the whole thing, and he’d just move the dummies as he wanted and film them. That suited his technique -- because if you move it’s a nightmare anyway, so the dummy stays still. So that’s what he did. We’re in some of it, for the time we had, a few days, to spend on it, but the rest of it is all dummies.

Well, does it look like you guys?

It’s very strange. At certain times you can’t tell. We actually had the Death Masks made, which is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through I my life.

Is that where you just breath through straws in your nose?

Yeah, absolutely terrifying. I would never do that again. I didn’t like it at all. Even Simon I think was pretty freaked out by it and he’s not bothered by things like that usually. What an experience, wouldn’t recommend that one in a hurry I have to say. Once your eyes go, and your ears go and your mouth goes and you feel that there’s an inch of concrete on your face and you can barely breath cause there’s just these two little straws, you realize that all you need is for someone to pull those straws away and seal it up and that’s it.

Like being buried alive.

Yeah! It is, I found it absolutely terrifying, I must say.

That’s really freaky.

It was. Mine came out and you can almost see the terror on my face. I guess, hence Death Mask. They said ‘Well, we can do another one.’ I said ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ (laughs). No!

Wow, I hope I get to see that video some day. "Lava Lamp" is a really great song and my favorite song on the record. Is the lyric like a metaphor for a really sexy relationship or something more metaphysical?

Um, it’s kind of about a girl, really. It is obviously very abstract. What I did, originally, I had the title. I’d just written down on this piece of paper -- literally -- ‘La la la la lava lamp.’ There’s just something about it that was so frivolous, yet very appealing. That’s the kind of thing I do love about pop music. Anyway, Warren and I had this bizarre sequence going on when we were in the studio one day. Warren started playing that guitar riff over it, on "Lava Lamp," and I knew that that was that song. I just held up the piece of paper to Warren, I said ‘Look!’ And we had the chorus within about ten minutes, because it just sounded like that song should sound. Then I had to fill in the gaps because it’s almost got a slightly Caribbean feel to it, the way that the words all fall. I mean they really are the most bizarre bits.

It’s a very visual song also.

Yeah, yeah, its got lots of puns in it and lots of funny little rhymes and things. There’s images in there that are taken from different things. Babe Rainbow was a painting made by Peter Blake, who is the British pop artist equivalent of Andy Warhol at the time. It’s a very famous, a great painting actually. There are lots of funny references in there. Without spoiling it, ‘cause I don’t like explaining lyrics really, it is about really being magnetized to someone.

--On to Part 2 of Gail's interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo--

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Wild Boys Go the Way of Pop Trash
An Interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo of Duran Duran

Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3

1998 Interview With John Taylor

Gail Worley is the author of The Worley Gig, a Monthly Pandomag.com Column