  Wild Boys Go the
Way of Pop Trash
An Interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren
Cuccurullo of Duran Duran
By Gail Worley
PART THREE
After Nick and I
had talked for an hour, the band’s
Publicist, Rey, came in and dragged him upstairs
to another interview that was already in
progress. About ten minute later, Warren came
down and we spent about half an hour talking
about his take on Pop Trash, which he and
Nick produced. The movie adaptation of American
Psycho had just come out and Warren and I
spent ten minutes talking about that, and the
more recent Bret Easton Ellis novel, Glamorama,
and how much he hated it. Warren turned out to be
the sort of Guru of Duran Duran, very spiritual,
easy to talk to and he even let me rub his bald
head when I told him about my fetish for guys
with shaved heads, so I knew we were going to
have a fun interview.
Warren, when
you approach producing an album, what
sensibilities do you bring to the production
process and how influenced are you by things you
learned from people like Frank Zappa?
I’m a
song-driven person. My guitar playing is geared
towards enhancing the song. When we write songs
together we don’t think, ‘Oh this is
going to be a guitar song’ or ‘This is
going to be a keyboard song.’ This is a song
about melody. As far as he production goes, Nick
and I, as TV Mania produced the last Duran
album, Medazzaland, and this one. The
melody and the lyric are the main things in the
song. Everything else that’s around that has
to complement [those two things] in some way. I
feel that, from all the experience we have as
songwriters and as producers, you learn from
little mistakes and you try to correct those
things. Nick and I are really, really good
editors so we know very quickly, in an instant,
when a part works, and we don’t waste time.
It’s quite a quick process when we’re
putting tracks together.
I think, with
this album, we’ve created really luxurious
soundscapes for each melody and lyric to exist
over. There’s no clutter on this record,
we’ve really discovered that space has its
place in our stuff, as opposed to the last album
where we might have gone a little bit overboard
with just different textures. Even though there
are quite a few layers, in that we did go for
strings on a few songs, once again they’re
there to enhance the melody or double the melody
or just play a very nice kind of chordal
accompaniment in the background. There’s a
lot of acoustic guitar on this album which lends
itself to delicate accompaniment. There’s
acoustic piano on "Starting to
Remember." I wrote the song on acoustic
guitar and we used a beautiful acoustic piano
part played by Nick’s friend, and very
little else on there. We have a very dry drum
sound, a very 70’s sound on that particular
song.
I was
actually talking to Nick about that song, about
how it sounded like something off the White
Album.
Yeah, we used
the same engineer. That was the first song that I
wrote after my father had died. It wasn’t
that I wrote it because he died, I was
just wondering ‘What’s the first thing
that comes out of me when I go back into my
writing phase?’ I was always wondering what
it was going to be. Then all of a sudden, one day
I started playing this little acoustic thing and
I finished it very quickly. I thought
‘That’s it, that’s the one.’
This was the first thing I wrote after my father
wasn’t around on the planet anymore.
I like that.
I like that process.
I was just
wondering, was there going to be any assistance?
Because I don’t know where music comes from
anyway. None of us know where it comes from. I
just like that it flows through me. It was
strange that that was the one.
What’s
really nice about following my talk with Nick
with a chance to speak to you is that you both
speak like people who channel your creativity.
Everybody struggles of course, I struggle too,
but when things are really good, I really feel
like I’m channeling it.
I feel that way
too. There’s no other explanation. If I pick
up a guitar and start playing something, a rhythm
and a melody or a rhythmic figure, that I’ve
never played before in my life, where did it come
from? Where? I’m not on drugs, you know
(laughs), so it’s not drug-induced.
It’s a pure connection to some kind of great
note bank that’s part of your subconscious
and part of the Universal Consciousness, really.
I mean, we’re a sum total of everything
we’ve heard in all of our lives, every
little song that we’ve loved since we were
two years old, something that your mother sang to
you when you were in the womb, maybe. We’re
a sum total of all of that stuff. I wasn’t
born a songwriter, I learned how to write songs
and I learned how to thrive in a collaborative
situation. I’m very lucky, throughout my
career, to have really great collaborators to
work with.
So, that kind of
pure inspiration that comes, there has to be
(pauses) a channel. You’re tuned in to
something. I dream music sometimes and
wake up singing things. Most of the time I
don’t even pay attention to them and I
won’t try and record it or anything.
I’ve
talked to a couple of people who told me that
they dreamt songs and ended up recording them on
their albums. I think that’s so cool.
I’ve had a
few very profound experiences where I was mixing
a song, we were in the studio, and I had an intense
Deja Vu. And I know exactly what it was; it was
that I had dreamt that exact moment and
that exact piece of music some time in the past,
and didn’t remember it. But when we were
there in that moment in reality, whatever that
is, it came flooding back. It’s just the
most unbelievable feeling, because that
music must be flowing all the time. It’s
there all the time.
It’s
stored somewhere in your consciousness waiting to
be released.
That’s
true. The other thing is, this whole album is
very intuitive. For example, a few of the
melodies that Simon came up with for this album
were the first things that he sung over
the music that we were playing -- the very first
things. Like, "Someone else, Not Me."
We were doing the video for "Electric
Barbarella" off the last album and I’d
been working on this little guitar piece and in
between shooting the video I was playing the
guitar. Simon heard it and he just started
singing this melody, and Nick and I, the three of
us looked at each other an went, ‘Ah,
that’s a great melody!’ Then the
director said okay we gotta do this
"Electric Barbarella" again. So we
started playing that, finished that take and I
stared playing the guitar and Simon went ‘Oh
no! I forgot that melody.’ Then he spent
five minutes trying to find it again, finally got
it back, Nick called the cameraman over who was
doing the video shoot, to capture it on film,
just in case we ever forgot it. But we never
forgot it after that, and the melody that he sung
is the one that’s on the song, that’s
the first single. It was completely intuitive.
There’s
another song, "Playing with Uranium,"
that I had this track set up in the studio (sic).
Simon said ‘Oh I love this,!’ got on
the mic and just started singing. That melody and
a lot of the lyrics that are on "Playing
with Uranium" were first takes. (Quoting
lyrics) ‘In for an evening of light
entertainment,’ he sung that instantly.
‘Come on over to my place,’ he sung
instantly in the chorus. Very strange. I love it
when that happens.
I had a very
heart-felt reaction to Pop Trash almost from the
first playing.
Good,
that’s the desired intent that we have when
we make these things.
One of the
questions I asked Nick had to do with why the
record was sequenced with a very melancholy song
like "Someone Else Not Me" at the
beginning? It’s sort of a heavy kick off, on
a few different levels.
And then to go
into "Lava Lamp" (laughs).
And then I
asked him if it was done to create a specific
reaction and he went off on some tangent, so what
do you think?
Well that was
something that Nick and I discussed, because I
was working on the sequence for the album because
I was really unhappy with the way it was before
and it just seemed to be the only place to put
it, really. It was the only place for that song,
in the way, as far as the keys of the song, which
I take into account, tempo, a lot of things. I
think the flow of this album is really really
good and I think that’s because I put
shorter songs in the right places, because some
of the songs are quite long. If you go beyond
five minutes, it’s a little bit too much for
a listener sometimes, but if you follow it with a
short song, like two and a half minutes, I
don’t know, it does something to you. Also,
I think "Someone Else Not Me" is just a
really beautiful song. It’s very
understated.
I tend to
over-think everything anyway.
But if the album
ends with "Last Day On Earth" and you
put it on again and you get "Someone Else
Not Me" you’ll be relieved that that
song is there (laughs). This was kind of meant
for multiple play. It is only 46 minutes. Music
is not a movie. With a movie or a book,
you’re forced to live the whole experience.
When you read a book, you can’t read it
quickly, but you can listen to a record once and
it’s not going to seep in. When you read
that book, you learn about every character, you
know everything about the people in it -- if
it’s well-written -- and it becomes part of
your life, that book. It might take you ten
hours, over three days or something, but you
spend the time with that book. So it’s not
fair to a songwriter to just listen to their song
one time. Its like going to a movie, sitting
there for a two hour movie but going to the
bathroom five times. Then saying ‘You know
what, it just didn’t kill me.’
A record, you
need to listen to a few times so that you can
sing those songs, remember those songs and
differentiate between them.
*******
Pop Trash
is in stores and Duran Duran are on the road
coming to your town -- or a town near you -- this
summer.
--Back to Part 1 of
Gail's interview with Nick Rhodes and Warren
Cuccurullo--
**********
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
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