![]() ![]() “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. Taylor talked to Q about his transformation from music nerd to rock star, the effect drug use had on his career and whether he feels Duran Duran has received its due.Still, when drummer Roger Taylor arrives, the pair are happy to indulge in a little nostalgia. We never lost that sense that the next album has got to be better, that we've got to develop as artists." We always wrote the best songs that we could have written. I don't think we wrote down to our audience. I don't think we ever spoke down to our audience. Still, Taylor stands by Duran Duran's music. It just wasn't going to happen."ĭespite the comely band's members becoming music video pioneers and garnering such a large fan base - propelled in large part by teenaged girls, they were often not acknowledged by critics. We were never going to be wearing jeans and t-shirts on stage. "For me and Nick, if we were going to have a band, this band was going to have a look and it was going to be distinct. I’ve always appreciated a sense of style. "I've always appreciated a strong presentation with my music. The blending of the two helped shape what would become Duran Duran's look and sound, Taylor told Jian Ghomeshi on CBC's Q cultural affairs show. In the late 1970s, Taylor - then a punk music fan - said he was startled to discover he was also fascinated with the disco movement. A music nerd inspired by David Bowie, Roxy Music and the Beatles, John Taylor went on to become a rock star in his own right as a founding member of the blockbuster '80s band Duran Duran.Ī self-described "obsessive" music fan in his younger days, Taylor details his path to music, his band's international fame and its aftermath in his new memoir In the Pleasure Groove.
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