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Interviews : Interview with Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran

Feb 2nd, 2012

I admit I’m quite the Duran Duran fan. I admit this without worrying about the status of, or lack thereof, my coolness. I still ponder the lyric “I smell like I sound” from Hungry Like The Wolf and love it even though I haven’t the faintest idea what it means. I think it’s cunning for a band of boys (well, men) to have attracted so many female fans while simultaneously praising female prowess and ripping it to shreds with a sexism that was – and still is in much of the band’s music – sexy enough to get away with. Think of the two busty babes primped and propped up as lust objects for the hetero male gaze in the Girls On Film clip along with its potentially offensive lyric “the crowd all love pulling dolly by the hair”. And if pulling dolly by the hair didn’t get feminist analysts in a state, the proclamation four years down the track that “in exploitation’s name, she must be working for the skin trade” ought to have. Or indeed a decade later’s vitriolic attack: “Lady Xanax, where were you last night? All the cracks in your makeup are starting to show” just might have.

But are Duran Duran deserved of thesis paper status? They are only an all-boy (man) pin-up band after all: one that may not be as commercially modified and MTV-ed now as it was 25 years ago but nonetheless still shoved into that box labelled ‘big pop’ which we’d never force the more ‘serious’ likes of Coldplay or U2 into.

Video clips cut with contrived smashing of vases against walls and melting of ice across stiff nipples, pretentious Polaroid collages (courtesy of Nick Rhodes), architecture and artifice, and inane lyrics about ragged tigers and a girl named Rio withstanding, Cream thinks Duran Duran warrant a statuette of respect in music’s hall of fame. Sure, Simon rarely sings with a golden set of tonsils. Fair enough, the band hasn’t maintained a regular contemporary presence in the charts. And obviously most of the original members stepped out of the limelight just as the grey fog started passing through it. But they’re back together now – well, Simon, John, Nick and Roger are – touring the world again like there’s no tomorrow, and knowing full well that fans are dying to relive those fabulous songs of yesterday. Mind you, most of the tracks on the boys’ new LP All You Need Is Now ain’t half bad, either.

Antonino Tati caught up with Simon Le Bon to discover a man who’s come somewhat closer down to Planet Earth than he appeared to be in the heady 1980s, but a diehard pop star just the same who talks of way-out lyrics, heady partying, sampling rappers, and still seeing girls walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight…

Tell me, Simon, do the lyrics come first to you these days, or the music?

The music tends to be the first thing. I find it easier to write lyrics when I get a feeling from the music as to what theme to write about. Music is evocative; it creates a mood and it inspires the words.

The lyrics on your past couple of albums seem less obscure and ‘arty’ than on your earlier albums – where you used to sing about ‘union of the snakes’, ‘dancing on valentines’, and my favourite, ‘smelling’ like you ‘sound’. Was the fairly schizophrenic poetry back then part and parcel of the New Romantic thing?

I just felt back then that it was okay to create these kinds of impressions, and to use words at random but to create some kind of odd feeling. A lot of the time I didn’t really know what I was on about: I just liked the sounds of the words together. I mean, “I smell like I sound” felt like a really animal thing to be saying, and I often just let my instincts lead me there. These days I think the mood has generally changed. I don’t think you could get away with those kinds of lyrics, really.

That’s kind of ironic since society has gone into this state of, shall we say, split personality, what with the internet and the information overload we’re subjected to. You would think the timing was right for more of your old style of mixed-up lyricism to be appreciated; yet here you are writing songs with more narrative and sense.

Well you’ve hit on the whole on the whole idea of what the new music is about really: the mingling of art and commercialism.

Those old lyrics, coming from any other band, and listening to them in retrospect, would appear absolutely inane, but coming from Duran Duran, they seem somewhat profound and as though there was some message to have been found amid the miscellanea.

Some of those lyrics were bits coming from personal places, and some were just from my imagination. Union Of The Snake came from my reading this book about tantra and the whole idea of kundalini: the sleeping snake inside the man. Tantra’s a belief in the practice of kundalini yoga. As in tantric sex…

I must say, sex and a high level of decadence seem to be persistent themes in Duran Duran songs. Sometimes it sounds like you enjoy watching decadent sex to the point of seeing people, particularly women, faulting from it. Like the woman who asks for too much and gets it hard in the end of All She Wants Is, or the subject in Lady Xanax (from the Pop Trash album) who has stayed out all night and now has cracks in her makeup.

Well, Nick wrote the lyrics to Lady Xanax so it’s actually got a lot of him going on in it. I just kind of fine-tune the songs so that they ‘sing’ right. It’s interesting because Nick has a very different point of view to mine.

So ‘Lady Xanax’ could almost be a pseudonym itself of Mr Rhodes? Nick’s certainly brought a lot of ambiguity to the Duran table.

He has.

Back when there were five...

Do you look back over 25 years, ponder your juxtaposing relationship with Nick, and go, wow, that’s a long time for two very different pop players to be getting along?

We tend not to look back generally because it’s kind of sad to see how few of us are left now. There’s only us and Depeche Mode and U2 left from that whole time, really.

Interesting you should put U2 in that category and not acts like Pet Shop Boys or New Order, even while they’re in as different a genre to you as U2.

Well I always saw New Order as a carry-on from Joy Division, coming from an earlier, different period.

Initially, there was some industry backlash toward you, however a lot of contemporary music makers did grow up with your songs and appreciated them enough to have paid tribute to you by covering them later down the line. We’re talking Hole, Nine Inch Nails, and Smashing Pumpkins on stage. Kylie Minogue, Ben Lee, and Powderfinger on record. Surely it’s flattering to have these latter day artists giving the thumbs-up to you?

I always thought it was odd that Duran Duran were dissed so much by the serious music papers, particularly in the UK, because we were making good music, and when the people who really count, that is the record buyers, who then grow up and form bands of their own and cite us as influences, it feels right and makes sense to us that we’re not being ignored anymore. It’s in much the same way that we cited bands and artists as our influences like David Bowie, Sex Pistols, and Chic. Coincidentally, we ran into Kylie Minogue in New York recently after we were just talking about her. She did a very fine version of The Reflex with Ben Lee, didn’t she?

Indeed, although I’d like to have seen a waterfall cascade over our Kylie on video.

Wouldn’t we all have!

Your songs have gone beyond being covered by other artists, and have leaked into alternative genres: Notorious was sampled for P Diddy’s Born Again, and samples of Save A Prayer appeared throughout Shut Up And Dance’s Save It Til The Mourning After. Do you like all this cross-pollination of music that’s occurring more and more?

I’m pleased with it. One’s ultimate aim as an artist is to get into people’s consciousness by whatever means possible, and getting on the Diddy song and getting through to a whole bunch of people who may never have bought a Duran Duran album, getting it through their brains even if they don’t know it’s Duran Duran, is part of the equation for us. Music’s been getting more and more diverse over the past few years, and now it’s coming together again. When music’s very disparate and there’s different styles going on at the same time, there’s no one thing that really unites everybody, and it doesn’t seem to work so well for the general collective consciousness. But when you get something that everybody likes; that cuts through different groups of people, it focuses the culture just a little bit more at that time.

You’ve kept the release of original studio albums consistent, on average delivering a new one every two years…

I’m too lazy to actually figure out how many but [someone] said 13 the other day so I’m just repeating. There’s the first album. There’s Rio. There’s Seven And The Ragged Tiger. Notorious. Big Thing. The Wedding Album. Thank You. Meddazzaland, Pop Trash, Astronaut, Red Carpet Massacre, and the current one All You Need Is Now. That’s 12.

There are actually 13. You forgot Liberty.

It’s very easy to forget Liberty.

Forget one of your own albums? At least the creative on Liberty was lovely: lots of final genuine Eighties looks. Are you happy to see the Eighties come and go in fashion?

We’re a culture of revival anyway, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the same people who were doing it in the Eighties; kind of getting out the old gear and going, “Hey, those were the days”. This is a whole bunch of new people, who were two-years-old back then, thinking, “I want to try this too now”.

You’ve been quite fortunate having a close association to the fashion world via wife Yasmin. Do you talk business with each other; you about music; she about what’s happening on the catwalk?

No, actually.

I keep reading in the English press and online that ‘Simon and Yasmin are on the A-list again’. Do you still do a lot of the premiere and party thing?

We have a load of unopened mail. There is a fashion scene that we’re a part of, and there’s a music scene that we’re a part of, and yes we get invited to glittering openings and things like that. But we kind of ration it a little because if you go to too many of those things and you end up all over the pages of sodding Hello magazine, you feel like you don’t own yourself after a while. Also, I just don’t like to be portrayed that way all the time. I’d rather be thought of as a guy who goes up on stage, and writes and records music, than someone who goes to an endless list of parties. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a bunch of fun to be had. You’ve just got to find the right balance, because if all you want to do is go out and get trashed, it’s not a lot of fun after a while.

Did you get trashed too often in your headier days of fame?

Not really. I think we coped with the whole thing remarkably well. What we managed to keep together was our sense of humour. When you come from the background that we came from, which was working class to middle class, there’s a lot of guys around you, keeping your feet on the ground. As soon as you start losing your grip on reality, somebody somewhere starts taking the piss and it brings you back down to earth. With a bump.

One final question, Simon. Do you still see them walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight?

You definitely do. On Putney Bridge, just close to where I live.

View the latest Duran Duran video ‘Girl Panic’ here starring an army of supermodels including Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigova and Cindy Crawford.

Duran Duran tour Australia in March. Dates and venues as follows:

BRISBANE

Saturday 17 March 2012

Brisbane Entertainment Centre

www.ticketek.com.au 132 849

MELBOURNE

Monday 19 March 2012

Rod Laver Arena

www.ticketek.com.au 132 849

ADELAIDE

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Adelaide Entertainment Centre