Duran Duran: 'Plugging into Nile Rodgers is like charging your phone'

“We’re at the stage where I feel like the house is built, so maybe we’re adding on a room or we’re redecorating, it’s enough,” says the 66-year-old. “I like to think that we have one of the most well tended legacy shows on the planet, so we’re very conscious of moving the material around the show. There’s, for instance, four songs that are currently in production for this upcoming tour and a couple of them are old, there’s a song by another artist that we’ve never played before, there’s surprises that are being worked into the tour and right now that feels like where we’re at.

“What’s making the band an enjoyable endeavour, I would say, is that we’ve all got the same appetite for work. Having done it as long as we have, just having everybody going ‘I’m good with doing this many shows a year’, and if maybe we can work on a new track or so that’s kind of OK with me. There’s not one person who’s desperate to work and somebody else who doesn’t want to work at all, which is often the case, which makes for a really difficult dynamic. We’re all going with the flow but nobody’s really determining the flow, the flow is what it is.

“If that’s a very long and drawn-out way of saying there is no new album on the horizon, it kind of is, and I think that’s because the last couple of albums – Paper Gods and Future Past – were both big projects. They both took two years to make and I’m proud of them, and they certainly give us a theme for 12 months touring, but it’s a lot of work. I mean I’m not afraid of work, it’s just the psychological challenges. Our biggest strength is our democracy in a way, but when everybody has to sign off on whether the chord is a major or a minor or whether the tempo is 121(bpm) or 119, it’s a lot. That phrase ‘life’s too short for this’ starts wafting through your head.”

Having last year sold his home in Los Angeles and moved back to London full-time, he says he and his wife – fashion designer Gela Nash-Taylor – are still “coming to terms with that”. As far as the band goes, he adds: “I feel like we’re fairly happy with each other at the moment, and I think that’s an achievement after this much time.”

They’re also “excited” to be coming to Leeds on their tour. “It’s been a long time,” he says. “There’s something fundamental about it, and there’s something about appreciating the opportunity.”

Forty-eight years in, Taylor feels “you have to reconsider what being creative is”. “I can’t speak for the other guys, but throughout the course of a week there’s a certain amount of creativity that is required from me to feel OK with myself, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to write any new songs with the band. One is constantly having to re-adapt to market forces and your own energies. The 80s were a certain way.

“There are two bands I think about that came before Duran – Buzzcocks and Blondie – and they were both bands that seemed to have over a three-year period they’d put out a single every four months, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. That taught us you’ve got to have a single every (few months), it was about three singles a year most of the 80s was for us. But now it’s pointless, and when you do something new you’re thinking about what you’ve already done – how is it going to stand up, and honestly I just don’t feel compelled.

“I’ve also learned that my partners aren’t going to do anything they don’t want to do...and they would say the same about me. Five years ago we actually thought that if three of us wanted to do something we could compel the fourth to do it. We came to learn it wasn’t worth it. So whatever it is we do, we’ve all got to be on board for it.

“There are half a dozen projects that are in the works, whether any of them will come to pass, I don’t know.”

Nile Rodgers joined Duran Duran at their Hyde Park gig. Their ongoing musical collaborations over four decades are based on a personal friendship as well as a shared musical respect, Taylor feels. “When I first met him I didn’t think of him in that way. It would’ve been like meeting Bowie and thinking, he’d be nice to work with one day. But it was just like, wow, what a great guy. We met at the end of the Rio tour and then we first worked together when with the third album we were looking for a single and The Reflex wasn’t it on the album, it just wasn’t there, so the thought occured to approach him about doing a remix and that really started the ball rolling.

“I think Nile really appreciates that back when (there was the) ‘disco sucks’ (movement in the US) and everything was anti-disco in the cool world, Duran Duran very much quoted Chic when we came out, so he knows that before we were friends we were fans and appreciators of what he did, and I think that’s always been meaningful to him. So you’re not just coming to him because he’s a successful producer, you’re coming to him because you really appreciated what he brought to the table. Plugging into Nile is like charging your phone. When he comes into the room, whether you’re in a studio or on a stage, he just brings a raw, human energy but he also brings a musical sophistication that we’re not even capable of understanding, so you feel very fortunate to have him in a room with you or on a stage with you.”

As the band edge towards their 50th anniversary, Taylor believes that their original goal of sounding like a cross between the Sex Pistols and Chic still holds true. “I think so,” he says. “If you were asking Nick (Rhodes) he would answer it differently – he said yes, but there was (Giorgio) Moroder as well, there was an electronic component – but there was something about that Sex Pistols and Chic thing which was kind of compelling because they were so antithetical, they had nothing in common, and somehow we found there was a drive...but I think it’s more than just riffs with grooves. We’re still punks, really. We’re certainly not serious musicians, so there’s a rawness.

“But punk had the attitude, it had the hair, it had the clothes, there was a certain aesthetic that went along with it, and likewise disco. In a way you could say that the Sex Pistols plus Chic equals new wave. I don’t think we’ve really gone outside of that.

“There’s a gothic drama element that actually was there from the beginning, it was there on Waiting For The Nightboat, it was there on The Chauffeur, and that has been something I think that we’ve really lent into over the last few years, like with this annual Halloween show that we’ve been doing and some of the songs on the Danse Macabre album because it’s sort of been a home for the band, actually. It’s like the band found there was this theatrical gothic drama thing that was going on, that we could wear those clothes and fit in.”

The fact that the band have continued to operate as a democracy, even down to sharing songwriting royalties, has enabled them to maintain their longevity. “Simon (Le Bon) says that’s the reason we’re still together – and when he said that in an interview a couple of years ago I thought, oh, that’s interesting,” Taylor says. “He’d obviously thought about it – how come we’re still together – it’s because we all still make the same amount of money.

“Again, it’s a punk thing. Punk was very democratic. Also there was never a songwriter in this band, there was never a Freddie Mercury, there was never somebody who was showing up and saying ‘OK, fellas, this is how it’s going to go. I’m going to need you to play E minor...’, it was just never like that. We kind of sculpt music, we always did, and that’s kind of been our way. There was a period where I thought maybe we needed to rethink that, but that seems to be the most satisfying way for us to continue.”

Duran Duran’s journey has taken Taylor and his bandmates all over the world. But after some thought, he says one ambition remains unfulfilled. “I’d like to get an Oscar,” he says, perhaps remembering that the band missed out when they were nominated for the Bond theme A View To A Kill.

Otherwise, he adds: “Individually and collectively...if one is, let’s say, a positive force within the culture, we’d like to continue to be a positive force within the culture. The world is challenging enough as it is. I think musicians learned through Covid how important concerts are, these get-togethers. Sometimes it felt like a bit of an ego trip but after Covid it became...work that was appreciated. You want to bring people together and you want to give them a safe space to have a good time with people you would never normally mix with.”

Ambition is, he reflects, “a tricky question”. “One thing I’ve learned over the years is that everybody’s got to be in harmony. If I go down a road of ‘I want to do this and I want to do that’, if the band isn’t feeling it… The band is this umbrella that hovers like a Close Encounters spaceship, but the band only goes where the band wants to go. Do I sound really lacking in ambition if I said I hope we keep doing what we’re doing for a few years?”

Duran Duran play at First Direct Bank Arena, Leeds on October 24. https://duranduran.com/tour/