Let's Danse: John Kearns talks to Duran Duran
Last updated 2nd Nov 2023
Duran Duran’s Halloween album comes hot on the heels of their Future Past tour.
Never a band to sit still creatively, Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor and Roger Taylor have jumped straight into the next chapter with Danse Macabre,
an album that boasts three brand new songs, a variety of creepy cover versions and a few eerie reinterpretations of fan favourites.
The project was born from a successful Las Vegas Halloween show where the band sprinkled a suitably spooky selection of themed songs from their own catalogue into the setlist (Night Boat, Shadows On Your Side, Lonely In Your Nightmare) as well as slotting in the likes of The Specials’ Ghost Town, Siouxsie’s Spellbound and Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer to complete the ghoulish goings on.
Duran Duran founder member Nick Rhodes tells me that the band’s darker side has always existed, living in perfect harmony with the cherry ice cream smiles and the glamorous girls on film.
“I think that light and shade is what makes us the band we are. We set our parameters very wide from the start on our first album. We had songs like Planet Earth and Girls on Film co habiting with Night Boat and To The Shore, so we have always endeavoured to have that balance in there. Some people may of course be only aware of the singles which tend to be mostly on the lighter side but we’ve always had that darker element in our sound.”
Even though Duran Duran have been making music for forty two years , their artistic zeal still shows no sign of diminishing . That incessant desire to constantly create is fiercely apparent as is their collective desire to remain relevant. Rhodes in particular seems to be the most vociferous in demanding that the band consistently push forward musically.
“ The most exciting thing for me is when I go into a studio and there is nothing - I don’t have anything prepared and in fact none of us do. We don’t have any lyrics, we don’t have any musical scores or chords in our heads even … it just flows out . I love that when I leave the studio that night that something exists which didn’t exist earlier that day. If you’re lucky something good exists and you’ll find that out when you go back to it the next day so the creative process is fascinating and exhilarating for me. I like the other aspects of what we do , playing the live shows has been fantastic over the past two years , I mean we’ve enjoyed some of the best shows we’ve ever played but that wouldn’t mean anything to me unless we’d written something new . It’s as if we have to legitimise everything else by writing something new . It’s not that we play entire new albums , we just fit in a few new songs here and there that will keep the fans excited. “
That hunger to come up fresh material has certainly paid off with Confessions in the Afterlife, the closing track on Danse Macabre – one of Duran Duran’s finest songs in years. Reminiscent of earlier offerings such as Palomino, What Are The Chances and indeed Missing from the Arcadia record, it’s a song that almost makes the entire project worthwhile.
Nick seems particularly proud of the latest atmospheric fan favourite.
“Simon worked really hard on the lyrics for the new songs and I think the concept of Confessions in the Afterlife is particularly good. That idea that in some sort of afterlife you are forgiven for everything. it’s a concept I’m sure everyone would like to exist. You mentioned Missing from the Arcadia record and I actually based my sound palette for Confessions on that song. Missing is a ghost story too and I always remember recording it. We were working with Mark Egan a jazz bassist, the percussionist David Van Tieghem and Masami Tsuchiya on guitar , so they were all coming from such diverse musical backgrounds. I was playing in the control room with them while Simon was singing and I was mystified , I’d never heard anything like that sound before and that moment for me was one of the most important in our entire career. It was a true epiphany and that is what I based Confessions in the Afterlife on in terms of the sound palette. “
Danse Macabre by Duran Duran is out now .