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Before going back and analyze the making of the new album, we'd like to start this site update with the most recent news we got straight from Nick Rhodes, as we had the pleasure to ask about the album's sound and its progresses during an online chat held by Red Ronnie on May 6th 2020.
Here is his exaustive answer. Nick Rhodes: In three words: ehm.. three words… Different Than Before! |
Salvo: so good to see you Nick, safe and sound, I want to talk a little bit about the new album, you just mentioned working with Giorgio Moroder but the main producer seems to be Erol Alkan, who is following the whole project, and of course he’s sharing his chair with Mark Rondon and Moroder as well, so there are different elements in the new Duran Duran receipe, different flavours, how would you describe the new duran duran sounds in three words if you want; how was working with them, what about the sound? I know it’s difficult to define music with words, but maybe you can try because we are all so curious about it. And how was working also with Lykke Li?
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The song with Giorgio are almost done, we're gonna do the final vocals, and then the songs with Erol Alkan , which I think we have about 8 or 9 in total; they are a little different but they all fit together with the Giorgio songs and the songs with Mark as well. Erol obviously comes from more of a deejay dance background, but he came out of indie dance music more. We were so close to the finishing line and we will of course get to the finishing line, but there’s about two weeks work left and then we’re gonna mix, we’re actually gonna start mixing a few of the done anyway now. |
We got Spike in LA mixing away our new album |
Mark "Spike" Stent is an English record producer and mixing engineer who has worked with many international artists including Madonna, U2, Beyoncé, Björk, Depeche Mode, Lady Gaga, Coldplay, Muse and many others, morover he was responsible for the mixing of both albums, All You Need Is Now and Paper Gods. He's based in LA and that's where he's currently working on the Duran album mixes. On the right a picture of Nick and Spike Stent taken at the studio in London during the Paper Gods final session. |
So there are several tracks on the mixing stage already, in the hands of Spike Stent, an old acquaintance of Duran.
“The mixing is where a song lives or dies” says Nick “that’s why you want the best possible people to work with for the mixing process, when you got someone likes Spike is extraordinary. He’s got a very broad view and understand things well, he’s very special”. “Everyday I get a new mix is the highlight of the day”, says Roger, “and it’s really exciting! I speak with Erol most days about the mixes, we got Spike in LA mixing away, that’s has really been a bit of a light at the of the tunnel I have to say, for the first time we haven’t been in a rush to finish the record, so we really had time to spend on the mixing and really get these songs sound amazing, time is on our side at the moment, which is good.” |
Joshua Blair sound engineer of DD15 |
Joshua Blair has been working with Duran for many years, from Red Carpet Massacre to Paper Gods. These are some of the pictures of the equipment, tools and plugins he and the band have been using in the studio during the recording sessions of #DD15. |
Duran Duran #15: Let's start from the beginning |
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This update is almost completely dedicated to the making of the new Duran Duran album. We want to retrace the evolution of the facts behind Duran's fifteenth album. EP or not EP? So maybe in the beginning they only had an EP in mind and maybe they wanted to use some unreleased stuff along with it, in fact when I spoke to Nick, back in January 2019, he mentioned two very good unreleased tracks from the Paper Gods sessions that were going to be taken under consideration for the new album [at the time these two tracks only needed lyrics]. |
| Picture above: Nick Rhodes and Salvo in London, during one of the 2019 album recording session |
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December 2018 | Back in late 2018 Roger refers to the first session as new material, he didn’t want to call it an album back then. don’t mention the “A” word he said… "I think is gonna come together really quickly, I think the way Erol has worked with us has been very inspiring, and I think he knows what makes Duran Duran tick and is bringing out some really great things from everybody in the band. To me is the strongest sounding material that we’ve done in years, the stuff we have so far is very very strong and very exciting.” “Erol has got a fantastic energy”, says Nick, “he really understand Duran Duran in a way that some of the other procurers have to, like Mark Ronson, he gets where we are coming from… Erol came in with the attitude that he wanted to make the greatest Duran Duran album for many many many years. Erol reminds of Mark Ronson in some ways, the way that he works and in other ways is very very different, much more wild than Mark; Mark is a bit more controlled and precise, Erol goes off at a complete tangent in a great way and both ways of working are good for us. “Nobody knowledge an album yet”, says John, “we are just writing some songs, by spring we we’ll knowleging if we’ll be doing an album… ideas that are fresh now, another year they’re not be going to be so fresh.” |
Erol is not afraid to push |
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It all changed over the months, as soon as the guys went deep into the writing and recording sessions with the super talented Erol Alkan and realized that they had quality material for an album. |
The quality of the music is really up there |
An excerpt of the Classic Pop interview, published this month, was already pubished on March 12 on the Daily Mirror. |
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The Mark Ronson session in Los Angeles |
After the two weeks session in December 2018 which, according to what Nick told me in January, were very fruitful as they created two tracks with lyrics… they managed to work for a couple of days with Mark Ronson in Los Angeles, at the end of their mini tour in the States. When I met Simon at the end of January 2019, after those session early session, he was enthusiastic and motivated about this new Duran Duran phase. “We are giving a spin up to the album, we are going to reconvene in London at the end of March and he anticipated that the band had some studio time booked in LA after the US shows… those were the Ronson session with Lykke Li. After the session with Mark Ronson, Roger was so enthusiastic about the project and what the band was able to do in such a short session with Ronson: “we did a couple of days with Mark Ronson while we were in LA and again we had no clue what we were going to do, but there’s something when we play together that always seems to create something special, and you go back and listen to in the control room and it all sounds totally different from when you heard it when you played it. Mark Ronson said of that session: “The songs we did, there’s two song I love, I mean the two that I have in my head, I know there’s a few others great that I recently started, the one with our friend the singer I’m feeling that one, is one of my favorites things still melodically I’ve worked in the past year and also the other one is quite emotional and touching as well.” |
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| Picture above from duranduran official site: February 28 2019, Los Angeles, Duran Duran with Graham Coxon, Lykke Li and Mark Ronson. |
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About the Ronson session Simon said: “It was great fun and we did a lot of work, Mark was amazing, he came in we talked briefly about the of the work we were doing, and he wanted to go in the studio immediately to start writing. Lykke Li is wonderful she’s such a treasure she’s a lovely person to work with.
Roger confirms that the band worked on a couple of songs with Mark “so Mark Ronson will definitely be present on the record”… “we did a little bit Mark Ronson, a bit with with Giorgio Moroder, but the bulk of the record is gonna be all about Erol, he is the main man”. About the recent collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, as Roger told me back in December, it was a couple of days session, Erol wasn’t present in the studio, just the band and Moroder. Nick said: “Working with Moroder was something special to us, because of what he meant to us, he’s a true Master. He is on a level only a few people are, like Quincy Jones… a proper Master, so working with him real won the lot, he had such a good time, he’s such a lovely human being, so gracious and clever. He’s a true master. He didn’t get four Oscars for soundtracks for nothing”. |
Simon Le Bon, writing lyrics for two years |
Some nice picture I took last year, during the Modena 100 ore at Mugello, in Tuscany. |
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I met Simon a few times over the recording sessions, in UK but also in Italy, during the Modena 100 ore car race, where he told me that he has been writing lyrics on his own over the past two years, not necessarily at the studio, he said he’s very happy with the result so far. |
DD15: I smell like a sound |
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Direction | Yeah, that’s what many fans are wondering, with all these new elements into the Duran formula, three producers and a new guitarist. Erol Alkan and Mark Ronson in some way represents two different music scenes, the London and the LA based ones… moreover we can expect some extraordinary euro-disco elements with the grand master Giorgio Moroder. We surely have some elements we can analyze from the guys recent comments on the music they have created so far. According to Roger the album “is quite different from that last record, it’s much more organic sounding, Erol Alkan is much more into organic sound I think, is into real drum sound, real bass sound, it’s going to be much more organic in that respect.” Roger’s comment lead us to think that the sound is more natural, direction that seems to confirm the divergency from the EDM sound of Paper Gods. Roger clears that organic sound concept commenting on the kind of gear he’s using: “It’s mainly live drums, it’s a combination of what I use in the live set and stuff that Erol Alkan has in the studio, so it’s a real combination of different acoustic kits but it’s definitely sounding a lot more live this record; the last one was more electronic sound but this is a lot more organic because Erol is a big fan of organic drums and we put a lot of work into the drums tracks to get a bigger live sound. Roger says: “mostly of this record is organic drum sound as when Erol came in he said he really didn’t want to use electronically generated drums, because we have done that in the last record and Erol is quite a big fan of the organic sounding early records much in the way Mark Ronson was when we made the All You Need Is Now album. Erol wanted to capture that real, proper acoustic drum sound so we spent a lot of time working on the sound of the drums. That concept might also allude to the band’s studio dynamics, the way the bands writes and records as typically music that it is organic "grows" from the seed of an idea and then develops into a different thing, the most organic type of music is probably free improvisation, or music that was composed out of improvisation. |
| Pictures taken in the July 2019, during the last recording session of the Summer. After that session the band reconvened in October [with Giorgio Moroder]. |
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Even though is always difficult to describe music, Simon comments about the new sound give even more details… the choice of words and adjectives from someone who’s main job is playing with words in not only very significant but also enlightening: “I’m very excited about the music, it’s into the realm of experimental for sure, you know… some albums are more kind of mainstream and other goes… I think the Rio album was a mainstream album but the first album was a more experimental album, now with this one will definitely be more in the first album experimental camp. It’s a very different kind of vibe to Paper Gods and I think it has a lot to do with Erol’s involvement. Simon continues, during an interview to BBC radio solent, “We are really excited about the new album, it’s very uplifting, it’s a dance music sort of orientated work, like Rio, like the first album. It’s got a lot of dance floor on it”
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Meeting Erol Alkan, the main producer on DD15 |
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I had the pleasure to chat with Erol a couple of times last year, at the end of the Summer sessions in London and in Milan when he came for a DJ set at the Botanical club back in October 2019. |
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From an old interview: What makes a 'good remix'? In July 2003 Erol curated One Louder, a remixed compilation album featuring Duran Duran's Girls On Film (Night Version). The album was given away free with Muzik Magazine, a UK monthly electronic music magazine. |
Exclusive pics of Duran Duran and Graham Coxon |
“I Feel Love, that's the DNA we all used” |
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Did we predict the Duran & Moroder Back in March 2010 we asked Nick trough In a KatyKafe from march 2010 Nick answered to fan's questions, Salvo says: In a recent interview Giorgio Moroder has been asked if he had any regrets for artistic enterprises he has refused over the years. He mentioned the never made remake of George Pal's 'Seven Faces of Doctor Lao' [film with Michael Jackson] and he also said that he renounced to produce Duran Duran before they became Duran Duran. Nick says: Hmmm, well Salvo, Giorgio Moroder, as you probably know, is somebody who all of the band hold in particulary high regard, he was incredibly infuential on our earlier work, particulary for me with regards to his sequencies on songs like I Feel Love and on the Midnight Express soundtrack, later on Cat People and certanly with the fantastic Spark album Number One in Heaven, Beat the Clock and all that songs, Number One in Heaven how great that is, I haven’t heard that for a long time. Sooo yes, I would love to work with Giorgio Moroder one day, even on a song, I’m not sure what would happen at this point, I don’t know what he has done very recently but somebody who is that clever and has a vision like that usually continues to produce interesting things so that would be a real pleasure at some stage... I imagine we did approch him very early on, I don’t recall exactly, it probably would it be for our first album around the time, hmm, guess would it be 1980 so those demos would it be things like Girls On Film possibly Planet Earth, but there you go, sometimes things don’t work out, sometimes they come together later, sometimes they never do but certainly he has created some terrific records, even his own solo records called E=MC2, for the mathematicians out there, that’s a beauty. |
“Nick Rhodes on Giorgio Moroder” |
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“We did two tracks with Giorgio, I’m thrilled with both of them, he is the maestro of dance music, I couldn’t more of a fan, I think the track I feel Love that he did with Donna Summer was one of the singular most influential pieces of music on modern music, certainly on duran duran and a lot of other artists, because it was really the introduction to proper electronic dance music.” “Giorgio just turned 80s and he’s most like a 50 years old, he’s amazing and love working with him, can’t wait to get those tracks out there, there’s actually very little guitar on those tracks but on the rest of the album we worked with Graham Coxon, who you probably all know from Blur, he’s a rather wonderful guitarrist. Gosh we have great taste, don’t we?” It becomes particulary interesting this excerpt from an interview to Nick about some of his favourite albums. I am very grateful to Giorgio Moroder for inventing this way of thinking and for the other records he’s made. I think he is a terrific talent and I loved the work he did on a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly Midnight Express and Cat People. Without ‘I Feel Love’ there wouldn’t be a lot of electronic dance music. That’s the DNA we all used. Moroder, for me, had a period where he was defining the future and it was very unnoticed by a lot of people, perhaps because he was more of a producer than a writer of a lot of songs. |
DD sign global publishing deal with Warner Chappel |
Deal covers the group’s catalog from 1986 to date along with future compositions. |
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Duran Duran has signed a publishing administration agreement with Warner Chappell Music that will cover the group’s catalog from 1986 to date along with future compositions.
Signing with Warner Chappell reunites the group with Carianne Marshall, co-chair and COO, who worked with the group while she was head of creative at Songs Music Publishing. |
Post-lockdown Duran plan? |
| This picture, taken and the Celebrity Fire and Ice Ball, shows Roger and John posing with a piece of Duran Duran art and its author. The artistic artifact was made of hundreds of piece of vinyl records. John joked about it saying that they were all Spandau Ballets records. |
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40th Anniversary Projects | A press release for the band states that they are currently working on their fifteenth studio album, and they plan to tour it extensively once its released alongside a series of 40 thrilling projects and live events that will celebrate their long and illustrious career. We assume among these events there will be also an exhibition, according to Nick they “have been approached by different galleries around the world to staging it". He also recently talked about the Duran-archive which has been object of different visits over the past years, “I don’t know how that will manifest itself"m said Nick, “I would think there will be be some sort of publication, a book, definitely online, there probably be some access available at some stage I don’t know to all of it or a limited amount, at the moment there’s over a hundred thousand items lot. Among these items in one of our chats he talked about letters from Buckingham Palace, and the very first and unreleased band photo session. According to Nick Rhodes recent comments on the monthly duranduranmusic.com Askkaty, Nick says “what we have managed to do is move things along a little - after the restrictions here in London - I have been able to go into the studio to do some work and therefore several tracks have gone to the mix with the great maestro Spike Stent, who mixed our last couple of records, and I’m in the process of finishing a few more tracks, so we got so far 6 or 7 mixes back and there’s another couple that will be coming over the next week or two.
As already said, in the agenda they have also finishing the tracks with Mark Ronson as soon as it will be possibile to go to into the studio. About the shows he says: “some of them them have been already rescheduled for next Summer “and of course we are hoping that everything would be possible by that time and the world will return to some kind of normality, but we are are just trying to really reorganize everything we had for this year for next year.“ |
Tentative release date for the new album |
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“My guesses, realistically”, says Nick, “it will probably be out more like the first quarter of next year now, I think it will be ready to go this year, maybe we could put out a song sometimes later in the year, it depends. There’s a lot of optimistic songs on this album, particularly the couple we did with Giorgio Moroder, and I don’t know that the Winter is the right time to put those out, especially with what we are going through at the moment - people don’t even go out in bars and clubs to dance. I’d like to think that we can put some of the songs out when people will be together again to be able to enjoy the wide screen experience. |
They look back to get a special Duranthology |
According to Nick there's a side Duran project in the making, an Anthology. He recently said “I’m sure as we move along, the catalog generates different types of compilations and actually what I would eally like to do is an anthology, or “Duranathology” as it’s know locally, because I think there’s a lot of tracks that we never quite finished or demos of things that we could gather together and probably put together a decent compilation, so we’re looking into that.” Also some comments by Anthony J. Resta [Medazzand’s producer] last year seemed to validate the idea that the band is curating a project like the one that Nick described, filled with unreleased material. Antony J. Resta is working on remastering Beautiful Colors | On March 21th 2019 Resta posted this with an audio blurb of Beautiful Colours, from the Astronaut sessions. "We are mastering a very special treat specifically for all you Duranies. 16 years later we dug it out of the archives and Will Borza [Mastering Engineer at Howie Weinberg Mastering] brought Beautiful Colours to life. This is a different arrangement and production than previous leaked versions of the song. I’ve added strings, some extra analog bleepy pulsing synths and percussion. This authorized mix was done in 2003 but was never released. I’ve rearranged the song for a single length here. Here is a sneak peak at a never heard before version of the track we started back in 2003". He also posted a sample of the song. |
The Duranthology, according to Nick could also include “instrumental versions of tracks we never got a vocal for, all things that would make the anthology more special” |
Among the material that Rhodes wants to resurrect there's also Don't Look Back, the song recorded with Nile Rodgers during the Wild Boys sessions but never finished. He listened to the track not a long a go, a year or so ago, “I’d like to make something really special with the Anthology, where we resurrect few tracks that never got finished and Don't Look Back is the first thing that cames to mind.
Andy wouldn't made things any better |
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During Ronnie's online chat, back in May, Nick was asked about Andy Taylor's eventual return to the band for the 40th anniversary celebrations. His answer was quite clear: I don’t think, to be quite honest, he would made things any better, in any way. Andy is a great guitarist, he’s, yes, difficult to be around. |
Reportage needs 4 weeks work |
The album could go out as a separate album at some point |
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In regards of Reportage and Andy's involvement Nick said recently: “I think it’s worth releasing it one day, we all like the record, I’m assuming Andy probably would not be adverse to it going out if we all agree on mixing and sorting all out, some really interesting material on there, it’s a time capsule, it’s probably a bit more political than most of our albums has ever been. It needs to be finished, it needs probably 4 weeks work to finish the remaing bits of the lyrics, but most of the lyrics are done. That could go out as a separate album at some point.”
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Tidbit: Boys on film: Duran star's movie plans? |
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Daily Mail Janunary 20 | Boys on film: Duran star's movie plans Duran Duran keyboard player Nick Rhodes tells me: ‘We’ve been talking about a biopic for more than a decade. |
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