Yet, according to John Taylor in his 2012 memoir In the Pleasure Groove, the group was undaunted by such changes, perhaps even emboldened by them. Ace session drummer Steve Ferrone, who played with the Average White Band, also appeared on Notorious, picking up where Roger Taylor left off, and the difference between their styles was quite discernible. You gotta build that foundation and let’s take the fans along with us.’ And that’s what the Notorious album was supposed to do.”Īlthough Andy Taylor is credited on the record as a contributor, the guitar slack was taken up by Rodgers and Missing Persons’ Warren Cuccurullo (who would later be promoted as a full-time member). Now it’s time to go in the direction where you can become more like a U2 that’s really classic and solid artistically. And the music becomes sort of an added bonus. I used to say to the guys, ‘People don’t realize how great you are because you’re still like this boy band and the girls are still talking about your looks. I think I was the glue that held that together. I don’t like to overly take credit for anything, but since they said it first… Had I not been there in their lives in that pivotal time of their lives, when we did Notorious, when the two other Taylors left, that’s a heavy blow to a band at the top of their career. “I think that we were the right paring - it was the right thing at the right time. “I love Duran Duran,” Rodgers once said in an interview with Spinner back in 2011. Having previously worked with Duran Duran on the remix of “The Reflex” and “The Wild Boys,” Rodgers was the perfect choice to lead the band in a new stylistic direction towards funk and soul, particularly the sound of Chic, the 70s disco-influenced group that has been often regarded as one of Duran Duran’s major influences. Reduced to the trio of Le Bon, Rhodes and John Taylor, Duran Duran made an album that heavily turned up the funk and R&B, resulting in perhaps one of the band’s finest - if almost criminally underrated - records on a par with the self-titled debut album and Rio.Ī huge part of that creative spark and reinvention came in the form of Notorious’ producer, Nile Rodgers of Chic, who was hot off producing David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Madonna’s Like a Virgin. But that wasn’t the case with Notorious, the band’s fourth studio album, released 30 years ago on November 21, 1986. that was shifting away from British synth-pop and towards American guitar rock again, might have signaled the end of Duran Duran. Those departures of two key founding members, further augmented by a changing music scene in the U.S. When Duran Duran eventually regrouped in 1986 to work on its next record, both Roger Taylor and Andy Taylor left the band. №1 song with “A View to a Kill,” which all five members together performed at Live Aid for the last time until almost two decades later.įrom 1981 to 1985, Duran Duran achieved huge worldwide success and fame at the dawn of the MTV era that earned the band the moniker of the ‘Fab Five.’ But the media and fan hysteria inevitably led to a feeling of burnout within the band. And if that wasn’t anti-climatic enough, Duran Duran scored its second U.S. Both groups released their own albums (The Power Station’s eponymous debut, Arcadia’s So Red the Rose), which yielded Top 10 hit singles collectively. The year before, the group had splintered into two factions: the hard-rocking supergroup the Power Station, featuring bassist John Taylor and guitarist Andy Taylor and the art-rock outfit Arcadia, made up of singer Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and drummer Roger Taylor. By the time 1986 rolled around, Duran Duran was at a major turning point in its career.
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