Because, when you’re in a band like that, you’re very much recognized for being part of the whole. “It sounds like a cliché, but I needed to get to know myself. “I needed to get some space,” he explained. Opting to leave Duran Duran, Taylor moved with his family to a 150-acre estate in the British countryside. ![]() “Everyone knew who the drummer in Duran Duran was-and they knew the bass player and the keyboard player and the guitar player. Not even Taylor’s relatively obscure place in the band, as the drummer, could shield him from the glare. I really wanted to play the drums in a band. “I’d known that I wanted to be in a band. “The only perspective we could put into that was that’s what the Beatles went through.”īy 1986, the madness around Duran Duran was too much for the naturally shy Taylor. “But playing it live, they just wanted to scream the entire time,” he added with a laugh. “Because we were quite serious about music, we put a lot of time into our songwriting and the recording and production,” Taylor said. That phenomenal popularity was a mixed blessing. “When they opened the curtain, the noise that came off the audience was deafening-high-pitched screaming from the start of the show to the end of the show.” ![]() “We would be behind the curtain, all in place, ready to play,” he said. Taylor vividly remembers the shattering clamor fans generated at concerts. Amidst the ear-piercing noise created by Duran Duran’s fans in the ’80, however, maybe critics didn’t hear the music. and that felt really great.”Įven though Duran Duran’s early hits-“Rio,” “Save a Prayer,” “The Reflex” and “Hungry Like the Wolf”-were packaged with slick, shallow music videos, the songs have merit of the kind only hard work and talent can achieve. “Some of it was a bit begrudging, but we finally got respect here in the U.K. “And that was like, hallelujah, that critics here finally gave us a little bit,” Taylor said. Paper Gods received good reviews in the U.K., too. Rolling Stone, for instance, praised the group’s 2015 album, Paper Gods, saying: “More than 30 years after they were dismissed as vapid new-wave man-dolls, Duran Duran are still kicking, and sounding surprisingly vibrant.” ![]() In the 2010s, Taylor and his fellow original Duran Duran members-singer Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes and bassist John Taylor-actually received good reviews. “It is a real tribute to that early batch of material.” “We’re honored when a band like Muse covers one of our songs,” Taylor said from London. And every song was written within the band-which kind of makes a bit more incredible, that those songs are still being played these days.”Ī recent remake of Duran Duran’s 1982 hit, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” by the major British rock band, Muse, is one example of Duran Duran’s lasting appeal. “But we knew that our material was valid. “We weren’t critically acclaimed in the U.K., I think mainly because we had a teenaged audience,” Taylor told OffBeat in advance of Duran Duran’s February 19 and 20 shows the Fillmore New Orleans. Maybe critics and music journalists couldn’t see past Duran Duran’s pretty-boy, poster-worthy looks. Duran Duran couldn’t last, they said.ĭrummer Roger Taylor believes the band’s very young following inadvertently turned music writers against the group. During Duran Duran’s Beatlemania-style fame in the 1980s, choruses of critics on both sides of the Atlantic blasted the British heartthrobs.
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