July 23, 2000
This album has a classic DURAN DURAN feel to it. You've almost gone full circle back to the time of your first release, Planet Earth. It's that same sound, but with an undeniable 90's twist.
NICK: I totally agree. The most interesting thing for us is we didn't set out to make an "electronica" album. We sat together and wrote some songs which felt right for the current atmosphere. It's just an instinct. Sometimes your instinct is spot on, and other times it doesn't coincide with what other people think music should be at that time. For example, we weren't about to make a grunge record, but for us this electronica thing is a breath of fresh air because it is an area that we feel very comfortable in. It's something that we pioneered in our own way in the 80's. Admittedly, it's a very different sound now, but it's that crossover of dance music with electronica, and rock music or pop music. That's really the borderlines of Duran Duran's sound. If you compare our other albums, i'd certainly be the first to agree that this is closer in many ways to the first album and the Rio album than any other albums that we've done since.
In your 84' Keyboard interview, you mentioned learning keyboards on a Wasp, and having a stable of a Roland Jupiter 8, a Crumar, a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, a Fairlight CMI, and numerous effects. What are you using now to acheive that classic Duran Duran sound?
NICK: Almost exactly the same things, Except i'm not using the Fairlight. You see, if you look at music as painting a picture or a collage, first of all you draw your outline, which is the tune, possibly some of the lyrics, and certainly the title so you know what your doing and where your going. You get the shape - the arrangement. Then you paint the thing, and bring it to life. That was very much how I started on the earlier albums. I didn't look at synthesizers as just instrument that was a keyboard, like a piano for example. Synthesizers for me were completely different. They were built for soundscapes and for completely coloring in the picture. I was using the paintbrushes, the analog synthesizers, the ones you've just mentioned, to do that. There was something about them that was so warm. For example, the Crumar string synthesizer....Now you can get string sounds from samplers that sound virtually identical to orchestras. That thing didn't sound like an orchestra, but there was something about it that was just very special. When you put that color on a song it just made the whole thing glow like a painting with a warm rich orange.
I carried on using these synthesizers certainly for the first two albums. The third album started to get a little more digital. Then with each album I used more and more digital technology, which gives you a much harder sound. It's taken me all this time to come back 'round. On the Thank You album I started doing it, and on this album I used almost completely analog synthesizers, apart from the samplers. I even re-bought a Wasp, which was the first thing I had. That is on things like "Undergoing Treatment." I used a Roland System 100, which I also had at one time; I managed to re-buy one of those. I used a [Roland] Jupiter-4, which is all over the first Duran Duran album, and obviously a bunch of modern samplers and loads of effects. But I wanted that warmth back. That's what it's come down to. In many ways the same arguements could be aligned to vinyl and cd's.
Were you ever tempted to go all the way and record, mix, and master on analog?
NICK: We recorded a lot of the stuff at our own studio called Privacy, in London. We recorded straight onto digital TASCAM, but all the drums, the majority of the guitars, apart from Warren's [Lexicom]jamman effects, and some of the vocals were done analog. In the final transfer, we transferred everything, all the digital things onto analog tape for mixing. Anything that was in sequencers, we dumped onto analog tape as well, so there's alot of analog. Even changing from digital to analog, we found added some warmth to the sound.
What new gear do you have?
NICK: The Korg Trinity. I like the flexibility of it. It's really easy to use, and it does have some great sounds. It doesn't sound too digital. Basically I think people are coming 'round to understanding that we all lost the plot when we decided that digital things were the wave of the future, and so they're softening alot of the sounds. Take the new Roland jp-8000, which I haven't really played with yet, but i've read stuff on. It sounds like that's heading in that direction too. I'm looking forward to that. We've got a pretty pumped up Kurzweil K2000. I used that for alot of percussive things. I found that using alot of old gadgets with new things was working well. Like I got out the old Roland Space Echo. I didn't know we still had one. I used that in tandem with digital things like the trinity. "Out of my mind" is the most digital of all the tracks. There's digital piano on that, though there are some analog synths on it too. The sound effects are the Roland System 100, and the strings on that are the Trinity. "Who do you think you are" is another example of analog and digital mixtures. There's sort of a vocoder sound on that.
Ah the good ol' vocoder.
NICK: See I love things like that. Now that's something I want to get a hold of, a proper, original vocoder. Warren and I wrote, recorded and produced two songs for Blondie. They've always been icons of mine. I asked Jimmy [Destri, Blondie's keyboardist], "What old gear have you got?" He said, "I've got this Moog Vocoder." He brought this thing in, and it was just the coolest looking thing i've ever seen. I was very jealous. I just really wanted to take this thing home with me. We used it on one of the tracks called "Studio 54."
Tell me about your studio setup.
NICK: It's a very compact studio. We've got everything we need in there, though. It's sort of been customized to our most eccentric needs. Warren calls it a synthesizer graveyard in there. As my passion has growna again, the room has slowly been consumed by these monstrous things with wires sticking out of them. It's sort of half analog and half as hi-tech as you can get. The basic equipment's very simple: a DDA desk and TASCAM machines. We've got three TASCAMs, which give us the 24 tracks.
We don't use alot of amps for the keyboards; we go direct for alot of it, but there are a few little old amps. My favorite thing for putting vocals through is a tiny little thing that you would have bought in K-Mart or something. It's sort of an instant Iggy Pop machine. It's just the cheapest little combo amp thing that you've ever seen, and we just mike it up. When you put Simon through it, it sounds great. It really is the nastiest thing. I don't even think it has a name, I think the maufacturer was too embarrassed to commit anything to it. There's alot of that kind of thing, Mark Tinley, my programmer, whom I have worked with for many years, and who also engineered this album, customizes alot of things for me.
Then There's Warren's guitar setup. I defy any guitarist in the whole universe to have anything as complicated as this. This machine, this monster, it's called Delilah. This rack....it's like the biggest refrigerator you ever saw. It's just jammed with all these things. I mean Warren can sound like an orchestra. It's this wall of sound that Phil Spector would have nightmares about. It is very evident on some of the tracks, things like "Big Bang Generation": the theme part is his rack at work. But now i've realized the full potential of this, i'm slowly working my way 'round the room, so I can plug my things through his rack. He's a little nervous about it.
So what else have you been cooking up in your studio?
NICK: The thing that we've got in the pipeline is the project that Warren and I have been working on over the last couple of years called "Bored with prozac and the internet." It's basically a cyber-soap rock opera. We wrote it for the stage, thinking of Broadway by the year 2000. It's super-modern and different from Duran Duran in just about every way - the sound of it, the content of it, the arrangement of it, the use of technology, the fact that it is a completely different story. Getting into induvidual characters is just a completely different way of writing than actually writing something from your own point of view. Warren and I have learned so much from doing it, that I think we brought alot of that to the Duran Duran album in the production, and also to the Blondie thing.
The tracks you've produced for Blondie are the first tracks you've produced for another artist since you worked with Kajagoogoo back in '83. Their album White Feathers was incredibly successful, spawning a #1 hit single ["Too Shy"] on both sides of the Atlantic. Do you have any plans to produce any other projects outside of Duran Duran?
NICK: You know what i'm really in the mood to do? I'm in the mood to produce a really cool young band. Someone with some really different ideas. If one came along, i'd definitely be interested. It's good to work with other people sometimes. We probably haven't done enough of it over the years. So, if there's anyone out there that's got something unusual happening....*
