Last year at this time I was playing a concert in Budapest, fortunately it was a pretty good one. Afterwards we went back to the hotel bar with our friends, Green Day. They came to our show and were in town playing a concert themselves the next day. We stayed up for a while (OK, quite a while) and chatted, and it occurred to me that although they all had very different personalities, they had an extraordinary bond between them and it reminded me of us, why we got together, what we wanted to achieve and how badly behaved anyone of us could be at anytime...

Later in the year we played at a festival with them and we were able to see their show. It's not often that all of Duran Duran are blown away, and we were.

It's always inspiring when you are an artist to know that you can appreciate other artist's achievements. I was thrilled that Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" became such a huge success in the UK recently because it is such a great song and that has largely restored my faith that people can really make the decisions about whether a song is good or not.

Today I am here in London, contemplating the completion of the new Duran Duran album. I know that we will end up delivering to you the best album we can, we are absolutely unable to do otherwise, the passion remains. At this point I would like to thank you in advance for your patience, as you know we are not very good with our own deadlines. I can also say there could have been more Duran Duran albums from this line up if our pride was not so great, but I am equally as sure that we made the right decisions and bizarrely, I still trust them all... We are hoping to do some shows to preview new material later this year with an album early next year.

Without wishing to sound like a game show host, I want you all to know that I am truly astounded by the amount of messages you have sent for my birthday, and I thank you dearly. So if I were to run for President, how many votes can I count on?

Love and gothic arched eyebrows,
Nick