URB gets exclusive and interviews Roger Taylor, drummer of Duran Duran and also a DJ -- right before he goes onstage in San Francisco.
The fact that they always play "Rio" is enough to make me want to go, so step up and get tickets!
But while getting tickets check out the excerpts from the interview below:
URB: How is tour going so far?
Roger: Really good -- We've been to Australia, the far east, down across central America and now we've just started the North American leg -- so it's looking good.
How does this tour compare to touring in the 80s?
It's easier to be honest with you. I think it's because our audience has matured a lot. Our core audience used to be hormonal teenage girls that would go to the ends of the earth to rip our clothes off.
So it's pretty hectic, but it's great because we still have our audience -- but it's a much more mature audience base -- you know they come for the music and to listen to us -- they used to just come and scream at us.
So there's no teenage girls ripping their clothes off?
Not quite.
What was it like working with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland [on the new album]?
It was great, because we've been gone for so long but we can still work with this dream team.
Timbaland must be one of the top, most successful producers of the last few years. Justin must be one of the biggest male artists in the world right now. So it was a great combination to work with.
They're both very very driven -- they came up and gave us a kick up the ass and we got the album finished very quickly. We didn't do any navel gazing, it was just the first ideas for them were the best of ideas and I think we learned a lot from them.
Of course Timbaland and the guys that he works with are the masters of groove -- so it's good to have people coming in with very strong ideas of where the music should go and what the grooves should be like. It was great for us.
About how much of the new stuff vs. the old stuff are you playing on tour?
We play about 3 or 4 songs from the new album and we do the whole catalogue, cool stuff from the 90s. We have to play "Rio" every night or else we'll get lynched on the way out. So we always play the classics -- it's a fine balance between representing the new stuff but also the more classic material.
So we heard you also DJ?
I do, it's a bit of a side project for me, which has been going very good actually. I did a lot in London at a place called the Met Bar. I just got invited as a DJ one night some years ago and I had no idea what to do -- I just turned up with a bag of CDs. I was putting one CD in the deck waiting for that to finish, then putting the next one on -- so there was quite a gap between the records. But I really enjoyed doing it -- so then I set about learning the technicalities of it -- I became very driven to learn how to do it properly.
It's something I've been working on for the last few years -- I'm a big fan of dance music. I've always loved house music.
Are you DJing any after-parties during the tour?
I recently did in Tokyo, which was really cool. That was pretty nerve-wracking because the rest of the band were there and they're so particular about the music that they like.
I'm actually going to mix in some of the [Duran Duran] grooves off the 12" with some more contemporary dance records. And I think I'm going to DJ in New York at the end of the tour.
What's next for Duran Duran?
We're very much in tour-mode right now -- we are doing a live collaboration with Mark Ronson in Paris this summer and probably next year we'll talk about some new material -- so who knows where that is going to go, it might go anywhere really.
Courtesy URB
http://www.urb.com/permalink/2757/Her-Name-Is-Rio.html
