Hello all. I returned from Switzerland last Saturday just in time to start rehearsing for the Sky Arts 'Songbook' TV programme. I do love the alps, the crisp air, abundance of the white stuff (no..I mean snow) amazing scenery, charging down slopes at a silly rate of knots and then of course sitting in front of a log fire in the evening with a stiff drink and a crimson face recounting the days experiences with any local unlucky enough to be in the general vicinity - who by the way has heard the same stories 20 times in the last week already. In fact, I often think that once this is all over you will find me sitting in an alpine bar by the fireplace, smoking a pipe, wearing a woolly sweater and a very large white beard ruminating over what was and what could have been...we can all dream and I have no plans to retire for many a year yet, and actually I'm not sure about that big white beard, not very Duran Duran at all and not sure that Nick would be at all impressed with me!
Anyway, snow does seem to be a recurring factor in my life at the moment, as I sit here looking over the grey rooftops and chimney pots of London, I hear that we have some heavy snow storms coming into the city later today which should be fun and very rare for London these days, thanks (I think) to global warming. People tell me that the Thames used to freeze up hard enough every year for entire neighbourhoods to skate on it, not much chance of that these days unless you have a large boat handy. Also, when I DJ'd at Webster Hall NYC in December, Manhattan suffered the first snow blizzards of the winter which did, unfortunately, seem to blow quite a few of the audience away with it, but thank you to the people who did brave the awful weather to still make it a memorable night for me. I am back in NYC in March at Cielo, so fingers crossed on the weather front for that one!
'Songbook' was really great to film, apart from playing 10 songs that span the whole career of the band, we talked in depth about the early days and how DD has developed and survived all the lineup changes over the years, and how the band has faced up to the challenge of constantly writing new material in a world where music scene after music scene has come and gone year after year...but somehow we are still here and about to begin writing the '13th' Duran Duran album. I'm not superstitious in any way but wish me luck....
RTx
