JOHN
BEST THING THAT HAPPENED IN 2025
Gela and I sold our Los Angeles home of 25 years and went all in on the UK! So far, it has been amazing. I am really happy to be back in the UK full time. I haven't lived in the UK for 30 something years. It was less of a leap for me than it was for Gela, but it’s all good.
Ah, and of course – my daughter’s wedding. I got to do a lot of dancing.
BEST MOVIE YOU SAW THIS YEAR
I have two movies – One Battle After Another with Leo, and the other was Bugonia. I loved Bugonia. It was extraordinary. But really, they were both masterpieces
BEST TV SHOW OR SERIES YOU WATCHED THIS YEAR
I am going to vote for Riot Women, a BBC series written by Sally Wainwright. It’s about a group of women who form a band as a way to get their angst out. It’s brilliant! It’s authentic! Actually, it would make a great musical – the music is great. The Yorkshire accents are pretty strong, so you may need subtitles!
BEST BOOK YOU READ IN 2025
I gotta give it to Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run. I went with the audiobook. When I was younger, in my teens and twenties, he was everything I didn’t like about music, but I realized over the years that I love so many of his songs and I love him! I find him to be a charming and authentic dude. To listen to him tell him story? Oh my god! If you’re interested in music, you should listen to it. To have him tell his story and what he thinks of it, was eye opening.
BEST PODCAST YOU HEARD THIS YEAR
When I am riding my bike, I listen to The Drive podcast with Peter Attia. It’s mostly about men’s health, and maximizing health and longevity. It’s a great podcast for men of a certain age. When I am not working, I have a lot of down time… I have to lean into good behaviors and wellness.
BEST MUSIC YOU’VE HEARD IN 2025
I still like Classical; I still like music that’s over 100 years old. It’s like going to an art museum – the older the stuff is, the better - that’s why it’s hanging there for over 200 years! From a musician’s point of view, I relate more to classical musicians, they inspire me. I need to be the best fucking bass player, and I am not sure new music would inspire me that way.
I did love Charli XCX on the Grammys this year. … and I am on a KC and the Sunshine Band kick. I am always waiting for the WHOA! moment when I am listening to music.
BEST DURAN DURAN MOMENT of 2025
Mostly they were spent onstage. The European summer tour was great. It was great going to places we hadn’t been in awhile. The Halloween show in Manchester was off the charts, it was a big challenge, and everybody played so well and had a great time. I really enjoyed the Shadows re-make and working on that. The fragrance launch in London was great.
MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2026
I’d like the world to be a happier place than it is now. All the people I know just want to get along, we need to be able to get along. The divisions are really hard core.
In other news, I am excited about my football team!
SIMON
BEST THING THAT HAPPENED IN 2025
What happened in 2025? I just can’t remember much of it because I was so busy working …ah yes, I had an amazing event that happened in January, 2025: My grandson Sasha was born. Absolutely wonderful.
BEST MOVIE YOU SAW THIS YEAR
I haven’t really been to the cinema. I haven’t seen much this year. I’ve heard One Battle After Another is amazing, so maybe that will be my movie of the year if I see it in 2025.
BEST TV SHOW OR SERIES YOU WATCHED THIS YEAR
Still Slow Horses. It’s fantastic. What else did I see? The one about the woman who takes a job with someone very rich on an island (Too Good to be True). I love The Diplomat. I am going to watch Landman and something called All Her Fault with Sarah Snook. Oh, I started watching Pluribus because someone recommended it to me.
BEST BOOK YOU READ IN 2025
Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, that was extraordinary. It was a really clever story. I read a lot of Lisa Jewell. Her most recent one is Don’t Let Him In about a guy who uses women and takes their money. It was really good. The one I am reading at the moment is a book by Nick Harkaway called Karla’s Choice and I am absolutely loving it. Nick is John le Carré's son, and he has picked up his father’s famous character, George Smiley, and is continuing his story.
BEST PODCAST YOU HEARD THIS YEAR
The BBC have done some great history ones. One called The Ambush about the war in Afghanistan and it is about a mission that went utterly wrong.(Katy can’t find this) I also really recommend The Rest is History.
BEST MUSIC YOU’VE HEARD IN 2025
If you want to hear the best music I’ve heard all year, then you should tune into WHOOOSH! We will be doing our year end special where we highlight the best music we played all year It’s so hard to choose just one track. We played the song “Fundraiser” by Bar Italia today and it was jumpin’! If you can’t listen to the show, you can check out the “Weekly WHOOOSH!” to see what we’ve played.
BEST DURAN DURAN MOMENT of 2025
Our Halloween show in Manchester was splendid and spectacular!
MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2026
The shows we have coming up, and I really want to finish working on REPORTAGE. There are some great tracks on it, and I am ready to get it out.
HOLIDAY COCKTAIL *Simon only
The smell of Christmas for me is freshly ground coffee …so you should make an espresso martini! Single espresso, vodka, Kahlúa and then heavy cream poured on the top.
ROGER
BEST THING THAT HAPPENED IN 2025
It would have to be my daughter Ellea’s wonderful wedding in Italy. It was so lovely and romantic. It was one of the great highlights of my life. Being “father of the bride” is one of the biggest moments a man can have, really. Ellea was the calmest and happiest bride I’ve ever seen, she didn’t show a moment of nerves. On the other hand, I was nervous about my speech, and the walk down the aisle! It created a great connection between us that day. And then John’s daughter Atlanta got married three weeks later in Italy as well, so it was a double bubble!
BEST MOVIE YOU SAW THIS YEAR
A music documentary - a rockumentary - about Led Zeppelin called Becoming Led Zeppelin. I saw it in the theatre, and that was reminiscent of when I saw the The Song Remains the Same at aged 15 at the cinema. The sound was fantastic. It was so interesting, it focused on the ascent of the band and didn’t go further than that, which I quite liked.
BEST TV SHOW OR SERIES YOU WATCHED THIS YEAR
This has come out fairly recently - it was The Reckoning, the Sean Combs Netflix series. I am not a fan of trial by media, but I found it to be very interesting. It really showed what fame and success can do to someone if it goes unchecked. He was involved in so many great musical moments, it’s sad that his ego took over and he spun out of control.
BEST BOOK YOU READ IN 2025
My favourite book of 2025 was What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci. It is thinly veiled as a food book, but it is really about family life; he has young children and he talks about bringing up children, thinking about what he is going to feed them, what it’s like when he leaves the home to do a movie – and I know all about leaving home for work. It goes into his journey with cancer a little bit too. It was quite a deep book, really, I couldn’t put it down.
BEST MUSIC YOU’VE HEARD IN 2025
I am choosing Wolf Alice’s The Clearing. I saw them on Jools Holland ten years ago and thought, wow they have a great female singer. And then I saw them on Glastonbury this year. For me, they stole the whole show, and I thought they had developed as a band from the last time I saw them. It’s just nice to see, so many bands come and go, but they’ve grown into an amazing band!
BEST DURAN DURAN MOMENT of 2025
The Manchester Halloween show. We all thought it was a momentous achievement, that we managed to pull it off in a major way. It was a long show, a lot to remember, a lot to rehearse, a lot to pull off for an audience of 25k people! We have honed the show over the last three Halloweens, and we had more time to prepare for this, certainly more time than we had to prepare for the show at Madison Square Garden. It was “awesome”!
MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2026
The REPORTAGE project - we say it every year, but I think this is the year it’s coming out! We really want to get it finished, and I’ve updated all the drums I needed to. We are going to have a crack at getting it out this spring. I believe we WILL do it this year, and I am looking forward to it.
NICK
BEST THING THAT HAPPENED IN 2025
I saw a lot of museum shows, it’s my inspiration and creative food. I saw Caravaggio at the Palazzo Barbarini in Rome. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, it was a real, real thrill. We went together as a band, which we don’t typically do; it was such a privilege to be there. Leonor Fini, which I loved, was at the Palazzo Reale di Milano. I had been to Palazzo Reale earlier in the year for the George Hoyningen-Huene show, which was magnificent. He is one of my favourite photographers.
John and I attended a small exhibition at SEA Design in London by Malcolm Garrett, our fabulous designer/collaborator from the very beginning. This exhibition focused on all the singles artwork we had from that period – he did our first three albums, Arcadia and all the singles associated with them. It was great to see all that stuff together in one place. What a magnificent design job Malcolm did with us! Later, Malcolm and I went to Gerry Anderson’s exhibit together at the Museum of Brands. Malcolm co-curated it and I lent them my Captain Scarlett hat for the show. It was really great.
The Dolce and Gabbana show in Italy was quite inspired, super Sicilian! Their use of religious iconography is fantastic - and the opulence is extraordinary!
The year started off with great things too: Van Gogh at the National Gallery and Francis Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery, both were fabulous. I saw the Tim Burton Exhibit at the Design Museum, always a joy to look at anything Tim does. At the same time there was a Barbie exhibit there, you can’t go wrong with that pink, it was uplifting, which I think we all need a bit of. I saw David Hockney at Louis Vuitton in Paris. He dedicated his life to his work in such an amazing way. When I was younger, I didn’t focus on his work so much, but now, looking back on them, I think he’s one of the most important artists to come out of Britain for sure.
BEST MOVIE YOU SAW THIS YEAR.As you know, I love the foreign film category when we do our Oscar picks. I loved ervery single movie in that category - and all so radically different too. Emilia Perez was a remarkable idea, truly original. I am Still Here, loved that. Seed of the Sacred Fig - both terrifying and brave at the same time. The Girl with the Needle - loved it even though it was so depressing. It was beautifully executed. And Flow - that cat! I would adopt that cat anytime. I haven’t seen many of the newer films as of yet. I have seen Frankenstein. I think it looks great. I am a massive admirer of Del Toro’s work; his movies are super-special. it was a little long for me, but was enjoyable to watch. I am glad I saw it.
BEST TV SHOW OR SERIES YOU WATCHED THIS YEAR
I finally watched Breaking Bad and I understood why people were so obsessed with it. The acting and scripting were so good. I caught up with the second season of Wednesday. I’m up to date on Stranger Things until December 25th. It was hard to assimilate the kids being so much older though. I watched Absentia, which is not the kind of thing I would normally watch, and was drawn in . It was filmed pre-covid and was quite unpredictable. I thought it was super-well scripted, and the acting was very good. It was a twisted, dark scenario. And I loved White Lotus. It’s fun to watch shows that are well written with crazy characters, and it certainly had that.
BEST BOOK YOU READ IN 2025
Can’t say there’s a lot of text in this book - it’s a photographic book, as most of my favourite books usually are. It’s an exquisite book by Miho Kajioka, a Japanese photographer that lives in Paris. It’s called “So It Goes, So It Goes, So It Goes, So It Goes”. It’s the fourth in a series, I am sure you can guess the title of the first three. Miho is a focused artistic with a unique aesthetic. She once more expands the ideas in the original book (“So it Goes”) and makes it something new, and I was thrilled to see that.
BEST MUSIC YOU’VE HEARD IN 2025
I tend to listen to a lot of chill-out music. so many great pieces out there, I love gothic choral music. Nothing quite like it. I listen to a lot of Classical. Sometimes I am drawn back to music from when I was a kid, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Velvet Underground… and then I always want to know what’s new. I listen to WHOOOSH! for that - Simon is good at sending the Link. I find some inspiration in that.
For me, I focus on what was the best pop song of the year, and there ia usually only one. I have to say it’s the Lola Young song “Messy.” Irresistible melody.
BEST DURAN DURAN MOMENT of 2025
It’s a loaded question! Halloween was quite spectacular this time. I was allowed to have fireworks and explosions – that made it a bit more fun for me, I have to confess. We worked with a great team on the whole thing. It was fun to bring it to the UK. We put so much work into one show a year, it’s complete madness, but at the same time, it’s so much fun for us to focus on making this crazy one-off night special, everybody rises to the occasion
Let’s not forget, we did a European tour and one of my highlights from that was John’s birthday in Milan. It was kind of special seeing all those people singing happy birthday to him. There’s something great about playing on your birthday. Later in the year we played Paris, which we hadn’t played in 15 years. That was one of the best Duran shows of the year.
The Xerjoff perfume launch immersive experience was great. This was a small event that we did with LOST. It was a bespoke, one-off event and it was so special. Xerjoff were true collaborators, it was a cool process to see what one goes through to make perfume. I was astonished how much work goes in to putting together all you need to craft a new perfume. Big highlight.
MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2026
I always look forward to just getting out there and seeing what life can bring. If you lose your curiosity, then you’re sunk. I hope that next year brings more peace, happiness, and stability in the world. With Duran Duran – we have a lot of exciting things coming up. There are several projects coming out slowly, but we do have a single with Nile Rodgers coming out; we are filming a video with Jonas Åkerlund in January, and I am super pleased about that. We are playing some shows on the West Coast in early January and that’s always fun. And we are going to try and finished the REPORTAGE album.
