Tag Archives: Interview

2011 ➤ Duran’s round-the-world adventure reaches the UK

Posted on 17 May 2011 | Leave a comment

SXSW, interview, John Norris, Duran Duran

Duran interviewed at SXSW in March: Simon Le Bon checks a runaway thought before the audience jumps to the wrong conclusion (SXSW video grab)

❚ UPDATE, JULY 1: Following the postponement of Duran Duran’s European arena tour owing to singer Simon Le Bon’s vocal problems, consult the band’s website for news… DD have rescheduled all eleven UK concerts to run from Nov 30 Brighton to Dec 17 Newcastle.

❚ UPDATE, MAY 29: Duran Duran now offer a fulsome apology for having to cancel their current UK tour dates — not, as sceptics suspected, because of unsold tickets but because of singer Simon Le Bon’s continuing “laryngeal problems”. Their website today reports: “Following a consultation with both a vocal coach and his team of ENT specialists today, Simon Le Bon has been advised that he needs to continue to rest his voice… Devastated by the news that they will not be able to resume the tour as planned on Tuesday, Simon said ‘We’ve been postponing shows with very little notice, in the hope each day that the improvement would have been significant enough for me to sing again without risking any long-term damage’.”

View John and Nick’s special video apology at YouTube . . . Today too, Roger Taylor blogs on the DD website on the horrible irony of Woody Allen’s famous quotation “If you want make God laugh, tell him about your plans” and he makes the promise: “I know that all the shows are very close to being re-scheduled later in the year.” . . . Read Simon Le Bon’s blog at DD’s website on June 1: “I reckon I got 6 semi-tones wiped off the top of my range and … it’s very difficult not to worry about it.”

❏ Here’s a sparky interview with the band just released by the SXSW festival, recorded in March. With former MTV reporter John Norris in the chair, Nick Rhodes says he still sees Duran as an art-school band and John Taylor reflects on the golden era of MTV. Stills from this interview have been posted at Flickr

Duran Duran, L'Uomo Vogue,Pierpaolo Ferrari
❏ This stylish tuxedoed shot by Pierpaolo Ferrari comes from the current “Long Live the 80s” issue of L’Uomo Vogue, with a feature on DD by former Wag club host Chris Sullivan, translated for the Italian edition.

HERE’S A CATCH-UP ON PREVIOUSLY POSTED
DURAN NEWS FROM THE YEAR SO FAR

❏ It was 30 years in March since the 80s supergroup’s debut single Planet Earth peaked at No 12 in the UK chart… This year their 14-track CD of AYNIN spent five weeks on the UK album chart.

❏ View highlights from Duran Duran’s Unstaged online concert March 23 at the Mayan theatre, Los Angeles, in 1080p HD at the band’s Vevo channel on YouTube /DuranDuranVEVO. Click here to find which global regions are licensed to view highlights at YouTube. The four DD Unstaged concert tracks most viewed via Vevo in the first three weeks after the live webcast drew more than 1.5m views — these are All You Need is Now with 700,930 views, then Notorious 298,505, Planet Earth 290,477, and Friends of Mine 274,935 way out ahead of all other tracks, most of which pulled only four-figure audiences.

John Taylor, Nick Rhodes, Duran, Facebook Live, interview, thequietus, SXSW ❏ Rhodes and Taylor give a 30-minute video interview on Billboard.com including live Q&A (right) on March 30, 2011.

❏ Rhodes and Le Bon give a seven-minute video history of DD for ABC News, Jan 2011 — “Rio was the album that made us the biggest band in the world. It made us big in America”

❏ Duran have been blessed by an interview at Quietus, its holiness the online magazine whose touchstone is “reverence” and claims “we’re not afraid of surprising our readers”. Writer Simon Price delivers two surprises. Plus this list of post-80s albums the band think most deserve to be listened to: The Wedding Album (1993) … Pop Trash (2000) … Medazzaland (1997) … Astronaut (2004).

❏ On the current AYNIN tour Duran Duran played North America and Mexico March 16–April 27, just before their 11-date UK tour from Newcastle to Sheffield May 18–June 4. They take in Berlin on May 26 and continue across Europe, Paris to Bergen June 10–Aug 28. [Update — These were the original plans, which were substantially cancelled in May and June.] In between they return to the UK for the V Festival on both Aug 20 and 21.

Duran Duran, All You Need Is Now, video, Nick Egan
♫ View Nick Egan’s Bacofoil video for All You Need Is Now, DD’s comeback single at Yahoo Music — available worldwide on iTunes. A 14-track CD package of the same name was released in March for most of Europe, Australia, Far East and North America with South America following in April.

♫ Listen to two new Duran tracks premiered on NYC’s East Village Radio.

➢ Elsewhere at Shapersofthe80s — 1980, How Duran Duran’s road to stardom began in the Studio 54 of Birmingham

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Posted in Europe, London, Media, North America, Pop music, Youth culture

Tagged All You Need Is Now, apology, Birmingham, Duran Duran, European tour, Interview, New Romantics, postponement, Rum Runner, UK tour, updates, Video

➤ Morrissey detonates bidding war for his memoirs

Posted on 25 Apr 2011 | Leave a comment

❚ A NEAT OUTCOME RESULTED from last week’s Radio 4 interview with Morrissey, former singer with The Smiths, the UK’s leading indie band of the 80s, who broke up in 1987. After the reluctant interviewee said that he was “very very surprised to be making music today” he added that, had his music career failed, “I would have become a novelist”. He then revealed that he had written his memoirs and was in the progess of redrafting his 660-page manuscript. He dared to suggest: “I’d like it to go to Penguin, but only if they published it as a classic. I can’t see why not — a contemporary Penguin Classic — within the next year or so.”

Very Best of Morrissey,CD,download, vinyl,Radio 4, Front Row By Good Friday Penguin Books, creators of the modern paperback, were trying to head off a bidding war between rival publishers by announcing that it is indeed willing to publish his autobiography. A spokeswoman told The Independent: “There is a natural fit between Morrissey’s sensibility, his artistic achievements and Penguin Classics. A book could be published as a Penguin Classic because it is a classic in the making. It’s something we would like to discuss with Morrissey.”

There is no minimum time limit before a book can be considered a Penguin Classic, but the list embraces people or works that have “caused scandal and political change, broken down barriers, social and sexual”. However, a leading article in the same day’s paper pours cold water on the mighty ego of the singer they call Bigmouth: “Sadly for Morrissey, it’s the accumulated judgement of posterity, rather than authors, which determines what literature survives and what gets pulped.”

Nevertheless, according to The Independent report: “Morrissey is not short of suitors. The publishing director of Faber and Faber sent the singer an open letter begging him to join the ‘house of Eliot’, a reference to T S Eliot, the giant of 20th-century poetry. Lee Brackstone wrote: ‘We feel very strongly that you belong in this company. You deserve Faber and the love we can give you. History demands it; destiny commands it’.”

These events coincide with today’s UK release of a new album, Very Best of Morrissey, a 20-track download and CD of remastered solo classics (also as 18 tracks on vinyl, EMI/Major Minor). A bonus DVD, which includes eleven remastered videos (three of which are previously unavailable on DVD) including Boxers, Sunny, and The More You Ignore Me The Closer I Get, plus I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty taken from the Jonathan Ross TV show in December 1990.

As from tomorrow the 12-minute interview with R4’s Front Row is available on iPlayer. Morrissey deals briskly with pressing issues such as ageing (“many of the early songs were like mating calls and I have to think seriously about singing them now”), the problem of having the prime minister as a fan (“no I’ve never met him”) and, inevitably, a Smiths reunion (this is not the place for spoilers). And yes, Johnny Marr gets a mention.

Dermot O’Leary,Morrissey, interview,Very Best Of Update: Listen to favourably selected highlights from a frankly tiresome interview between a cranky Morrissey and a very patient Dermot O’Leary (BBC R2 on April 30, 2011) as the evasive singer winds him up while discussing their Irish roots and musical idols, a UK and Scandinavian tour, an album of new material and the “mutants” of Coronation Street. We hear two clips from his Very Best Of CD, Girl Least Likely To, and Interlude: The next day Moz told True To You why he had been so cantankerous: “I’m sorry I made the O’Leary radio interview so difficult but I was in a foul mood, having spent a full week surrounded by the royal dreading. England may very well be a Windsor dictatorship, but, PR weddings aside, it is usually quite bearable.” He also complains about his familiar views on the British monarchy being cut from the earlier R4 interview.

SUMMER TOUR DATES

➢ Listed at True-to-you.net — Morrissey’s nine-date UK summer tour runs from Perth June 15–Plymouth June 30, plus Glastonbury Festival on June 24, and Hop Farm Music Festival July 2.

DOWNLOAD YOUR OWN MORRISSEY FONT

➢ Morrissey’s handwriting free from searchfreefonts
Morrissey,handwriting , font, download

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Posted in Culture, London, Media, Pop music

Tagged CD, DVD, Faber and Faber, free fonts, Interview, Morrissey, Penguin books, Radio, release, UK tour, Very Best Of, vinyl

➤ Adam Ant reveals his terrifying years in purgatory

Posted on 29 Mar 2011 | 1 comment

Adam Ant, John Humphrys , Radio 4, BBC, On The Ropes, bi-polar disorder, mental health

Adam Ant talks frankly about mental illness to John Humphrys © BBC

❚ ON THE ROPES is a serious issue-led strand on BBC Radio 4 in which veteran interrogator John Humphrys talks tough to somebody in the public eye. This morning he discussed bi-polar disorder in depth with the flamboyant and charismatic popstar, Adam Ant now aged 56, who at one stage in his later life “would have gone to prison for a long time”.

Humphrys — “The man who dominated the pop scene in the early 80s was [20 years later] a burned-out husk locked in a mental home with people who, he said later, wanted to be dead. Adam Ant, did you want to be dead at that time?”

Ant — “It wasn’t really wanting to be dead. It was really that I felt dead, I felt I was encased in a Dante-esque purgatory. It was worse than hell. I can’t describe how terrifying it was, knowing you are in control of your faculties and being told you’re not.”

Adam Ant in 1981: in his glam-rock guise as Prince Charming, a heroic highwayman based, he says, on the film stars Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood

Ant talks throughout in a low soft voice, but his views are heartfelt. He said he disagrees with the use of the term bipolar disorder and insisted: “At this point I don’t need medication… I am always passionate. I’m not hyper. Onstage I’m an athlete. That doesn’t make me nuts or paranoid.”

Afterwards, he was criticised for some of his blunt language, especially for saying: “I was put in a nuthouse and it is a nuthouse — it is worse than Bedlam.” His descriptions of life in care are graphic. “The only thing they are concerned with is polishing floors and making sure you take your medication… It’s like the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but there isn’t a cute nurse there being jokey and you’re sedated. I want the prime minister to know that takes place and it’s wrong.”

➢ Riveting listening, On the Ropes is repeated tonight at 9.30pm, then on iPlayer

❚ TODAY AT A PRESS CONFERENCE Adam Ant confirmed 11 concerts for his Blueblack Hussar tour of Britain from May 16 in Brighton to June 4 in York, plus a screening of the 1981 Prince Charming Revue on film, plus live Q&A at the Coronet Theatre in Elephant & Castle on May 11.

In today’s Press Association video interview (below) at Chelsea football club’s Stamford Bridge stadium, Adam Ant announces the tour with his new band, The Good, the Mad and the Lovely Posse, based on the series of preparatory small gigs over recent months. He says: “It’s time for a little bit of real rock and roll — there’s too much sampling and karaoke going on.”

He also says that his sixth studio album, Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar In Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter (an old naval term for corporal punishment in which sailors were flogged), has been postponed until 2012. His own website says: “So, apparently this tour will not be to promote new material”. Adam tweets Mar 30: “I would like to say… Its not my fault the album got pushed back… there are reasons which cant be disscused [sic] at this time.”

❏ Posted April 1 by music-news.com, below — 12-minute interview backstage after the midday showcase Under The Bridge on March 29 “I don’t want to do downloads. [My new album] is not for earplugs or mobiles. If you’ve got kids, you owe it to them to play them a vinyl disc in their lifetime because once they hear it they will never get over that experience… I don’t like the people that invented the internet — it encourages children to sit in a room, not move, look at a screen and get fat. And noone cares. I do. I have a daughter. I want real records for real people.”

➢ Stream-of-consciousness interview with Adam Ant in the British online magazine Clink, March 23 — on psychiatrists, mental health, families, Steve Jobs, the new album as a manifesto (“my heart, my guts, my soul”), Liam Gallagher, Robbie Williams, Sony, ticket prices and New Romantics

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Posted in Media, Social trends

Tagged Adam Ant, BBC Radio 4, Blueblack Hussar, Interview, John Humphrys, mental illness, tour dates, Under the Bridge, Video

➤ Anna’s Army — how the English-born editor of Vogue became her own global brand

Posted on 25 Mar 2011 | Leave a comment

◼ ONCE IN A WHILE a piece of journalism actually reveals stuff you didn’t already know and a great big penny drops. For its April issue, WSJ., the glossy magazine published by The Wall Street Journal, puts Anna Wintour on its cover (photographed by ex-Blitz Club barman Mario Testino), while writer Joshua Levine explains in thorough detail how her power and financial clout reach far beyond her own editorship of Vogue, which she assumed in 1988.

By mobilising a “fully connected network” of allies and celebrity shock troops Anna shapes micro-economic forces around the world, to become “basically a global brand”, in the opinion of Deborah Needleman, editor of WSJ., “someone whose power extends beyond what she does”. Or as a former colleague who attended corporate matchmaking sessions between fashion’s biggest brands says: “She’s really the McKinsey of fashion.”

A coalition of the willing: Anna Wintour’s army of allies extends her influence well beyond Vogue. Here are a few key people in what one academic calls her “fully connected network”. Graphic © WSJ. magazine

When some of New York’s 1,000 targeted stores balked at joining up to her Fashion’s Night Out initiative to rebuild sales amid post-recessionary thrift, she was calling it in from command central — “I’ll get you Sienna Miller at the store, I’ll send you Justin Timberlake!” Timberlake and Miller are among Wintour’s most zealous Hollywood allies. “She understands fashion is a frame of mind, not just the clothes,” Timberlake says. “She’s figured out that all these small moving parts come into play to make a bigger picture.” A year later FNO had become an international event in 16 countries, when Istanbul, for example, logged clothing sales of $2 million in three hours.

At the age of 61, Anna’s globe-trotting, matchmaking and event-planning have not only made her a force among fund-raisers but are fuelling rumours that she is angling for a job in Washington as an ambassador. Indeed, Michelle Obama is one of the first names Wintour mentions when asked whom she most looks up to. Read on to discover Anna’s response…

➢ The business of being Anna — in WSJ. magazine

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Posted in Fashion, Media, North America, Social trends

Tagged Anna Wintour, fund-raising, Interview, New York, Vogue, WSJ

➤ Gary Kemp puts his neck on the block — Spandau ‘the best live British band of the Eighties’

Posted on 13 Mar 2011 | Leave a comment

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“I’m going to stick my neck out and say that we were the best live British band of the Eighties. Spandau Ballet’s records are an important part of the evolution of British pop music, and I’m enormously proud of them. We were part of the golden age of pop. We were a gang who made records.”
— Gary Kemp on Spandau Ballet in their heyday
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➢ Read today’s bold interview with Spandau’s songwriter Gary Kemp in the Mail on Sunday … In the zoot-suited shadows of Le Beat Route club, student journalist Dylan Jones — today the editor of GQ magazine — watched Kemp shoot the video that would launch Spandau Ballet to stardom. Thirty years later, they meet again

Jones writes:
Kemp’s band was more than just timely – the music they made was genuinely groundbreaking. No, the critics were not kind, painting them as dim, inner-city mannequins, yet their songs resonated with a generation of young men and women who were determined to explore social mobility in much the same way that their parents did in the 60s. Their most important record from this early period was Chant No 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On), a song that mirrored Ghost Town by the Specials.

“Chant No 1 was all about urban paranoia,” says Kemp. “I wanted to make a Soho film-noir song, something that was evocative of an urban experience. Dark shadows, dark corners. A fear of living on the edge in an urban environment as a young man. The early 80s were rough for most people, and I wanted to reflect that in the song. It’s a very dark track and one that mirrored the economic plight of the time.”