Tag Archives: John Taylor

Never ask an artist “Why?” An inner Rhodes and another Cuccurullo, step up to brand their new project, TV Mania

➢ Nick Rhodes will exhibit a collection of original photographic works for sale at The Vinyl Factory Soho, London W1F 7BE, March 8-April 5. The collection, entitled Bei Incubi – translated as Beautiful Nightmares – will feature 20 Polaroids, and more than 30 original photographs and prints that have all been taken and signed by Nick.

❚ THE PHOTO SHOW celebrates the release on Monday of Nick Rhodes’s new experimental electronic album Bored with Prozac and the Internet? in a collaboration with former Duran Duran guitarist Warren Cuccurullo. Originally created in the mid-90s for the Broadway stage as the music to a “bizarre TV soap opera”, the tracks tell the tale of Cathy and Ray (named from the cathode ray tube) and their two children Sassy and Snoop, a fame-hungry family who give away their freedom to scientists in exchange for reality-show fame.

Bored was culled from a collection of tunes recorded when the band were between day jobs. Using samples from such sources as The Outer Limits and the British TV show Planet Fashion, TV Mania’s pastiche of cool beats and melodic hooks proved surprisingly prescient.

“It was innocently masquerading as an art-rock project, but there was a deep concept behind it all,” Cuccurullo says. “We were envisioning a world where a family would give up their day-to-day privacy and allow their existence to be televised to the masses, and this was two years before Truman showed and four years before Survivor. Now everyone is giving away their most intimate details online and on reality TV.”

“In 1996 the internet was still in its infancy,” Rhodes adds. “I was fascinated by communication and how things were becoming more instant and this was decades before all the sites we have now to communicate in different ways.”

A few months after Rhodes and Cuccurullo finished recording Bored with Prozac, a series called Big Brother hit the airwaves. “We looked at each other in absolute disbelief,” Rhodes says. “It was an idea that was in the ether at the time. We decided to lock it in the bottom drawer whilst we changed the story.”

➢ More details at TV Mania’s website

TAYLOR’s TALE FROM LOST SOUL TO HUMAN BEING

John Taylor grilled for Google… Click on pic to run video in another window

❏ Also published today: John Taylor bassist and cofounder of Duran Duran can now be seen on video visiting Google Los Angeles last November to discuss his frank autobiography In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death and Duran Duran. [Click on the pic to run video in another window]

Taylor tells his audience: “I have to fight to hold onto my memory these days, because there’s so much info coming at me… I started formulating an idea for the book, which is in three parts. There’s growing up in the 60s in the Midlands of England and becoming ‘John’… It’s a coming-of-age book, watching this little kid, an only child, and how he got into music. I had to find it for myself, at that time, 12-13-14, where the desire to remake my identity was so strong, and music in the UK had a lot of very strong personalities: David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Rod Stewart, Bryan Ferry. And for a kid who was not really connecting with school, I started connecting with these guys.

“The second section is hysteria and that’s really about the first five years of the 80s, this wild ride Duran Duran took. Then the third part is about becoming an adult human being … some of the more profound highlights of the last 15 years: losing parents, gaining children, marriages, divorces, all of that sort of real-life stuff. But through the lens of an ex-popstar.”

FRONT PAGE