"Astronaut" took more than two years to make, and it wasn't always easy. ("We're a tough room," Rhodes says.) But with the help of such diverse producers as R&B master Dallas Austin (TLC) and rap-metal master Don Gilmore (Linkin Park), the album is a raver's dream, complete with lush imagery ("Taste the Summer") and plenty of sex talk ("Bedroom Toys"). It manages to sound exactly like Duran Duran without being a stuck-in-the-'80s retread.
"It's got real depth to it," says LeBon. "We're not just fluff. We're fluff and we're depth."
"We're not just fluff. We're fluff and we're depth," says Simon LeBon, center, with Nick Rhodes, left, John Taylor, Roger Taylor, Andy Taylor.
(Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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"We've always been a contemporary band," Rhodes adds. "This wasn't a push for us to do. We actually got in and started playing together and it just sounded like us now. . . . We're a democracy that works. Somehow we all manage to persuade each other in the end."
No less an authority than Mark Goodman, one of the first MTV VJs (you know: big hair, looked a little like Sweathog Juan Epstein) and now the host of three Sirius Satellite Radio shows, says "Astronaut" "is one of the best records they've ever done. . . . They realized that the whole is better than the individual parts. . . . In the '80s, there was a real focus on the visual aspect of the band. Today, their music stands on its own."
Of course, the blokes don't take themselves too seriously. They know their mission.
Says Andy Taylor: "I remember doing ["Sunrise"] with Don, and he says he wants a beat like that" -- he pounds out a slow heavy beat on the table -- "and I said, 'You don't understand. You have to be able to dance to a Duran Duran tune. Big chords, propulsive beats.' "
"We like to lift people's spirits, our own included," Rhodes says. "We are absolute optimists, even in the face of what we've all experienced the last few years. You've got to look beyond it, see your way out, or it's all doom and gloom."
You can call the band cheerleaders all you want, just don't call them an " '80s band." They've had just about enough of that. "The last photograph of this band was taken in 1985," says John Taylor. "So there's a reason why the image of this band is linked to the '80s. People watched us grow through the decade. But this now is changing all that. Now all of a sudden it's like a genie out of the bottle."
"I like to think of us like the Mini Cooper," says Roger Taylor. "Everyone used to think that was a classic '60s car. But it was only when it was kind of reinvented a bit, everyone started to think it was a classic timeless car."
"Astronaut" debuted at No. 3 on the U.K. album charts and No. 17 on the U.S. Billboard charts. The band will embark on a world tour in February, which, if it's anything like last year's quickie tour, will be sold out all over. And yes, they'll even make some videos, although they acknowledge that getting back on the now-hip-hop-centric MTV will be tough. "I guess we'd have to do a reality show," says Rhodes with a roll of his eyes.
Still, the musicians say this is the most exciting time of their careers, especially because skeptics who once wrote them off as vainglorious pretty boys have come around and are finally focusing on the music.
"When we started, Duran Duran was quite unpopular with a lot of the music critics," Rhodes says. "They didn't like change. They wanted to cling to Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen, whatever they'd grown up with. It's taken a long time for that to be put into perspective. . . . Jean Cocteau's quote is the best one: First they ban you, then they put you in a museum."
Rhodes smiles at his colleagues: "We're like five sages, aren't we?"
