For their 15th album, Duran Duran collaborated with three masters of electronic music and a dog‑fixated artificial intelligence.

From their early ground‑breaking music videos to being one of the first acts to sell singles digitally, Duran Duran have always embraced the latest technology. The band’s latest album Future Past, their 15th to date, is no exception, with production split between Giorgio Moroder, Mark Ronson and Erol Alkan.

History & Energy

The group first began working on the new album in late 2018. Originally planned as an EP, it evolved into a full album before the process was halted when the worldwide pandemic hit in early 2020. Rather than continuing to work remotely, Duran Duran decided to put the project on ice.

“We work better when we’re mostly together,” says keyboard player Nick Rhodes. “I sometimes work independently because I have a lot more work to do on detail and there are more layers of synths, but when we’re writing and forming the shape of the songs, we will always work together. It’s only afterwards that we can get out the smaller brushes. Like Simon [Le Bon] will go in on his own with the engineer and producer and do all his vocals and figure out his harmonies and things like that.

“The main producer on the album was Erol Alkan, who we’ve never worked with before. He comes from a sort of indie and dance background and is a great DJ with a phenomenal knowledge of the history of music. I think his brain can only be rivalled by Mark Ronson’s. Between the two of them, you can name a track as obscure as you like, and they will know it. I find that quite inspirational. More than anything, I think Erol brought energy to the project, which was infectious, and it really helped particularly with the bass and drums.”

In The Dark

Once the band were able to regroup after lockdown ended, they returned to Assault & Battery Studios in Willesden Green to resume working on the album. “We did the bulk of the album there,” says Rhodes. “The studio had loads of analogue gear and a big analogue desk, a heavily modified Cadac G‑series, which we used for the drums and things like that. There was also a giant Roland System 700 modular synth sitting in the room, which we used on a few tracks in order to run sequencers with which we started writing.

“We set up in the control room with Roger [Taylor] playing a Roland TD‑30KV V‑Drum kit. And we had sequencers running from the Roland System 700 while I had four different keyboards to choose from. We had another keyboard on the other side of the room, too, in case somebody else wanted to play. And we usually created an atmosphere by having the studio as dark as possible when we were writing, with most of the light coming from the computer screens. It was a great room to work in at the studio.

“Because we usually build the palazzo from the foundations up, we’ve got to know what the bass and drums are doing at all times to be able to work around everything else. We often re‑record the bass and drums later if we want to tweak a little bit of something, but we don’t change the rhythm much. If we do change the rhythm, we will then have to rebuild the whole track. John [Taylor, bassist] and Roger are a very solid foundation, and I think their work on this album is the best they’ve done in a long time.”

Perfect Timing

The band worked with legendary producer Giorgio Moroder on two tracks, ‘Tonight United’ and ‘Beautiful Lies’. “Giorgio was everything we love in songs: sounds, melodies, arrangements and compacting things,” explains Rhodes. “Those two tracks are very Euro‑dance, with high‑energy pulsing synthesizers and sequencers, synth hooks and super‑hooky chorus lines and melodies. Giorgio is one of Duran Duran’s absolute superheroes and we’d been wanting to work with him since we first formed the band. When I was a teenager DJ’ing at the Rum Runner Club in Birmingham, I used to play a load of Giorgio tracks. I don’t know how we never managed to work with him over the past four decades, so to finally converge was great.

"We’ve had this vision in our heads of what it would sound like — the perfect blend of the Giorgio Moroder and Duran Duran sound — and for once it went predictably well. Everything we did just fell into place and sounded just as we envisaged it. He was the consummate professional, too. He’d turn up every day on time with his briefcase, get out his little keyboard and put it on the desk along with his computer and get to work.”

On another song, ‘More Joy!’ the group collaborated with a Japanese girl punk group called CHAI. With borders closed, this was largely done remotely, though lead vocalist Simon Le Bon did journey to Japan to record the track. “Simon engineered that one, as he spends some time in Japan where he has a small studio called SYN,” affirms Rhodes. “So that track was done remotely because they were in Japan doing the vocals with Simon.

“The track itself, though, came about out from a jam we wrote together with Graham Coxon. I think the guitar on that track is so spectacular and it was done completely live; there are no guitar overdubs on it at all. Sometimes when we were jamming on it, I couldn’t tell at certain points when I was putting things through effects or when Graham was putting things through effects. I didn’t know who was playing what. We loved working with Graham, as he is truly an inventive musician and a great energy in the room.”

Jupiter Rising

Despite Duran Duran’s emphasis on new technology, Nick Rhodes’ own musical contributions drew mainly on his collection of analogue synthesizers. “I barely use much that’s digital aside from the samples, particularly the orchestral samples. I do use some samples from Arturia, which I think are the best samples of analogue synthesizers out there. They’ve really worked hard to get the things as accurate as possible. They’re never going to be the same as analogue, though, because analogue sounds behave differently and synthesizers behave differently too, and they’ll be the first people to say that too. But if you want a sort of a low Moog bass or a Fairlight, which also sounds very close because that was digital anyway and only 8‑bit at the beginning, they’re it.

“I’ve used the same synths for many years, and I find myself constantly returning to my Roland synths: particularly the Jupiter 8, and sometimes the Jupiter 4. I have been also using the Roland Fantom; though it’s digital, I’m astounded by the quality of the reverb in it. It’s almost up there with the standard of a Lexicon. It’s extraordinary as I’ve never had a synth that has had that. I also use a Moog Voyager. I think there is no better bottom end sound than a Moog. I also used an Elka Synthex, a Prophet V and a lot of older analogue beasts.”

Other Beings

Cutting‑edge technology is apparent in the video for the album’s lead single, ‘Invisible’, the first to make use of an artificial intelligence called Huxley.

Nick Rhodes: It was a very fascinating experience working with another type of being, because it was much more than a computer.

“Huxley, our AI, is the most extraordinary machine,” exclaims Rhodes. “I think people are sometimes a little frightened of AI and what it’s going to do, and understandably so. As many of the great thinkers of the world have said, we must never let AIs become weaponised, because the leap in technology over the last decade has been phenomenal. With Huxley, what was interesting in making the video for ‘Invisible’ is that we fed in the song, photos of us, videos of us and, very specifically, videos of us mouthing the words to the song. Also, lyrics and references of what the song was about, along with some art references too, they all went in as well. After a while it learns like it is a child. Then the AI mapped all the measurements of our faces and took a load of photos and images and made its version of what it wanted it to look like. The blacked‑out faces was a shock! We didn’t tell it to black out our eyes, that’s just how it came back. I guess putting multiple layers of different images must have darkened the eyes.

“There were some strange things that happened along the way. At one point it became completely obsessed with dogs, and we didn’t know why. For about three days all it was doing was making dogs and we thought ‘This is going to go wrong!’ as there was no way to control it. So they then had to invent a director, who we called Hitchcock, to go in and give it a rule and try to persuade it by asking, ‘Can you make different types of animals?’ Then it started making all these different types of animals and strange creatures. It was a very fascinating experience working with another type of being, because it was much more than a computer. It was programmed to follow the same processes as the human brain. It’s based on the part of the brain that creates and dreams, rather than just the cognitive part that is logic and fact. The people that worked on it are all students of a prominent neuroscientist, Karl Friston.”

Change & Convenience

Through their 40‑year career, Duran Duran have successfully adapted to many such changes and developments in music technology. Looking back, Nick Rhodes pinpoints several that he believes were turning points. “There’s been a few of them that were game‑changers, such as sampling, for one. If you listen to an album like Fear Of A Black Planet by Public Enemy, you can hear what they were doing then with samples, making something really remarkable with them. And this was before anyone knew you had to credit people and that you weren’t supposed to just to take people’s things, which I’m sure they did very innocently.

I’ve used the same synths for many years, and I find myself constantly returning to my Roland synths: particularly the Jupiter 8, and sometimes the Jupiter 4... I also use a Moog Voyager. I think there is no better bottom end sound than a Moog.

“The Fairlight CMI, an Australian invention, was very significant in the beginning of proper sampling and digital synthesis. There weren’t many of us that had one at the time. I remember it was a very elite club as it was very expensive, but we had one along with Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Trevor Horn, Art Of Noise. The Akai samplers were another. Those Akai samplers made a real big difference. And the Linn Drum along with the Roland TR808 really revolutionised the sound of music through the early ’80s. We used drum machines from the very first album.

“I miss analogue tape, because I like the compression and I like lots of things about it. But there’s a convenience to being able to do things with a computer now and the use of digital effects and how you can mix and keep everything. I remember the very first automation for mixing desks. When we did our first album, Duran Duran [1981] there was me, producer Colin Thurston, the tape operator and whoever else was in the room, and there were like eight hands on the desk. My job might have been to turn on the echo at a certain point on the vocal, and I had to catch it in real time while somebody else had to ride up the string sound at the end of the song and somebody else had to mute the drums at a certain point. There was no automation. It was actually really exciting doing mixes that way, but it was a real drag when you got them wrong, because with some of them you had to do them 20 times to get them right.

“We take it for granted now with Pro Tools, and I also think people take it for granted when they cut things up, because it’s so easy to just sing a chorus and then say, ‘Right, now we’ve got it.’ We’ve tried very hard to never do that, as we try very hard to actually make it more of an experience and a performance. Simon, in particular, is not a fan at all of that cutting and pasting. He always likes to do all his vocals and the backing vocals for each chorus, and you will very rarely hear him say, ‘OK, you can take that and put it in the other place.’

“But where would dance music be without cut and paste? When we used to make 12‑inch versions of our very early songs, the night versions as they were called at the time, with songs like ‘Planet Earth’ and ‘Girls On Film’, we used to play them from start to finish. We would arrange the song and then go, ‘OK, we need another 24 bars there, so you do this with the drums and I’ll play this,’ and we’d literally rehearse an arrangement and then play it for nine minutes or so to a click to keep everything tight. There wasn’t a way to cut things up. Editing with tape was such a laborious process it just didn’t make sense to make 12‑inches like that. The first 12‑inch that we made by cutting tape was ‘Is There Something I Should Know’, which I did with producer Alex Sadkin.”

Immersive Mixing: Sony Reality Audio 360

Rhodes believes the key question about any new technology is whether it will enhance the music or whether it’s just a gimmick. The group were faced with this decision when it came to mixing the new album, which is being issued both in stereo and in Sony’s new Reality Audio 360 immersive format. “I played around with it in the studio with Josh [Blair, engineer] and it’s really good for headphones,” states Rhodes. “I would call it more like an enhanced stereo for around the head, as it’s not so much literally 360. You can put things in the middle in front of your face and move them over to the back of the head, and you can swirl things around the head and you really do feel it, which you wouldn’t think with just stereo in headphones that you would get that sensation.

“We wanted to do the album in that way because it’s a different way to listen to things. You will hear things in a way you wouldn’t if you just listened to it on regular headphones. Because the mixes are basically made from stems, you can pick something and you can, for example, make the snare drum move across diagonally from behind your head to a corner over in front of your head. We had so much fun doing that.”

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