You can`t do some of the things you used to do. I suppose you have to go at a gentler pace. I mean, God help us, you can`t sit at home being a Vicar or anything.
The thing about Duran... that gives you the ability to bring all that opportunity back into your life.
I discovered that it was a lonely world being a solo artist. Then I started working with another solo artist, Rod Stewart, and he used to tell me how lonely he was!
We were very young in Duran, and to get pushed in a corner can be very difficult to get out of.
From doing Power Station, it was like, it`s the same guys, but it doesn`t sound like them. When we were in Duran, the labels and management wanted more Duran stuff so they could sell it.
We had a huge audience, we sold truckloads of albums. If we do something that`s cool, people will listen to it. If we don`t, we would be selling people short.
When you have such a huge past, a big background as we have, you can play off that-a lot of people do. But we felt we wouldn`t have a legitimate future unless we put something new together.
It was mind-blowing. It was a small place with 2,000 standing-up tickets. It`s great to have your band back and working and playing again, people have been so generous.
I thought it would be weird if Duran Duran came back but didn`t have a great song the whole world could sing. That`s one of the things that drives us.
We wanted to get everyone back focused on the fact we are playing live again. It really does sound great.
We`ve kinda been watching the business fall apart and have been wondering how to take care of our business and make sure it doesn`t get affected.
Music is escapism, it`s entertainment.
This is a very screwed-up business. Record labels don`t sign a lot of bands these days. We just want to find a home and stay there and make records and do our thing and not have to look over our shoulder.
Melodic songs that people can relate to has always been our thing.
The five of us don`t know how to exist in any other way. We are an ambitious bunch, I guess.
When you are younger, you are running on that pure naive adrenalin, you don`t have any real responsibility aside from making sure you get there and play. And there`s usually someone there to help you do that!
There are very few guys you meet in your life that you can work with, but the five of us just know what the other guys are thinking and where we fit.
We`ve never actually stopped talking. We all saw each other-there wasn`t any great divide. There were no big walls or barriers to get over.
We didn`t just want to go out and do that whole greatest hits thing.
We recorded a bunch of the shows because they were the first shows we`d done back together. We wanted to have a memento of them.
You want to have stability in the commercial aspect of your operation.
It was fairly evident that nobody wanted to do this as a one-off thing. It`s too big a part of our life to do it quickly and dispose of it.
Those were the days, you know. It`s an English thing; as soon as it`s gets to 6 pm, you have to go and have a drink. We used to stick to that religiously.
Some of those songs, you really have to bite them. You challenge yourself, you challenge the audience, you do something different. People weren`t expecting it.
We play a long show, and you can`t beat yourself up too much over it, as physically you just kill yourself. It was always good fun on the road and it still is.
Rock n roll is what I would die for, but I love music and I love exploring, taking the challenge of playing, writing or singing... or producing.
The great thing about the Internet is that it allows people to find and consume music.
I don`t think you need a record deal to write songs. You don`t need any other reason than you want to do it. It`s a far cry from why some people do music today. They make it to order, which is pretty horrible.
To passively get up and play a bunch of old songs wouldn`t have really motivated us. So we are bringing the new material into the set and it goes down really well.
If you were looking at where you would like your career to go, then you would have to cherry pick The Stones. People love coming to see them. They are it, they are the most definitive rock n roll band ever.
When you don`t have a record label and you have been on your own as we have, you can look at all these other ways you can get in touch with other people and get music out there again.
We felt if we didn`t have new material in us and we didn`t have a real reason to exist, then we probably wouldn`t have done an 80`s revival thing. We are very conscious about the fact that`s what we are as a bunch of people.