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Q&A with John Taylor |
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John Taylor:
Easy as a Nuclear War
Whether it was swinging around yachts or making like road warriors for their budget-busting "Wild Boys" clip, Duran Duran invented the music video as a postmodern playground of the imagination. Guitarist John Taylor recalls how he became an unwilling innovator.
VH1: Were Duran Duran originally reluctant to make music videos?
John Taylor: It was some time before we accepted them as something we wanted to do, but it was a great tool. The band wouldn't have to go around the world to promote a hit. So the videos had a real impact in America. We couldn't understand why, in every interview that we'd do, people would talk about the videos. With songs like "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Rio," you saw them first. The music and visuals were one to most people. They imagined that we spent months and months making them, but you could knock them off in a 12-hour session.
VH1: What inspired the look of Duran Duran's videos?
Taylor: At the beginning of the '80s, the best video for me was Ultravox's "Vienna," which nodded to genuine cinema by focusing on a third person. We did that on "Hungry Like the Wolf." Everybody was obsessing over Apocalypse Now at the time, so we took one or two little visual ideas - well, three or four, actually - and put them in the context of that song.
VH1: Did Duran Duran set out to achieve any fame for their videos?
Taylor: Not really. I'm a musician. I'm not a filmmaker. We worked with Russell Mulcahy, who wrote the book on music video. He always did something that surprised us. But we were making so many records, we couldn't sit down and try to creatively plan our videos. "Wild Boys" was the first time that we wrote a song for a video. We had talked with Russell about The Wild Boys, the William Burroughs book, which he wanted to develop into a full-length feature. He talked to us about writing a song for it. We wrote the song, and he put the ideas that he developed for the feature in the video. That was the first time that we had written a song, thinking about how it was going to look.
VH1: How do you think MTV changed popular music?
Taylor: Thank God for MTV! It brought a new level of energy to the charts. Youth became important. MTV was forced to have a new agenda because it couldn't play the songs that radio was playing. Had there been videos for Air Supply and Christopher Cross, they would have played them. But they didn't exist, so they had to look to the newer music - artists like Duran Duran and Ultravox - who were making these videos.
VH1: How much of Duran Duran's success could be attributed to music videos?
Taylor: It definitely put us in the homes of millions of Americans. But we were good for video, too. We were a textbook case of how you could promote a band using the medium, and we evolved very quickly to really show what could be done.
VH1: Did you ever encounter any acts who rejected music video because they thought it would ruin their career?
Taylor: Established artists like the Stones, Rod Stewart, and David Bowie had to get with it, but if you're a survivor, you adapt to these new ideas. It became a very indie attitude not to make videos. George Michael [said he wasn't going to do] any videos for his second album. But nobody bought it until you relented and made one. You make a video for a song if you want it to be a success, and who goes into the recording studio unless they want a success?
VH1: Were you surprised that the "Girls on Film" video caused such an uproar over its sexual content?
Taylor: We knew exactly what we were doing with the "Girls on Film" video. Or if we didn't, our manager did. Before MTV came along, the only way you could see videos was in the rock clubs. Our videos for "Planet Earth" and "Careless Memories" were doing well. So we created "Girls on Film," which was Playboy meets Hustler. It was a horrible thing to shoot, no fun at all. We just weren't those kinds of guys, you know? But it came out and caused a stir, and … thanks very much!
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