_{Duran Duran/Photo Credit: John Swannell}

‘You’re going to get enough songs to dance, cry and reminisce to,’ says John Taylor, looking ahead to Duran Duran’s first ever show in the Highlands. ‘But you’re also going to get interesting newer work.’ He laughs. ‘You just have to trust us.'

He is at home in the English countryside when we speak, but could as easily be in London or Los Angeles, Manhattan or Berlin. He lives a global life and has done since 1982 when the band which he co-founded (with childhood pal Nick Rhodes) became the biggest in the world for a couple of years. He is garrulous and affable, a rake turned raconteur. At 61, there is still plenty evidence of the outrageous handsomeness (as far as it’s possible to tell over Zoom) that saw him named in Smash Hits as most fanciable male for umpteen years on the trot. 

He was, according to a recent book on the New Romantic scene, ‘considered to be the principal pin-up’ of the era. Taylor had the looks, yes, but also the chops. It was his exuberant syncopated basslines that made Duran Duran exciting in the first place, and the reason why songs from their classic period still sound alive. The synth melodies, the suits and hair, and the exotic videos may have caught the eyes and ears of a generation, but it was the rhythm section that gave that music its priapic disco vigour. Listen to the bass in 'Rio' and 'Girls On Film': just pure lust. 

‘I was very instinctual as a player,’ Taylor says. ‘I picked up a bass and it just started playing me.’ He listens sometimes to the band’s earliest records and is amazed at their accomplishment, given that he and the others were only fledgling musicians. Duran Duran, pop futurists, have always had a horror of nostalgia, but Taylor allows some tender feelings towards his earlier self: ‘God, this kid really had something.’

The room of the 15th-century manor house in which he is speaking (oak beams, wood-panelling, guitar propped against an antique globe) speaks to the material comforts of stardom. ‘We’ve had very privileged lives as a result of the success we had early in our careers,’ he says. ‘It’s very easy to get complacent.’ Not that they have; they do try to keep pushing forward creatively, but a little smugness would be understandable given that Duran Duran’s rise seemed, well, not destined exactly, but certainly devised with keen strategic intent. 

On 16 July 1980, following a gig in their native Birmingham, their first with Simon Le Bon as singer, Taylor and Rhodes shared a taxi home, planning the milestones on the road to world domination: Wembley by 1983, Madison Square Garden by 1984. Le Bon, no wallflower, opened that show with the words, ‘We’re Duran Duran and we want to be the band you dance to when the bomb drops.’

_{The Rio Era/Photo Credit: Andy Earl}

Those early shows at Birmingham’s Rum Runner club, where they were the resident band, were characterised by a sense that Duran Duran were already on top of every presentational detail. Taylor and Rhodes, two years his junior, had been going to see bands since their early teens (Roxy, Iggy, Blondie) and had a keen sense of the way in which artists could, through stagecraft and charisma, appear to be in control of time and reality. Control: that was the key idea, but when they broke through, when the screaming started and they could no longer hear themselves play, did it feel like they had lost that?

‘I would agree,’ Taylor nods. ‘It’s a bit like going on a fairground ride that looks like fun, but then you get on it and you go, "Oh shit". Had I been sober throughout that time, had I been able to apply the same focus that I can today, and that I did in the beginning, maybe it would have been okay. But I went on stage too many times worn out from the night before. It was quite challenging, that period. I thought that being in a pop group was somehow going to be an endless graceful circling of an ice rink. I just didn’t realise there were going to be so many obstacles and bumps. They didn’t teach you about that at grammar school. But the beauty of Duran, and the reason we’ve survived, is that there’s a lot of resourcefulness in the band.’

Taylor entered rehab in 1994. Playing concerts without alcohol and drugs, he feels an empathy with the audience, as if the band and the crowd are all part of the same communal expression of love for music. Another significant change from the years of superstardom is that the songs mean more to people. They now come with all sorts of associations and memories. That it's within Duran Duran’s gift to sing people’s lives back to them is not something Taylor takes for granted. ‘I’m trying to avoid using "miraculous" or "extraordinary", but it is. To have a handful of songs, or two handfuls of songs, that have that ability to transport people is wonderful.’

The beautiful ballad ‘Ordinary World’ does all that, but has of late taken on deeper resonances, too. Playing it when less restrictive covid rules made live music possible again, and dedicating it at a recent performance to the people of Ukraine, the song has come to embody a sense of yearning that many feel for a world they recognise. ‘It’s got a transcendent spirit and brings hope in a way,’ Taylor says. ‘Kind of like the best hymns. Sometimes it is hard to put into words what one is feeling. You look through the newspaper in the morning and you are bombarded with events. But a certain song can allow you to let the feelings out.’

This may indeed be Duran Duran’s purpose in the universe: good time music for when the times are bad.

Duran Duran play The Caledonian Stadium, Inverness, on Saturday 2 July.