We’re going off the beaten path for this one.
Back in October, I attended a discussion John Taylor held as
part of his promotional tour for his just-released memoir, In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death and Duran Duran. A friend had a spare ticket she wanted
to sell, and a friend of a friend of a friend was looking for a ticket, and
through The Power of Twitter, we met at the event and sorted everything out,
and a lovely time was had by all. The friend of a friend of a friend turned out
to be John Ares, also known as VJ Johnny Blitz, producer and host of the
New York cable-access series Music Madness, a music-interest show specializing in
hard-to-find videos.
John Ares is a delightful fellow with a deep and
comprehensive knowledge of music, who can talk circles around me on the subject
of Duran Duran. A charter member of the MTV generation, John's enthusiasm for the then-emerging field of music videos led to the creation of Music Madness in 1983. While the original run ended in 1986, John launched an expanded version in 1993, which ran until 2002; he still produces occasional one-off Music Madness specials. He's also the exclusive VJ of the Depeche Mode Fanclub New York. Anyway, he gave me a copy of a three-part Music Madness special
on John Taylor, taped in 1998 when John was touring with his post-Duran band,
John Taylor Terroristen. John Taylor sat down for a lengthy interview with him, covering his time with Duran Duran, his solo career, and his multiple
side projects, including the Power Station and Neurotic Outsiders as well as
Terroristen. Let’s take a look at it:
First up: John Ares and John Taylor discuss the origins of
John Taylor Terroristen. Of the band’s name, John says he was inspired by a
wanted poster in a German airport, which he describes as evoking, and I quote,
“a nineteen-se… cosmo… kind of… angry… thing.” Not his most articulate
statement ever, but he (mostly) gets the point across.
According to John Ares, John Taylor refused to have his hair and makeup done for this interview. Even without it, he still looks damn good.
According to John Ares, John Taylor refused to have his hair and makeup done for this interview. Even without it, he still looks damn good.
There’s some exclusive-to-Music Madness footage of
John singing “Better Way” at Life nightclub in New York during the East Coast
leg of his tour. The footage is very good—in fact, after this episode aired, John passed word through his manager to John Ares that it was the best live concert footage of his solo career he'd ever seen.
John's performance, on the other hand, is… fine. John Taylor is such a cool, likeable guy that I
find myself really wanting to say warm and fuzzy things about it, but… look, if Nick Rhodes or Simon Le Bon did something this
underwhelming, I wouldn’t hesitate to eviscerate them. This is because Nick and
Simon are—excuse me, gents, I mean this with love—a pair of hilarious, venal
bitches with gold-plated hides. If I ever wrote something they deemed unfair or
unflattering, Nick would sniff disdainfully about how Philistines can’t be
expected to understand True Art, and Simon would shrug and open a bottle of
wine worth more than my life, and neither would ever think of it again.* John, though… John’s different. He’s earnest. He cares.
I don’t have the heart to mock John Taylor, so I’ll leave it at this: There
might be a reason John Taylor Terroristen didn’t make many waves outside of
Taylor’s pre-established fanbase.
*And then there’s the curious case of Andy Taylor, who
apparently likes it when I take the piss out of Duran Duran. Andy’s kind
of special that way.
Next, John Ares brings up John Taylor’s involvement, along with fellow Duran Andy Taylor, in the
hugely influential 1985 supergroup Power Station, which generated two monster hits: “Some Like It
Hot” and “Get It On (Bang a Gong)”. Per John Taylor, Duran Duran’s huge success
primed him to expect similar big things from the Power Station: “Everything we
touched was turning to gold. I mean, Kajagoogoo went number one.” Heh. This, of
course, is a reference—a slightly catty reference, but also a funny and apt
one—to how Kajagoogoo’s debut album, which Nick Rhodes produced, resulted in a
number one hit with “Too Shy.”
By the way, John Taylor wears a Kabbalah bracelet throughout
this interview. There could be any number of reasons for this, but the most
likely explanation is probably because it’s 1998, and he’s a hip celebrity
living in Los Angeles.
John Ares brings up the Power Station’s 1985 appearance on Saturday
Night Live, in which John played his bass while wearing a silk
dress. You know, just because. 1985 was a fun year for Duran Duran. In
1985, the various Durans were all splitting up and splintering off and feuding
at Live Aid and getting into near-deadly yacht mishaps and doing weird things
with their hair, and were pretty much just going entertainingly bonkers in a
very public way from their limitless money and fame and power.
Case in point: This is what the three non-Power
Station-affiliated Durans were up to in 1985:
Oh, Arcadia. How I love you, Arcadia.
Music Madness then airs the complete video for “Get
It On (Bang a Gong)”, which premiered in the summer of 1985. Of course it did.
With its frenetic neon squiggles and its over-saturated pastels and John’s and
Andy’s enormous tangled mullets, it could not have been made in any
other year. A video made in 1985 could no more be mistaken for one made in,
say, 1982 than a film directed by David Lynch could be mistaken for one
directed by John Hughes.
The plot of the video is some hyper-stylized piffle about a
sexy lady who brings disaster everywhere she goes. Here, she has a terrible
mishap with a hair dryer. Busy with his mad guitar licks, Andy ignores her.
Meanwhile, John wears leather pants and loiters seductively
near an open toilet.
Back to the interview: John next discusses his first solo
hit, 1986’s “I Do What I Do” from the 9 1/2 Weeks soundtrack, which he
co-wrote with Michael Des Barres and frequent Duran Duran collaborator Jonathan
Elias. John also directed the video, which consists of clips from the movie
interspersed with footage of himself sitting in a darkened movie theater. Jim
Kerr, front man of Simple Minds, told John the song was the “best thing he’d ever
heard Duran Duran do,” which John laughingly describes as a “backhanded
compliment.” The word you’re looking for, John, is “insult.”
In his memoir, John states that, after showing Nick the
video, Nick replied, “That’s great, Johnny. But we can do so much more
together, don’t you think?” This is the through-line of John’s entire non-Duran
career. “I Do What I Do” isn’t a bad song (though it was nominated for
Worst Original Song at the 1986 Golden Raspberry Awards), nor is it a bad
video. Still, John’s more impressive as a vital part of Duran than he is when
he’s off doing his own thing.
Supergroup #2: In 1996, John teamed up with Steve Jones of
the Sex Pistols and Matt Sorum and Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses to form
Neurotic Outsiders. What started as a bunch of guys playing a regular Monday
night gig at the Viper Room led to a tour and an album deal with Guy Oseary at
Madonna’s Maverick Records. In the Music Madness interview, John Ares says
he’s surprised Neurotic Outsiders never received much attention outside of the
music industry. So am I—as you’d expect from that group of assembled talent,
their music is really good. Neurotic Outsiders only released one
official video, for their insanely catchy single “Jerk” (“You’re a bitch/I’m a
jerk/I don’t think that we will work”), which Music Madness airs here.
In the video’s performance scenes, John jumps around onstage while wearing a
kilt, which probably gave everyone in the front row a nice thrill.
And here’s another Music Madness exclusive: John
Taylor Terroristen’s live performance of “My Own Way.” Oh, holy hell, I’ve
changed my mind: I do have the heart to mock John Taylor. “My Own Way”
has never been one of Duran Duran’s stronger songs, but even so, John’s version
doesn’t do it justice. It’s droning and tuneless. It is the worst thing any
Duran has ever done, and I’ve heard their cover of “911 is a Joke.”
In 1995, pre-Terroristen, John released a solo album, Feelings
are Good (and Other Lies). Music Madness airs the video for his
single from the album, “Feelings R Good” (of the title, John wryly notes,
“Irony intended”), which was included on a bonus CD-ROM with his 1997 solo EP Autodidact.
Full props to John here: pretty great video, pretty great song (even with
lyrics like “I’m sad, and I want my dad.” Duran Duran’s reigning poet, Simon
“cherry ice-cream smile, I suppose it’s very nice” Le Bon, is not threatened.
Nor, for that matter, is Duran’s emergency back-up lyricist, Nick “emotionless
and cold as ice, all of the things I like” Rhodes). The video features stark
black-and-white footage of John working out his various psychological issues
whilst running around Manhattan with a megaphone. It’s good.
And now, finally, John gets around to discussing his time
with Duran Duran. He stresses how naturally everything—the hit songs, the
iconic videos, their distinctive visual style—came to them in the band’s early
days: “If we were a board game, it’d be easy to play.” Strictly speaking, they were
a board game, and from all reports, they were easy to play.
Ah, here we go, Duran Duran’s 1989 video for “Burning the
Ground,” in which they took all of their singles up to that date, chewed them
up into a masticated pulp, and spat them in the general direction of the mixing
board. NME’s editor Steve Sutherland once snarked memorably that “Wild Boys” sounds “like an epileptic outbreak in a woodworking class”; multiply that
by a thousand for “Burning the Ground.” Like the song, the video smooshes all
of Duran’s earlier videos together, then tosses in some ill-advised footage of
burning rain forests and a neon-enhanced Space Shuttle (a nod to the image of
the Space Shuttle on the Stephen Sprouse-designed cover of their 1989
compilation album Decade) for good measure. It’s both terrible and
awesome. It is sheer giddy lunacy, in an inimitably Duran way.
Amongst all the video clips in “Burning the Ground” is that
footage of John and Nick getting doused by the elephant in “Save a Prayer.”
Yep. Still the best thing ever. Can’t see that too many times.
And then there’s one final Music Madness exclusive
performance by John Taylor Terroristen: “Hey Day,” which features vaguely
autobiographical Duran-themed lyrics in the manner of George Harrison’s “When
We Was Fab”: “We made a good noise/We made the sun shine/We met some more
guys/And we changed their lives.”
In wrapping the interview up, John Ares asks John Taylor
where he sees himself in the next ten years. John replies, “No clue,” adding
that he hopes to be known as “an artist, good dad, husband, well-rounded human
being.” It’s been fourteen years since he sat down for this interview, and
these days he does indeed seem to be all of that (he can also add “best-selling
author” to that list. Here he is, posing with John Ares at a book signing in October).
At the time this interview was taped, though, he was still a
couple years away from rejoining Duran Duran. I’ve no doubt he needed the time by himself—to get his head on straight, to set his own schedule, to clear all the
glitter and hair gel out of his system. As he wrote in his memoir, “The lines
between me and Duran had become so blurred that I didn’t know what I was
capable of alone.” Returning to Duran, though, gives his story a better third
act. It’s good to have him back.
(Remastered DVDs of the three-part Music Madness Special: John Taylor: Past, Present & Future may be ordered by contacting John Ares directly at MusicMadnessTV@aol.com. Visit VJ Johnny Blitz's Facebook page here.)
(Remastered DVDs of the three-part Music Madness Special: John Taylor: Past, Present & Future may be ordered by contacting John Ares directly at MusicMadnessTV@aol.com. Visit VJ Johnny Blitz's Facebook page here.)
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