MakingOf: Alright gentlemen, thanks so much for sitting down with us. First, just want to know what everyone is asking, where did the decision land for Mr. David Lynch?
John Taylor: Ah, we were just talking about that actually.
Nick Rhodes: It’s very exciting!
MO: It’s super exciting! I’m really excited to see this.
JT: How did we…
NR: Well we hooked up actually, first to do a remix. He’d done a remix of our song “Girl Panic” and it came through and we listened to it and said, “Woah! That is actually really unusual!” It’s just so out there, so different than what you’d expect from a remix. ‘Cause remixes tend to come back and you usually say, “Eh, it’s ok, yeah, I like that bit, it’ll work for the dance floor.” He looked at it as a piece of music and let’s make something really interesting with it. Which is what remixes used to be I think, and loved it. So we hooked up with American Express and they said, who do you want to direct your concert? And he [David Lynch] was really right at the top of the list. He’s one of the most creative filmmakers out there, has been for over three decades now and honestly, he’s made a lot of our favorite movies, so, hey, couldn’t wait!
MO: You guys have seen the, kind of, rise and fall of music videos, you guys were in the heyday of music videos, how have you guys grasped the internet in providing information to your fans and new music to your fans…
NR: I’ve seen John Taylor tweet four times in the last five minutes!
JT: I think, when we made the decision, we made the decision to get together with iTunes, and we put out a nine-song version of our album, with iTunes and it was kind of a big deal for us to do that. But putting all your money on one number and we kind of felt, Nick and I, we realized that it was something we wanted to do, something that we felt very strong about. And as it was getting closer to the release date, I kind of felt that it behooved me to, you know, I got involved personally, to get online and really start talking up the album. And the week that the album came out, on iTunes, right before Christmas, I had just got myself on Facebook and Twitter, and the excitement and, just what it created, the engery, was created around the release of the music on iTunes, and me getting involved, engagement with the fans all around the world. Watching the album, the success of the album, it was just…I didn’t think it was possible to have that much fun in the music business, then. So I had such a good time and I think what it’s done, besides get me involved in Twitter, is that our fans are feeling the creativity again, that they haven’t felt in maybe 20 years. And that’s a big part of what makes a band’s fan base is the degree to which they interact. And I think the last album that we did, came out a few years ago and that was a time when we really, the music industry was down and we really didn’t know where it was going to go next. And I think we really, like three years later, the music industry has really gotten in sync with the internet, we’re feeling good again. Feeling kind of healthy, and we’re enjoying ourselves.
MO: What advice do you have for young, I mean you’ve obviously had this question millions of times, but what advice do you have for aspiring bands right now? What should they be doing and how should they be focusing on the music, but also focusing on their fan base?
NR: Well I think that the first thing that you have to focus on is what you want to be, and you have to have a vision and you have to stay true to that vision and really concentrate on the song writing, performance, and getting your ideas into the shape where you can convey them to people. I mean, honestly, I like to listen to a lot of new stuff, I know John listens to even more than I do. But it’s very rare that I find something that I’m really, completely knocked out by. And I think the reason for that is that a lot of people out there are making things that are very derivative, a lot of things that we’ve heard before, and there’s not enough people taking risks. When we started the band, the most important thing to us was to do something new, to carve out our own sound that wasn’t anything to do with anybody else’s. And I guess that’s the best advice that I could give to any new artist, just find your own space and then other things fall into place.
JT: You said something interesting the other day, I thought, when you said “I think if I was starting a band today, I’d have a videographer in the back.” Which I think is really interesting, because it’s very easy to lose energy talking about all this social network stuff and whatever and having fun with it, but it’s got o be a real drain, you know, and you do have to preserve your energy for your artistic statements. I mean, we’re having a lot of fun right now because we’ve been sequestered in the studio for a year and a half and we’re finally out, we made an album that we feel really good about. We were on lock down for 18 months.
MO: That has to be exhausting keeping up the twitter and the Facebook and the posting and everything. That’s another part of the job now.
NR: I mean, I haven’t started with it yet. I’m thinking about it. I have some ideas for it. But I suppose my thought has always been, the ones that are successful the ones that people follow are people that are pretty constant. I understand that. Cause once you get into it you got that little window into somebody elses thought process. I suppose you could get addicted to it the same way you get addicted to soap operas.
MO: Do you think you guys could have predicted when you were starting out where the music industry would head?
JT: A lot of people on the internet and on the street talk to me about “WOW could you have imagined if we had this in the 80’s?”. I say you are crazy. There is no way we could have cooped with that. We would all be basket cases by now. There are people who have been able to predict how technology is going to change. There are some science fiction writers that talk about how information would be moved around.
NR: well in 1997 we became the first band to sell a download over the internet. It was a song called Electric Barberella and fondly enough at that time I personally battled with Capital Records & EMI to get them to allow us to download a song for sale. We were selling it, so it wasn’t giving away free. And they were so against it for such a long time and then eventually, I suppose as an experiment that they allowed us to do it. And I thought that when we did it, we sat down in Abbey Road and I pushed the button, 99 cents and the thing came back, didn’t sound great, it was a crushed up little file that later became known as an MP3, and I didn’t love the sound of it, but I knew that that was the future then and it was so obvious that you’d click a button and you can get a track and, already obviously, Napster was out there, but I can’t, still get my head around the fact that why the labels were so unbelievably foolish in their handling of selling music over the internet and that’s why Apple won the war.
MO: What would you say that your most rewarding experience has been here so far?
JT: Well it feels really good to be where we’re at right now. We’re just about to put an album out, it’s our 13th studio album and we love it as much as anything that we’ve done and that’s a real achievement…
NR: Yeah, I think getting to now is…
MO: Yeah! You guys look great, you look happy, healthy, that’s awesome. Well thanks so much guys, I did a horrible version of Girls on Film last night at karaoke…
JT: Do we get royalties on that?
MO: You wouldn’t want royalties on that…it was bad. But thank you so much and congratulations, can’t wait to check it out.
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