GQ LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD/ MEN OF THE YEAR 2011
By Simon Mills | Photos by John Wright | 07 October 2011
By Simon Mills | Photos by John Wright | 07 October 2011
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Duran Duran keyboard player Nick Rhodes believes 2011 has been one of the best of his band's 33-year career. And by the looks of it - GQ spying the musician sitting in a corridor by the Savoy hotel's ballroom where a devastating clowder of supermodels (Yasmin Le Bon, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Helena Christensen) are getting primped to appear in a Jonas Åkerlund-directed video for the band's single "Girl Panic!" - he's not wrong. To top it off, they've just been named as GQ's Lifetime Achievement award winners. "Wow. Well, you've got to love any event that brings together Alice Cooper and David Cameron under the same roof," laughs Rhodes.
So how come this band still hold such a cache of cool? Well, as much as the recherché romantics in us love classics like "Rio", there is also something particularly impressive about the manner in which a group, now in their fourth decade, made up of slim and dapper men in the peak of middle age, still strive tirelessly for relevance, fashionability and modernity. Survivors, modelisers, wolves in chic clothing, unapologetic guy-liner wearers and pretentious punk-disco cheek-suckers, Duran Duran don't stop.
During the past decade and a half, contemporary artists such as the Killers and Panic! At The Disco ("All bands that we like," points out Rhodes) have named them as an influence, prompting an almost perpetual re-evaluation of Duran's style and back catalogue by critics who might have written them off as an Eighties teeny phenomenon. Mark Ronson produced the group's last album All You Need Is Now (which last December reached No.1 in the iTunes pop chart), while Timbaland helmed Red Carpet Massacre before that, and even back in 1997, Duran Duran's "Electric Barbarella" single became the first song available for download on the internet.
"Our original manifesto has been to collaborate with fashion, art, photography, design and architecture," Rhodes says, grandly. "I guess I've always thought of Duran Duran as a kind of ongoing art project."
Click here to see Duran Duran receiving their Men Of The Year award.
Originally published in the October 2011 issue of British GQ.
So how come this band still hold such a cache of cool? Well, as much as the recherché romantics in us love classics like "Rio", there is also something particularly impressive about the manner in which a group, now in their fourth decade, made up of slim and dapper men in the peak of middle age, still strive tirelessly for relevance, fashionability and modernity. Survivors, modelisers, wolves in chic clothing, unapologetic guy-liner wearers and pretentious punk-disco cheek-suckers, Duran Duran don't stop.
During the past decade and a half, contemporary artists such as the Killers and Panic! At The Disco ("All bands that we like," points out Rhodes) have named them as an influence, prompting an almost perpetual re-evaluation of Duran's style and back catalogue by critics who might have written them off as an Eighties teeny phenomenon. Mark Ronson produced the group's last album All You Need Is Now (which last December reached No.1 in the iTunes pop chart), while Timbaland helmed Red Carpet Massacre before that, and even back in 1997, Duran Duran's "Electric Barbarella" single became the first song available for download on the internet.
"Our original manifesto has been to collaborate with fashion, art, photography, design and architecture," Rhodes says, grandly. "I guess I've always thought of Duran Duran as a kind of ongoing art project."
Click here to see Duran Duran receiving their Men Of The Year award.
Originally published in the October 2011 issue of British GQ.