MARK LINDORES
To say that Duran Duran were at a crossroads in 1991 as they readied their seventh studio album is no understatement. The new decade had seen the advent of genres like rave, rap and grunge – none of which were an obvious fit for Duran Duran, or “Done Done” as some crueller sections of the media had taken to calling them. 1990’s Liberty spent one week in the Top 10 before falling out of the charts; the single Violence Of Summer only scraped the Top 20 while Serious missed the Top 40 altogether.
“After Liberty, we decided we weren’t sure we had gotten the direction right,” recalls Nick Rhodes. “A funny thing happens when a decade changes. In reality, not much happens on that day, but people think, ‘Right, now things have changed’. Somehow at the end of the Eighties, music changed considerably. We had grunge, techno and rave culture, which left us in a place where we felt we had to make ourselves relevant to the times. We weren’t about to make a grunge or techno album, but we had our songwriting. We very much went back to basics. We went to the studio and wrote and wrote.”