{"id":976,"date":"2015-12-10T10:47:12","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T18:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/?p=976"},"modified":"2023-03-05T15:37:25","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T23:37:25","slug":"duranalysis-power-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/duranalysis-power-station\/","title":{"rendered":"Duranalysis: The Power Station"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201c\u2026an album that was made by some guys once, and that\u2019s it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been paying a lot of extra attention to Simon and Nick in recent Duranalyses. Since I don\u2019t want Andy and John to feel neglected*, this week I\u2019m taking a look at the Power Station, the supergroup John and Andy formed in 1984 with singer Robert Palmer and drummer Tony Thompson of Chic; Chic bassist Bernard Edwards produced the band\u2019s self-titled 1985 album, which scored two monster hit singles with \u201cSome Like It Hot\u201d and a cover of T. Rex\u2019s \u201cGet It On (Bang a Gong)\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*I\u2019ve probably paid even less attention to Roger than to Andy and John, but I feel confident Roger prefers it that way, thank you very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d intended to focus on the videos for \u201cSome Like It Hot\u201d and \u201cGet It On (Bang a Gong)\u201d, both of which were directed by Peter Heath, but\u2026 well, the videos are\u00a0fine<\/em>, but there\u2019s not much there to\u00a0Duranalyze. Of the two major Duran Duran side projects, Arcadia clearly came up with the more interesting and visually striking videos. No contest. So instead, I\u2019m examining the band\u2019s electronic press kit<\/a>,\u00a0a fourteen-minute behind-the-scenes featurette\u00a0showcasing the album recording sessions and the filming of the \u201cSome Like It Hot\u201d video. The usual warnings about muddy screenshots taken from grainy VHS footage some kind soul uploaded to YouTube apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s three in the morning, and the assembled members of the Power Station are swilling Heinekens and giving dramatic interpretive readings of the \u201cSome Like It Hot\u201d lyrics (complete with requisite circumscribe\/circumcise puns) and bopping around in the control room of a New York recording studio. This particular studio\u2019s name happens to be\u2014wait for it\u2014The Power Station; the band took its name from the studio (whereas\u00a0Nick named\u00a0Arcadia after Nicolas Poussin\u2019s\u00a0Et in Arcadia Ego<\/em>. The differences in the stylistic approaches of the two bands are already readily apparent). Raucous decadence is in the air:\u00a0In Andy\u2019s memoir<\/a>, he talks about how he and John moved into New York\u2019s Carlyle Hotel while making the album and managed to rack up a $450,000 bill over six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Next, we hop on over to the Meantime Film Studios in Greenwich, England, where everyone is busy making the \u201cSome Like It Hot\u201d video. We see some behind-the-scenes footage of John and Andy shredding it on their guitars by a big fake cactus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Again, the \u201cSome Like It Hot\u201d video is fine<\/em>. There\u2019s no plot, but the bright, stark, cartoonish visuals\u2014flaming cacti, neon lipstick, flashbulbs\u2014are a good match for the driving, pulsing, overheated nature of the song. John looks good, as usual, but it\u2019s Andy, with his tangled rat\u2019s nest of hair and his tight leather pants and his crisscrossed bandoliers, who really steals the video. The ratty, scruffy image he sported during this time might\u2019ve been a terrible match for his sleek and well-coiffed bandmates in Duran Duran, but for rough-and-tumble Power Station? It\u2019s perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

John hangs out in his trailer on the set while wearing a baggy cow print blazer with padded shoulders which, defying all reason, manages to look pretty darn good on him. He fumbles his way through an explanation of the video\u2019s concept, which is about \u201c\u2026individuals in individual situations. It\u2019s all pretty surreal.\u201d As if realizing he hasn\u2019t shed too much light on the subject, he shrugs and concludes, \u201cI like things that are nice to look at.\u201d Fair enough, John. So do I, and that\u2019s why you\u2019ll always have a place in my heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

John describes the video\u2019s featured performer, actress\/model Caroline \u201cTula\u201d Cossey (who, in 1991, became the first trans woman to pose for Playboy<\/em>), as a \u201cwonderful six-foot Amazon. She\u2019s quite a daunting prospect for any man, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Both John and Andy seem head-over-heels enchanted with Tula. Andy gushes, \u201cTula, the tall girl, she\u2019s actually seven foot tall with shoes and her hair. I\u2019m five foot six, and she\u2019s seven feet, so\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to overstate how cute and bright and chipper Andy seems in this featurette. From all appearances, it looks like he\u2019s having waaaaaay more fun than he ever did with Duran Duran. In his memoir, Andy writes, \u201cThe Power Station made me very happy for a long time.\u201d It shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Wardrobe update: John is now wearing a dazzling, glittering, sequin-covered paisley shirt. John\u2019s outfits have been delightfully bizarre thus far; apparently this is what happens when Nick isn\u2019t around to give him pointed sartorial suggestions. He discusses his love of Bernard Edwards, whose work on Chic\u2019s \u201cGood Times\u201d first inspired him to pick up a bass. He mentions he feels \u201ctotally inadequate\u201d playing the bass in front of a legend like Bernard. John is\u2026 look, it\u2019s 1985, so it probably goes without saying that John and Andy are probably riding high on something other than life throughout this featurette, but he seems cheerful and sincere, like he\u2019s having a great time working on a project he feels genuinely passionate about. As a preteen Duran fan in 1985, I harbored deep resentment toward the Power Station\u2014dude, why would you want to be in the Power Station when you could be in Duran Duran<\/em>?\u2014but looking at it now with the wisdom(?) of age, it\u2019s clear taking a break to play a different style of music with a different group of musicians was exactly what Andy and John needed at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the studio, Bernard coaches a visibly exhausted John through the \u201cGet It On (Bang a Gong)\u201d bass line. Of John, Bernard says, \u201cHe didn\u2019t want to be thought of as a teenybopper all his life, he knew ten years from now when the cute blond hair is gone and all that\u2026 you gotta play, you know?\u201d Blond<\/em> hair, Bernard? I guess John sported some highlights off and on throughout the eighties, but he seemed pretty consistently brunet during his Power Station days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Tony Thompson talks a bit about his early years with Chic, which is fairly interesting, but my main takeaway from this is the following: Goddamn<\/em>, Tony was smoking hot back in the day. As in, \u201chey, if you ever get tired of drumming, you could probably scrounge yourself up a nice career as a supermodel\u201d levels of hotness. Maybe even approaching \u201cJohn Taylor is the second most attractive person in this featurette\u201d levels of hotness, if you can wrap your mind around such an outlandish concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Andy talks about Tony: \u201cHe\u2019s an idiot. An adorable<\/em> idiot.\u201d Andy, who could sometimes be described as an adorable idiot himself, dissolves into hysterical giggles: \u201cTony\u2019s going to kill me for saying that. And he\u2019s bigger than me! Much, much bigger!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robert Palmer:  \u201cJohn is the instigator, their ideas man. Andy is the volatile one.\u201d This is accompanied by footage of Andy cavorting about in the control room with cigarettes jammed up his nostrils.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

(Is it wrong that I cringed a little upon hearing John described as an \u201cideas man\u201d?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bernard Edwards: \u201cAndy just goes and attacks things. That\u2019s his attitude about things. He can be abrasive at times\u2014and very nice\u2014but usually he\u2019s pretty angry and pretty rowdy.\u201d He seems to mean this as a compliment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andy explains how he prefers to record in the control room instead of in the sound booth: \u201cIt\u2019s very lonely when you\u2019re out on the studio floor all on your own, just playing, and there\u2019s a big piece of glass, and you can see all these people talking behind it, and you don\u2019t know what they\u2019re saying about you. You don\u2019t know if they\u2019re going, oh god, listen to what he\u2019s doing tonight, he\u2019s really not playing very well.\u201d As charming and fun as Andy seems throughout this, it\u2019s interesting how the personality traits that would later fuel his acrimonious split from Duran Duran\u2014namely, the anger issues and the vague sense of persecution and paranoia\u2014are very much present here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ah, Robert Palmer, the immaculately-groomed soul singer with the powerful pipes, who looked like the love child of Ewan MacGregor and Kenneth Branagh. In his wildly successful post-Power Station solo career, Palmer gave the world some of the\u00a0smuggest<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0most brotastic<\/a>\u00a0songs and videos of the eighties. As a result, I came into this featurette harboring a few anti-Palmer feelings, but he seems like a perfectly nice dude. He talks about how the Power Station wanted to get back to a more classic rock-and-roll sound, in contrast to the synth-heavy bands of the day: \u201cWe\u2019re all in this unit a bit bored with that. It isn\u2019t organic enough, it doesn\u2019t have personality.\u201d And somewhere across the Atlantic, Nick Rhodes narrows his beautiful eyes, glances at the stack of synthesizers piled haphazardly in the corner of his luxurious suite at the Plaza Ath\u00e9n\u00e9e, raises a flute of Krug Clos d\u2019Ambonnay to his painted lips, and gives a dainty sniff of disdain while muttering something incomprehensible about \u201cpersonality\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s Andy to wrap things up: \u201cThe Power Station can only ever be looked at as an album that was made by some guys once, and that\u2019s it, and it all finishes in a couple of weeks. And if people like it, they can buy it, and if they don\u2019t, well, it doesn\u2019t really matter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Duranalysis<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Despite Andy\u2019s assurances, that wasn\u2019t quite it for the Power Station. The band went on tour in 1985 with Michael Des Barres filling in for Robert Palmer, who left to launch his solo career. Everyone reconvened to record a second album in 1996, minus John Taylor, who dropped out of the project due to personal issues. There\u2019s an impossibly grim coda to the Power Station story: Bernard Edwards, who took over from John on bass, died suddenly of pneumonia in 1996 at age forty-three while the reformed band was preparing to go on tour; seven years later, Robert Palmer died of cardiac arrest at age fifty-four, while Tony Thompson died of cancer at age forty-eight, less than two months after Palmer\u2019s death. The Power Station\u2019s time in the sun didn\u2019t last long, but for a moment in the mid-eighties, it burned<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026an album that was made by some guys once, and that\u2019s it.\u201d I\u2019ve been paying a lot of extra attention to Simon and Nick in recent Duranalyses. Since I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":991,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-duran-duran"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=976"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1537,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions\/1537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}