Coke & Wet: The Power Station Versus Arcadia (part I)

35 years on, Simon Price revisits the undeclared war between Arcadia, who made "the most pretentious album ever", and The Power Station, who made "the most cocainey album ever"; and asks, who, if anyone, is the winner.

"Arcadia and The Power Station", writes Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story Of Pop, "were possibly the two worst bands of the decade. So much huff and puff." Critical hindsight hasn't been kind to Duran Duran's two splinter groups. It wasn't even particularly kind at the time, for that matter. There's a puritan streak in the music press which abhors excess, and Duran Duran were the most excessive band in an excessive age.

Duran Duran were essentially the Led Zeppelin of 80s teenpop, a band defined by their extravagance and extremes. As Boy George, a close eye-witness, put it in his autobiography Take It Like A Man, "the champagne-swilling, yacht-sailing Duran Duran touted 'playboyeurism' and a new pop superficiality. Suddenly it was OK to be rich, famous and feel no shame. Some saw it as a natural consequence of Thatcherism." And, as befits a shamelessly over-the-top band, when Duran Duran broke into two factions, they released two of the most extreme records, in very different ways, of their era. If Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and the Taylors (Andy, John and Roger) comprised a New Aristocracy, then Arcadia and The Power Station were their grand follies, each set up in stark opposition to the other. One project represented the Chauffeur wing of Duran's sound, the other the Wild Boys end. One was ultra-arty, the other thunkingly blunt. Beauty, and the Beast.

It's an appraisal shared by Roger Taylor, the Duran Duran drummer who contributed to both spin-offs, and is therefore uniquely-positioned to offer an informed perspective. "I had a foot in both camps," he told me when I interviewed the band for tQ in 2011. "I did a lot in Arcadia, and a little bit in The Power Station. Was it cocaine-fuelled? Yeah. It was the two ends of the band really, wasn't it? You had the arty end and the rock end. A kind of parting of the waves. I think Arcadia has stood the test of time better, maybe. The feeling was that The Power Station was more successful at the time. It was a bigger commercial success. Arcadia was probably cooler."

It was The Power Station who fired the first shot in the undeclared war. But that shot didn't come out of a clear blue sky: there were precedents in Eighties pop. 1983 was the year that the sumptuous sheen of the New Pop got roughed up. It was the year of bands telling journalists their new album was going to be "harder, more percussive", while wiping their white powder-encrusted nostrils. ABC's The Beauty Stab, released in November of that year, was the most infamous example, its strutting pseudo-metal guitars and colossal drums riding roughshod over the orchestral elegance with which they'd made their name on the previous year's Lexicon Of Love. Duran Duran, who spent most of '83 outside the UK as tax exiles (save for a Prince's Trust concert at the Dominion in London and a Mencap charity show at Villa Park in front of Princess Diana, who famously named them as her favourite band), were at it too. The tub-thumping Is There Something I Should Know?, a non-album single which became the band's first No.1 in the spring, dispensed with the sparkle and subtleties of the Rio era in favour of a reductive, shouty simplicity.

However, the subsequent album Seven And The Ragged Tiger, recorded with Alex Sadkin at George Martin's Air studio on the island of Montserrat, reverted to the fussy maximalism and carbonated pop fizz of their earlier work, to the frustration of their bassist, who had been increasingly keen to move in a tougher, rockier direction. John Taylor reportedly smashed up a shower cubicle in the apartment he was sharing with Sadkin, when the producer asked him to come into the studio and re-record a bassline because keyboardist Nick Rhodes had changed the chord structure to a song. Rhodes, meanwhile, collapsed with a heart condition during sessions and had to be airlifted to hospital. The cracks were beginning to show.

Nevertheless, the Ragged Tiger era presented an opportunity for a bit of serious wish-fulfilment for at least one member of the band. Famously, John Taylor's original vision for Duran Duran was to fuse the Sex Pistols and Chic, after hearing the two bands back-to-back on a pub jukebox and experiencing a lightbulb moment. Duran Duran's first shot at working with an actual living, breathing member of Chic came towards the end of the Seven And The Ragged Tiger sessions, when the band were tinkering with The Reflex with a view to releasing it as a single, but couldn't quite get it right. Impressed by his recent production job on INXS's Original Sin, Taylor called Nile Rodgers in for a remix.

It was, however, a single release which almost never happened, because Capitol Records told the band that Rodgers' treatment was "too black-sounding". The producer and the band stuck to their guns, called the label's bluff and put Rodgers' version out. It went on to become the biggest hit of Duran's career. Point proven, Rodgers was duly hired to actually produce the next Duran Duran single, Wild Boys, which was incongruously tacked onto the band's live album Arena. (To return the favour, the Durans sang backing vocals on 1984 remix of Sister Sledge's Chic-produced Lost In Music).

Chic, by 1984, had fizzled out as a working entity, while Nile Rodgers' career as a solo producer was taking off via smash hit albums with David Bowie and Madonna, leaving his former rhythm section of bassist Bernard Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson at a loose end. Duran Duran had first met Chic in '82, but it was when John Taylor and Andy Taylor met Tony Thompson after a David Bowie concert in Fréjus, France in May 1983, while Thompson was drumming as part of Bowie's Serious Moonlight touring band, that they planted the seed of the idea of working together some day. Within a year, it became a reality.

David Bowie in Fréjus, France (1983)

For the first four months of 1984, Duran embarked on a world tour (the one captured on Arena, the film and album). During the subsequent hiatus, John Taylor and Andy Taylor convened an ad hoc gathering of musos at Maison Rouge studios in Fulham, to back model, singer and serial rock girlfriend Bebe Buell, whom John was briefly dating, on a cover of T. Rex's Get It On (or, as it's known in the States, Bang A Gong), with the newly-unemployed Chic rhythm section of Edwards and Thompson on board. However, the project foundered when Taylor and Buell fell out, giving the Duran-Chic alumni the makings of a supergroup, but no-one to front it.

A plan came together, under the working title of Big Brother (ditched when someone realised the name had been previously used by Janis Joplin's band in the Sixties), for a 'house band' along the lines of the Funk Brothers at Motown, Booker T & The MGs at Stax, or – more recently - Heaven 17's B.E.F., for a revolving-door cast of star singers. Mick Jagger, Billy Idol, The Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler and Mick Ronson were all approached to take part, but the hunt ended when Robert Palmer came into the picture.

The former Vinegar Joe blues-rocker, by now a suave purveyor of urbane adult pop, was a favourite of the Durans: they'd invited him to support them at those two charity shows in 1983. In the autumn of '84, John Taylor ended up on the same flight as Palmer, and told him about the side project, now renamed The Power Station after the New York studio which had become its de facto HQ.

The Chic contingent had barely heard of Palmer when he came in to try out on the ready-made Get It On (Bang A Gong) backing track, but he nailed it. Bernard Edwards, now the act's producer, told the Taylors: "Stop looking. You've got your singer." It was an unlikely generation-spanning alliance – the Taylors were pretty boys of 24, Palmer a gnarled 36 – but somehow it clicked.

By now John Taylor had moved to New York, where he was waiting to move into an ultra-modern chrome-and-glass condo in the Park Belvedere (a tower overlooking Central Park on the Upper West Side that was still being built), driving the same type of gull-winged DeLorean as used in Back To The Future, and dating Danish supermodel Renee Simonsen, upon whom he'd made a terrible first impression at a party after failing to recognise her from her photos, and lolled drunkenly on the floor rather than greet her properly. (In a bizarre piece of symmetry, back in London Simon Le Bon was also dating a model – Yasmin Parvaneh, his future wife – whom he had originally seen in photos, and who was initially unimpressed by his advances).

The making of The Power Station's debut album was as lavish as its creators' lifestyles, costing in excess of $500,000. The sleeve of the finished LP bore the inscription "Conceived, written and recorded in Paris, Nassau, London and various bars around the world" - the ones with marble-topped cisterns, one might surmise. The travel and accommodation costs alone must have eaten up the lion's share of the budget. In Notorious, the excellent unauthorised Duranography by Steve Malins (to which I must credit many of the facts and stats in this article), one learns that at first, the two Taylors stayed in the high-class Carlyle Hotel, whose clientele included Prince Charles and President Reagan, and that when Roger Taylor and his drum tech were flown over to make their contributions to the record, it was by Concorde.

The original basic tracks were laid down in London, and the vocals recorded in Nassau (where Palmer lived), but all the fancy whizzbangs and effects – and there were plenty of those – were created at The Power Station Studio, which John Taylor had first visited to oversee the mixing of Arena. A former Consolidated Edison plant in Hell's Kitchen on West 53rd St, run by Tony Bongiovi (cousin of Jon Bon Jovi), The Power Station was famous for its massive reverb, created using a disused lift shaft, and for its abnormally huge Urei speakers. All Chic's classics had been recorded there, as had albums by Bowie, Roxy, Blondie and The Clash. When The Power Station (the band) were in residence, Dylan, Ferry and Jagger were to be seen wandering in and out.

In that kind of company, a certain amount of musical insecurity was to be expected. It's hardly surprising that the formerly chubby, uncool kid called Nigel had a sudden attack of stagefright. John Taylor compared himself to the musicians around him, and found himself wanting. Embarrassed by his lack of proficiency, at least relative to that of his own producer, Taylor asked Bernard Edwards to play the basslines on the album himself, but Edwards insisted he should play on. The Duran faction were equally in awe of Tony Thompson, whom John later described as having "the heaviest foot in the business", praising his power and volume. "The Power Station project", he explained, "was intended, as much as anything, as a way for Andy and me to pay homage to Tony Thompson and, hopefully, put him in the spotlight we felt he deserved."

Another way in which the studio was remarkable, even by rock & roll standards, was the availability of Class As. John Taylor, whose own coke habit had reached the point of getting high during Duran Duran gigs, slotted in comfortably. "I'd never seen more drugs in my life," he later recalled. "The access to cocaine was unlimited." The studio even used a phoney bike courier service, through which 23 different types of drug could be ordered from a menu, attached to photographic sheets. The bassist's intake became so prodigious that Park Belvedere neighbour Boy George, no saint himself, mischievously left a silver tray piled high with white powder (actually sugar) outside Taylor and Simonsen's door. Andy Taylor, speaking to Goldmine magazine, was candid about the chaotic lifestyle the band were living: "We used to hang out down in the Village at Beebop and get whacked, do Power Station and fuck about. We were really living it up, spending $500 a night, just doing stupid things. It was just a massive party all the time. I don't know how we got any work done. It was great." John would put it more tersely: "1985. Nobody ate that year."

No surprise, then, that the end result was what I've called before, and will call again, The Most Cocainey Record Ever Made. The first the outside world would hear of it was the single Some Like It Hot, released on 4 March 1985 with a video starring transsexual model Caroline Cossey aka Tula. Some Like It Hot is an ugly brute of a thing, but it's a fascinating artefact. If Andy Taylor, a Geordie from Cullercoats, hadn't answered Duran Duran's ad for a guitarist, he would have been hammering metal as a shipbuilder. On Some Like It Hot, he was fulfilling that alternate destiny through music. The thwacking gated drums (the punchy reverb-curtailing technique pioneered by Tony Visconti on David Bowie's Low and popularised by Hugh Padgham on Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight) are more than just the promised showcase for Tony Thompson: they're practically a demonstration brochure for The Power Station studios, screaming "Just look what we can do with drums nowadays!" The bottom end cooked up by John Taylor and Bernard Edwards is so overdriven it threatens to buckaroo the needle out of the groove. And on top of it all, Robert Palmer's uptight, knotted-tie delivery, sounding like he's on the brink of phoning the paramedics. It's a record that brooks no dissent. Sometimes you just need to put it on at full volume and marvel, submit to its strutting rock-funk grandeur.

Robert Palmer during the shooting of the Some Like It Hot music video

The rest of The Power Station's eponymous album is in much the same (bulging) vein. Lonely Tonight and Communication are clench-teethed white soul numbers. Go To Zero, co-written with prolific session bassist Guy Pratt, is a decent piece of Princely synth-funk. Sadly, that T. Rex cover has none of the sexy slinky swagger of Bolan's original, trampling all subtlety with its bump and grind. And to say that their cover of Harvest For The World lacks a certain lightness of touch would be an understatement of the sort to which The Power Station were congenitally allergic: the only harvest they were interested in was the one in Colombia. But everything anyone needs to know about The Power Station is in that opening track, the debut single. Fire up the twelve inch, turn it up to 11. Your septum hurts, just listening to it. Some Like It Hot feels like being slapped by Tony Montana then skullfucked by Patrick Bateman. The Power Station are the high water mark of the BIGNESS of the Eighties: big dreams, big noises, big budgets, bigger shoulder pads, biggest drug habits. They're musical Ozymandias. Look upon their mighty works, ye feeble peons, and despair.

Talking to me for the aforementioned Quietus interview, Nick Rhodes gave his outsider's perspective on The Power Station. "I wouldn't know, because I wasn't there for those sessions, but The Power Station certainly felt like it was boiling over. There were some really good songs on their album. I remember hearing it at the time and not loving it, because I was so engrossed in what we were doing, but I think history's been kind to it, and they invented a sound for Robert Palmer to continue with, that's for sure." Simon Le Bon, meanwhile, was more direct in his verdict. "About the cocainey thing? I would agree! I don't think even John Taylor would disagree with that. In a cocaine battle, they would win that."

John Taylor himself, in the same interview, reluctantly accepted the C-word. "Cocainey? Yeah, maybe," he conceded, blowing air through his lips, horse-like. "I don't think that's a compliment. You can't resist the lure of these… it was an opportunity to do something different to Seven And The Ragged Tiger, which was a really difficult album to make, and I wanted to make something more primal, Andy felt the same way, and we just concocted this plan to 'play away'. Cocainey? Yeah, it's definitely one way to describe it."

Interestingly, America took to The Power Station more than Britain did. In the States, Some Like It Hot and Get It On (Bang A Gong) both made the Billboard Top 10 (even though the former took three whole months to get there), and the Top 20 in the UK. In the States, the album reached No.6 and sold a million. In the UK, No.12. In any case, The Power Station were a going concern, and Duran Duran were on hold.

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