Firing Up The Power Station (part 1)

Firing Up ‘The Power Station’ for a 40th Anniversary Boxed Set: Duran Duran’s John Taylor on Coralling Robert Palmer and Members of Chic for a True Pop Supergroup.

As a founding member of Duran Duran, you wouldn’t think that much could surprise John Taylor. By 1984, each of the British new wave gods’ first three albums had gone platinum, their cinematic videos were regularly rotated on MTV, and nonstop global touring attracted Swiftian levels of excitable fans. So, to get away from it all, and rock harder than the synth-pop-driven Duran Duran, bassist Taylor and his guitarist bandmate Andy Taylor hooked up with Chic drummer Tony Thompson, invited Chic bassist Bernard Edwards to produce, and brought in blue-eyed soul legend Robert Palmer to sing a few songs.

The next thing Taylor knew, his sidepiece supergroup, the Power Station (named for the NYC studio), had racked up two Billboard Top 10 hits in Some Like It Hot and a cover of T. Rex’s Get It On (Bang A Gong). The group’s 1985 self-titled debut got to No. 6 on Billboard’s Top 200 and went platinum without even trying. "I was not, in annnnny way, prepared for that to happen,” says Taylor, from his home in Los Angeles, about the astonishment that was the success of the Power Station. To quote one of Robert Palmer’s solo songs: “Some guys have all the luck.”

Taylor is on tour through the end of January with Duran Duran, which will soon release a Deluxe version of its eponymously titled 1993 comeback record, oft-referred to as The Wedding Album. But the reason for our conversation is a well-deserved 40th anniversary edition of that famous side project, out today. Expanded into 4-CD and 2-LP packages, The Power Station comes complete with, among other extras, live rarities from their time with a second journeyman singer Michel Des Barres. (Palmer performed on stage with the Power Station just once, for Saturday Night Live in February 1985, then left the band shortly after their album came out the following month.) It also includes testimonies form Taylor paying respects to Power Station’s two late members, Palmer and Thompson, and their producer, Edwards.

Palmer's only live performance with The Power Station was on 'SNL' TV show (Feb. 1985)

Going back to before the start of the supergroup, Taylor recalls Duran Duran’s biggest moment with bittersweet reminiscence. “Collectively, psychologically, after Seven And The Ragged Tiger... that record was a bitch to make, something where we went in having to top to our massive second album (1982’s Rio) and show musical growth,” Taylor says, thinking of the heights of Duran-mania that accompanied their third album. “We had a huge, long arena tour where everything’s bonkers, and was truly the first time that we’d been exposed to such mass hysteria, internationally. To be honest, we were frazzled at tour’s end, to say the very least.”

Knowing that, in 1984, the post-tour Duran Duran did not have another album in them, despite the urging of its management (“We gave them one new song, The Wild Boys, for the live album Arena”), the quintet decided to take a break, yet make their time away from each other a working vacation. “Everything was changing within Duran,” Taylor notes of that band’s suddenly sweet smell of success, and the so-called “fork in the road” that brought about both the Power Station and Arcadia, Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes’ art-pop project with Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay.

“Going back to the question of what was going on psychologically with Duran Duran then, things were complicated. It was the first time where we all had money; some of the guys got married; some of us began to develop outside relationships during that time off, most notably with Tony and Robert. Andy and I just broke off a bit from the others – we were like Thelma and Louise, off into the sunset, motherfuckers…. And with those two guys right there, Andy and I couldn’t resist doing something, something a little bit more organic, a little more muscular, a little less thought-out.”

Taylor met Thompson around the time that his fellow Chic member Nile Rodgers had exploded with his first huge production outside of their disco ensemble, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album. “Tony played on Let’s Dance and Madonna’s Like A Virgin (another Rodgers production) and his was a style of drumming that lit up the dance floor,” says the bassist, before adding that Thompson was the “real star” of the Power Station, the foundation upon which every other sound was built.

John Taylor: "Thompson was the real star of the Power Station"

It was, however, another non-Duran relationship of the time that signaled the start of the Power Station project before it had a name: the one with model and Playboy Playmate Bebe Buell, who, at that moment, was John Taylor’s paramour. It was upon Buell’s urging that the bassist would back her on a crunching cover of 1971’s Get It On.

“I was dating her at the tail end of that Duran tour. She was an artiste who’d already had a record out by that time (1981’s Covers Girl EP produced by Ric Ocasek and Rick Derringer), and I thought it could be fun producing something with her,” says Taylor, who went to his then-label, EMI, for backing. “They weren’t going to say ‘no,’ so we got the green light for studio time to develop the idea, then she and I fell out. But by then the horse was running, and Andy and I took the bit between our teeth… Andy, Tony and I were going to be this rhythm section, despite not having played together as a unit at that point,” adds Taylor, talking about a “fantasy” of that trio of musicians backing various vocalists ,as if they were “a new version of the Stax house band.” The schematic of many singing cooks in one Power Station kitchen changed when their pal Robert Palmer stopped by the studio.

“Robert came in, sang Communication (a tune penned by the two Taylors and co-composer Derek Bramble, to which Palmer added lyrics), and asked about Get It On. We put that track up next, and as soon as he finished singing, Bernard said that we’d need not look further for vocalists – that Robert was the perfect singer for this project. At that exact moment, the nature of the project changed.”

Pour lire la suite, cliquez ici