Fact #162841
When:
Short story:
Thunder, a solo album Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor, enters the UK album chart where it will spend just one week at No67.
Full article:
Andy Taylor : It's funny…I suppose whatever you do musically, even if you don't understand it at the time, it is a reflection of where you are at.
When I look at the early Duran stuff you can hear the early club vibe from it, you can hear where we were at as people.
That Thunder album I did as the whole band was falling apart. Some of the songs like Don’t Let Me Die Young were actually about that. When I look back it was quite scary…there was so much shit going on at the time. I guess that's why I went off in a more 'fuck you, this is me' guitar kind of direction.
It was trying to find your own identity away from what the cocoon of being involved in Duran Duran was. It was like 'hello, there is an individual in here'. At the time you aren't conscious of it, but when I look at it now – even my wife says, 'you don't realize how deep that record is'.
It's one of those things – you don't recognize the person that did it, but it was you.
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Johnny Black : One-time Duran man goes guitar crazy! It should have been obvious, really, watching Andy progress through the New Romantic pop-disco of the Durannies, into the less subtle dance-floor rock of Power Station, that the next stage would have to be out and out heavy rock. AOR, aimed fairly and squarely at the American stadium market.
It must have rankled with him the Durans never really used his guitar prowess to the full but, in the light of this excessive powerglide, maybe they had the right idea. When Andy’s kept in check, reined in by a tight arrangement and the restrictions of a decent tune, he can be a powerful asset to a band. Once he’s set free, however, the tunes disappear, guitar licks are piled on top of distorted guitar licks and he starts singing in an American accent.
I’ll happily admit that on some of these outings, he could give Z.Z.Top, maybe even Van Halen, a run for their money but all too often he slips into excess, letting his love affair with his axe get in the way of his common sense. Buy it only if you value big guitars more than you value your braincells.
(Review first appeared in CD Review magazine, October 1987)
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When I look at the early Duran stuff you can hear the early club vibe from it, you can hear where we were at as people.
That Thunder album I did as the whole band was falling apart. Some of the songs like Don’t Let Me Die Young were actually about that. When I look back it was quite scary…there was so much shit going on at the time. I guess that's why I went off in a more 'fuck you, this is me' guitar kind of direction.
It was trying to find your own identity away from what the cocoon of being involved in Duran Duran was. It was like 'hello, there is an individual in here'. At the time you aren't conscious of it, but when I look at it now – even my wife says, 'you don't realize how deep that record is'.
It's one of those things – you don't recognize the person that did it, but it was you.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Johnny Black : One-time Duran man goes guitar crazy! It should have been obvious, really, watching Andy progress through the New Romantic pop-disco of the Durannies, into the less subtle dance-floor rock of Power Station, that the next stage would have to be out and out heavy rock. AOR, aimed fairly and squarely at the American stadium market.
It must have rankled with him the Durans never really used his guitar prowess to the full but, in the light of this excessive powerglide, maybe they had the right idea. When Andy’s kept in check, reined in by a tight arrangement and the restrictions of a decent tune, he can be a powerful asset to a band. Once he’s set free, however, the tunes disappear, guitar licks are piled on top of distorted guitar licks and he starts singing in an American accent.
I’ll happily admit that on some of these outings, he could give Z.Z.Top, maybe even Van Halen, a run for their money but all too often he slips into excess, letting his love affair with his axe get in the way of his common sense. Buy it only if you value big guitars more than you value your braincells.
(Review first appeared in CD Review magazine, October 1987)