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The beating heart of Rio’s sound was Roger Taylor’s drums. The synthesiser’s arpeggiator was deployed to great effect on a good enough system, you can hear it running all the way through tracks such as Hungry Like the Wolf. On this album it was heavily phased, which gives an even more ethereal feel. Even at the time of the album’s release, the JP8’s string sound was highly distinctive, and has come to be regarded by many musicians as a thing of great auditory beauty. This meant the band’s high energy rock backbone could be gilded with a layer of futuristic sounding electronics. “I completely fell in love with it”, keyboard player and songwriter Nick Rhodes later explained. As John Taylor once recalled, "we were coming out of a tradition that was all about guitars and drums", but Rio is dominated by Roland’s Jupiter 8 synthesiser, which had just been released. You couldn't cut it up on the computer and make loops."īy the early 1980s however, AIR was running a sophisticated multitrack mixing desk which gave Thurston enough room to garnish each song with production details that wouldn’t have been possible just five years earlier. Roger Taylor remembers: "I’d have to do a single drum take―in those days, you could play the song for five minutes, and make a mistake at the end…and it was, 'Oh no, I've got to do it again!' The tracks were all played live. The synthesisers were as analogue as the studio’s open reel tape recorders, and everything had to be committed to tape manually. This was despite of the lack of MIDI― computer controlled musical instrument connectivity―that was just around the corner.
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Laid down at EMI’s Manchester Square studios and AIR Studios in January and February 1982, Rio emerged sounding as hot and steamy as its name suggests. The British pop scene had given rise to some very swish productions, from Roxy Music’s Avalon to ABC’s Lexicon of Love via Simple Minds’ New Gold Dream, but Rio’s production was classier still.Īlthough recording technology was fast advancing by the early 1980s, it was still primitive compared to what we have today. At the time of release, it sounded like nothing else around. " heard the talent that was in the band and made it modern", said Simon Le Bon. What is striking now, nearly four decades later, is Rio's musical sophistication, allied to a masterful production by Colin Thurston, who had previously worked with David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and collaborated with Duran Duran on their eponymous debut album 18 months earlier.
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Simon Le Bon summed it up pithily at the time, nothing: "Duran Duran is a pop group for young people with a lot of energy." Duran Duran deliberately eschewed musical miserablism to deliver a shiny and sophisticated sound that wasn’t in the least bit self-conscious. After the doom and gloom of the late 1970s, and the harsh recession of the first couple of years of the following decade, there was definitely a sense that people wanted to have fun. Reflecting on the album’s sound, Roger Taylor later noted: "You can hear all the different influences on Rio― the very funky bass and drums, the dark guitars, quite dark keyboards and optimistic vocals." It was a unique sound at the time, and one that bridged the musical gulf between the brutalism of punk rock and the upbeat, polished 80s pop that Rio popularised. The result was vast amounts of records sold, and no change to their sound. Duran Duran turned out to have the perfect look for the new US cable television network, which put their music on heavy rotation. Yet this bid to refashion their image was stopped in its tracks by the launch of MTV. Mindful of how the group’s so-called ‘New Romantic’ image and sound would go down in the southern states of the US, its Stateside promoters suggested Rio should be remixed to give a rawer, more hard rock feel. "We were really a rock band with synthesisers," drummer Roger Taylor once said, "and we thought we’d be in the studio all the time".Īround the time of the album’s release, Duran Duran embarked upon an American tour. The group’s largely teenage following had caused it to be pigeonholed as what we would now call a 'boy band'―yet that’s not how the five members of Duran Duran regarded themselves. Released on May 10, 1982, Rio arrived at a time when Duran Duran was much-maligned by many serious music fans.
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"It was a band at the top of its game that was having so much fun, playing every day, and an engineer-producer who just knew exactly what to do and exactly how to channel what he was hearing." So said Duran Duran bass guitarist John Taylor about the group’s second studio album, Rio.