Duran Duran’s signature New Romantic look and sparkling, sometimes broody sound have propelled them to unimaginable heights and made them arbiters of taste. Now Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, and Roger Taylor, who have pleased the eyes and ears for over 40 years, are coming for your third sense, smell. Working with Sergio Momo of Xerjoff, the band has introduced two new fragrances (with names that reference song titles)—NeoRio and Black Moonlight.
NeoRio is bright, exploding with top notes of candied fig, rum, and elemi absolute, before gently mellowing with saffron and soft rose oil; Tonka bean and Peruvian balsam bind it all together. Darker and more sensual, Black Moonlight has a base of patchouli, vetiver, Tonka bean, and benzoin, which is overlayered with top notes of bergamot and mandarin, as well as saffron, lavender, Sambac jasmine, and hazelnut.
Over Zoom, Rhodes, who led the project with LeBon (though all members were involved) said the two fragrances are representative of the band’s “yin and yang” duality. An A-side/B-side analogy might work as well. “We’re always looking at different ways to express what Duran Duran is,” said Rhodes, who, in the course of our conversation, revealed what he smelled like in the 1980s and the nuts and bolts of perfume making as he experienced it.
Fragrance is something that really interests me, in part because we can’t digitally recreate touch and scent, which I think gives these two senses more value than they’ve had in a while.
Makes perfect sense.
I’m wondering how this project got started and how scent fits into the Duran Duran universe?
Well, interestingly, following on from what you’re saying, we’ve spent most of our career for several decades trying to excite people’s senses, in particular sound and vision. [We’ve done this] with live shows, obviously with songs we write, with videos, we’ve made films, but we’ve never really had the opportunity to use the other senses so much, so the idea of making a Duran Duran scent that would affect people, hopefully in a very positive way, was exciting to us. We approached the project in the same way that we approach everything we do, with a sort of blank sheet of paper and said, “Right, what would we like to create here?” We were guided very carefully by Sergio Momo, who owns the Xerjoff brand, and he really educated us about what scent is, how it works, how it’s made from the base notes up to the high notes, and how you can very, very subtly tweak it, when you add one more ingredient, you can just change the whole mood of what you’re doing—there are so many possibilities.
We were fascinated with the process and we started off trying to make one perfume, but ended up splitting the atom for exactly the same reasons as we do when we make albums, in that there’s a light side and a dark side. The dark side in this case being the Black Moonlight perfume, which is really sort of mysterious and musky and attractive, and then the NeoRio perfume is just full of light and energy and bright colors.
It’s interesting that both music and fragrance use notes as a terminology.
Yes.
Scent is such a personal thing—we all have scent memories and our skin and our biology and chemistry react differently to fragrance. It must have been a challenge when four and creating a scent. How did that work?
We sort of act as one unit in the band—we’re like a small SWAT team that goes in and figures out these problems or these creations. In this case, Simon and I really led the project. All the other members of the band were involved and came to the meetings, but they trusted us and our noses to sniff out the right direction. We talked to Sergio and we would go through scents that we liked in real life when you wander around—freshly cut grass, petrol, things like that—that you just catch a hint of. It really is a fantastic experience that makes you remember certain things and triggers different things in your mind. We went through a lot of exploration and what we wanted the perfumes to represent and what kind of ingredients would be good if we wanted one fragrance to be a little Eastern and a little dark and sexy, and if we wanted the other one to be more like summer—but a sort of flash of inspiration of summer arriving soon, rather than stuck in the heat of the summer.
To his great credit, Sergio took our surreal madness of descriptions and came back with about 30 different options, which was rather overwhelming, but Simon and I painstakingly went through them all and we narrowed it down to about five, which was interesting because two of them were very different from the other three. And that’s when we literally split the atom and said, “Right, there has to be two.” Sergio was very happy to go along with two different ones, and he liked the story of the yin and yang of Duran Duran and that he knew instinctively what to do with it. And so we came back again and brought different versions of the ones we liked. We literally zeroed in, it was a process of elimination and then a process of refinement…. We were just bowled over, and the other members of the band were sort of with us all the way every few months. The process took just over 18 months. Simon and I would report back to everyone and they’d say, “great, sounds good.” And then we’d have a meeting altogether. For example, packaging is something that was more John [Taylor] and I, because we generally deal with the band’s artwork and visual side a little more—and that was fascinating too. Sergio came in with a master stroke for the NeoRio bottles in day glow colors, and we just all folded immediately and said, “Yeah, that’s it. Perfect.”
Maybe it was kismet, or maybe you were already working on the project, but in the “Moonlight” video a woman is spraying people with a fragrance.
We’d started to work on the project, and so it was like a fun in-joke that we all shared together. We’ve actually taken little bits of that video and made a couple of tiny little tease ads for the perfume.
Will you indulge me a little bit? I wanted to touch a little bit on some greater themes that we’re seeing in the industry, like a resurgence of interest in the 1980s right now, and a neo-gothic mood or this feeling of living in a Tim Burton–esque world, lots of neon Patrick Nagel–style makeup at Louis Vuitton, big shoulders. It seems like Duran Duran is always on trend. Why do you think that people might be nostalgic for the ’80s?
I think things just go round in circles. You have wide trousers and you think they look fabulous, and then they just look completely wrong; you need tight, narrow trousers. Sometimes you have wider shoulders, and then the shoulders need to stand up a little bit more, and then you want the shoulders to come down more; skirts up a little above the knee, slightly below the knee. It’s not that we haven’t seen it before. I think the ’70s were very influenced by the 1930s, and the ’90s started to creep back for a moment. Fashion is always instinct to me, it’s what feels right. It’s not just about the shape of the clothing, it is about color, it is about the time, it’s about mood.
That’s what I’m interested in, the why behind the vibe, I guess….
Well, a lot of people feel that it’s going on in the world. It has a big impact on fashion too, the triangular shape where shoulders are wider, and then it comes into the triangle at the bottom. The point is a symbol of power and is used at times when people want to make women look more powerful—men too. I’ve always loved fashion and many of my friends work within the fashion world, so I watch, but more than that, I am interested in creating things that we just do for ourselves. We work with a great designer who’s always on tour with us called Jeffrey Bryant, and he’s one of those sort of unspoken heroes who lurks around in the shadows. Every time we make something, we smile and say, “Well, I wonder where that will end up going?” and usually a few months later, it’s on a runway somewhere or it’s on the front page of Vogue. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily because we absolutely did it first, it’s often because the mood is right, and everybody has this sense of where things are moving—it’s almost like it’s in the ether. You can’t put your finger on it and say, well, it’s precisely because of these 10 points. You are absolutely right where it is now. I guess a lot of people are nervous about the way things are around the world, the instability, some of the leaders that we have, well, people that should be leaders. I don’t think I want to go there….. I mean, some of the leaders we have in the world are certainly thought of as being rather undesirable by many people, and understandably. And in a way, I think that also leads to some defiance.
People want a different world and people want to show their individuality now, and that was very much part of the ’80s, so if anything, I think that fashion is being driven by that. If you think about the beginning of the ’80s, you had Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana in Paris, and you had Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, you had Vivienne Westwood continuing with the crazy stuff in the UK, you had Giorgio Armani and Versace coming up in Italy, and in America you had all those designers, people like Calvin Klein, who was really starting to shape something new. They were all radically different; it was about individuality, it was about portraying what you wanted, not being afraid of what people thought about things and looking different. Towards the ’90s, I think we moved into a phase where people wanted to fit in instead of standing out, and that’s why you ended up with all those sort of designer jeans and trainers that looked the same and a lot of T-shirts and zippy jackets. On the other hand, you had the birth of Alexander McQueen, the amazing things John Galliano was doing then, and the Japanese continuing to create stuff, even is, it was a great period. I could talk about fashion for hours.
I could listen forever! I’m curious what your scent-scape was in the ’80s?
I used to wear Jungle Gardenia, which wasn’t a particularly expensive fragrance. I don’t know who was wearing it first, but I got to hear about it, and I rather like gardenia. I don’t know whether I could wear it now; it’d probably be a little too strong. But it was just good fun and uplifting.
I could happily have wandered around the counters at Bergdorf’s or in Harvey Nichols in London and just sprayed a couple on until I thought, ‘Oh, that’s okay. I like the smell of that.’ I think the times were a little more experimental, and I often used female fragrances instead of men’s fragrances.
I was just going to ask you about gender and if that was part of the discussion as you were designing these fragrances?
Well, we’ve always thought that Duran Duran is for absolutely anybody and everybody. We are always inclusive and have never been exclusive, and so when we made a perfume, it made perfect sense that it was unisex, that it was for anyone at all, any gender. And I think perfumes have always been like that. Some things certainly smell more masculine, some more feminine, but then I think when girls wear slightly more masculine scents, there can be something really attractive about that and vice versa. It brings a softness to some men when they have something on that’s just a little sweeter than maybe they would normally have gone for. And perfumes smell different on different people; it depends on your skin, it depends what you like to eat, it depends on many different things. It makes sense to me that perfumes should always be for whoever wants them. I used Chanel ones endlessly through the late ’80s, early ’90s—particularly the ones you could just get from Rue de Cambon. At the time, I was fascinated with two perfumes that I think were from the 1930s, one was Cuir de Russie, and the other one was Gardénia. For me, the natural transition from the slightly less expensive Jungle Gardenia was to the ridiculously expensive Chanel Gardénia that you could only buy in Paris from the flagship store.
I feel that scents do represent time periods, there’s no question. You brought up Opium, which I think really put a big stamp over things, Chanel N° 5, Thierry Mugler’s Angel…. When people hit upon a formula where they’ve just managed to get the mix right, it’s like having a big hit record, you just are touching a moment when people are connecting with you. It’s impossible to say entirely why, but it means you’ve got something right. All we’re trying to do is communicate with people, to grab people’s attention, and to lift their spirits, and that’s really what I’m hoping for with this perfume.
