Duran Duran drummer Roger Taylor has credited producer Mark Ronson with helping the band into its late career “purple patch”.
The Birmingham-raised musician, 61, said Ronson, whose credits include Amy Winehouse’s Rehab and Uptown Funk with Bruno Mars, had taught the bandmembers to “make friends with ourselves again”.
This week Taylor, frontman Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes and bassist John Taylor released their 15th album, Future Past.
It comes after 10 years of improved commercial and critical success with 2010’s All You Need Is Now and 2015’s Paper Gods.
Taylor told the PA news agency: “It’s since we started work with Mark Ronson.
“He took us into a bit of a purple patch and he made us make friends with ourselves again because we have been down a lot of different avenues, trying to find different directions and different sounds and almost trying to sound like other people.
“We had to go through a process of self-acceptance to get where we are with this record.
“But it was Mark that really put us on the right path and got us where we are today.”
The new album features keyboard work from Mike Garson, who played on nine of Bowie’s studio albums from 1973 to the 2000s.
Taylor said Bowie had been the musical influence that united the band when they formed in Birmingham at the start of the New Romantics era.
He said: “Bowie is another godlike figure to us.
“We have often said that there wouldn’t have been a Duran Duran without Bowie, because he was the common denominator when we all came together.
“We all liked different bands. Andy (Wickett, the original singer) was into AC/DC and Nick liked Kraftwerk, and John and I wanted to play funk and disco.
“But Bowie was the one person that we all loved.”
Future Past by Duran Duran is out now.
