Reportage (album)

In Andy Taylor's 2008 autobiography, Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran, he revealed that the band had originally been offered the opportunity to record their next album "aboard a [$450 million] superyacht owned by Paul Allen... but sadly the plan fell through at the last minute due to the boat becoming unavailable."^[1] Instead they began with three weeks of self-produced recording sessions at Andre Agassi's Tiburon mansion in September 2005.^[2] They moved the recording sessions to London in October, where they continued working on the album until April 2006 with Michael Patterson as engineer and co-producer.^[3] In March, drummer Roger Taylor commented that "the record will be in some ways a homage to our roots as a band, more direct and a return to our dance and new wave origins."^[4]

Bassist John Taylor discussed the circumstances behind Reportage during a 2007 XM Radio Artist Confidential Session: "We'd been on the road with the reunion tour for a couple of years and we were feeling pretty confident. We felt that we'd found ourselves again as musicians, so we were quite excited to come off the road and start writing and recording straight away. Our confidence was such [that] we felt we didn't need a producer, we could make all the decisions ourselves, so we wrote songs quite quickly and really felt that we had an album." According to Andy, John was taking charge of the sessions: "We did some more recording in February 2006, and this time John seemed more determined than ever to take on the role of producer."^[5]

Following sessions at London's Sphere Studios, they submitted a rough mix of the album to their record label Sony Music in May 2006, but it was rejected for not having an obvious lead single. According to John, "I guess we'd worked on it for about six months, we got a title Reportage and we kind of had a cover and we presented it to the label. They said they heard the second single and the third single but not the first single, so they suggested could we perhaps go and cut a couple of songs with a producer—maybe something a little bit more commercial." According to Andy, the band met with producer Youth in June and discussed working with him at his studio in Spain that autumn to "work out which bits were the most important and how to make all the various components work together as a whole."^[6] They also made plans to record a few potential singles with Timbaland in October. The band and Timbaland had previously met and expressed their desire to work together.

The Timbaland sessions were advanced to September to allow for the participation of Justin Timberlake. They both joined the band along with Nate "Danja" Hills at Manhattan Center Studios in New York City for writing and recording sessions, but Andy didn't appear. After a month of fan speculation, on 26 October 2006, Duran Duran announced that "As of last weekend, the four of us have dissolved our partnership and will be continuing as Duran Duran without Andy, as we have reached a point in our relationship with him where there is an unworkable gulf between us and we can no longer effectively function together. Although obviously disappointed and saddened about this, we are excited about the next chapter of the Duran Duran story and look forward to seeing you all soon.".^[7][8]

One week later, before a concert in Providence, John went on to suggest that the split had been coming for some time: "We've not really been on the same page for a while. And it's been getting very testy most of this year, actually. And there's just been a break coming. We've had different aims, different considerations, different loyalties. (...) And life goes on. Four out of the five of us have rediscovered each other, and realized that we're the best friends we've ever had. And we're enormously grateful to have each other in our lives. And there's nobody I'd rather make music with, and I can say the same for the other three. I don't think I could say that for Andy."^[9]

Andy later wrote in his autobiography that there had been "pressure building up" between the band members, a "lack of clear direction" during the sessions, and that the music had been prematurely submitted to Sony in his opinion: "the album needed more work" he wrote, although he had "played enough guitar parts for about three albums". Andy attributed the cause of his departure to a combination of "constant arguments within the band", clinical depression brought on by his father's recent death, and "administrative failures by the band's management" in neglecting to renew his US work visa, leaving him feeling "as if I'd been trapped on a derailed runaway train."^[10]

The band initially planned to incorporate the new Timbaland-produced songs into Reportage. A December 2006 Billboard article claimed that "the as-yet-untitled follow-up to 2004's Astronaut would also feature the reggae-tinged '48 Hours Later' and 'Transcendental Mental,' which [Nick] Rhodes says takes aim at 'new-age frauds. It's one of the funniest lyrics Simon has written in many years.'... Asked if the disparate sounds of [the Timbaland tracks] compared to the album's more guitar-driven songs may be jarring to the listener, Rhodes says, 'With [those cuts], you can tell there was another hand in them for sure. Although they are a slight change of direction in that some of the others are a bit more guitar-heavy or indie-sounding, Simon is the glue that holds them all together.'"^[11]

After parting ways with their guitarist the band soon decided to abandon all of the Reportage songs, cancel the Youth sessions, and further explore their new musical direction with Dom Brown on guitar and Danja producing and co-writing.^[12] John was quoted as saying, "we were kind of coming to the decision that we were going to let go of all of this music, and we were going to let go of songs that we had been working on for months and months. But there was such a thing that we were moving forward, that we were creating this new identity."^[13] As Rhodes commented later, "Our sound exploded with pop culture's brightest flowers (...) The vision became clear".^[14]

Duran Duran wrote and recorded three songs with Timbaland, and they became the starting core of an entirely new album titled Red Carpet Massacre. Completed with the help of Hills, Jimmy Douglass and Timberlake, and anticipated by the "Falling Down" single, Red Carpet Massacre was released on 19 November 2007 to mixed reviews and disappointing sales (it peaked at #44 on the UK album chart compared to the #3 peak position of Astronaut). As a result, the band broke ties with Epic Records and its parent company Sony.^[15]

In a 2011 interview for the release of their album All You Need Is Now, Rhodes and John commented on the Reportage / Red Carpet Massacre days. According to John, "That whole project was a fucking nightmare. We delivered an album to Sony that was a natural-sounding, almost rock album, and they were like 'We need something a bit pop, do you fancy doing a couple of tracks with Timbaland?' And around the same time we fell out with Andy, so the Timbaland stuff sounded hugely different from what we'd done before." Rhodes expanded: "The thing was, we got an opportunity to work with Timbaland, so we thought 'Great, let's go for it.' We knew it was a risk in terms of what the fans would like, if you're working with someone who is ostensibly an electro/hip hop producer. When Timbaland saw the guitar and the bass and the drums come in to the studio, I think he was mortified, because everything's in a box for those guys. But I'm really glad we made that album, because in time I think it will stand up."^[16]