As a founding member of Duran Duran, you wouldn’t think that much could surprise John Taylor.
By 1984, each of the British new wave gods’ first three albums had gone platinum, their cinematic videos were regularly rotated on MTV, and nonstop global touring attracted Swiftian levels of excitable fans. So, to get away from it all, and rock harder than the synth-pop-driven Duran Duran, bassist Taylor and his guitarist bandmate Andy Taylor hooked up with Chic drummer Tony Thompson, invited Chic bassist Bernard Edwards to produce, and brought in blue-eyed soul legend Robert Palmer to sing a few songs. The next thing Taylor knew, his sidepiece supergroup, the Power Station (named for the NYC studio), had racked up two Billboard Top 10 hits in “Some Like It Hot” and a cover of T. Rex’s “Get It On (Bang a Gong).” The group’s 1985 self-titled debut got to No. 6 on Billboard’s Top 200) and went platinum without even trying.
“I was not, in annnnny way, prepared for that to happen,” says Taylor, from his home in Los Angeles, about the astonishment that was the success of the Power Station.
To quote one of Robert Palmer’s solo songs: “Some Guys Have All the Luck.”
Taylor is on tour through the end of January with Duran Duran, which will soon release a deluxe version of its eponymously titled 1993 comeback record, oft-referred to as “The Wedding Album.” But the reason for our conversation is a well-deserved 40th anniversary edition of that famous side project, out today. Expanded into 4-CD and 2-LP packages, “The Power Station” comes complete with, among other extras, live rarities from their time with a second journeyman singer Michael Des Barres. (Palmer performed on stage with the Power Station just once, for “Saturday Night Live” in February 1985, then left the band shortly after their album came out the following month.) It also includes testimonies form Taylor paying respects to Power Station’s two late members, Palmer and Thompson, and their producer, Edwards.
Going back to before the start of the supergroup, Taylor recalls Duran Duran’s biggest moment with bittersweet reminiscence. “Collectively, psychologically, after ‘Seven and the Ragged Tiger’… that record was a bitch to make, something where we went in having to top to our massive second album (1982’s “Rio”) and show musical growth,” Taylor says, thinking of the heights of Duran-mania that accompanied their third album. “We had a huge, long arena tour where everything’s bonkers, and was truly the first time that we’d been exposed to such mass hysteria, internationally. To be honest, we were frazzled at tour’s end, to say the very least.”
The Power Station
Knowing that, in 1984, the post-tour Duran Duran did not have another album in them, despite the urging of its management (“We gave them one new song, ‘The Wild Boys,’ for the live album ‘Arena’”), the quintet decided to take a break, yet make their time away from each other a working vacation.
“Everything was changing within Duran,” Taylor notes of that band’s suddenly sweet smell of success, and the so-called “fork in the road” that brought about both the Power Station and Arcadia, Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes’ art-pop project with Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay.
“Going back to the question of what was going on psychologically with Duran Duran then, things were complicated. It was the first time where we all had money; some of the guys got married; some of us began to develop outside relationships during that time off, most notably with Tony and Robert. Andy and I just broke off a bit from the others – we were like Thelma and Louise, off into the sunset, motherfuckers…. And with those two guys right there, Andy and I couldn’t resist doing something, something a little bit more organic, a little more muscular, a little less thought-out.”
Taylor met Thompson around the time that his fellow Chic member Nile Rodgers had exploded with his first huge production outside of their disco ensemble, David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” album. “Tony played on ‘Let’s Dance’ and Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ (another Rodgers production) and his was a style of drumming that lit up the dance floor,” says the bassist, before adding that Thompson was the “real star” of the Power Station, the foundation upon which every other sound was built.
It was, however, another non-Duran relationship of the time that signaled the start of the Power Station project before it had a name: the one with model and Playboy Playmate Bebe Buell, who, at that moment, was John Taylor’s paramour. It was upon Buell’s urging that the bassist would back her on a crunching cover of 1971’s “Get It On.”
“I was dating her at the tail end of that Duran tour. She was an artiste who’d already had a record out by that time (1981’s “Covers Girl” EP produced by Ric Ocasek and Rick Derringer), and I thought it could be fun producing something with her,” says Taylor, who went to his then-label, EMI, for backing. “They weren’t going to say ‘no,’ so we got the green light for studio time to develop the idea, then she and I fell out. But by then the horse was running, and Andy and I took the bit between our teeth…
“Andy, Tony and I were going to be this rhythm section, despite not having played together as a unit at that point,” adds Taylor, talking about a “fantasy” of that trio of musicians backing various vocalists ,as if they were “a new version of the Stax house band.” The schematic of many singing cooks in one Power Station kitchen changed when their pal Robert Palmer stopped by the studio.
“Robert came in, sang ‘Communication’ (a tune penned by the two Taylors and co-composer Derek Bramble, to which Palmer added lyrics), and asked about ‘Get It On.’ We put that track up next, and as soon as he finished singing, Bernard said that we’d need not look further for vocalists – that Robert was the perfect singer for this project. At that exact moment, the nature of the project changed.”
Robert Palmer, by 1984, was a cooly composed, eclectic, British R&B-rock vocal legend — a “concessioner of many things,” by Taylor’s estimation — without having ever had a huge, continuous presence on the charts since his solo album debut with “Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley” (1974).
“Robert had a very dexterous voice and a clever lyrical style about him,” says Taylor.
Palmer’s gritty but gracefully soulful singing prowess and fast way with a lyric brought a different energy to what the Taylors and Thompson had planned for the sessions. “We didn’t have a plan…. Didn’t really think it all out,” says the bassist. “Andy and I didn’t have, as our goal, to start another band. We just wanted to make cool music with Tony and Bernard. Suddenly, however, we had this other group. Fuck me, right? But it all sounded so incredible with Robert in the mix.”
Suddenly, and quickly, the Power Station became an “antidote” to what Duran Duran had become at that time, where everything they did felt important and pre-planned, if not fussy. “It was nice to do something that wasn’t at all important,” Taylor says. “Actually, what we did was like we were having an affair from our marriage. And we knew that this affair wasn’t going to last. We were built to come together like a lightning flash, and pull off something unusual.”
The album’s most thundering track, one that came together speedily, was Power Station’s biggest hit, “Some Like It Hot,” a Twin Taylor idea where Palmer immediately added the “sweat when the heat is on” lyrics after hearing the title.
“The success of these songs was excess to expectation, as no one could anticipate the outcome, let alone the lot of us who made it,” says Taylor. “This project was driven solely by a desire to fuck, to rock – nothing contrived. It all started out as truly unconventional.” Taylor quickly credits the work of “the hottest engineer and mixer at that time, Jason Corsaro, from the hottest studio around, the Power Station,” as hugely beneficial to his band’s buoyant vibes.
That drive – and this band’s muscular rock and funk sound – quickly pushed “The Power Station” up the charts following the March 1995 release, to the point they immediately scheduled a summer shed tour. That same sound was so crisp, cutting and, yes, commercial that Palmer suddenly took it as his own, and recorded 1985’s “Riptide” with producer Edwards, drummer Thompson and guitarist Taylor on his biggest-ever solo hit to date, “Addicted to Love.” Not long after “Riptide’s” release, Palmer left his longtime label, Island, for new digs at EMI, and a continuation of the crunch-rock-rhythm sound.
Palmer bailed on the tour and split from the Power Station weeks after the album’s release. Taylor doesn’t sound angry at Palmer, now, for having jumped ship on the Power Station when he did.
“Hey, Island made him a huge money offer at the time to deliver a new album on the heels of ours,” says the bassist. ”Look, we were blessed just to be able to make a record with Robert. He’s a great artist, a great collaborator, and should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Robert just came into the studio, loosened his tie, and took off – he made it all look so easy.”
Taylor makes sure to mention that Palmer’s Power Station tour replacement, Michael Des Barres, came nobly to their rescue when the already-booked 1985 Power Station summer tour and Live Aid appearance reared its head. “We started out as a band meant to have more than one singer, so why not,” says Taylor with a laugh. “Still, we needed a singer for this tour, so God bless Michael.
“Everyone knew his reputation as an amazing singer and an underachiever who had two bands who were supposed to have been massive – Silverhead and Detective – that just didn’t happen. And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t current; he had just written that Animotion song ‘Obsession,’ which was a huge hit, and he was wide and alive. We found Michael in Texas hanging out with Don Johnson on a movie set, flew him into New York, he hit the mic, and immediately we knew that he just got it. Michael was perfect. He came in and embraced it.”
Taylor says that listening to the never-before-released August 1985 live show that’s part of the new Power Station boxed set was something of a thrill, as he’d never heard the tapes prior to creating this 2026 collection. “I forgot that we’d had to fill out a two-hour set on that tour based on a Power Station album of just eight songs, so, sure, we did ‘Obsession.’ And of course, let’s do a Duran Duran song. Hey, let’s do two.”
The lesson John Taylor learned with the creation of the supergroup: there’s no place like home.
“The idea of a supergroup was so everything not punk-rock, right?” says the bassist with a big laugh. “The Power Station started off as this unconventional thing, gained traction, and became more legitimate, more conventional. And by the end of its 1985 tour, I realized that I didn’t start the Power Station for the sake of convention, or even to have another band. I was already in a great band to start: Duran Duran.”
