Ник в интервью, своими словами Опции

[winter rose]

И он сказал, что Рене –милая хохотушка?
By GINA VIVINETTO
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 29, 2000

«Пресс»-вопросы

Во время тура по Уэльсу 38-ми летний дендиподобный клавишник ДД Ник Родс отвечает на 10 «пресс» вопросов об искусстве, секретах макияжа и искрометной Рене Зеллвегер...

 1) ДД всегда вели декадентский образ жизни-снимали дорогие видео на Шри-Ланке , разъезжали в автомобилях Астон Мартин как Джеймс Бонд. Однажды я читала, что вы ели клубнику с шампанским на завтрак. А что было самое экстравагантное из того,что вы делали?

Самое экстравагантное..ну вот однажды я купил картину Пикассо на карту Американ Экспресс :). Я купил ее на юге Франции. Это было в конце 80-х.

2) Ну так что, клубнику с шампанским на завтрак вы все-таки не ели?

Да не знаю..Может было один раз. От шампанского у меня жутко болит голова. Я не большой поклонник шампанского. Предпочитаю красное вино, и естественно никто не будет пить его на завтрак.
На завтрак я ем фрукты. Иногда мюсли или что-нибудь в этом роде. Но обычно фрукты и йогурт. Я вегетарианец. Уже 11 лет.

3) Интересно вращаться среди известных людей? Вы когда-нибудь волновались при встрече с кумирами детства, вроде Дэвида Боуи или Рокси Мьюзик?

Вообще-то нет. Ко времени личного знакомства с ними я уже сам был известным человеком. Если б я встретил их , когда мне было лет 15-16, скорей всего это было бы по- другому. Но всегда приятно познакомиться с актрисой ,которая в жизни выглядит лучше чем на экране.

А такое часто встречается?

Ну , знаете , иногда случайно встречаешь людей где-нибудь в ресторанах и... знаете я бы сказал.., вот Рене например, действительно очень мила. Рене Зеллвегер. Она такая хорошенькая хохотушка.

Она только что рассталась с Джимом Кэрри.

По-видимому так. Я познакомился с ней много лет назад.  Она была веселая, милая и забавная.  


4) Когда кто-нибудь чихнет, вы из тех людей, которые соблюдают этикет?

Конечно. Это очень по-английски. Мы всегда говорим: «Будьте здоровы».

5) Я знаю, вы ценитель искусства. И к тому же еще и фотограф.
Искусство в каком стиле вы предпочитаете?

Фотографы? Ман Рей- король всех фотографов. Из фотографии в области моды я люблю Еллен фон Унверт.
Художники? Марсель Дюшам, Энди Уорхол, Жан-Мишель Баския. Я и классических художников люблю. Мне нравится Рафаэль.  Взгляните на полотна итальянцев-они свое дело знали.  

6) Вас с Саймоном еще не тошнит друг от друга?

(Смеется) Нет. Мы дружим. Нам весело друг с другом.

7) Вы умеете делать искусственное дыхание?

Да.

А когда-нибудь делали?

Слава богу, нет.

А стали бы?

Если б никто другой не смог сделать это лучше. Если бы в доме не оказалось врача.

8) Самый лучший мультфильм?

Симпсоны и South Park. Я их обожаю. Добросовестно смотрю все серии. Я ничего не смотрю по ТВ кроме новостей, репортажей , кино, Симпсонов и South Park`а. У них самые лучшие сценарии.

9) Вы один из немногих выходцев из 80-х, кто еще красит волосы и делает макияж.

Конечно. А почему, собственно говоря, нет?

Дадите каие нибудь советы по макияжу?

Думаю , стоит выяснить,что вам самой нравится на своем лице. У меня, к счастью, одно из таких лиц, на которых косметика смотрится естественно. Как будто так и надо.

Ошибки с прической?

Однажды мне так осветлили волосы, что сожгли кожу головы , и она вся покрылась волдырями. Я провел рукой по волосам, а пальцы были все липкие. Это было самое отвратительное. Плохо. Очень плохо.

10) Самая лучшая рок-группа?

Velvet Underground


(Редактор winter rose - 04-05-2003 21:43)

[winter rose]

А вот и Татлер :)

Переводить пока-нет сил :blush:

Who's a pretty boy then?
Nick Rhodes is the ideal boyfriend: he'll dress you, make you up - even sing to you. Vassi Chamberlain on Duran Duran's glam rocker.
A slightly embarrassing experience, shopping for Valentine cards with a famous Eighties pop star among the acres of pink schmaltz and I Love You's of Liberty's stationary department. Nick Rhodes and I retreat to separate tills but, suddenly, he's by my side again. 'Quick, this way,'he says, grabbing my arm. 'See that woman there - she pounced on me.' What, a member of Duran Duran still being nobbled by a fan? Did she get the right person?
As it happens, Rhodes may receive rather more of this type of attention before the year is out. The original members of Duran Duran (not seen together since Live Aid in 1985) are about to relaunch their careers with a new album. It's odd, considering what has come and gone since the pretty boys from Birmingham burst onto Top of the Pops in 1981 with 'Planet Earth', that the music industry is prepared to give them another chance. But Duran Duran, and Nick Rhodes in particular, were never just about music; it was their looks and style that also captured the zeitgeist.
That was 20 years ago. Today, hunched over the table in a West End Conran, Nick looks surprisingly good - the only person worth looking at in the room. Dramatic, in top-to-toe Dolce and Gabbana, he's carrying a small Chanel carrier bag. It contains a mobile, Dior sunglasses, an invitation and a smart ink pen. He has not seen the natural colour of his hair since he was 16. Dyed Marilyn-blond, it hangs in a rough cut fringe over the palest green eyes. It's not immediately obvious that he is wearing make-up. But of curse he is. There's a touch of mascara on his fluttery long eyelashes, a thin veil of foundation on his velvet-cushion-plump skin. I resist the temptation to stroke it. Despite the make-up, he looks wholesome and young - not at all how a 40-year-old pop star should. That's probably because the only thing he did to excess during the band's wildest days was shop - the music career as fashion statement.
While Simon Le Bon and John Taylor sent their teenage fans into romantic tailspins, it was Nick Rhodes, head bobbing at the keyboard, a geisha-face full of make-up, that is the band's most enduring image. 'News presenters cover themselves in panstick - why shouldn't he?' asks his friend Antony Price, the fashion designer. 'He's never done it to look like a woman but to be a better-looking man. It doesn't make him gay, does it?' Thank God someone's brought that up because, frankly, he's got to be, hasn't he? All that slap, the fancy wardrobe, the female side so strong it reeks. But, face-to-face, my gaydar doesn't even twitch - he's both masculine and sexual. 'He's always been able to pull fabulous birds,' confirms a begrudging Le Bon. 'Almost better than... well, I haven't done so badly, have I?'
Most of all, Nick Rhodes likes to confound all our preconceptions of how a straight man should behave. You could meet him 20 times and still not get the measure of him. That's because you think you know who he is - an effeminate pop star pretending to be straight. You think that because he comes from the concrete soullessness of Birmingham he's a little rough round the edges, someone who keeps his famous flame burning by sticking to his Eighties androgynous look. You should be right about all of the above. But you're not.
As it turned out, Nick Rhodes's friends were a little more forthcoming than he was at first. 'There's no one quite like Nick?' says Antony Price. 'His idea of Heaven is being in a top restaurant surrounded by 10 supermodels, discussing make-up. He's a girl with male genitals.' The feminine side of him possesses a collection of Vogue magazines, dating back to 1912; it makes him answer 'the camp ones, of course' when I ask him what artist he prefers, and also why he enjoys going to fashion shows. Nothing to do with front row seats, apparently - he just loves fashion.
'He has an obsession with the photographic image,' says Price. 'He's like Bryan Ferry. They both know more about what is going on in Vogue than what's happening in the music business. And it's no coincidence that all his girlfriends are very photogenic.'
Is he argumentative? 'Is he ever,' says Le Bon. He's very analytical and that can be a pain in the arse. He cares about everything, and I mean everything. He feels it's his business to chose my socks and underwear.'
Le Bon should calm down. Rhodes's girlfriends haven't faired so lightly, and have all undergone a top-to-toe make over. 'He used to go to Harvey Nichols and buy all my clothes,' his ex, Madeleine Farley, tells me. 'He taught me how to wear make-up, how to dress. He's the closest link between gay men and straight women. He was the woman in our relationship. I had a pair of couture fangs surreptitiously made for him - the dentist and I were in cahoots. He'd always wear them in bed, and I'd have on my six-inch Manolos.'
The relationship ended after 10 years and left Nick heartbroken. 'Nick, almost Svengali-like, invented Madeleine,' a friend of both tells me. 'He created somebody who walked away. She wouldn't have done so if he hadn't created what she became.'
Although he rarely invites anyone home - preferring to eat out in such places as Sketch and Locanda Locatelli - his Chelsea house is described as 'rough-edged and glamorous, like a St Petersburg palace', and a 'bordello-turn-of-the-century Parisian with Tintoretto-style ceilings'. I wheedle out that he 'favours gently decaying Venetian' and that he possesses an art collection that includes Warhols, Basquiats and Clementes, although this comes with no invite to view it.
'I love that wonderful contrast - a Brummie lad with so much sophistication,' says Princess Katya Galitzine, who refers to Rhodes as 'my Prince Nicholas'. 'We visited Tallinn together once and he couldn't believe his luck that we'd landed in a city full of icons, gold and rococo.'
'I like culture-type things, ' says Nick, as we wander round the Titian exhibition in the National Gallery a few days later. He refuses one of those electronic contraptions - Titian in 15 minutes - and gives me his own, surprisingly academic, running commentary instead. As he weaves excitedly through the hordes, I can't help noticing that Nick Rhodes is still an unusual sight among real people.
'I collect everything,' he says. 'That includes fashion, art, any kind of design.' What, all with the same intensity? I ask, imagining storerooms brimming with a surplus of style. 'No, no, no it's all about editing and detail. God is in the detail,' he says, resting his long thin fingers in a fan shape on his chin, and then adds with what can only be described as an evil smile, eyes shining underneath the mop: ' I'm an atheist.'
As he pokes his head between the zombies and their headsets to get a better look at Bacchus and Ariadne, I wonder why he's so reluctant to give anything away about himself. His intellect is weaselish; he adroitly sidesteps anything he does not wish to say. Humour and charm deflect unwanted attention, preternatural calm diffuses any unpleasantness. If he found a question irritating, he'd testily drop my name at the end of an answer, always with a smile, but without revealing anything. On the surface he might appear to be the sanest and most grounded man to have come out of the music industry - his manner is that of an exquisitely mannered, amusing dinner-party guest - but there is an oddball lurking within.
Forget Being John Malkovich - being inside Nick Rhodes's head would be infinitely ore interesting. Compiling a list of his peculiarities is a lengthy task. Paranoia leads the way: he worries, for example, that his discarded nail clippings might one day be used to clone him. That we have benefited from his genius during our lifetime is not good enough - he is thinking of having himself cryogenically frozen (not just his head, the cheap option, but his entire body). He longs for the day that his fridge announces that his sprouting mung beans are a few minutes past their sell-by-date. Disappointingly, he's a vegetarian, although the Hitchcockian tale of how he became so involves a Prague restaurant and the blood of a juicy steak spurting onto his white shirt 'like an artery pumping blood'. Madeleine relished recounting every last detail of her 'darling Nicholas'. Did his habits drive her mad? 'Are you mad?' she says. 'It endeared one to him.'
And you can see why. He firmly believes that the female species is superior to the male, which will one day die out. 'Like me, he suffers from only-child syndrome,' says Galitzine. 'We speak to our mothers every day. It's part of his character that he believes that he's the centre of his world, that he can do anything he wants.'
According to Le Bon, Rhodes (real surname Bates) was spoilt as a child. 'His mother had a toy shop and, can you believe, he had the run of it. He was bought a car at 16 but he never bothered to learn how to drive. Anyway, he'd be admiring the architecture or something and end up in the back of a lorry.' But whatever his friends think of his oddities, it is clear that they are able to tease him without incurring any bad feeling. 'We made a promise 20 years ago that we'd always stick by each other, and we have,' says his closest friend Simon Le Bon. Do they see each other often? Yes, but not always just the two of them. 'As much as I like him,' says Nick biting into a cucumber sandwich later on at tea in Claridge's, 'it's always best to have some girls around.'
Humour is the key to Nick Rhodes. His old friend Stephan Elliott, director or Oscar-winning Aussie film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, says he has never taken himself, or the band, remotely seriously. 'He got the joke about why they were famous right from the start.' The pair recently came upon the idea of shooting a Duran Duran documentary, in the style of The Osbournes, except that the whole thing would be a lie from start to finish. 'We invented drug problems, weight problems, we were going to out Nick the homosexual - basically the caricature of what you'd expect from a famous rock band. We would have gone ahead, but we couldn't guarantee that everybody would keep their mouths shut.'
His romantic affairs have been slightly more tumultuous than his friendships, although it is clear that he is happier in long-term relationships, apart from the whirlwind few months he spent with Tara Palmer-Tompkinson a couple of years ago ('I haven't seen her recently, but the last time I did she was adorable'). He was married to Julie Anne Friedman at the apex of Duran's fame when he was only 21. They divorced acrimoniously seven years later and she retreated back to California. Did it pt him off women? 'No, why should it have?' he replies. 'Women aren't all the same, are they?' They had a daughter Tatjana, now 16, who goes to a smart boarding-school and visits her father a weekends. They spend their Saturdays checking ut what's new on the King's Road. 'She's my pal,' he says.
His current girlfriend is another American, the blond and sinewy Meredith Ostrom. Sh's a model/actress, soon to feature in Richard Curtis's directorial debut, Love Actually. They are a curious match. She's an Upper East Side New Yorker, whose mother Barbara is a successful interior designer with clients such as the late Richard Nixon and the music mogul Russell Simmons.
'My mother is very social,' says Meredith. 'We spent every saturday of my childhood visiting the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon on Fifth Avenue.' Nick and Meredith met on a London street 18 months ago while hailing the same taxi. ' Nick's friend suggested we share the cab. I thought that very rude but we found out we were going to the same party. His haircut made me laugh. I had no clue who he was. When we stepped out the cab and all these flashbulbs went off, I felt like I was in a Woody Allen movie.'
At the age of 23, she could be forgiven for never having heard of Duran Duran. The courtship was slow and romantic. Meredith arranged for her investment banker brother to meet Nick, to check him out for the family. 'My brother was wondering why he was wearing a bright pink shirt. I agree with him. I hate that shirt. If I see it again, I'll burn it. My parents adore him - they think he's really sweet,' she says. 'Before they met he used to tease my mother over the phone and tell her he was wearing a full face of make-up.' Nick and Meredith spent Christmas with the Ostroms at their house in St Bart's (he doesn't sunbathe). Do your parents expect you to marry? 'Well, um...' I hear shuffling of feet. It's an unfair question but she answers diplomatically. 'Probably they hope that,' she says finally. It must be difficult for a 23-year-old to fall seamlessly in line with the life of a man almost 20 years older. The couple live separately - a move I suspect instigated by Mrs Ostrom. Is he controlling? 'How much time do you have?' sh asks. Do they argue? 'Only about food.' Food? 'I cook too much,' she says. 'Have you heard of Quorn? He loves it, so I cook Quorn burgers, Quorn sausages - I even make him turkey-flavoured Quorn sandwiches to take to the studio. Yuk!'
She may be god with meat substitutes but less so when dealing with her boyfriend's activities, such as working non-stop, watching the news from morning to night, or browsing in bookshops. 'He goes to this dingy little bookstore. He'll be in their for hours. It drives me nuts. He buys so many books and he doesn't even have bookshelves at home. They're in neat stacks everywhere.' Other complaints include not going on enough holidays, his extreme tidiness, workaholic tendencies and what she calls the 'reality lectures' he gives her. 'When I hear that word 'reality',' she says, 'I just start shaking. Before meeting him I'd have assumed all rock stars take drugs. He's a very steady guy - more like an investment banker.'
Relax, you're one hell of a lucky girl, Meredith Ostrom. Given the dire predictions coming out of the City, she should thank her lucky stars that her boyfriend's career is in music. Apart from the Duran comeback, there are many other projects. 'He constantly conceptualising,' says Paige Powell, Andy Warhol's former assistant. 'Andy really liked him. He was attracted to originality and Nick exuded that.' He looks after four other bands: The Devils, which he fronts with his old friend Stephen 'Tintin' Duffy, and The Dandy Warhols, She Said Yeah and Riviera, which he produces. He is also launching Monkey Me, a Wayne's World-type TV channel for rockstars.
Whether Duran Duran's comeback is a success or not is immaterial. Nick once said to Andy Warhol: 'Duran is something I enjoy doing, but I have a bigger world out there.' He doesn't crave the plaudits and he certainly doesn't need the money. He possess a Diana Vreelandish quality in that he is able to be himself, make grand pronouncements ('I prefer champagne in chocolate than having to drink it' and 'Tony Blair is Margaret Thatcher in drag'), put himself together peculiarly and still be admired. He doesn't fit into any box, a factor that may find irritating in others, but with Rhodes it somehow works. He's worked out how to do and live life well. He's the pretty boy with brains who, even though the jokes on him, gets it, as always, before everybody else.