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Комментарий Саймона к песне The Chauffeur из Live From London.
Заранее прошу извинения за неточности- записано на слух
( несколько слов так и остались загадкой,а также бормотания и хихиканья
)
When I first met the band I brought with me a big thick book of lyrics. I remember Nick looked at the lyric of The Chauffeur and said –“I wanna do this one”.
I actually loved this video Russell Mulcahy …yeah I`m pretty sure it was him…he showed driving around London. I think it was almost difficult for us in a way to accept this because it was the first Duran Duran video without a single member of Duran Duran appearing in it.
And I think we were talking about doing it to a different music and I said-well, hang on, I`ve kinda written it already ,and if you feel like me play it to you –I`ll play it and I did and it worked really well and we just decided to keep it pretty much as it was.
Everybody was pretty much taken with work of Helmut Newton at that time and you`ve got a girl in a raincoat and when you see her you- know she`s not wearing anything underneath.
Well this is simple I think.
When recording it in a studio in the centre of London it was almost like an acoustic song. The recording process was really what crystallized it and made it into what it was. I was good just to have the freedom to be I guess what you call ambient now and it is one of the darkest esoteric songs that Duran Duran have ever written.
I took the guitar and just started writing a song and I took myself into a kind of a science fiction world… and I put this girl sort of into the back seat and I put myself in the front …and this complete story of unrequited love… and it became the Chauffeur.
It`s got a beautiful kind of melancholy feeling for me. It`s not self-indulgent and it is not kind of following in a self-pity but it was being able to kind of appreciate an emotion that is not happiness but it`s a depth of emotions, kind of getting of how much something effects you and I think it`s what is like when you are loving somebody and you know that they don`t care at all about you. Yeah… and there`s that bit about “glass splinters that lie so deep in your mind”. I think I nicked it off Garcia Lorca`s Blood Wedding-there`s something about glass splinters but I think they are in a heart but I just loved this idea of somebody who`s sort of unresponsive and is almost as if they have these sharp, painful things inside their mind ,their heart and their soul…
I had a book as a kid called Time Travel and every time somebody was gonna come in for the future or life in the past they`d see Blue Silver and it just seemed to fit perfectly with the vibe of the story I was trying to tell.
We love playing this song , it is just something that we`ve always loved to play and everybody`s trying really hard. It`s not easy to play live this song , especially you know when you`ve got Perry Lister dancing behind you with little stars on her nipples I think.
In a recording studio and to putting it together Nick brought in a BBC Sound Effects album-how cheesy is that? But we listened to it and we found a noise of the crickets and things and if you listen to the record-you`ll hear that stuff.. but you`re gonna listen carefully.
It`s got that ocarina bit in it which is almost…I don`t know..reminds me…like a baroque sort of dance or something like the dance of Capulets and Montegues. It`s quite strange and very very formal and it goes so beautifully with the girls dancing.
We were making this record and a big percussion case came in and it had all sorts of shakers and it had tambourines , maracas and…this little clay wind instrument in it. It is called an ocarina which I think is Italian for a baby-goose and it is made of clay. I started playing it and coincidentally it was exactly the right key to play that little baroque that is such an important little thing in me song.
I`ve been all around the world now and I`ve been never able to find another one that sounds quite the same.
