Q&A: Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes And Wendy Bevan On Their Ambitious ‘Astronomia’ Project

During the many interviews I did during the early days of the COVID lockdown I joked with a number of artists about how with so much time to write they would be coming out with the COVID box set.

However, as of now, Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes and his musical collaborator, Wendy Bevan, are the first and only to act I know of to rise to that challenge. The prolific duo have thus far released two of their four instrumental Astronomia records. The second two are due in September and December, which will bring the whole collection to a total of 52 songs released in 2021.

As they explained to me the pair were in the studio working on Bevan's solo album, which Rhodes was producing, when they decided that with the onset of COVID they wanted to wait to release her solo album. But not wanting to stop working or slow their momentum they began working on "four or five" instrumental tracks, which eventually became the 52 pieces of music.

I spoke with Rhodes and Bevan about the origins and influences of the Astronomia project, their dream of doing the songs live and why it would be at NASA, the films that inspired them and much more.  

Steve Baltin: Where are you both based these days?

Nick Rhodes: At the moment we're actually both in London. But Wendy's spending quite a lot of time in Los Angeles and when we made the record together, the Astronomia project, she was there the whole time.

Baltin: How did you choose the release dates?

Rhodes: The second one came out on June the Twentieth because they're actually being released on solstices and equinoxes. So the next one will be September the Twentieth, or around there, and the final one in December. We have written the 52 pieces, but Wendy and I are still tweaking. With each album it just about gets finished before the release date.

Baltin: When you go back and listen to this music how much of L.A. and London do you hear in the songs?

Wendy Bevan: I think, for me, writing in L.A. allows me the space I need to create a lot of the atmospheric work that I write. So I can really hear it and feel it when I listen back to the project, on my parts that I've contributed. Maybe the juxtaposition of the two is exactly what Astronomia is. Nick, you wrote in very different circumstances to me. I was in the sunlight in my studio in L.A. I like it very light when I write, I like an open space, I don't like to feel claustrophobic. Nick, you kind of write in a different way (laughs).

Rhodes: It's absolutely the polar opposite. The gloom and darkness of London, obviously we're both experiencing the pandemic. So they weren't very easy times. But I actually found some solace from locking myself into a dark studio, having no contact with the outside world and just immersing myself in music to express the anxiety and confinement knowing that there's all that wonder out there in the world that none of us were allowed to explore for that period.

Baltin: Nick Cave once told me as an artist you write what you're longing for. As the listener, I don't hear the anxiety and confinement. Do you hear it as the artist looking for an escape?

Rhodes: For me, it was very much trying to find a way out of it. When I first started out in music long ago, growing up in industrial Birmingham in the U.K., and I think the reason that we made the music we made then, that was optimistic and uplifting, was because we were in somewhere so gray and we had a great desire to get out of that and to see something else and to find inspiration. So with this project, certainly, for my part, I had to find the inspiration from within. And then Wendy and I both sort of looked to the universe, which is obviously an infinite inspiration for many artists in different fields. But we looked at it in, "Well, there is actually hope elsewhere." And I think that was really the start of the idea on basing the project on the skies.

Bevan: I think also it became a parallel universe, didn't it, Nick? And it was something we very much created. No matter what environment we were in it became this extension. But I do love Nick Cave's comment. He is one of my favorite songwriters too and the idea of prophecy is always there in music for me. And, yes, in the way I write I think there are these curious spells that come up from somewhere. These pieces of music, whether there were lyrics or not. Obviously Astronomia doesn't have any lyrics, so it's just all pure feeling and atmosphere. But on my part I work well with space and I feel that's really there in the sense of the music. I really respond well to light and space.

Baltin: When did you discover the two of you could work together?

Bevan: Working together in this particular way was new. Because prior to Astronomia, we'd worked in the studio together writing an album of mine as a vocalist, which Nick was producing. And still is producing. So we'd actually been in the same room in the same city in the same country prior to developing Astronomia, which was obviously five and a half, 6,000 miles apart.

Rhodes: For me it was lovely having Wendy around in the studio. Of course you have a different relationship and you're much closer, you can just sort of whisper across the room to each other and say, "Try that, or what about this?" Whereas when we made Astronomia I only got little sort of coded messages coming from Wendy.

Baltin: Was there a moment where you shifted from working together on Wendy's record to the instrumental projects?

Rhodes: There was kind of a defining moment because what happened was we'd pretty much finished recording Wendy's solo album by January of last year. And realizing what was starting to happen, Wendy said, "I think I'm gonna back to L.A. for a while, let's see how it unfolds." And, for sure, over those next couple of months we all saw what happened and we decided to delay Wendy's album because she wanted to do some live shows to promote it and obviously all the things that go around releasing an album. So we said, "We spent almost a year doing this. Let's hold on and do it properly." Not having any idea how long this period would last for the world. And then we said, "Let's keep working though, let's keep our spirit moving." I said to Wendy, "Why don't we make a few instrumental pieces? That's a nice way to introduce elements of the sound we've made together. And perhaps we put that out before we put out your solo album. Let's make a few and see how they work together." Because Wendy had made some beautiful atmospheric pieces on her own that I liked already. And I've got piles of them sitting in computer files that I've made over the last few years when I had time. So we both liked this area. We began making four or five before Wendy and I had the conversation together and said, "This is a separate project. It's not just a few pieces to put out there." Then it developed when we decided upon the universe and then my sort of OCD moved to, "Okay, it's 52 tracks over four albums, each one on an equinox and a solstice." Wendy smiled at me in a way that was sort of quite unnerving because I think she sort of meant, "Are you sure about this?" (They laugh) But we did and we got through it. It was a challenge for ourselves, right?

Bevan: It certainly is, but we had the amount of work. When we started we obviously had a few tracks like Nick said, then all of a sudden we realized we had a lot more than that. It was a monumental amount of tracks that all strangely fit together in this sort of parallel universe that we created. So I think the defining moment was probably a few tracks into it or several tracks in and thus deciding, "Okay, well what is this?" Astronomia doesn't need words. It's just pure sound and atmosphere.

Baltin: Are there any plans to do these songs live even in a one-off type show?

Rhodes: We did actually talk about it. Both Wendy and I would love to do something extraordinary with a symphony orchestra and synthesizers and obviously Wendy would do her vocal stuff and the choral, we'd have a choir. But it's an awful lot to do. Even though planning this and putting the albums together has been an enormous amount of work, we've had the time to do it. Whether we can pull together a one-off show at some point over the next 12months, I don't know. The will is there. I think it would be a wonderful thing to be able to do and to log a record of it. And of course it would be fabulous for us to hear it all come to life live with real musicians playing everything. But that one we're not sure yet.

Bevan: It's a fabulous dream right now. It would certainly be wonderful if it happened, but it won't be this year.

Baltin: Since this is only fantasy at the moment where would be the dream location to do this one-off show?

Rhodes: The Observatory in Griffith Park is quite extraordinary. So I'd be more than happy to do that.

Bevan: I would say the same for L.A. Nick, you recently did a show at NASA. Why don't we take Astronomia right back there and see if they'll have us?

Rhodes: That's true. That was one of the most extraordinary settings I've ever been in. We were lucky enough with a Duran Duran show to play in the Rocket Garden at NASA in Florida. So behind us the backdrop was all these old rockets and we're just a few hundred meters away from where they launched the Apollo rocket to the moon. It was pretty amazing. I'd be delighted to take you back there, Wendy, and see if we could twist their arm to let us have a little space somewhere.

Bevan: Okay, let's do that. That's the programming, you got it.

Baltin: Are there artists and artist/symphony collaborations that inspire the idea of what you might do live?

Rhodes: I don't know. Wendy and I are both very visual, the way we think and the way we create. We're always in pictures. I think what we would want to do is recreate the four albums chronologically and as faithfully as we could to what we made. Because they do sort of follow pathways. We spent a long time sequencing and making sure that the journey, as an album, really works. It's all about the listening experience and getting that right. So the most important thing would be to make sure we got amazing musicians and that we could get the sound somewhere close to what we made.

Bevan: As a violinist I'm big on strings. So honestly if we had budget, if nothing else I'd just want so many strings there. Bjork did a fantastic performance a few years ago with strings.

Baltin: Since you mention visual are there films that became visual inspiration?

Rhodes: We actually chatted about some of the films whilst we were making the project, particularly the [Jean] Cocteau films, The Orphic Trilogy. They were all based on Greek myths, which has crept into our lexicon of influence. And I think those three films are absolutely extraordinary. So we'd sometimes reference those. [Stanley] Kubrick is ever present, I think in many artists' work. How could he not be? A fair amount of science fiction. We love some of the '50s films, some of the old things like The Day The Earth Stood Still and there's something about that element visually. Anything going in to the unknown I guess we were looking at that too.

Bevan: For me, there's always a bit of David Lynch in my work Also some Werner Herzog, director, I love his work. Anything surreal and slightly offbeat is pretty much my bag (laughs).