You never know how you're going to be received, after all this time. The initial response we had was just overwhelming, particularly that tour of the States.
When you're in a band that's so big when you're young, you kind of lose your identity a little bit. You just become part of the band. I just needed to get away from it.
Nick and Simon had come to a natural end of their working relationship with Warren, which obviously opened the door for a reunion of the original five.
I was burned out. I think I was just exhausted. It was a very intense five years. We didn't stop. It was constant touring, constant writing, recording.
I slowly started to drift back into music again. I finally got the call from John... about getting the band back together again. It was so out of the blue. I almost thought that the moment had passed.
I lived a normal life for a number of years. I had kids. I lived up on a farm in Gloucestershire in rural England, and just kind of got back to reality again.
I guess when we were up against it, we knew this album was going to be compared to all the classic early material, because it was going back to the original five.
Everybody was on the same page. Nobody has really gone out there on a different musical journey. When we got back together again, we all wanted to do the same kind of music.
At some of the venues, the audience was so loud we could hardly hear what was happening on stage, which kind of threw us back to 1983, when we had very similar reactions on a much bigger scale.
The bar was very high-we had to really make sure that we got what we really wanted, that it was a real finished album. We weren't going to give up until we got that.
As Andy says, being in this band in the early 1980s made you feel like you were part of a pizza. We were always one of the band, one of Duran Duran, or one of the Taylors.
It was great fun. We had gone on tour in between the sessions and reconnected with the audience and got a lot of energy back from them, a lot of positive energy.
