Reportage (album) - The Making of Reportage

The Making of Reportage

In Andy's 2008 autobiography Wild Boy: My Life In Duran Duran, he revealed that the band had originally been offered the opportunity to record their next album "aboard a superyacht owned by Paul Allen... but sadly the plan fell through at the last minute due to the boat becoming unavailable." Instead they began with three weeks of self-produced recording sessions at Andre Agassi's Tiburon mansion in September 2005. They moved the recording sessions to London in October, where they continued working on the album until April 2006 with Michael Patterson as engineer and co-producer. In March, drummer Roger Taylor commented that "the record will be in some ways a homage to our roots as a band, more direct and a return to our dance and new wave origins."

Bassist John Taylor discussed the circumstances behind Reportage during a 2007 XM Radio Artist Confidential Session: "We'd been on the road with the reunion tour for a couple of years and we were feeling pretty confident. We felt that we'd found ourselves again as musicians, so we were quite excited to come off the road and start writing and recording straight away. Our confidence was such we felt we didn't need a producer, we could make all the decisions ourselves, so we wrote songs quite quickly and really felt that we had an album." According to Andy, John was taking charge of the sessions: "We did some more recording in February 2006, and this time John seemed more determined than ever to take on the role of producer."

Following sessions at London's Sphere Studios, they submitted a rough mix of the album to their record label Sony Music in May 2006, but it was rejected for not having an obvious lead single. According to John, "I guess we'd worked on it for about six months, we got a title Reportage and we kind of had a cover and we presented it to the label. They said they heard the second single and the third single but not the first single, so they suggested could we perhaps go and cut a couple of songs with a producer -- maybe something a little bit more commercial." According to Andy, the band met with producer Youth in June and discussed working with him at his studio in Spain that fall to "work out which bits were the most important and how to make all the various components work together as a whole." They also made plans to record a few potential singles with Timbaland in October. The band and Timbaland had previously met and expressed their desire to work together.