Liberty (Duran Duran album)

Liberty is the sixth studio album by English new wave band Duran Duran. It was released on 20 August 1990 by Parlophone. The album reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart, and spawned the singles "Violence of Summer (Love's Taking Over)" and "Serious".

Liberty
Studio album by
Duran Duran
Released20 August 1990 (1990-08-20)
RecordedMay 1989 – March 1990
Genre
Length50:26
LabelParlophone
Producer
Duran Duran chronology
Decade
(1989)		 Liberty
(1990)		 Duran Duran
(1993)
Singles from Liberty
  1. "Violence of Summer (Love's Taking Over)"
    Released: 23 July 1990
  2. "Serious"
    Released: 1 October 1990
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[1]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music[2]
Entertainment WeeklyC−[3]
Rolling Stone[4]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[5]
Select[6]

Recording

Liberty is the first Duran Duran album to feature songwriting credits outside the lineup from the first three albums. Guitarist Warren Cuccurullo and drummer Sterling Campbell were made official band members and given songwriting credits, although Campbell would leave in early 1991, before the band began work on their subsequent album The Wedding Album.

Writing and rehearsing for the album took place intermittently between May and July 1989; demo sessions took place in August and September, and final recording began on 9 October at Olympic Studios, with producer Chris Kimsey and engineer Chris Potter. Recording, production and overdubbing of the many keyboard and vocal layers dragged on until March 1990.

In a 1998 interview with Goldmine magazine, bassist John Taylor admitted that he was struggling with his drug addictions during recording of the album. He said, "When we were in rehearsal, it seemed like we had a great album, but we weren't able to parlay it into a great album in the studio, whatever. I can just remember smoking hash oil, that's all I can really remember about making that album." [7]

Vocalist Simon Le Bon commented, "We went into a barn in Sussex and started jamming away, and before we got finished, it was like, 'Right we've got the album, let's go and record it now.' And I don't think we got it right; I don't think we were paying enough attention. We were quite self-conscious at the time as well, the way things had been going, and it kind of made us stand outside of ourselves to do the album. But out of that came two of the best songs Duran's ever come up with, 'Serious' and 'My Antarctica,' they're really, really beautiful songs. I don't think it's a bad album, but there's definitely weak spots on it, definitely. I mean, something like 'Violence of Summer', it just didn't have a proper chorus, great verse though. Just not paying enough attention, we just lost our concentration."[7] Ultimately though, he proved to be quite sanguine about the album as a whole, stating on its 25th anniversary in 2015: "I wouldn’t go back and change anything though, I’d rather spend two weeks writing a new song then making changes to Liberty. It was a point in time for Duran Duran. I really do look back on Liberty with a lot of fondness."[8]

A bootleg recording of the demo sessions for the album, titled Didn't Anybody Tell You? surfaced in 1999. Many unreleased, scrapped songs from the Liberty sessions were heard by the public for the first time:

  • "Bottleneck"
  • "Money on Your Side"
  • "Dream Nation"
  • "In Between Woman"
  • "Worth Waiting For"
  • "My Family" (played live 1989)

When asked about the bootleg, John Taylor said, "I like coming across things that I've forgotten about. That I've forgotten that we recorded. That's what's really exciting about the Didn't Anybody Tell You bootleg, because there's so many songs on there that never got finished. They just take me back to that moment. Actually, what I like about that album is that the Liberty album - when we were rehearsing it, when we were writing it was gonna be a great album. I really felt it was gonna be a great album. When we got in the studio I fell apart and the production just wasn't right. It turned out to be a very mediocre album, but at the demo stage, which is what that [bootleg] album is all about, I think there's a great album in there. Could have been great songs."[9]

Track listing

All tracks are written by Duran Duran, except where noted. As with the previous release of Big Thing, Toshiba-EMI would release Liberty in a two-disc set, with a 3-inch CD (CD3) of remixes.

No.TitleLength
1."Violence of Summer (Love's Taking Over)"4:22
2."Liberty"5:01
3."Hothead"3:31
4."Serious"4:21
5."All Along the Water"3:50
6."My Antarctica"5:01
7."First Impression"5:28
8."Read My Lips"4:30
9."Can You Deal with It"3:47
10."Venice Drowning"5:13
11."Downtown"5:23
Bonus disc (Japan only)
No.TitleLength
1."Yo Bad Azizi"3:03
2."Throb"4:25
3."Violence of Summer (Love's Taking Over)" (The Story Mix)3:18

Singles
  1. "Violence of Summer (Love's Taking Over)" (July 1990) #20 UK, #64 US
  2. "Serious" (October 1990) #48 UK, #6 Japan

Personnel

Duran Duran

Additional musicians

Charts
Chart (1990) Peak
position
Australian Albums (ARIA)[10] 56
Dutch Albums (Album Top 100)[11] 37
European Albums (Music & Media)[12] 37
Swiss Albums (Schweizer Hitparade)[13] 36
UK Albums (OCC)[14] 8
US Billboard 200[15] 46

Certifications
Region CertificationCertified units/sales
United Kingdom (BPI)[16] Silver 60,000^

^shipments figures based on certification alone

References
  1. Allmusic review
  2. Larkin, Colin (2011). The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th concise ed.). Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-85712-595-8.
  3. Entertainment Weekly review
  4. Rolling Stone review
  5. Sheffield, Rob (2004). "Duran Duran". The Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th ed.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8.
  6. Kirsch, Michele (September 1990). "Duran Duran: Liberty". Select: 82. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  7. Green, Jo-Anne. "Your Mission, Barbarella: Find Duran Duran Archived 4 March 2007 at the Wayback Machine." Goldmine, Volume 24 Issue 456 (16 January 1998)
  8. "Simon Looks Back on Liberty". DuranDuran.com. 20 August 2015.
  9. Interview with John Taylor Archived 22 November 2006 at the Wayback Machine, 31 August 2000. Trust the Process (Official John Taylor website).
  10. Ryan, Gavin (2011). Australia's Music Charts 1988–2010. Mt. Martha, VIC, Australia: Moonlight Publishing.
  11. "Dutchcharts.nl – Duran Duran – Liberty" (in Dutch). Hung Medien. Retrieved 18 January 2019.
  12. "European Top 100 Albums" (PDF). Music & Media. Vol. 7 no. 36. 8 September 1990. p. VIII. OCLC 29800226. Retrieved 18 January 2019 – via American Radio History.
  13. "Swisscharts.com – Duran Duran – Liberty". Hung Medien. Retrieved 18 January 2019.
  14. "Official Albums Chart Top 100". Official Charts Company. Retrieved 18 January 2019.
  15. "Duran Duran Chart History (Billboard 200)". Billboard. Retrieved 18 January 2019.
  16. "British album certifications – Duran Duran – Liberty". British Phonographic Industry. 10 September 1990. Retrieved 18 January 2019. Select albums in the Format field. Select Silver in the Certification field. Type Liberty in the "Search BPI Awards" field and then press Enter.
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