SO… DUANE, er, what’ve you been doing, then? You know, since all those old hits and twangy guitar riffs. Been busy, or…
“Well, l had a kind of comeback about '75 time.”
What, with ‘Dance With The Guitar Man’?
“Yeah, that's right, then I kinda stopped doing anything for a while. Until about three years back, that is. I’d kinda lost the urge to play but a lot of friends came round and got me back doing things again.”
Duane Eddy looks somewhat different from the man (travelling style), with twangy guitar. ‘Shazam’, ‘Because They're Young’, all his classic instrumental sounds still crawl from the radio from time to time, but you can’t put names to them, you can’t quite picture the juvenile Duane bending those strings.
Over 20 years on, Duane Eddy has a beard, a revitalised version of his best known cut 'Peter Gunn' riding high in the Charts - with the help of Art Of Noise - and a new enthusiasm to play.
But how did this second teenage awakening begin?
“I was playing with Ry Cooder and lots of other people, thinking about getting my band together when l got a call from The Art Of Noise.”
As simple as that. Those ex-Morley post pubescents, it seems, had been toying with the idea of working with another for some time. And... Well, let The Art(y) JJ, Cellnet telephone and coffee in hand, tell you how it all came about. A Filofax speaks.
“We’d just got on a computer list where you can phone people via your terminal and we were looking through it to see who else was on it and we saw Eddy, D. We thought, lt can't be him, but we rang him and it was,” slurps JJ.
And that, young un-chipped people, seems to be how the contact was made.
There was, of course, an outburst of mutual appreciation - the A’s are big Stateside and Duane reckons them as the best instrumental thing to come along for many a moon.
“I really liked what they were doing," drawls Duane. “My favourite, I suppose, must be ‘Moments In Love’. When I heard that I thought they were stretching the outer limits, so to speak.”
“We were then,” interjects JJ, his Cellnet lying dangerously dormant. “But it's pretty old hat now. Everyone's done it now.”
SO, EVEN the newest Noise is old hat? But you must admit ‘Peter Gunn’ is a superbly well written piece of music and, even if the Art is tried and tested, the end result still makes for an excessively strong dancefloor record. Sure, they wouldn’t tamper with Duane's guitar sound, but did they change the song to meet their needs?
Over to you JJ.
“We didn't want to mess around with the initial guitar sound, the idea was to put it into a modern setting and make it more contemporary.”
A minor achievement? Well, they didn’t change it that much.
But, with that one head-on twang, is that the end of the relationship? After all, Duane, Art Of Noise have your sound locked in their computer now, they don't really need you anymore.
“Reckon,” reckons Duane.
“It was originally designed as a one-off,” prompts JJ, “but we will be playing live in the States and maybe we’ll dep with Duane and vice versa. I mean, we don’t want to drop into a groove. . . you know, into a trench.”
No. You’d never hear your Cellnet ring.
“If I was them,” speaks Duane in a strictly non-profit making managerial mode, “I would come out with another really great instrumental just by themselves.”
And what about you?
“Well, l’m getting some dates organised for my band and I’ll be coming back to Europe soon to do some TV and stuff like that.”
As that bending beat trickles back again, this marriage born out of microspect has spawned a hit and enhanced both halves’ careers. Art Of Noise will be back; Duane Eddy will, hopefully, march down those dusty riff-laden roads again, too.
Did technology kill the cat? We’ll have to wait and see.
