Director David Lynch helms Duran Duran film

NASHVILLE — Next month will mark a period of high activity for British popsters Duran Duran. Along with work to finish a new album, the rock band will appear at the Fashion Rocks concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, before releasing Duran Duran: Unstaged, a concert-film collaboration with director David Lynch. The film is an enhanced version of Lynch’s 2011 original livestream presentation, with tweaks and enhancements added.

Said Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes: “It was one of those moments where we all looked at one another and said, ‘Good luck, let’s see what happens.’ And it went out on the Internet just exactly as we played it, and of course, there were some things that didn’t work quite as well as others. It’s been refined for cinema, and it looks beautiful, too. The print is fantastic.”

When the group approached Lynch to oversee the initial livestream, he said he’d consider it only if it were “radically different” from the staid concert-film formula. Lynch chose to shoot the piece in black and white — like The Elephant Man, which Rhodes and bassist John Taylor saw together as teenagers — and created a series of images to run over the top of the band’s performance.

“There was a room filled with smoke all the time,” Rhodes said. “There was another room where there were a lot of actors doing strange things. Then, he pre-prepared some other footage, which varied between sort of hand puppets and aeroplanes and clocks and machinery, and this footage just sort of literally was superimposed over us playing ... and I think the results are really pretty unusual.”

The band is aiming for less radically different results in the recording studio where it has been cutting songs for its new album, which is slated to be released in the first half of next year.

“I think we know where we want to be and it’s right in the centre of the dance floor,” Rhodes said. “That’s what we’re aiming for together.” AP