Nick Rhodes life and biography

Nick Rhodes (born Nicholas James Bates) is an English musician, is best known as the keyboardist of the pop rock band Duran Duran.
Rhodes and singer Simon Le Bon are the only members to have been with the band throughout its existence. Furthermore, Rhodes is the youngest band member and the only member to have been in the band since its creation in 1978.
While in Woodrush, he and John Taylor formed a band called 'RAF' with other classmates.

As the band coalesced into its final lineup in 1979-80, Duran Duran started playing at a local Birmingham club called "The Rum Runner". The club owners became the band's managers, and Rhodes began working at the club as a disc jockey.
The band achieved rapid success, and Rhodes was a driving force throughout. An unschooled musician, he experimented with the sounds his analogue synthesisers were capable of, but shied away from the "novelty" sounds of some other early synth bands.
By the late 1990s, Rhodes had begun writing lyrics for Duran Duran, as well as music. His digitally altered voice is heard on the title track to the 1997 album Medazzaland.

In 2001, the original five members of Duran Duran reunited to record new music.
Rhodes studied production techniques while in the studio with Duran Duran, eventually helping to mix several tracks on the Rio album, and was a co-producer on many of the band's later albums.
Rhodes and Warren Cuccurullo wrote and produced three tracks for the Blondie reunion album in 1996; the tracks were not used, but one song called "Pop Trash Movie" was later recorded by Duran Duran for the 2000 album Pop Trash.

In 2002, Rhodes co-produced and played additional synthesizers in nine tracks of the album Welcome to the Monkey House by The Dandy Warhols. In 2004 he produced British-based pop group Riviera F for their debut EP International Lover.
With his bandmates Simon Le Bon and Roger Taylor, Rhodes formed the side project Arcadia while Duran Duran was on hiatus in 1985. The band had a moody, keyboard-heavy sound, far more atmospheric than Duran Duran (or the hard rock of the other Duran splinter group of 1985, Power Station).
The band scored a major hit with "Election Day" and the band's only album, So Red The Rose, went platinum in the US but was less successful in their native UK. The band never toured and was dissolved when Duran Duran regrouped in 1986.
Throughout the 1990s, Rhodes worked on a side project called TV Mania with Duran bandmate Cuccurullo. They created a self-described "social junk culture triptych opera" composed of music, dialogue, samples, and "found sound," and hoped to make it into a Broadway play. The music and packaging have reportedly been finished, but they have not found a label to release it.
In 2006 Rhodes and John Taylor collaborated on the compilation album Only After Dark.

Rhodes met Julie Anne Friedman (heiress to the Iowa, USA Younkers Department Store fortune) at a yacht party while on an American tour in 1982, and married her on 18 August 1984. They have one daughter together, Tatjana Lee Orchid (born 23 August 1986). After a brief separation and an attempt to reconcile, they filed for divorce in 1992.

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