Duran Duran star NICK RHODES decided to revive his shelved side project Tv Mania after discovering the band's long lost album by accident.

The keyboardist teamed up with former Duran Duran guitarist Warren Cuccurullo for the project back in the 1990s, but the music was put to one side when his commitments with the pop group took precedence.

Rhodes finally released the TV Mania album Bored With Prozac and the Internet? on Monday (11Mar13), 17 years after completing the record in 1996, and now reveals he found the music by chance when going through some old tapes in storage.

He tells Rolling Stone magazine, "We created something that I think is truly unique, and when I took it to our record label, Emi/Capitol, needless to say, they thought we'd gone completely crazy... We were gonna go off and release it independently... but it ended up being shelved because we then wanted to complete the Duran album...

"It just got lost. I thought it was gone forever. Then one day 18 months ago, I was searching through one of our tape storage places trying to find a Duran track to digitise and I opened a little Dat (digital audio tape) box that was mislabelled and inside was the TV Mania album. I didn't even have a Dat player anymore; it's one of those lost formats. So I had to get one, and I was really happy when I heard it because it's aged rather well. It's a real time capsule."