And "serious music" is not necessarily for everyone, as Rolling Stone 's James Henke realized when he referred to Duran Duran's eager fans as "young girls who were glued to their television sets watching MTV every waking hour. These girls had little use for the Clash's left-wing politics, or the ranting and raving of that weird-looking Elvis Costello.
But Duran Duran, now they were something else. Five extremely good-looking young men. Dream dates. Duran Duran began coming together in some sources say in the Midlands city of Birmingham, where Rhodes and guitarist John Taylor started performing with a variety of bandmates. The group, which takes its name from a character in the film Barbarella, became complete in when Simon Le Bon, a drop-out drama student, showed up one day in pink leopard-print leotards and said he wanted to sing in the band.
Le Bon joined Rhodes, John Taylor who switched to bass , drummer Roger Taylor, and guitarist Andy Taylor none of the Taylors are related , and the quintet began performing in Birmingham, most frequently at a club called Rum Runners which had become established as the home of England's burgeoning New Romantic scene. Duran Duran quickly became the headliners of that movement, playing at large clubs and festivals throughout England, and in early they released their first single, "Planet Earth," which went to number 12 on the United Kingdom charts.
Later that year their first album, Duran Duran, went to number three on the album charts and spawned two more hit singles, including "Girls on Film. The lavish videos helped transfer this new-found fame to the United States, where "Hungry Like the Wolf" reached number three.
By Duran Duran was an international phenomenon—their third album, Seven and a Ragged Tiger, debuted at number one and suddenly the boys were living the lives they had created for themselves on video, playing sold-out tour dates around the world. They were dandies, playboys, and their profiles became plastered on teen magazines everywhere. First there was Rhodes his name was originally Nicholas Bates , the man who probably most personified the band's gaudy image.
Rhodes grew up with John Taylor and both found that they liked the music of glittery stars like T. His wanderings were well-chronicled there. Roger and Andy Taylor rounded out the band and were more known for staying in the shadows while the others baited the screaming girls at center stage. By Duran Duran had started suffering from the personality conflicts that hamper many bands.
Their production slacked off as the players spent more time apart, getting together only occasionally for certain projects, such as the immensely successful single and video for the James Bond movie A View To a Kill.
The song was the only Bond theme to go to No. John and Andy Taylor began work on an outside project with Robert Palmer in and formed a band called Power Station, which recorded an album of the same name which was number 30 that year, according to Rolling Stone and played at the Live Aid benefit concert.
In the meantime the remaining "thoughtful" members of the group briefly performed and recorded as Arcadia, spawning the LP So Red the Rose. It, too, climbed the charts; Rolling Stone found it harmless and bland: "Egan's lubricated bass line contrasts nicely with Simon's hog-calling tenor. And no matter how obnoxious or not you may have found them, personality is one thing Duran Duran never lacked.
Their effort, Notorious, received the usual chilly reception from critics, but the videos were popular on MTV. Rolling Stone actually went so far as to call Notorious Duran Duran's "most consistently listenable work," but felt the band had lost personality in the search for musical maturity.
Big Thing! People panned the album; "As 'mature' musicians, they're marooned. Far more important was their marketing success, whereby they capitalized on their obvious visual attractions through the media video and the glossy pop magazines , a technique that became increasingly important in the music industry in the Eighties. Liberty, released in , was another of Duran Duran's efforts to renew their past success.
This time the band combined "everything from disco to guitar rock, Motown, Philly soul, and new wave," according to Stephen Thomas Erlewine of All Music Guide, creating an album that was stylistically confusing and helped to continue the band's falling sales. The greatest hits compilation Decade: Greatest Hits was also released that year and would eventually earn platinum sales in May of The group's fortunes changed, though, in with the release of what was considered a comeback album, Duran Duran The Wedding Album.
But then something happened between us and punk: It went into a slightly more austere kind of style where everybody wore black, and the album covers were monochrome. It all got a bit dull. There was a collective consciousness: There were shops in Birmingham like the Oasis where suddenly color had come back into fashion. And I turned up, famously, in pink leopard-skin pants. The whole glam thing became a part of the scene, and Kraftwerk became a big part of the scene as well—and all of that filtered through the new things that people were doing.
NICK: We also had the benefit of having lived through the s musically, which was the most adventurous, crazy decade, with all these different genres. And, unusually for the time, we liked quite a few different things from different genres. We can have that as well as the punk sensibilities. I mean: videos, to name maybe the most obvious of these zeitgeist-defining things. SIMON: We just came at this incredible time when all these roads crossed at the same place and we were at this junction—it was musical, it was fashion, it was the technology of the video—.
Is there something about that that you saw early on as having potential? ROGER: One of our managers actually wanted to be a film director, and being the manager of Duran Duran was kind of a stepping stone or a rehearsal for him—he wanted to make these epic movies.
Russell Mulcahy, the director, was one of the four guys who invented the visual language of that time. JOHN: It was hugely significant, though: I think before Sri Lanka we were still kind of a club band: We looked like a club band, we thought like a club band, and people sort of thought of us like that. But we came out of that and got to Australia, where people had seen the video, and we were stars. Thousands of people showed up —they had to block the streets, and they had to get police on horseback to control the crowds.
NICK: I suppose in a way, after having seen Beatlemania and what happened with the Rolling Stones in the early 60s, people thought that sort of thing had gone away for rock music. I remember being quite panicked about it. Most of you have been playing together in some form for the better part of 43 years. Is it a calling, a vocation—or is there simply a demand for what you do that you want to satisfy?
NICK: This particular lineup has been together since or so. Le Bon similarly wanted to emulate Jim Morrison; the problem was, that with his sailing, he was less Doorsy, more outdoorsy. If Duran Duran were essentially an electronic band with a heavy rock guitarist bolted on, then Hungry Like the Wolf was the sound of the rockier elements within the camp winning the battle rather than the war.
The other was Girls on Film, a song apparently about exploitation in the fashion industry. Shot on a crepuscular evening and balmy afternoon, with panoramic vistas and Le Bon in rolled-up Antony Price trousers sitting pensively on the beach, it conveyed the message that being in Duran Duran was the best fun in the world, and being a fan of Duran Duran might be the second-best option.
Save a Prayer was the first ballad they released as a single, featuring an immediately identifiable yet mysterious, almost arabesque, musical ululation at the outset and throughout. It has also become synonymous with tragedy, with Le Bon dedicating it to Marvin Gaye during the filming of their concert film Arena An Absurd Notion in , and to his friend Michael Hutchence in If Rio had been the cohesive sound of an organic pop band at their collective peak, then the direction in which Duran Duran would move for their third album would cause ructions that would ultimately lead to a schism.
And what a belter it is, too. Roger Taylor, the most underrated member of Duran Duran, brought an irrepressible groove as its foundation, with the rest of the band building a whole city of instrumentation on top. But time has been kind: three decades on it sounds mesmeric. The follow-up to Union of the Snake is one of the great underrated Duran singles.
It only reached No 9 in the charts, which must have hurt them like parents expecting great things from a child who duly fails all their exams. As well as delivering a, by now customary, lacerating Le Bon chorus, the singer also quivers and croons seductively over a hypnotic beat in the verses, with some of the incidental keyboard lines lifted straight out of China Girl. Rodgers would become a big player in the Duran Duran story. Nile Rodgers — whom John and Andy Taylor had met while recording their spin-off album as the Power Station with Chic partner Bernard Edwards — was drafted in to sprinkle some of his pop magic over the track.
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