It took a little longer for Duran Duran to catch on in the US. (Sean O’Callaghan, the chosen bomber, turned out to be a police informant.) In 1983, when Duran Duran played a charity show at London’s Dominion Theatre, Charles and Diana came out to watch, and the IRA tried to plant a bomb at the show. Shortly after she married Prince Charles in 1981, Princess Diana named Duran Duran her favorite band. By the time they released Rio, their second album, they were a full-on phenomenon in their homeland. When the group found a stable lineup, they signed to EMI and quickly caught on in the UK, where the sensationally horny “Girls On Film” video helped push the 1981 single to #5. Le Bon was the oldest of the group the #1 single in the US on the day he was born was Tommy Edwards’ “ It’s All In The Game.”) (Amazingly enough, Le Bon was born with that utterly perfect name. The last Durannie to come on board was the University Of Birmingham drama student Simon Le Bon, who became the band’s singer. Eventually, Duran Duran put together a lineup of foxy boys, three of whom had the last name Taylor even though none of them were related. For a while, they didn’t even have a drummer they just used a drum machine. Taylor and Rhodes named Duran Duran after the bad guy from the 1968 cheesecake sci-fi fantasy Barbarella, and the band went through a ton of different musicians in their first few years. Right now, across the street from that site, there’s an ’80s-themed club called the Reflex. The Rum Runner, which became Duran Duran’s home base, was torn down in 1987. John Taylor and Nick Rhodes started putting the group together in 1978, when both of them were working at the Rum Runner, a Birmingham club that patterned itself after Studio 54. But wherever Birmingham exists on the English map, it’s not a particularly glamorous place. Readers of this column have informed me that Birmingham, the town that birthed Black Sabbath and Electric Light Orchestra and Dexys Midnight Runners, is not, in fact, a Northern town, that it’s really a Midlands town. But the New Romantics did get their name from the lyrics of Duran Duran’s 1981 debut single “Planet Earth,” so it’s not like it’s unfair to use that term when talking about them. Before too long, Duran Duran came to overshadow the rest of the so-called New Romantic scene, the Visages and Ultravoxes of the world. I’m allowed to be over-dramatic.ĭuran Duran came from a beautiful little moment in UK pop history, a time when new wavers reacted against punk’s ferocity and, through the lens of new wave and Roxy Music, embraced the gaudy flash of Euro-disco instead. It would be over-dramatic to say that this twist of fate was tragic. Instead, Duran Duran scored their first chart-topper when they were already well into their tax-exile phase, spending too much money to overthink their drum sounds and to wonder whether they really wanted to cause any more teenybopper mob scenes.
No chances for this column to celebrate billowy shirts and desperate yelps and arch guitar-stabs set against percolating sequencers. But only one of the Rio singles made it into the top 10 in the US.
The images that came out of the Rio videos - Simon Le Bon chasing a tiger-painted model through the Sri Lankan jungle, Simon Le Bon plunging off a sailboat into the azure-blue Caribbean - are among the most memorable snapshots of MTV’s golden era. By the time that happened, Duran Duran had already started to bloat, and the giddy charge of their best records had begun to dissipate.ĭuran Duran’s golden pop moment was their 1982 sophomore album Rio, a close-to-perfect piece of giddy and haughty and flirty pop craftsmanship. Perhaps because of that radical newness, it took a little while for American radio to embrace Duran Duran - or, at least, to embrace them tightly enough that one of their singles finally fought its way to #1. Duran Duran may have been the peak early-MTV group, the band whose flashy and pouty and colorful visual presence came to stand in for a generational shift in pop-music tastes. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Īll too often, transformative acts don’t score their first #1 singles until the party is almost over.
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