I’m a hard-core Duran Duran fan. I have followed them through side projects and solo albums. I have listened to every single one of their mediocre comeback albums, even the one that was called Red Carpet Massacre. I rented the 1986 movie American Anthem, a sensitive love story about two Olympic gymnasts, just because Andy Taylor did the pus-gushingly bad theme song.
Hey, I have my moments when I worry about how much I love Duran Duran. I’ve done things I’m not proud of and frequented chat rooms I won’t visit again. I realize they’re maybe not the most productive group in the world, or the most talented, or the most proficient. But it doesn’t matter. We share secrets, Duran Duran and I. I watched the Live Earth broadcast in 2007 just to see them save the planet. Simon Le Bon told the crowd, “Just coming here is not enough to get what’s got to be done, done . . . but . . . if we all sing . . . we might just make a stand, right here!”
And what song did Simon choose to save the planet? “Girls on Film.” That is why he is Simon, and that is why we love him.
“Girls on Film.” Famous for a video with sexy models attacking sumo wrestlers.
Let’s not mince words: Duran Duran are famous because girls like them. If a few boys want to come along too, that’s fine with Duran Duran, they like the color of our money. But we are the fans they do not care about. They don’t need us. They have the girls. They know who keeps them in business.
They’ve always known this, even in their earliest days. In my collection of DD memorabilia, I treasure their 1981 interview with Melody Maker. Nick Rhodes announces, “I’ve just worked out why so many more blokes are coming to our gigs this time round.” Why? “Because they’ve heard that so many girls come.”
In most styles of music, there’s a stigma to having this kind of a female audience. When LL Cool J was having his rap battle with Canibus, the deadliest insult Canibus could say was, “Ninety-nine percent of your fans wear high heels.” In part, this is just jealousy, but there’s also some primal male fear involved. There’s the fear that if you have a female audience, male fans won’t touch you, and when the females move on to the next cute dude with a catchy song, you will be broke and lonely.
Of course, it goes the other way too. Ladies love LL Cool J—that’s what the name stands for, “Ladies Love Cool James”—whereas Canibus never had a hit in the first place. LL’s response to the high-heels line? “Ninety-nine percent of your fans don’t exist.”
“Hungry Like the Wolf.” The first time most of us heard Duran Duran, at least in this country. Still the only hit song in history ever to endorse lycanthropic sex.
Simon still sings in the high-pitched yelp of the pop idol. That can be a dangerous thing for a rock singer. It’s an old showbiz truism that a low voice has a longer career than a high voice. Even in the old-time radio days, if you were a lightweight tenor, it meant your audience would be female, and that meant you would have a short run. Frank Sinatra became an idol in the 1940s by crooning breathy love ballads to girls while their boyfriends were off fighting World War II. When the soldiers came marching home, Frankie’s career crashed—until he made his 1950s comeback with his deep new broken-down-by-love voice. Singers with high voices always try to aim deeper. As baritone Bing Crosby told tenor Dennis Day on The Jack Benny Program, “Get your voice down here where the money is, kid.”
Simon never worried about any of this. In fact, the mere fact that he decided to go pro with that voice is proof he is made of sterner stuff than people realize.
It can be uncomfortable for a boy to watch the frenzied, uninhibited enthusiasm of girl fans screaming for their idols, whether it’s Sinatra, the Beatles or Michael Jackson. That is partly jealousy too—who wouldn’t want to be the one who inspires girls to make that kind of noise? But it’s also partly because we envy that enthusiasm. The archetypal girl fan does not have to worry about whether music is cool or valid or authentic. If it makes her dance or gets her hot, she screams.
Boys do not scream, so we get threatened by all this libidinal energy. As the musical philosopher Lil’ Kim has noted, inside every man is a baaaad girl. And that bad girl can scare the bejeezus out of us. The lady makes demands.
There’s a story I love about the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, a gay man who could never publicly acknowledge the intensity of his love for this band he’d discovered. One night, on tour in America, he gave himself a special treat he’d never indulged before. He sneaked into the back of the crowd, anonymous in the dark, stood with the girls, and screamed as loud as he’d always wanted to.
When I hear Duran Duran, part of me wants to scream for them and part of me wants to be the guy who the girls are screaming for. I guess that’s why they keep me feeling fascination. Duran Duran are a girls’ band who have stayed famous by being true to their girls; they do not let this stigma get to them. They are flamboyantly pleased to be adored by females. They do not get rattled by the screams.
Next up on the hit parade is “Rio.” The title track to their second and biggest album. Still their most famous video, with their second-most-laughed-at lyric: “It means so much to me, like a birthday or a pretty view.” Gloriously terrible sax solo too.
They cared nothing for rock standards of authenticity. They had three guys in the band named Taylor, as in clothes-makers, and I didn’t know what was more brilliant, the fact that it was their real name or the fact that they weren’t related. They came from Birmingham, and if I’d known anything about Great Britain, I would have known it was a grim industrial steel town where the urge to break out of gender confines must have been overpowering. But I didn’t. All I knew was the way they draped themselves on the inner sleeve of Rio. For a few months, it was hard to tell Nick from John, unless John was sporting his bare-chest-under-white-blazer-and-one-of-La-Toya-Jackson’s-spare-headbands look.
I still get that frisson every time I see the “Rio” video. Simon’s on his yacht, wearing some kind of powder-blue mesh tank top. A girl swims through the ocean carrying a pink phone, which Simon answers so he can sing the second verse to another girl on another boat. I love the girl who strolls out of the surf with a knife strapped to her thigh. (Why, Lord, why? Why didn’t that look catch on?) I love the girl who stretches on the love seat and yawns indulgently while John nervously fumbles with the champagne.
I have no idea how many different girls are in this video, but they’re all Rio to me, and I fell in love with all of her. The way she winks at the end, as if she has been here before. Duran Duran are not the first rock-and-roll sailor boys to zoom through her harbor, and they won’t be the last. She is older than the sand upon which she dances. You will pass away, lover boy, just another pair of dancing footprints in the sand, but Rio will roll on. Creamed jeans are made of this!
Side 2 starts with “The Reflex.” Their first and only U.S. number-one hit, even though everybody likes “Rio” a lot better. The lead singer of the Fixx denounced this song, saying, “There’s a soul flapping in the breeze there.”
Boys were threatened by Duran Duran, which was understandable. They were the first popular band to get dismissed as a video band, an MTV scam that gullible girls got brainwashed into liking. John Lydon of Public Image Ltd., formerly Johnny Rotten, sneered, “As for you poor little cows who buy Duran Duran records, you need serious help ’cause these people are conning you.”
That was a popular sentiment. When the Clash called their 1985 album Cut the Crap, Duran Duran was probably the crap they meant. Sweatband-wearing rock prudes Dire Straits rustled up a huge hit called “Money for Nothing,” raging against them. “That little faggot with the earring and the makeup / Yeah buddy, that’s his own hair.” Dire Straits didn’t wear earrings, makeup or hair for that matter. They just wore sweatbands.
Boys around the world were arguing with their girlfriends, trying to explain why Duran Duran were a fraud, a smoke-and-mirrors show, an imperialist plot, a joke. They probably didn’t write their own songs or play their own instruments; they were a soulless corporate produc
t. If I’d had a girlfriend, I probably would have given her the same argument. Maybe I liked Duran Duran so much because I could console myself for not having a girlfriend. By being a DD fan, I was part of the problem that was making so many other boys so mad.
Lots of bands complained that Duran Duran and the other new-wave hair-hoppers were taking up valuable airtime that rightfully belonged to the American bands turning up the soil of the punk underground: the Minutemen, the Flesh Eaters, D.O.A., Big Boys or Black Flag. Some of my favorite bands grappled with the moral ambiguities of the whole DD phenemonon: X came out against them (“I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”), while the Replacements found them amusing (“Androgynous”).These were both great songs. Not as great as “Hungry Like the Wolf,” though.
“Is There Something I Should Know?” This ballad has Duran Duran’s most famous line: “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war.” No, I don’t know what it means.
The first time I met Duran Duran, they were called Shaun Cassidy.
Maureen Connelly brought the Shaun Cassidy album into school one day, in that fateful spring of 1977. The entire girl half of the fourth grade sat rapt as Shaun whispered his secret girl code: “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Da doo ron ron? What the hell did that mean? The dewy look on every female face in the room made me eager to know more, but Shaun wasn’t telling. Da doo ron ron.
All of us boys hated Shaun Cassidy, feared him, made fun of him, boycotted his Hardy Boys television show. We were singing “fuck you ron ron ron, fuck you ron ron” to his Dynamite cover shot, cursing his blond perfection and his three-foot-wide blue eyes; I rejoiced when Mad magazine renamed him “Shorn Chastity.” What we didn’t realize was that Shaun didn’t understand this girl language any better than we did. We had no idea “Da Doo Ron Ron” was an old ’60s girl-group song by the Crystals. Shaun didn’t know what “da doo ron ron” meant either.
A few months later, the same damn thing happened all over again. Except now it was Melissa Kaiser bringing the album into class, and Shaun’s name was now Andy Gibb. He was even blonder and cuter, with ringlets that cascaded down his head like the wool of a sacrificial lamb. That’s when it dawned on me that this cycle would never end. By the time Andy Gibb was up to his third or fourth hit, there would be another one, and then another. Only the names would change, and even then not much. It was like Showgirls: there’s always someone younger and hungrier coming up behind you on the stairs.
This proved to be correct. Every few months there was always someone new, except now my sisters were old enough to command the radio and buy records, so I heard them at home rather than just at school. They kept coming, the Rick Springfields and John Stamoses (Stami?) and Loverboys and REO Speedwagons. And—just in time for high school—Duran Duran, a new breed of boys on film.
The average girlie-idol pop star has a short run, partly because girls are fickle, but mostly because boys always want to be taken seriously. So they try going rock, and get alpha bravo’d by reality, at which point the girls have found someone else. Your average pop star gets famous by acting girlie—and as soon as he gets to the top, he frantically tries to get rid of the girls and starts trying to get taken seriously by the boys. Hell, even Shaun Cassidy tried to go boy-rock eventually, doing an album of Who and Talking Heads covers produced by Todd Rundgren.
It’s the oldest story in the book, but the stars never learn. They wash off the makeup, grow some stubble, start frowning and crossing their arms in the band photos. Hey, is that a brick wall? Let’s stand in front of it! It never, never works.
Okay, right, it worked for George Michael. And Justin Timberlake, and I guess you could count Bon Jovi too, although I’d trade their entire mature classic-rock phase for one chorus of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” But look at the wreckage. Poor Ricky Nelson—he changed his name to Rick, disavowed his teenage-idol past, started playing sensitive hippie country rock. The Bay City Rollers became the Rollers and started writing adult rock songs about how lonely it was being teen idols on the road. The New Kids on the Block changed their name to NKOTB and tried to win the serious hip-hop crowd with “No More Games.” Frankie Goes to Hollywood claimed, “We’re not a girl’s band. We’re a man’s band.” (Well, that was understandable.) Spandau Ballet went metal. Milli Vanilli tried singing.
Even Poison, those frou-frou bubble-metal skanks—they scrubbed off the Max Factor, got serious, did an acoustic ballad called “Stand.” “You got to stand for what you believe.” Wait, I’m getting advice from Bret Michaels? About standing for what I believe? I’ll tell you what I believe, Bret. I believe in “Talk Dirty to Me,” and C.C. DeVille, and Rikki Rockett, especially on the album where you were credited with “Vocalizin’ and Socializin’ ” while C.C. was “Sticks, Tricks, and Lipstick Fix.” I believe in every single episode of Rock of Love, especially the one where the crazed stripper steals the gym socks from the roller rink. But “Stand”? Nay, Bret—this is not what I believe in, and you never believed it either, which is why I believe in you. Hug?
Every star is afraid of the scent of Bubble Yum, the snap of barrettes. But can you blame them? It’s got to be unnerving being up there in the girlie lights, hearing the screams of the lust-crazed bacchantes. It scared the ancient Greeks—Orpheus, the inventor of song, was ripped to pieces by lovesick sea nymphs because his voice was just too hot. Euripides wrote The Bacchae, about the dancing ladies who worship Dionysus and get driven so mad by his music that they rip off their husbands’ heads.
If Simon Le Bon ever feels it’s a drag to get up there every night and remember the plot to “The Chauffeur” and act surprised every goddamn time Rio shows up to run him down (“Wooo! Hey now! Look at that!”), he keeps it locked inside his pretty little head. If he owns any sensible shoes, he never gets caught wearing them in public. If any of the Durannies have any fits of male pride where they feel it’s demeaning to tart themselves up for the ladies, they keep it to themselves. These men let their self-doubt float across their sky like a fluffy black cloud. Once, when an interviewer asked who would play them in a movie, John Taylor named some guy from Dynasty, Simon picked Eddie Murphy and Nick Rhodes said, “Joan Crawford, just because she wore great shoulder pads.” Now that’s a star talking.
“A View to a Kill.” The theme to a James Bond movie that nobody has ever seen. The video has John Taylor shooting a bunch of people on the Eiffel Tower.
When I was writing for the MTV Video Music Awards, in the summer of 2003, I wrote a speech about them. Kelly Osbourne and Avril Lavigne were giving the band a Lifetime Achievement Award, and I wrote their speech. They are both huge DD fans, even though they weren’t born until 1984, circa “The Wild Boys.” It was a daunting task. How could I do justice to the subject—not to the band, who I’d written about a million times, but to the fans. Could I do justice to the girls who were screaming for this band before Kelly or Avril showed up to scream along?
It was a surprise award for the band. They thought they were merely invited to appear onstage and present an award to somebody else; Kelly Osbourne and Avril Lavigne came out with the trophy and sprung it on Duran Duran as a surprise. The band looked pleased—but not humbled. Who wants to see them humbled?
Kelly and Avril delivered the speech beautifully, passionately. Kelly sounded like a preacher, getting religion, waving her hands in the air and getting the crowd screaming. Every time she yelled out another DD song title, the screams got louder. She was on fire. I was watching from my seat in the back of Radio City Music Hall, where I was just another dude. But Kelly Osbourne and Avril Lavigne—they were girls who loved Duran Duran.
“Notorious.” A huge hit in 1986, produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic. This was the first DD hit without Roger and Andy. It was also the first hit that made people say, “Oooo, I like this one. Who is it? Duran Duran? What the hell are they doing still around?”
There’s a character in a Shakespeare play who describes life as “six or seven winters more,” but what she really meant was “six or seven Duran Duran
records more.” They always keep making more. More than you would guess without having to look it up. No matter how big a fan you are, you probably haven’t flipped through Nick Rhodes’s photographic collection Interference, or listened to Simon’s solo version of “Ordinary World” with Luciano Pavarotti. Duran Duran have more records than you’ve heard, more than they remember, more than anyone wants. They’ve stuck around so long, they have aged into the despot dowagers of new wave. To tell the truth, even a hard-core fan has to be stunned by their staying power.
In the ’90s, they had an urban radio smash with their cover of Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” But they don’t really worry about hits anymore. Now they make records with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, just to prove they can. They seem to be constantly doing reunion tours. Once in a while, you catch them taking themselves seriously, and although those moments are brief, they’re reassuring and kind of poignant. There’s a VH1 Classic Albums documentary on the making of Rio. It’s downright sweet to see Nick Rhodes in the studio at the mixing board, turning up the guitar track from the master tapes of “Rio.” “It’s a hell of a guitar sound, actually,” Nick muses. “Andy always used to use Marshalls but then he was quite experimental with his pedals at that time too, so I’m sure it was chorused and flanged and delayed a little.” John Taylor adds, “He had a lot of knowledge of the fret-board.” Oh, puh-fucking-lease! What are we, Jeff Beck now? This is a Duran Duran record!
I feel I still have so much to learn from Duran Duran. They’re like the musical version of the sensei that Uma Thurman goes to study martial arts with in Kill Bill. They are my new-wave senseis. What do we expect from DD? Egomania. Ridiculousness. Sexual hysteria. A little humor if we’re lucky. You will never meet anybody in your life who has ever felt disappointed by them or anything they do. But somehow, that just makes it safer to love them.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Page 20