4/5 stars

“I FEEL like a teenager again,” tweeted one fan in an instrumental interlude during Duran Duran’s exhilarating return home to Birmingham.

Keen to show they’re moving with the times – how else would they have lasted 30 years and still be able to command an arena tour – the iconic Brummie band posted Twitter messages on a big screen in what was a trip down retro lane for most of the 12,000 packed into the LG.

And while the hits kept coming, from their first sing-along single Planet Earth from 1981 to their world-wide smash Ordinary World from the early 90s, the current tour also showcases Duran’s latest and 13th studio album, All You Need Is Now.

Produced by Mark Ronson, the disc marks a clear return to form for four of the original five-piece with tracks like The Man Who Stole A Leopard tipping its hat to long-standing fans’ fave The Chauffeur from Rio, the album that launched them into the pop stratosphere.

Always looking to connect with the audience, front man Simon Le Bon made one Durani’s night when he ventured into the stalls and invited Lucy from Coventry to open The Reflex with a chorus of ‘Da, na, na, nas,’ while the first track of the encore saw the thumping good Wild Boys morph seamlessly into Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax and back again to set up everyone’s favourite show stopper about that pretty girl who dances in the sand... Do, do, do, do, do, do... Do, do, do, do, do, do.

Ah... they don’t make ‘em like that any more!

Courtesy Coventry Telegraph
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