Kathy McCabe Music Editor - The Daily Telegraph
March 28, 2012 6:57AM
WHEN Duran Duran performed at the newly opened Sydney Entertainment Centre almost 30 years ago, the noise which greeted their arrival on stage set a record which lasted 15 years.
For the women - and token men – whose parents wouldn’t allow them out that night, the band’s return to the venue on their All You Need Is Now tour was welcomed just as enthusiastically. Although the screams now give you an ice-cream headache.
Duran Duran still hungry like the wolf
Let’s get the gratuitous that-was-then and this-is-now thing out of the way.
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Duran Duran still hungry
SIX months ago, Duran Duran was staring into the abyss.
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WITH eighties bands and artists in vogue, another has decided it's time to come back to Australia.
Simon Le Bon looks hot again, John Taylor looks weird with the Katy Perry blue streak, Nick Rhodes owns a time machine and Roger Taylor is agelessly handsome.
But with a minimalist set of steel and video, it was the music and its performance which stamped a timelessness no critic in the 80s would ever have granted Duran Duran.
They bravely started with new track Before The Rain before slamming into Planet Earth, the song which launched their career and gave them their first No.1 worldwide, down here in Oz.
Its synth-heavy new wave is now a guitar and bass-driven rock-out in a post millennial setting, yet sacrifices none of the poptastic hooks, a theme which resonded throughout the gig.
Even when they mashed the industrial edge of Wild Boys with the h-so-80s club of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax, this was hardly some retro robot dance down nostalgia avenue.
New track Girl Panic! Is the 2012 companion of the epic Girls On Film, while Safe (In The Heat Of The Moment) can hold its own alongside Come Undone and the sublime Ordinary World.
Yet who could resist the sensory memory pull of The Reflex, A View To A Kill, Hungry Like The Wolf, Notorious and Is There Something I Should Know?
Each band member shared a memory of Sydney to demonstrate their enduring “special relationship”, as John Taylor calls it..
And Taylor dedicated Tiger Tiger to Molly Meldrum, who they credited with championing their career here – the band visited him at home in Melbourne earlier this week.
Duran Duran, whose latest album was produced by hitmaker-of-the-moment and fan boy Mark Ronson, seem able and determined to boldly keep their past in the future.
“If you promise to keep coming back, so will we,” Taylor said before walking off stage.
That’s fine by Sydney, John.
Courtesy Sydney Telegraph
