“Did you come to dance,” asked Simon Le Bon, a fallen angel in white bondage surrounded by a band of zombie punks and ghostly Marie Antoinettes, “or did you come to die?” A somewhat cake-or-death question. The witches, she-devils and general nosferati of the Co-Op Live arena in Manchester clearly came for their annual dose of Beelzebub boogie.
Hungry like the … werewolf? You were in the right place. Since throwing the New Romantic Halloween party to end them all in Las Vegas in 2022 — not so much wild as lost boys for the night — Duran Duran have had a bloodlust for the role of most devilish band in pop. In 2023 they dipped their biggest songs into the synth-goth cauldron and covered some of Satan’s best noir-pop and indie rock tunes on the Halloween-themed Danse Macabre album, and each All Hallow’s Eve since they’re staged these one-off pop heath-meets across the globe. This year they put the hits up Manchester, psychically summoning 23,000 parent-pop innocents away from the typical Halloween pursuits of Farage cosplay and entry-level extortion.
Trick or treat? Well, what the Durannies have dubbed their “dark phase” definitely came pumped full of E numbers. The opening Night Boat was cast in suitably Stygian tones, but Danse Macabre and Lonely in Your Nightmare — which morphed, Hyde-like, into Rick James’s Super Freak — were far more Thriller than Cradle of Filth. ELO’s Evil Woman and Supernature, Cerrone’s 1977 track about pollution creating an underworld of vengeful mutants, were pure diabolical disco. And you could be a thousand-year-old Balkan nobleman and never have heard a more Blitz Club-friendly version of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Spellbound in your life.
The ghastly gimmicks came thick and fast. The visuals were all possessed dolls, voodoo bone-men and demonic Milan catwalk shows. The dancers were straight-jacket psychos, S&M fire priestesses, topless demon sprites and she-wolves pawing the band through Hungry Like the Wolf. Their cover of the Specials’ Ghost Town refocused on the horrors of the haunted fairground rather than Thatcherism. Video-mapping turned the crowd into digital fiends on The Reflex; the keyboardist Nick Rhodes donned a suit of crows for a flame-strewn Wild Boys; and during a mid-section of doomy ballads Le Bon appeared in stag’s horns and druid cloak, as if finally ready to take his sacrificial blade to Spandau Ballet.
