The problem, according to Simon Le Bon, was the girls; those young women, the Duranies, who chased Duran Duran around the 1980s. He is not complaining. I am not sure I have ever met a man less prone to moaning. It is just that predominantly female fanbases tended to put off the snooty male critics. “They thought we were the next Bay City Rollers,” Le Bon says with a sigh. So Duran Duran did not have the respect they deserved? “Certainly not.” He grins and cackles at the memory of the highly regarded Tom Petty scoffing at him in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. “But, you know, that’s the price you pay for being hot,” he says, laughing, before stopping abruptly. “You won’t take that out of context, will you?” he asks, a little nervously.
Still, Le Bon does have a point. Duran Duran were a whirlpool of fantastic sound and vision who took the theatrics of their hero David Bowie and made it Eighties. They were Princess Diana’s favourites.
The band formed in Birmingham in 1978 and were labelled the Fab Five, posing for the burgeoning MTV as rather, yes, hot young men playing their indelible, funky, rousing synth-pop. For some it was more style than substance, something that Moby calls the “Bee Gees curse” — meaning when an artist is so “successful and stylised” that they are not taken seriously. Not that Le Bon is bothered. With songs such as Rio, Girls on Film and Ordinary World, they never disappeared up their own art, instead selling more than 100 million records and scoring 15.6 million monthly Spotify listeners (equal to their rivals Spandau Ballet and Culture Club combined). Despite multiple line-up changes and various fears that it might all come to an end, they are still at it, headlining London’s BST Hyde Park for a second time this summer.
Read the entire London Times Culture magazine piece here.
Photo: Stephanie Pistel
