The Origins 1981-1982 1983-1984 1985 1986-1991 1992-1996 1997-2000 2001-2005 Influence Video Pioneers
John
Taylor and Nick Rhodes formed Duran Duran in
Like
Depeche Mode, Duran Duran were among the earliest bands to work on their own
remixes. Before the days of digital synthesizers and easy audio sampling, they
created complex, multilayered arrangements of their singles, sometimes recording
entirely different extended performances of the songs in studio. These
"night versions" were generally available only on vinyl, as b-sides to
45 rpm singles or on 12-inch club singles, until the release of the Night
Versions: The Essential Duran Duran compilation in 1998. |
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From the
very beginning, the band had a keen sense of style, and worked with stylist
Perry Haines and fashion designers like Kahn & Bell and Antony Price to
build a sharp and elegant image, soon growing beyond the ruffles and sashes of
the pirate-flavored New Romantic look. They may have suffered from the typical
hair spray and mullet excesses of the 1980s, but have maintained a focus on
presenting fashion as part of the package throughout their career. In the 1990s,
they worked with Vivienne Westwood, and in the 2000s with Giorgio Armani. (One
of the band's advertising taglines adopts journalist Linda Ellerbee's phrase
"Styles change, style doesn't.") In addition they retained creative
control of the band's visual presentation, and worked closely with graphic
designer Malcolm Garrett and many others over the years to create album covers,
tour programs, and other materials. Teen and
music magazines in the UK latched onto their good looks quickly, and the US soon
followed; it was a rare month in the early eighties when there was not at least
one picture of the band members in teen magazines like Smash Hits or Tiger Beat,
even if the sugary coverage was at odds with the band's titillating videos and
sometimes dark lyrics. It helped that each member had a distinctive look and
personality. John Taylor once remarked that the band was "like a box of
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However, the Rio album did not do well in the |
1983–1984:
On top of the world
To
satisfy During
the promotion of this album, Rhodes and Le Bon served as MTV guest VJs for a
show, during which artist and admirer Andy Warhol dropped by to greet them. An
autograph-signing session in The
hysteria of their teenage fans accompanied them everywhere they went, drawing
frequent comparisons to Beatlemania. Also in
1983, keyboardist Nick Rhodes produced the Number 1 hit "Too Shy" for
the English band Kajagoogoo, and Andy Taylor became the first member of Duran
Duran to get married. The band's main rivals were now Culture Club and Wham!. Duran
Duran returned to songwriting at a chateau in Finally
at the end of 1983, the band released Seven and the Ragged Tiger, which included
the hits "Union Of The Snake", "New Moon On Monday" and
"The Reflex"; Duran thus had Top Twenty hits off of three albums in a
single year. They made music headlines by deciding to release the " The band
then embarked on a massive around-the-world tour that continued through the
first four months of 1984, including their first major stadium dates in
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The live
album Arena was also recorded during the tour, and was released with the new
studio single "Wild Boys", which went to Number 2 on both sides of the
After
the tour concluded, Roger Taylor was married in Duran
Duran then began a long break; however, as most of them remained in At the
end of the year, the group was featured on the Band Aid benefit single "Do
They Know It's Christmas?" along with other music celebrities like George
Michael, Boy George, Bono, Paul Weller, Paul Young and Sting.
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1985:
Hiatus and side projects
Duran
Duran then regrouped to contribute the title song to the soundtrack of the James
Bond movie A View to a Kill – it remains the only Bond theme to go to Number 1
on the As a
follow-up to the Band Aid single, Duran Duran performed in front of 90,000
people (and an estimated 1.5 billion TV viewers) at the Live Aid charity concert
held at JFK Stadium in With the
Bond song holding at Number 1, and the band arguably suffering from
overexposure, their Live Aid set became infamous for Le Bon inadvertently
hitting a falsetto note in the chorus of "A View To A Kill" – an
error gleefully noted in the press as "The Bum Note Heard 'Round The
World", and which the singer himself would later describe as the most
humiliating of his career. During
the previous year, Le Bon had taken up the hobby of yachting. He again drew
media attention when his maxi-yacht Drum capsized during the August 1985 Fastnet
race, trapping him under the hull for an hour. He went on to participate in the
1986 Whitbread Round the World Race as well. At the
end of 1985, he married model Yasmin Parvaneh. After a
break from Duran Duran, Le Bon, Rhodes, and Roger Taylor formed the band
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After Finally
in September 1986, Warren Cuccurullo (formerly of Missing Persons and Frank
Zappa's touring band) was hired as a replacement sessions guitarist. With Le
Bon, Rhodes, and John Taylor, he recorded the rest of the album Notorious,
released in October, 1986. Although
the title track went to number two in the Subsequently,
Duran Duran's fame began to wane, as they struggled to escape the teen idol
image and gain critical success with more complex (and less confident) music.
Another factor was the band's dismissal of early managers the Berrow bothers.
There were no public reason given, but disagreements over money, and their
involvement in Le Bon's yachting adventures (they were co-owners of Drum) were
suspected to play a part. Whatever the reason, Duran Duran did not have
consistent management through the latter part of their career, switching
managers frequently and going through periods of self-management. In addition,
EMI (which fired its president and went through a major corporate restructuring
that summer) seemed to have lost interest in promoting the band. Many casual
fans never heard that the band had released anything after Notorious, and
assumed that the band had broken up. The next
album Big Thing (1988) yielded the singles "I Don't Want Your Love",
"All She Wants Is" & "Do You Believe In Shame?". The
record was very experimental, taking inspirations from hip-hop and house music
and mixing it with Duran's atmospheric synth pop and more mature lyrics (the
juvenile title track notwithstanding). It also strongly featured Cuccurullo's
creative guitar work. Fans and critics either loved it or hated it. In April
1989, after the six-month world tour for Big Thing, Cuccurullo and tour drummer
Sterling Campbell were made full members of Duran Duran. A
greatest hits album titled Decade was released late in 1989, along with a remix
single entitled "Burning The Ground" which consisted of woven snippets
of the band's hits from the previous ten years. The single came and went with
little fanfare, but the album became another major seller for the band. However,
the tepid 1990 release Sterling
Campbell left the band early in 1991, going on to work with Soul Asylum and
David Bowie. At the end of that year, John Taylor (then 31) married nineteen-year-old model/actress Amanda De Cadenet, already pregnant with his daughter at the time. |
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1992–1996:
A second climb, another fall
In 1993,
the band released a second self-titled album – this Duran Duran album is
informally known as The Wedding Album (for Nick Egan's cover art featuring the
wedding photos of the bands' parents) to distinguish it from the 1981 release.
The swift commercial and critical success of this album (#4 in the UK, #7 in the
US) came as a surprise to many who considered Duran Duran to be a purely
"Eighties" phenomenon which had already faded to oblivion. It hinged
on two Adult Contemporary singles. "Ordinary World" was forced onto
radio playlists months earlier than planned by listener demand for the leaked
single, and went on to win a prestigious Ivor Novello Award award for
songwriting. It reached Number 3 on the Both the
band and the record label seemed to be caught by surprise, and bassist John
Taylor, who was considering leaving the band, agreed to stay. The band's largest
tour ever, which included stops in the Middle East, the recently de-embargoed However,
the band's upswing in momentum was once again swiftly curbed, this time by the
poorly received covers album Thank You. The album was reportedly begun as a
lighthearted tribute to the band's influences, in the vein of Bowie's Pin Ups
– some of the tracks were recorded in borrowed studios (including Prince's
Paisley Park) while the band was on tour, with the intent to have an album ready
to release soon after the tour was finished, with another studio album to follow
quickly afterwards. However, conflicts within the band and between the band and
Capitol/EMI created delay after delay; mix after mix was ordered and rejected,
and by the time it finally came out in 1995, the band was not enthusiastic about
supporting the album. Singles
from Thank You included covers of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five's
"White Lines" (which included backing vocals from the original
artists) and Lou Reed's "Perfect Day". In a video interview included
in the album's electronic press kit, Reed said that he considered Duran Duran's
effort the best cover ever done of one of his songs. The title track was also
included on the 1995 Led Zeppelin tribute album Encomium. Still, the critics
lambasted the band's attempts at "911 Is A Joke", "Lay Lady
Lay", "Ball of Confusion" and "Crystal Ship", and the
band completed a 1995 summer tour of radio station festivals only under duress.
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After
that tour's completion, John Taylor recorded a solo album as well as founding
and touring with the supergroup Neurotic Outsiders; he also initiated a reunion
of the Power Station, but the project went on without him when he had to
withdraw to deal with his divorce from De Cadenet and drug rehabilitation from
his long addiction to cocaine.
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Freed
from some internal writing conflicts, the band returned to the studio to rewrite
and re-record many of the songs on Medazzaland. ( This
album was a return to the layered experimentation of Big Thing, with intricate
guitar textures and processed vocals. The track "Out of My Mind" was
used as the theme song for the movie The Saint, but the only true single to be
released in the The
group played a set at The Princess Diana Tribute Concert on June 27, 1998, by
special request of her family. Although
Medazzaland was released in the Duran
Duran parted ways with Capitol/EMI in 1999; the label has since used Duran's
back catalog to release their own compilations of remixes and rare vinyl-only
b-sides.
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The band
then signed a short-lived deal with Disney's Hollywood Records – it was to be
a three-album contract, but lasted only through the poorly received 2000 album
Pop Trash. The album itself was considered by some to be a strange one in the
band's catalog, slow-paced and heavy-sounding. It took its title from the track
"Pop Trash Movie", which was originally written by Rhodes and
Cuccurullo for a Blondie reunion album.
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2001–2005:
A highly anticipated reunion
In May
2001, as the trio finished their final dates for the global Pop Trash tour, it
was announced that Cuccurullo would be leaving Duran Duran to work again with
his 1980s band Missing Persons, and that John, Roger, and Andy Taylor had
returned to reform the original five-member band. Throughout
2002 and 2003, Duran Duran worked on writing new material. The band rented a
house in St. Tropez to work on their first serious writing session. They then
returned to Then in
August, the band were billed to appear as presenters at the 2003 MTV Video Music
Awards, but were instead surprised with a Lifetime Achievement Award. They were
also given a Lifetime Achievement award by Q Magazine in October, and the
equivalent Outstanding Contribution award at the Brit Awards in February 2004. The pace
picked up as a sold-out 25-city American tour was followed by several stadium
dates in Duran
Duran then celebrated their homecoming to the
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The
first dates for a 2005 world tour have been announced, starting with |
Although
they began their career as an interesting New Wave art-school band in the
tradition of Roxy Music, the band's quick rise to stardom, their polished good
looks, and their embrace of the teen press seemed to have doused their chances
of favor from music critics. The British music press was particularly venomous. During
the 1980s, Duran Duran were considered the quintessential manufactured,
throw-away pop group – not too different from other boy bands created by
behind-the-scenes managers (Menudo, New Kids On The Block, NSYNC). While
few would argue that the music was light and uncomplicated pop, the critics
seemed to miss that the band wrote and played their own music long before there
were managers or record companies involved, and were driven by their own
ambition. As Moby said of the band in his website diary in 2003: "... they
were cursed by what we can call the 'bee gees' curse. which is: 'write amazing
songs, sell tons of records, and consequently incur the wrath or disinterest of
the rock obsessed critical establishment'. Over the
years, the band's contemporaries (The Bangles, Elton John, Kylie Minogue, Paul
Young, Smashing Pumpkins) have lauded their efforts towards pure, uplifting pop
which rebelled against the cynicism of punk and the doom and gloom of Margaret
Thatcher-era Successors
like Barenaked Ladies, Beck, Jonathan Davis of Korn, the Deftones, Garbage, Gwen
Stefani and No Doubt, Gavin Rossdale and Bush, Wyclef Jean, Marilyn Manson, Fred
Durst and No Doubt, Gavin Rossdale and Bush, Wyclef Jean, Marilyn Manson, Fred
Durst of Limp Bizkit, The Orb, Pink, have all cited Duran Duran as a key band in
their formative years in music. Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray has called himself one
of their biggest fans; he "wanted to be John Taylor" when he was
young. Sugar Ray's videos have included affectionate parodies of Duran videos.
Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake have also praised the band. The
newest crop of performers to name Duran Duran as influences include Dido, Franz
Ferdinand, Lostprophets (who took their name from the title of a Duran Duran
bootleg tape), Goldfrapp, The Killers, the Scissor Sisters ("the reason we
got into music") and The Strokes. The
band's music has also been used by several hip hop artists, most notably
Notorious BIG, who naturally sampled the 1986 song "Notorious". Nick Rhodes has directly lent his production techniques to Kajagoogoo (White Feathers) and The Dandy Warhols (Welcome to the Monkey House).
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Their
songs were cheerful, hook-laden pop that fared well on the radio, but what many
remember best about Duran Duran are their iconic music videos. Though many of
the videos were tongue-in-cheek, the band never quite escaped the glamourous and
decadent jet set image their early videos projected. The MTV
cable channel and the band were launched at about the same time, and each had a
hand in propelling the other to greater heights. MTV needed showcase videos with
charismatic performers, and the band's video work was influential – even
revolutionary – to the medium in several ways. First, Duran Duran filmed in
exotic locales like Finally,
Duran Duran was among the first bands to have their videos shot with a
professional movie camera on 35mm film, rather than on videotape with cheaper
video cameras. Thus the group's work compared very favorably to many of the
quickly- and inexpensively-shot videos which had been MTV staples up until then.
Duran Duran changed the views of record companies on what a video could
accomplish, and the views of other bands on how much effort should be invested
in them. In
return, MTV gave Duran Duran critical access to American radio markets that were
unfriendly to British music, New Wave music, or "anything with
synthesizers". Because MTV was not available everywhere in the Duran
Duran's sun-drenched videos " In 1984,
Duran Duran brought video technology pioneered at the 1982 US Festival into
their live stadium shows: they were the first major act to provide video screens
above the stage to bring the action closer to the audience in the rear. They
have also recorded concerts using IMAX and 360 degree panoramic "immersive
video" cameras, with 10.2 channel audio. In 2000, they experimented with
augmented reality technology, which allowed three-dimensional computer-generated
images to appear onstage with the band.
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Duran
Duran appeared on several century-end video countdowns: The MTV "100
Greatest Videos Ever Made" featured "Hungry Like The Wolf" at #11
and "Girls On Film" at #68, and the "VH1: 100 Greatest
Videos" listed "Hungry" at #31 and "Rio" at #60. MTV
also named "Hungry" the fifteenth of their most-played videos of all
time. The band
has released several video compilations, starting with the self-titled
"video album" Duran Duran, for which they won a Grammy award, up to
the 2004 two-disc DVD release Greatest, which included alternate versions of
several popular videos as easter eggs. In addition to Greatest, the documentary
Sing Blue Silver, and the concert film Arena (both from 1984) were released on
DVD in 2004. Other video collections, concert films, and documentaries are still
available only on videotape, and the band has not yet released a comprehensive
collection which includes every music video the band has made. Duran Duran has
also said that a huge amount of unreleased concert and documentary footage has
been filmed over the years, and they hope it can be edited and released in some
form over the next few years.
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* extracted from Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia