“Las boy bands They rarely stay together and one of the factors that distance them is their love lives. The kids get older, get married, have children and no longer spend time together. It’s a natural process,” writes Stephen Davis in Please Please Tell Me Now (Editorial Cúpula), in whose title we recognize the refrain of Is There Something I Should Know?one of the many successes of Duran Duran, the British band that lived five years of true glory between 1981, the date of their first and eponymous LP, a classic (like the next two), and 1986, when they contributed to the James Bond musical universe with the unsurpassed A View to a Kill.
At the time of filming that clip with interspersed shots of A view to kill -Bond with bad Grace Jones-, they were no longer on speaking terms: everyone had their parallel projects, Arcadia and The Power Station. Their thousands of fans, mostly teenagers, or even preteens, had also grown up, and moved on to something else. Duran Duran was a rite of passage for an entire generation reading Super Popthe Spanish equivalent of Smash Hitsin whose pages they rivaled the softer Spandau Ballet.
Duran Duran broke up and got back together. The new album, Danse macabre -like the anthology of Stephen King’s essays-, in which Andy Taylor is no longer present (sentenced for terminal cancer), will be released on October 27 and might not be bad, like the previous one Future Past (2021). But it is clear that his time is far behind him.
They themselves already laughed at it, with the clip Girl Panic! (2011), where a group of super models appeared playing them. Yasmin Le Bon, wife of the band’s singer, Simon Le Bon, was Andy, the guitarist; Helena Christensen, Roger Taylor, drummer; Cindy Crawford, John Taylor, the bassist; Eva Herzigova, Nick Rhodes, keyboardist, and Naomi Campbell, LeBon.
And yet, although the kingdom of Durania was ephemeral, the Birmingham group was not, like other boy bandsan invention of the record company, but a group of kids who, while still teenagers, formed in a slum called Rum Runner, a club in their hometown that, with its methacrylate mirrors, pretended to be the British replica of Studio 54. One picked up glasses, the other carried the list from the door while Nick played Bowie, Ferry and I could end the night with Private Life, by Grace Jones. They were children of glam and the new wave, they had one eye on Chic and the other on Japan, David Sylvian’s band, which greatly influenced their androgynous image, and their goal was to burn the dance floor.