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WHEN
THE Beatles, the pride of Liverpool, played the Ed Sullivan show
20 years ago this week, Duran Duran, the pride of Birmingham, was
still a young band. The oldest was Simon Le bon, who was 5. The
three people in Duran Duran who aren't related but are all named
Taylor - Andy, John, and Roger - were 3. Nick Rhodes, the keyboard
player of Duran Duran and founder of the band with bass player John
in 1978, was only a year old.
Rhodes, who's now a mature-sounding 21-year-old, was on the telephone
from Vancouver this week, where he's about to kick off the band's
first major-arena North American tour, which will bring it to Maple
Leaf Gardens on March 5. Because Toronto has been a strong area
of support for the band during the past three years (as well as
the home of Simon Le bon's girlfriend), the concert is also being
filmed here.
Rhodes doesn't understand exactly how his band got saddled with
The Beatles' association, why such labels as The Fab Five have suddenly
been hung on the young English band, but he's willing to hazard
a guess - creative journalism.
"Well, you have to understand the press in England, which is where
it all started," he says. "I have a laugh about it now. At first
I thought, 'What an honor]' until I realized it was really quite
a load of rubbish. We don't approach what The Beatles accomplished.
"They take photographs of hysterical girls in the first few rows
at our concerts and put them next to photos of screaming girls at
Beatles' concerts. It's a press invention really: you know, The
Beatles in '64, Duran Duran in '84, and all that. We don't take
it seriously. I mean, it's serious music, but we don't take ourselves
that seriously."
Still, Duran Duran has become a pioneer in its own way: the name
comes from the name of an angel in the film Barbarella, and indeed,
visual media are at least as important as musical ones in the band's
success. The group began playing dates on Roxy/Bowie nights at the
local disco, The Rum Runner's Club, until one of the club's owners,
Michael Berrow, mortgaged his house to help the band do its first
British tour, which led to a record deal with Capitol-EMI in 1980.
The first video came out almost immediately, and ever since, the
group has been rivalled only by Michael Jackson in consistently
making the most popular videos around.
Record sales eventually started to keep pace. Their current and
third album, Seven and The Ragged Tiger, is also the band's third
to go Top 10 in North America, largely by virtue of an unusual amount
of faith and imagination on the part of Capitol-EMI. Album No. 1
died when it was released in 1981 and only after the band had established
itself on MTV, the U.S. music-video cable network, did it release
its second album, Rio. Encouraged by the band's video success, Capitol-EMI
proved unusually resilient in pushing Duran Duran in North America.
Rio had to be partially remixed and released a second time before
it caught fire here. Only then did the band's first album begin
to sell, with a new hit single Is There Something I Should Know?
added to push its popularity. The debut album finally went to No.
10 on the U.S. charts, almost two years after its initial release.
From the time they wore Savile Row suits as leaders of England's
short- lived New Romantic movement, Duran Duran's members have always
known that looking good can pay off handsomely. They used their
album covers to popularize the work of neo-deco illustrator, Patrick
Nagy. The band's videos, shot in exotic locations such as Sri Lanka
and Antigua with director Russ Mulcahy, are consistently among the
most requested on television music-video shows; indeed, Duran Duran
is widely credited with proving the power of MTV to record companies
in the United States. They are the first post-new wave pin-up band,
idols of teen-age girls on two continents.
The second part of the plan is to be taken seriously on a musical
level as well: "I object to that 'teeny-bop' band label," says Rhodes.
"We're not The Bay City Rollers. Sure, a big proportion of our fans
are young girls, and we appreciate that youth and enthusiasm, but
our concerts really draw a much bigger cross-section of people than
you usually see in photographs or read about in the press. The photographers
are always taking pictures of the young girls, because they're at
the front, and they're the most loud and colorful people in the
audience. Obviously, nobody's going to take a picture of the 30-
or 40-year-old man standing at the back against the wall, but our
music is aimed at him as much as anyone."
Rhodes has no illusions about the importance of video in the band's
success: "Two years ago, before MTV, we worked extremely hard, but
we couldn't get arrested in the United States," he says. "Really,
it's a three-pronged attack - videos, records and live performances.
No part is disposable. We're very proud of the fact that we can
play well live as well. We're not like a lot of English bands who
can only do it in the studio. And now, after three tours, we're
ready for the big halls."
Besides the sexy videos and the pin-up looks, Rhodes thinks he knows
another reason why Duran Duran has proved successful in creating
best- selling pop singles: "Even if we use polyrhythms and complicated
arrangements, our music is basically melodically simple. All good
pop and rock manages to revert back to simplicity sooner or later.
"For us, all this really started with punk, you know. We'd see bands
like The Clash or The Sex Pistols when we were in our teens, and
we realized it was possible to create your own music. My rule of
thumb is, if you can't come out of the studio at the end of the
day humming or whistling a tune, it's been a wasted day."
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