Members have left, record sales have dwindled
and nostalgia threatens to take center stage. Yet the last three diehards in Duran Duran
say you haven't heard the last of them yet.
The group with an early-MTV pedigree (extravagant videos for "Hungry Like the
Wolf" and "Rio" raised the bar in the early 80s) has already had one
comeback. Now the question is whether Simon le Bon, Nick Rhodes and relative newcomer
Warren Cuccurullo can do it again.
The band's first resurrection came in 1993, when Duran Duran escaped post-80's obscurity
with a self-titled disc dubbed The Wedding Album. It sold more than a million copies,
charted higher than any other Duran Duran album and spawned a couple of hits
("Ordinary World" and "Come Undone.") But then the comeback came
undone. The group-reduced to a trio after the last of the three Taylors in the band
finally exited-- made a couple of questionable discs and struggled with its label.
"It's amazing all it takes to mess it up,"
Rhodes said on the phone recently. "It's a number of
things. I certainly wouldn't just blame the label. After the success of The Wedding Album,
we put out what was intended to be an interim album, which was a covers album called Thank
You. It met with a lot of critical battering, but it's not something we're not familiar
with."
But Thank You invited critics to tee up. The band ridiculously covered songs such as
Public Enemy's "911 Is A Joke", Elvis Costello's "Watching the
Detectives" and the Doors' "Crystal Ship"-- none of them comfortable fits.
Next came Medazzaland, a more ambitious and experimental album that fared better with the
critics but fell flat at the registers.
"It was a harsher record, a more brittle sound," Rhodes
said. "I'm pretty fond of that record, but commercially it
was pretty much a disaster. I still stand by it absolutely, but I think that it was much
more experimental. Certainly, it had much more obscure subject matters covered in the
lyrics."
But the band-- now in its 20th year-- is trying to right its ship with a new label, album
and summer tour. The band plays at the Fillmore Auditorium on Tuesday.
The summer tour is a strange twist, given the new album, Pop Trash, won't be released
until early next year. It will be the band's first on the Disney-owned Hollywood Records.
"To be honest, it's like a logical follow-up to The Wedding
Album," Rhodes said. "The strength is in
the songs. At the end of the day, the one thing that has kept us around is the
songwriting. There's several songs on there that I truly believe are up there with
anything we've ever done."
They put them to the test in concert. The band has been playing new songs such as
"Hallucinating Elvis" (a paean about Elvis being alive and well in everyone's
mind) and "Lava Lamp" along with all the old hits, including "Planet
Earth", "Girls On Film" and "The Reflex." It's the group's
way of acknowledging the past while keeping its eye on the future.
"What I'm not into is the whole idea that the 80's is what people are
interested in at the moment. I've lived through the 80's. I've done that already. I've got
some fond memories of them, but I don't particularly want to live through them again.
"Now, if we play "Rio" or "Hungry Like the Wolf", that's fine by
me. That doesn't mean I have to relive the 1980s. In the same way that the Stones can play
"Satisfaction" or "Brown Sugar". These are songs that have held up and
I'm very proud of them. We're also a band, and I pride myself in saying that we're
entertainers. If we leave an audience, and they don't feel as though they've had
a great night, then I find that depressing. I think that we haven't delivered what they've
come to see. It's about exciting people and taking them on a ride for a couple of hours.
"Those are one of the things you learn from experience. Duran Duran has been playing
shows for almost 20 years now. If we haven't learned something, then we really should give
it up."
by Michael Mehle |