Of the many bands whose trajectory dovetailed with the emergence of MTV as a driver of industry commerce, there was perhaps no greater beneficiary than Duran Duran. Duran Duran’s self-titled debut album was an artistic triumph, and a UK smash, but barely made a splash in US markets, where a belief persisted that the band might be “too English” to capture American imaginations. The group’s youth belied the assuredness they would bring to early singles like “Planet Earth’ and “Girls On Film,” fully actualized amalgams of tough-minded rock, blue-eyed soul, and disco, drawing on inspirations ranging from Brian Ferry to Johnny Thunders to Chic. Named with adolescent exuberance after a character from Jane Fonda’s 1968 quasi-sexploitation sci-fi film Barbarella, the band formed as teenagers in and around the largely unglamorous art-school scene at Birmingham Polytechnic. Working alongside such legendary producers as Colin Thurston and Nile Rodgers, Duran Duran were instrumental in creating a new vernacular for popular song whose resonance far outdistances the majority of their Heartland Rock contemporaries. The condescension toward synth-based artists was not atypical of the time, but looks especially ludicrous in retrospect. Although each member played a vital role in formulating the band’s signature sound, something in the uniform beauty and shared nomenclature of the members smacked of plasticity to many critics, who frequently seemed to regard them as a factory-assembled curiosity. The Fab Five, as the British press termed the band with customary subtlety, consisted of singer Simon Le Bon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and no less than three Taylors on bass, guitar, and drums: Roger, Andy, and John - amazingly none of them related. Re-launching the formula ultimately required the perfectly manicured Birmingham five-piece Duran Duran, whose adventurous and relentlessly catchy series of early-’80s singles would for a time set into motion a hysteria as devoted and manic as any of their ’60s forbearers. Warhorses like the Who and the Stones remained major draws, and the Police were continuing their slow ascension to full-on stardom, but in the main, American audiences had proven surprisingly resilient to the Anglo-entreaties of glam and new wave - choosing homegrown stars like Kiss and the Cars over their British counterparts.
DURAN DURAN HITS FULL
By 1982, twenty full years after the initial British Invasion, the time-honored model of sending gifted, handsome young blokes across the Atlantic to plunder the hearts and wallets of English-mad America had begun to show signs of fraying.
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