Duran Duran

“For us, each time it’s a different thing. It’s like software, and this is Duran Duran Version 3.3 or whatever.” Trust Nick Rhodes to come up with a hi-tech image to describe the continuing story of one of the world’s most forward-looking, barrier- breaking pop groups of these or any times. Duran Duran have been many things in the course of career sales of 60 million records worldwide, but one word that has never applied is nostalgic.

Let’s just put a marker in the shifting soil of cultural trendiness and get a fix on just how much and how long Duran Duran have endured. The week they hit the U.K. charts for the first time with PLANET EARTH in February 1981, John Lennon’s recent death was being globally mourned. Records were made from vinyl. We didn’t know about the CD, or about AIDS. Reaganomics and the Walkman were just off the shelf, and dinosaurs like Styx, REO Speedwagon and Journey ruled the earth. Even their U.S. statistics–15 Top 40 singles, 11 of them Top 10, three double platinum albums, four platinum albums and two gold albums–don’t tell the true impact of Duran Duran’s glorious, glamorous reign. They built their own pop dominion with an unfailing ear for indelible songmanship and a steady eye for creating and surviving fashion. In the process, they became the most idolized global attraction since The Beatles.

GREATEST, the band’s 1998 “greatest hits” retrospective from Capitol Records, revisits 19 of the most absorbing chapters of the Duran Duran story. But, epic as it is, that story remains a work in progress. The album, and the accompanying “Greatest and Latest” U.K. arena tour in December, draw a line under the first 17 years of their worldwide adventure. But with original members Simon LeBon and Nick Rhodes and longtime colleague Warren Cuccurullo scampering about in the studio like a band who just got their first deal, their fans are promised lean and lithe new material from Duran Duran in 1999.

But let’s stop awhile, consider the facts and, with the band’s help, torpedo a few myths. They came from white funk, not fashion-pop. They’d bid adieu to the New Romantic movement before the end of their first year in power. They weren’t the creation of MTV. “One thing people never do with Duran Duran is put it in the climate of the times,” says Rhodes. “It’s always been very much an honest band that has sucked in everything around us, chewed it up and spat it out as our songs.” To start with, when Rhodes, John Taylor and some pals formed a group in Birmingham, England, in 1978, their ambitions were very different from those that Duran Duran fulfilled. “We came out of an underground cult club movement,” remembers Rhodes, “a world of B-movies, futuristic images and surreal lyrics. There were some pretty dark lyrics on the first album, but they were taken the other way by a predominantly pop audience and predominantly female.

“That was not something we ever thought would happen in a million years. We very much felt we came out of an apres-punk, glam-rock world. It was bizarre to be singing ‘The Chauffeur’ to crowds of screaming girls.” And as the world around them spun faster and faster, the songs went down as the milestones for some dizzying times. “Certain songs remind you of certain periods,” says LeBon of the GREATEST album. “‘GIRLS ON FILM,’ that was Duran Duran and Princess Di. That was that song; she said we were her favorite band. ‘PLANET EARTH,’ that was the New Romantic thing, and why did I let them talk me into wearing that pair of trousers? “But if you look at what that movement was and how long it lasted, and look at us, we outlived the pigeonhole that we were put into. It only really applied to that song and the next one, ‘CARELESS MEMORIES.” “GIRLS ON FILM” was not only a hit by royal appointment, it signaled Duran Duran’s place on the steering committee in the new world of pop videos. It was, they gleefully admit, a hedonistic world, full of sun, sea, sand and bulging, er, budgets–but also full of hard work and painstaking attention to detail. “Because of the amount of energy we put into doing videos, it established our position as pioneers in that field,” says LeBon. “People used to look for new Duran Duran videos–‘Where will they have gone? What’s Andy’s hairstyle? What girls will be in it?’”

Adds Rhodes: “It’s easy to look at the ‘RIO’ video and say ‘My God, it’s like a Martini advert. There they are in their lilac suits, swanning away’… For us, it was like ‘Wow, we can get the record company to pay for us to go to the Caribbean islands and make a video? ‘Of course we were going to go. We were kids. You’d never make a video like that now, but for the times they reflected, they were very much in context.” Lest we forget, in LeBon’s mind’s eye are a couple of snapshots of the swirling peaks of Duranmania. “I remember coming into Heathrow once…and there were something like 4,000 people waiting to meet us.. .. Someone said, ‘There’s a few people here to meet you.’ We came around the corner, there was this enormous noise, and we went straight back into the customs hall. Then I remember doing an appearance at Video Shack in New York and 12 mounted policemen arrived.” 1985, with such mania in full effect, marked a staging post. “Duran Duran had turned out to be a major corporate bomb, a ticking bomb,” remembers Rhodes. “We thought we had to do something before it went off.” In a way, the starting point for the grown-up Duran Duran began after their James Bond theme “A VIEW TO A KILL,” a Live Aid appearance that summer, and Arcadia and the Power Station, the splinter projects they undertook “for our sanity’s sake,” as Rhodes says.

With both John and Andy Taylor now out of the equation, Missing Persons guitarist Warren Cuccurullo was among those recruited by chief songwriters LeBon and Rhodes to help in the making of a pivotal Duran Duran album. “When we did the NOTORIOUS album,” says Rhodes, “everyone wanted us to make another version of ‘THE REFLEX’ or ‘WILD BOYS,’ but we wanted to make a white funk album with Nile Rodgers. Duran Duran’s artistic integrity has never veered. We’ve always gone off and experimented in different areas.”

“I looked at them as a bunch of guys my age who were writing my kind of music and working with cool producers,” says Cuccurullo, who’d been U.S. labelmates of Duran Duran’s as a member of Los Angeles band Missing Persons at Capitol. He became a full-time member in 1988, and his creative presence was soon felt. “There was no way I could continue just as a guitarist, ’cause I’m a writer,” he smiles. “But it was so obvious during that ’88 tour that we were a band.”

Thus the new Duran Duran triumvirate was established, soon to experience its own triumphs and never more vindicated than on 1993’s DURAN DURAN (THE WEDDING ALBUM) and its enormous hit “ORDINARY WORLD.” “We knew when we were writing it that it was going to be massive,” says LeBon. “I remember the whole feeling that went into that song, the whole honesty. Something which was a deep, personal feeling was going to be heard by people, people who had said we were just a bunch of pretty faces and hairdos.”

And thus, via subsequent albums and ever-increasing namechecks of Duran Duran as an influence by many late-’90s notables, to GREATEST, merely a pit stop in a marathon that will lead to new studio material next year. “I’m pleased the greatest hits is coming out now,” says LeBon in a break from recording at the band’s own studio. “The simple fact is we’ve got a repertoire that starts off in 1981 and carries on right up to now.” Longtime fans, relive your memories; new listeners, start here and stick around, this ride is far from over.