LeBon’s voice has held up pretty well over the last 40 years.
Rhodes’ keyboard work adds color, shade and lift. It’s certainly no stretch for listeners of a certain age to picture Casey Kasem’s voice announcing more than one of these songs as the “latest to be climbing up the charts” on an American Top 40 back in the day.Īnd the band sounds good throughout. Disco legend Giorgio Moroder, one of the band’s influences, co-produces a couple of tracks.Įven with all the outside names, the final result is unmistakably still Duran Duran with a well-produced, cohesive album clearly connected to their ’80s heyday without trying to painstakingly recreate it. Throw in guest appearances from the likes of Swedish pop star Tove Lo, Japanese pop band Chai, English rapper Ivorian Doll, longtime David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and producer Mark Ronson on guitar. In this case, the most prominent are Erol Alkan, who co-produced and co-wrote most of the album and Graham Coxon, spending some Blur’s ongoing hiatus time to play guitar and co-write throughout. It also allows them to find collaborators that play to their strengths without making them sound like they’re straining to be relevant (which could be called U2 Syndrome). Duran Duran is in a place where, even with three of their core four - singer Simon LeBon, bassist John Taylor and drummer Roger Taylor in their 60s and the fourth - keyboardist Nick Rhodes a spry 59 - don’t have as far a leap to produce something that sounds contemporary in 2021 as a lot of their rock-oriented chart contemporaries of the first half of the ’80s would.
The through line from 1981 to 2021 is shorter than one might think in some cases. The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”, the biggest hit of 2020 that spent a record 90 weeks in Billboard’s Hot 100, is just one example of a track that basically screams “I remember the ’80s!” The other aspect is that a lot of younger artists have definitely mined that ’80s sound, especially those synths, for several years now.
Men At Work, Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club and 2021 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees The Go-Gos, to name four, had all basically broken up within five years of MTV went on the air with the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”īut one of the biggest breakthroughs and arguably the most videogenic, has kept going, even through rough patches.ĭuran Duran is still here, 40 years after its debut and mostly intact, with four of the five members from those ’80s salad days present and accounted for on Future Past, their 15th studio album and first since 2015’s Paper Gods.ĭerided in some quarters at the time as pretty face standard bearers for a video music network that was treated as more about style than substance, Duran Duran perservered in part because the material in those first few years held up better than the tut-tutters predicted and because the band itself proved adaptable enough to still produce hits for a while - the title track to “Notorious”, produced by Nile Rodgers in 1986 was one, the self-titled release from 1993, known more as The Wedding Album, produced “Ordinary World” and “Come Undone.” Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.īut in those heady early days, before the likes of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the network afforded a rare window of opportunity for artists and bands who weren’t getting played on the radio. Forty years following the launch of MTV, we are now in a world where that network has been a lifestyle channel of scripted and “reality” programming longer than it was about music.
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