And how they’d love to find a song of this quality down the back of the couch now. It’s fair to say his vocal, and the band’s squelchy, angular attempts to emulate Chic, were works in progress, but the raw goods were all there from the beginning. Lyrically, it deals with nothing much deeper than all-night parties in hotel rooms, but the tune is magnificent and draws you in, with Le Bon’s voice going from a deep insouciant croon to a deranged “la la la” in the chorus. What they had in spades though – aside from delectable cheekbones – were great songs, and tellingly Late Bar was tossed off as Planet Earth’s B-side, not even making the final cut of the band’s debut album. At 6ft 2ins, Hertfordshire-born lead singer Simon Le Bon was an imposing figure, but styled in foppish collars and cuffs, he looked “more like a scrum-half who’d blundered into his mum’s washing line” according to one reviewer. These days, boybands, for want of a better word, are normally militarily slick from the off, so it is a joy to behold the amateurishness of an inchoate Duran Duran. They’d set their sights on the very thing they were singing about on their debut single. The single peaked at No 12 in 1981, though Duran Duran were thinking bigger than a trendy club scene dominated by Spandau Ballet. Dropping the words “new romantic” into the song earned the derision of their cooler Blitz-kid contemporaries in London, and bass player John Taylor admitted it was an “opportunistic” attempt to get their foot in the door (even if Rhodes later claimed it was sarcastic). The first signs of life came when Planet Earth was released in 1981, a gloriously catchy sci-fi adventure that owed a debt of gratitude to Japan’s Quiet Life, right down to the sequenced opening it was the kind of homage that could have been brazened out had keyboard player Nick Rhodes not turned himself into a bleached clone of Japan’s David Sylvian. Their faith would be repaid handsomely as a bidding war broke out, with EMI emerging victorious. They were managed by the entrepreneurial Berrow brothers, owners of the Rum Runner nightclub in Birmingham, whose conviction that the five-piece would eventually hit the big time was such that Michael Berrow mortgaged his house to finance a tour with Hazel O’Connor. Duran Duran emerged out of the state-funded art-school free-for-all of the 1970s, though their naked ambition and subsequent years of success would coincide with those of Margaret Thatcher it’s difficult to imagine they could have existed at any other time.
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