RIO
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For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series:

Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal

Timeless by Martyn Deykers

Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming

Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik

The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau

xx by Jane Morgan

and many more…

To my husband and permanent plus one, Matt, and my parents, who never told me to turn down the music

Rio

Annie Zaleski

Contents

Introduction

1 The Road to Rio

2 Writing and Recording Rio

3 Why Rio Matters

4 Duran Duran, Video Pioneers

5 Winning Over US Radio

6 1983: The Year of Duran Duran

7 Rio’s Impact and Resonance

Acknowledgments

Works Cited / Source Material

Index

Introduction

Context is everything when it comes to formative musical influences. I first heard Duran Duran’s Rio not in the hair-sprayed 1980s, but sometime in the grungier mid-1990s. As a pre-internet teenager with limited spending money, I expanded my mind in the audiovisual section of my beloved local library. The hushed media room was a cultural oasis from where I borrowed a well-loved copy of Rio, along with other curiosities and classics: The Velvet Underground & Nico, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, Ultravox’s Vienna, The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, U2’s October, R.E.M.’s Chronic Town. At home, I dubbed Rio onto a blank cassette, writing out the album title in bubble letters on the J-card.

I had discovered Duran Duran several years before this, via the gorgeous power ballad “Ordinary World” and sinewy “Come Undone.” By then, the band weren’t the freewheeling vacationers and adventurers of the “Rio” clip, but the more sophisticated, 1990s version of Duran Duran: ruminative, smartly dressed wedding guests in “Ordinary World” and the rainbow-haired techno-punks of “Too Much Information.” In an era where musical reinvention dominated—grunge demolished rock norms, U2 dabbled in razor’s-edge irony, David Bowie was an industrial rock god—Duran Duran fit right in. They looked and sounded relentlessly modern and effortlessly sleek.

Rio’s chic futurism also resonated with me deeply. I romanticized the album as part and parcel of the bewitching 1980s music era. Mired in khaki-boring suburban Ohio, the melodramatic darkness of Duran Duran and their peers—other personal favorites included the Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, the Human League, and the Thompson Twins—sounded novel and fresh. Aggressive modern rock bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam understood my angst—but I also desperately wanted to feel and be perceived as cool, and these moodier British bands gave me exactly that feeling.

Where Duran Duran were concerned, I was certainly familiar with Rio’s singles—“Hungry Like The Wolf” and the title track, “Rio,” might as well have been retro alternative radio standards—and the melancholic “Save A Prayer” connected with my romance-bereft teenage heart. But Rio’s album tracks dug their claws in with subtlety: the way “Rio” ends and “My Own Way” immediately begins with a satisfying bass curlicue, or the presence of otherworldly synths hovering in “New Religion,” or how much fun it is to harmonize with vocalist Simon Le Bon on “Lonely In Your Nightmare.” I vividly remember being in the orchestra pit at my high school—I was a flautist for the drama club’s production of My Fair Lady—listening to Rio on my Walkman and feeling transported away from that dark, dusty space.

Today, I cringe a little at how awkward and goofy I must have been, mooning over a version of England and the 1980s that was certainly much different than reality. But decades after my musical discovery, this period has stuck with me well into adulthood. Plenty of 1980s albums had a couple of amazing singles sprinkled between a lot of generic, forgotten filler. (Thanks to cassettes being dirt-cheap in the 1990s, I learned this lesson early.) But time has been exceptionally kind to Rio. Although released in 1982, it doesn’t feel like a musical relic preserved in amber but an album that even now continues to give up sonic Easter eggs. More than that, Rio feels like a complete, cohesive statement—a cultural-shifting sonic universe akin to 1980s blockbusters such as Prince’s Purple Rain, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.

Back then, I would’ve been roundly shamed and ridiculed for saying that. Duran Duran’s mainstream press coverage in the early 1980s was skeptical, dismissive, and occasionally quite mean. Part of that was because teenage girls worshipped the band—and few things are more maligned and diminished than the tastes of teenage girls. Pop music also wasn’t taken seriously as an artistic endeavor; it was seen as calculated, manufactured product with vapid messaging. Although Duran Duran had some press and radio champions, the band were often perceived as one-dimensional pop stars: all style, no substance. In the eyes of detractors, the members of Duran Duran couldn’t be both handsome and talented; their songs couldn’t be commercially oriented and also innovative; the band couldn’t be ambitious and artsy.

Yet the truth was binaries never suited Duran Duran; neither did narrow pigeonholing. They weren’t a synth-pop band; they weren’t exactly new wave; they split the difference between pure pop and straightforward rock. New Romantics? Yes, the band had dalliances with ruffled shirts and swashbuckling fashion, but that tag didn’t really fit either beyond a certain point. Because they hailed from Birmingham, England, and were initially away from London’s hype and glare, Duran Duran were free to create their own approach to the sounds and styles of the day.

The Rio-era lineup coalesced in mid-1980. Their first big hit, “Planet Earth,” came less than a year later. By the end of 1982, Duran Duran were all over MTV and, shortly thereafter, radio and magazines. In 1983, the band became a true phenomenon: Duran Duran had four US Top 20 singles, with three reaching the top 5, and had multiple music videos making waves. This incredible rise came about due to visual innovation paired with impeccable songwriting, a music culture ready for fresher sounds, and ferocious self-confidence. Duran Duran didn’t need to wait around for a career to happen; they had the audacity to believe they could manifest their own success.

Nearly forty years after Rio’s release, however, Duran Duran aren’t resting on their laurels or basking in vintage MTV’s staticky glow. They’re continuing to seek out eclectic collaborators, including Janelle Monáe, Giorgio Moroder, and Mark Ronson. And their concerts remain a sheer joy—telegraphing the pure pleasure of Rio, of course, but also highlighting the danceable grooves of the 2015 release Paper Gods.

Like two other groups that rose to prominence in the 1980s, the Cure and Depeche Mode, Duran Duran are now massively influential on multiple generations of musicians and fans, and are hailed for their musicianship, songwriting, and live shows. During the Rio era and after, these three things were all present in spades; it’s not like the band woke up in 1993 and had suddenly just figured out how to string chords together or play a solid set. But during the band’s peak popularity, the Duran Duran narrative was focused on their visual aesthetic and image—and tabloids devoured any news about band lineup fractures, dalliances with drugs and debauchery, and high-profile romances.

The tawdry stuff has been covered extensively elsewhere, including in various band member interviews and memoirs released by bassist John Taylor and former guitarist Andy Taylor. But this book places Duran Duran’s music in historical and cultural context, and celebrates Rio’s resonance. Today, the youthful Duran Duran drama has largely fallen away, replaced by very earnest, vocal respect for the music—as heard on plaintive ukulele covers of “Rio” on YouTube, lengthy video tutorials detailing how to (almost) replicate Nick Rhodes’ synth sounds, and teenagers asking bassist John Taylor for musical tips during Reddit AMAs. Duran Duran had bigger hits after Rio—including two No. 1 singles in the United States—but the LP was the catalyst for everything that came next.

Rio is what happens when five kids who had their DNA rearranged by the Velvet Underground and 1970s musical movements—glam, punk, hard rock, progressive pop, Bowie—then embrace futuristic disco grooves, pristine studio production, and synthesizer experimentation. Add music videos filmed in glamorous locales, boyish good looks and snappy wardrobes, charming personalities, and forward-thinking collaborators—and you get the bold culture force known as Duran Duran.

“The passage of time does allow you to look back with some good grace, and be a little more pragmatic about what things did, and what things meant,” says keyboardist Nick Rhodes. “And I think that all of us would say that the Rio album was what set us on our trajectory for not only the next decade, but really the rest of our career.”

1

The Road to Rio

For Duran Duran, the road to 1982’s Rio started a decade before in Birmingham, England, when Nick Rhodes and John Taylor each experienced musical big bangs: 1972 Top of the Pops performances by David Bowie and Roxy Music, respectively. Not long after, the pair became friends and discovered a shared passion for record shopping, concerts, and, eventually, starting a band. In 1978, the pair formed Duran Duran, settling on a name derived from a character in the movie Barbarella.

The band’s sound was very much a work in progress; after all, the first Duran Duran lineup featured a clarinet and two basses. But being in Birmingham gave Rhodes and Taylor the time and space to find their way. The latter’s love of disco—he started playing bass because of Chic—crept into Duran Duran’s sound by 1979. And when the band needed a drummer, they found a Birmingham native named Roger Taylor (no relation to John) who fit right in: while playing with a fledgling punk band called the Scent Organs, he also listened to disco, Roxy Music, and David Bowie. “We were living these parallel lives, if you like—and John and I didn’t even know each other til ‘79,” Roger says.

Although a permanent vocalist and guitarist was still elusive in 1979 and into 1980, John Taylor crystallized his vision for Duran Duran’s sound: a cross between Chic and Sex Pistols. That combination became a north star as he, Rhodes, and Taylor continued to push their band forward. Make no mistake: long before John Taylor and Nick Rhodes on a whim popped into the Rum Runner, the club owned and run by brothers Paul and Michael Berrow, Duran Duran had their ambition in place and concept down.

That Rum Runner visit proved pivotal. The Berrows became Duran Duran’s managers, a position they’d hold through the mid-1980s. The band members would start working, rehearsing, and playing gigs at the club. And the Rum Runner itself served as a flashy recruitment tool. When Cullercoats, Northumberland, native Andy Taylor came to Birmingham to try out for Duran Duran—he had answered an ad looking for a guitarist inspired by Phil Manzanera, Mick Ronson, and David Gilmour—the Rum Runner’s infamous Bowie night bowled him over.

“I walked in the club—I was like, ‘Fuck me,’” he says. “It was like walking into the everything of everything. I’d never seen anything like it—and I’d never experienced anything like it. You know, I was always a bit singled out, bullied, weirdo at school playing guitar. Never hung out, didn’t like fighting and drinking. And I was like, ‘I found my weirdos.’” Birmingham University drama student Simon Le Bon, meanwhile, connected with Duran Duran thanks to an ex-girlfriend who worked at the club. Le Bon famously showed up for his vocalist audition wearing loud print pants (a pink leopard pattern, to be precise) and carrying a notebook of writing. Needless to say, he got the job.

The five-piece Duran Duran played their first show together on July 16, 1980, and workshopped an ambitious three-year plan: Hammersmith Odeon in 1982, Wembley Arena the next year, and then Madison Square Garden the year after that. They also continued to strive for a deeply original sound. Although lumped into the UK’s New Romantic movement and compared with Spandau Ballet, who became their frenemies/press adversaries, Duran Duran despised labels. After all, in the 1980s, imitation wasn’t flattery; it was frowned upon.

“Everybody knew that you had to have your own identity,” Rhodes says. “You wouldn’t dream of just copying someone else, or having a style that was so similar to the next band down the street. It wasn’t something that you did.” Rhodes recalls that at one point early on, Duran Duran had a Birmingham rehearsal room right between UB40 and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. “We had been the most successful things, even though it was the early days for everybody, to come out of that area. None of us even sounded like we were from the same planet.”

The keyboardist says being based in Birmingham was a “double-edged sword” although “mostly it worked to our advantage. We were outside of the bubble of London, where competition was very tough, and everybody had their own little clique. We were removed and able to work on our own stuff at our own pace. And I don’t believe we were ever tainted by a trend or a fashion or a style of music that was coming out.”

“Undoubtedly, we got categorized by the media as first futurists and then later New Romantics,” he adds. “But even that worked both ways for us: We didn’t particularly like that we were put into a category—hence the remark in ‘Planet Earth.’ But we also saw it as an opportunity, because people were writing about us.”

The London music industry was well aware of the Rum Runner—Rhodes says Pete Townshend, Steve Strange, Boy George, and Spandau Ballet visited—and they knew what Duran Duran were up to because of the band’s co-manager, Paul Berrow. A proactive promoter, Berrow called journalist Betty Page, who ended up writing the first article on Duran Duran for Sounds in 1980, and tipped off Dave Ambrose, who worked in the A&R department at EMI Records.

“[Paul] persuaded me with a really intense phone call to go up and see Duran Duran at Holy City Zoo in Birmingham,” says Ambrose, who had previously signed the Sex Pistols to a record deal and would later sign the Pet Shop Boys. “It was a tiny club, really tiny, probably about 20 by 20 at most.” Although he admits the concert was “a bit shaky,” the band’s immense promise stood out to him right away. This hunch was confirmed after hearing a demo of “Planet Earth”: “That’s when it all started, really—because that was obviously, to me, a hit song,” he says.

In November and December 1980, Duran Duran opened the UK tour of actress and musician Hazel O’Connor, then riding high with the LP Breaking Glass. Ambrose was also along for the ride for these gigs, tagging along in a Winnebago to, as he terms it, “keep an eye” on the band in advance of an EMI record deal offer. (He needed to: Ambrose recalls spotting a former EMI colleague who now worked in A&R for rival Phonogram at the Rum Runner.) As John Taylor recalls in his book, In The Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran, the “EMI charm,” and the fact that the label was also home to acts such as the Beatles and Queen, convinced the band. Duran Duran signed a worldwide record deal with EMI Records London, with Ambrose as their A&R rep at the label.

The band’s self-assuran ce, as well as strong ideas about their music, visual aesthetic, and future goals, made an impression on other label employees. “I’d never met a band who was so focused on success,” says Rob Warr, who became their marketing manager at EMI early on. “I mean, they were absolutely driven. It was about, ‘How are we going to become the biggest band in the world?’” The band communicated this ambition at a big London debut on December 11, 1980, at The Venue, a show booked at the invitation of Blitz Club DJ Rusty Egan. “We felt ready then,” says Rhodes. “We’d done our apprenticeship in Birmingham, and we were really ready to take on London. And we were really quite well finely tuned at that point.”

Duran Duran’s performance that night indeed impressed Rupert Perry, the Los Angeles–based VP of A&R at Capitol Records who happened to be visiting London that week. During that same trip, Perry and Ambrose’s EMI A&R colleague Terry Slater took Duran Duran to see Queen at Wembley Arena. “It was interesting: There we are, we just signed this totally unknown act, Duran Duran,” Perry says. “And we’re sitting there with the guys and saying, ‘That might be you in a couple of years’ time.’ And it was.”

Ambrose for one certainly wasn’t surprised at Duran Duran’s superstardom. “When I saw them, I knew that they were going to be massive,” he says. “It was as simple as that. It’s almost like the Beatles, in a way. They had those essential qualities of good construction. Very smart. They were absolutely contemporary. Their influences were great. And the management—pretty solid, Mike and Paul Berrow, and you need that. And they didn’t flinch about going on tour. We just got on with it.”

In retrospect, Duran Duran laid the groundwork for Rio’s music and imagery all throughout 1981. Having already honed a batch of songs live, the band headed into the studio to record their debut album with Colin Thurston, co-engineer of David Bowie’s “Heroes” and Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life, and the co-producer of the Human League’s Reproduction. “We wrote the first album to kind of make up what we were going to be, what this futuristic sound was,” says Andy Taylor. “I’m a fucking AC/DC fan—out-and-out headbanger. But I’d also learned to play every single style of guitar from all the covers bands [I played in] when I was young, and the military bases I played in.” His background provided intriguing contrast to Rhodes’ self-taught synthwork. “He would do Eno, and I would do Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page,” Taylor says. “I’d do the guitar bit, and he’d do the weird bit. And then somewhere in the middle, we found a way to get the musicality right.”

Released in June 1981, Duran Duran’s self-titled debut is the work of a glamorous and modern young band—whether it’s the zipper-punk stomp “Careless Memories,” horror-electro chiller “Night Boat,” or the cheeky synth-rock romp “Friends of Mine.” The LP also features Duran Duran’s striking debut single: the gold-foil disco swerve “Planet Earth,” which boasted burbling bass, apocalyptic riffs, and ice-planet synths. The single promptly went top 10 in Australia, No. 12 in the UK and even reached the top 30 of Billboard’s US dance club charts as an import before receiving a proper domestic release. Duran Duran were on their way.

For sleeve design needs, EMI’s Rob Warr connected Duran Duran with the graphic designer Malcolm Garrett, who was known for creating striking artwork for acts such as Buzzcocks and Magazine, and later designed the Rio sleeve. “[Warr] said, ‘I want you to come and see this band. We just signed them and they’re going to be fucking huge,’” Garrett says, adding that when he met the band members, things also clicked for him. “I really came to understand their own enthusiasm and their belief in what they were doing. That’s always something that’s important for me, who I’m working with.”

Garrett also remembers intuitively understanding John Taylor when the bassist shared his Sex Pistols-crossed-with-Chic musical concept for Duran Duran. “In that first year [of the band], people would be going, ‘What? They’re nothing like the Sex Pistols!’” he says. “But they’re like the Sex Pistols because they’re a street culture—and they’re like the Sex Pistols because they wanted to be independent and own their own identity, own the way that they projected themselves and operated in the marketplace. But the Chic bit is, they wanted to be very popular and danceable and reach a disco audience. And so that seemingly incongruous merger actually holds a lot of water when you start to think about it and analyze it.”

The designer’s forward-looking approach and perceptive insights meshed well with Duran Duran’s musical vision and personalities; in fact, he and his company, Assorted iMaGes, would come to design multiple items of band merchandise in the coming years. However, first Garrett received a commission to design the sleeve for “Planet Earth.”

Sensing a science fiction vibe from the band because of their name, he hit on a concept. “I had decided that Duran Duran was an airline,” he says. “Their first logo was, ‘Okay, it’s like TWA.’ You know, it’s Duran Duran World Airways.” Garrett cut otherworldly photos out of National Geographic that were taken from above the Earth, as if someone was flying over the planet, and paired them with the song title and the band’s name. “It’s like: They’re an airline, they’re modern, they’re futuristic,” he says. “To some degree, it’s a blank canvas. But at this point, we’re just looking out of the window at what they might have been singing about, or what they might have in their minds. And what they had in their minds, obviously, was actually being recognized the world over. So ‘Planet Earth’ was their target.” He laughs.

Before Duran Duran could conquer the world, however, they first had to make inroads in America. The EMI label Harvest, US home of British bands such as Pink Floyd, issued the Duran Duran LP stateside. Harvest was distributed by Capitol Records, which also provided marketing support and “were really good with straight-ahead kind of artists,” says Harvest A&R executive Bruce Ravid, who notes Capitol had broken Bob Seger and Steve Miller. “We weren’t as good as a label with some of the bands that required more of a grassroots thing. And Duran Duran, they were definitely that.”

Dave Ambrose laughs as he vividly remembers being in a limo with Capitol executives who were decidedly skeptical after he shared news of his exciting new signing, Duran Duran. “They all said”—and here he affects a disappointed tone—“‘Oh, Dave. You must be joking. I’m reall y sorry, Dave—you’ve blown it.’ And I just thought, ‘God, you really don’t know what’s going on in England, do you?’” Ambrose stresses he did have several allies at Capitol, namely the A&R executives Bruce Garfield and Rupert Perry, who understood Duran Duran like he did; Perry especially “made sure that the American company pushed the button. And they got the full push.”

Among other things, Perry sent a copy of Duran Duran’s debut to Doreen D’Agostino, a Capitol Records publicity manager based out of New York City. “I got a note from him with a cassette of Duran Duran, and he wrote, ‘D’Agostino, this one’s for you. Let me know what you think,’” she says. The publicist, who was a fan of Kraftwerk and the new sounds coming out of the UK, loved the music and wanted to work on promoting the band in America. “It was really difficult in the beginning,” she says. “It took every inch of creativity I had in my brain to figure out the best way to get the press’s attention. The press [couldn’t have] cared less about Duran Duran.” Even some likely suspects, such as the teen glossy 16 Magazine, didn’t bite, even though the band was popular in the UK teen magazine Jackie.

Her persistence and ingenuity paid off, however. For example, D’Agostino had been pitching the band, to no avail, to the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Separately, however, when Duran Duran arrived in the United States in September 1981 for their first American tour, Nick Rhodes made two requests: to go up the Empire State Building and meet Andy Warhol. Sensing an opportunity, D’Agostino called Interview and boldly asked to speak to Warhol directly. The artist actually picked up the phone and listened as she pitched Duran Duran and asked if the band could come and meet him—and he said yes.

“At that point, I didn’t even have much of a budget to ask for taxi money, honestly,” D’Agostino says. “But somebody gave us a ride down to the Interview office. We walked in and asked for Andy Warhol, and he came out with his little camera and said, ‘Oh, look, everyone—rock stars!’” D’Agostino had a copy of Duran Duran’s early videos with her, and a conference room viewing party ensued. The Cash Box issue dated Halloween 1981 features a photo of Warhol conversing with members of Duran Duran, presumably at the same meeting since the caption notes a showing of the Godley & Crème-directed “Girls on Film.”¹

D’Agostino also made sure Duran Duran were on the radar of Ed Steinberg, who ran RockAmerica, a company that distributed music videos to clubs across the country. As an avid reader of UK music publications, Steinberg was already hip to the band and included Duran Duran clips in RockAmerica’s monthly video compilations throughout 1981. In fact, the September RockAmerica cassette² included the deliberately risqué, unedited version of “Girls on Film.” In one scene, two models clad in négligées have a pillow fight and kiss while straddling a pole covered in whipped cream; at another juncture, a topless woman wearing only skimpy underwear mud-wrestles with a swimsuit-clad foe.

Not long after the video’s release, Billboard proclaimed it “the most controversial rock promo video of 1981,” and interviewed Le Bon for his take on the clip. “I don’t look on it as a pornographic film or a dirty movie,” he said. “It says a lot of things visually which are in the song. It’s not for dirty old men in movie theatres. It’s for girls as well as fellas.” Although the unedited video even today can seem shocking (and is much too steamy for daytime TV), Le Bon is right that the clip can have multiple interpretations. Viewed from one perspective, “Girls on Film” represents an exaggerated projection of a male sexual fantasy. However, the video is occasionally so over-the-top, it actually scans as humorous; it’s a meta commentary on the often-absurd premises of fashion photo shoots. At any rate, the video garnered US press attention: a widely syndicated late 1981 Associated Press Duran Duran feature was very positive about the band (and made it clear they were not New Romantics) but theorized the “Girls on Film” clip “may be the first X-rated rock video, a pornographic fantasy film.”

Unsurprisingly, “Girls on Film” also didn’t go over great in clubs located in more conservative places, Steinberg recalls now. Still, the video became enormously popular in many US dance clubs. Vinnie Longobardo was working as a video jockey at New York City club the Peppermint Lounge in 1981; as it happens, he later worked at MTV and produced Duran Duran’s first interview with the channel. In the club, reaction to Duran Duran was “phenomenal,” he says. “I’d get people coming up and requesting the band all the time.” The “Girls on Film” video “really, really took off,” he adds. “And that was in very heavy rotation—I pretty much played that every night for a few months because the crowd was very into it.” The “Planet Earth”/“Girls on Film” pair ended up at No. 30 for all of 1981 on Billboard’s dance chart in terms of audience response, just above Prince’s “Uptown.”

Image aside, Duran Duran also had a handful of American radio champions in 1981 who understood what the band was about. Their first US interview took place on the new music-friendly Long Island station WLIR, one of Duran Duran’s earliest and loudest advocates. “Their recordings were exquisite,” says Denis McNamara, WLIR’s then-program director. “For a band that came of that New Romantic scene, it was obvious that [they] had something special when they went in the studio.”

In Cleveland, Ohio, the city credited with breaking David Bowie and Roxy Music in the United States, Duran Duran also had a major fan in Kid Leo, music director of rock radio powerhouse WMMS. The DJ supported all the New Romantic bands, but considered Duran Duran “the most polished” of the bunch. “I instantly loved the sound and the look,” he says. “It was a throwback to the glam rock era, in particular the music and fashion of Roxy Music, who I championed fervently.” WMMS had “Planet Earth” in rotation, and Leo also recalls that “audience reaction was very strong” to “Girls on Film,” particularly on a listener-driven show he hosted called Kid Leo’s Grand Jury Of Rock And Roll.

Across the country at Los Angeles’ influential KROQ, Dusty Street—who spun early Duran Duran singles on her new music specialty show, “The Import Show”—gravitated toward the band’s melodic sensibilities and musical approach. “The best way is to describe it is that it was a turn from one-two-fuck-you kind of punk rock,” she says. “[Their vocals weren’t] screaming, harsh, punk rock vocals. They were much more—gosh, I don’t know, almost crooner-like. The things that I was used to—I was very much into R&B and the blues.” In Long Beach, California, Jimmy Christopher recalls “a handful of adolescent girls waiting outside” his station KNAC for Simon Le Bon to arrive for an interview—unusual for a virtually unknown band—and the spark of Duran Duran’s 1981 Los Angeles show at the Roxy. “[It was] their stage presence; their style,” he says. “It seemed to read what was to come for the ‘80s, and what MTV would be, and what their videos were at that time.”

Although Duran Duran’s hi-tech sound and dapper style would soon come to define and even direct pop music of the 1980s, most of America wasn’t quite ready for the band in fall 1981; in fact, the Duran Duran LP didn’t even enter the Billboard pop album charts. Still, the group remained enthusiastic and undaunted: these early days in America were exhilarating for Duran Duran.

“The energy we had, and the excitement about discovering America, was exhaustive,” Rhodes says. “We would’ve stayed there all year if we didn’t have to run to somewhere else. It was the most fascinating country to us at that time, because everywhere was so different. We were kids from the middle of England, and we were suddenly in Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and Boston, and Detroit, and Cleveland, and New York City. Everything was on such a grand scale for us.”

As 1981 progressed, the band’s visual image evolved as well. Among other things, Perry Haines—the i-D magazine co-founder and “Careless Memories” video co-director who styled the band early on—took Duran Duran shopping at Antony Price’s store in London. In the coming years, Price’s sharp suits would become synonymous with the band and their aspirational lifestyle. That thoughtful emphasis on image, when paired with Duran Duran’s music and personalities, helped amplify their popularity. “When they first started, when we did interviews, they’d all turn up,” says Suzie Kaplan, who became their UK publicist at EMI circa Rio. “Which would be great: They really were a good working unit together. [And] during that period of time imagery was massive. They had such a great visual image.”

Malcolm Garrett also designed the sleeves for Duran Duran’s other 1981 singles: “Careless Memories,” “Girls on Film,” and “My Own Way.” (The latter was done in collaboration with another noted designer, Peter Saville.) Although the band’s logo and the artwork evolved, Garrett used a grid system on each sleeve so the imagery was in the same place. “They evolve, but they’re pinned down by the structure,” he says of the sleeves. “There was a continuity. That’s another part of my methodology. It’s like, ‘Okay, what structures do we need to have in place that will allow that continuity?’ Even when the style, the visual style, changes dramatically, as it did from ‘Girls on Film’ to ‘My Own Way,’ there’s a consistency. It still moves forward.”

The way he describes Duran Duran’s 1981 sleeve artwork has striking parallels to the band’s own evolution that year. Musically, things were forging ahead, and new songs were already coming together. Back at home, Duran Duran closed out 1981 with the Careless Memories Tour. In the set list already was the future Rio track “Last Chance on the Stairway,” which at this stage had a morose post-punk edge, a la New Order’s Movement, and a dreamy, rain-streaked guitar tone. “It’s a song which has got a bit of soul in it, which makes it kind of a new development for us,” Le Bon said by way of introduction at the band’s December 17 show in London.

After three shows at the Odeon in Birmingham with Talk Talk, Duran Duran broke for the holidays—and headed into 1982 with an abundance of momentum. “When we went into the rest of the writing to prepare the Rio album, we hadn’t really had time to think about the success that we’d achieved with the first album,” Rhodes says. “We’d already moved on, and we’d got some songs that we thought were as good, if not better, than some of the songs on the first album already.”

“We didn’t have that horrible moment where there was a break and we had to think about, ‘What on Earth are we going to do for the second album?’” he continues. “The train had left the station, and it was moving really fast, and we were on it. There was nothing we could do about it—other than keep up with the tempo and have everything that we needed for every stop when we were required to get off that train.”

In hindsight, it was fortuitous Duran Duran didn’t have time to take stock of their success. Bands that immediately earn hit singles or albums often overthink or labor over subsequent releases, to the detriment of the music. But the members of Duran Duran simply followed their instincts and let their songwriting develop naturally, in response to their busy 1981 and the tantalizing potential of even more exciting adventures yet to come.

Notes

1 Rhodes would also later go on to become close friends with Warhol.

2 Other bands on the cassette include Specials, Toyah, Ramones, and Kraftwerk. Full tracklist here: http://www.remixservices.com/services/issue/rockamerica-september-1981.

2

Writing and Recording Rio

In early 1982, as Duran Duran started mapping out Rio, the band knew the album was in good shape. “It wasn’t like we got to the studio, the studio clock was ticking, and we were like, ‘Right, now we gotta write some songs,’ which is pretty much how every subsequent [Duran Duran] album has been made,” John Taylor says with a laugh. Although a few tunes were still coalescing, the music had largely come together piecemeal, inspired by various places and parts of the world, in the preceding months and years.

“People often ask, ‘Well, how on Earth did you follow up on ‘Girls on Film’ and ‘Planet Earth’? It must have been really difficult going through second album syndrome,’” Rhodes says. “And there was a simple answer to it: We didn’t ever have second album syndrome, because even before ‘Planet Earth’ was being released, and we were still on our first album cycle, we continued to write.”

On August 28, 1981—less than three months after Duran Duran landed in stores—the band recorded four songs at the sixteen-track studio located in the basement of EMI’s iconic building in London’s Manchester Square. The building was notable for being the site of several famous Beatles photographs—specifically, the ones depicting the quartet at various times (and haircuts) in their career leaning over a staircase railing. Duran Duran were well aware of this historical connection; Rhodes recalls that he and the rest of the band stared reverently at the iconic staircase when they first visited the label headquarters.

Duran Duran had been to Manchester Square’s studios before—in a sad coincidence, the band recorded several demos for their debut LP there on December 8, 1980, the day of John Lennon’s murder—as demo time was built into the band’s contract. But in August 1981, the band tracked three songs they later fleshed out for Rio (“My Own Way,” “New Religion,” and “Last Chance on the Stairway”) and one, the Roxy Music-lush “Like An Angel,” that became a b-side. These early London sessions represented freedom and possibility: away from Birmingham, the band could soak up the city’s nightlife and social scene—but when it came time to record, they could dig in and focus on developing their sound.

“We just sort of rolled up with all the gear, it all got taken in, and we were just left to our own devices there,” Rhodes says. “Everything was in there we needed.” As a budding studio gear enthusiast, he was also in heaven, as Manchester Square boasted world-class amenities. “They had some outboard gear and effects, which I was just learning about during the first album when we were working with Colin Thurston—things like the Eventide Harmonizer, AMS delays and expensive reverbs and plates that usually only big studios had. So it was fun to be able to expand our sound and to play with all these different things.”

Rapid sonic experimentation was certainly a hallmark of Duran Duran’s early days. In a July 1980 AIR Studios session, the band cut a heavy version of “Girls On Film” dominated by guitars that roared like a hot furnace; the take that surfaced a year later on their debut album is taut, spiraling disco-pop. “My Own Way” boasted a similar evolution. At the August 1981 Manchester Square session, the dance floor-inspired song boasted rattlesnake coils of pattering percussion and a nimble bass line, but also had bursts of jagged electric guitar. In contrast, the version released as a UK single in November 1981 was a striking disco throwback dominated by prickly, icy strings, and a careening tempo.

Duran Duran eventually updated “My Own Way” yet again in 1982 while recording Rio with Colin Thurston. But not all of their early demos needed that much work to reach their final form. Through a modern lens, the Manchester Square-recorded takes on “New Religion” and “Last Chance on the Stairway” sound strikingly similar to their Rio counterparts. Certain details and flourishes are missing, but it’s clear that the album’s sonic identity was coming into focus months before the LP’s release.

In a nod to how in sync the members of Duran Duran were at the time, “Hungry Like the Wolf” emerged nearly fully formed over the course of a single Saturday at another, separate Manchester Square session. This quick genesis was somewhat miraculous: several band members had been out rather late in London the night before, which made a mid-morning demo session unappealing. “I remember having the most terrible hangover,” Rhodes says. “I almost didn’t want to go in. But then I thought, ‘No—no, no, no. Come on, you’re here to work. And we’ve really got to move this thing along.’” It helped that Rhodes had recently acquired a Roland Jupiter-8 keyboard, a powerful instrument with which he was already enamored because it was so intuitive to use and offered appealing tonal warmth.

Using the synth’s arpeggiator, he landed on chord patterns that sounded “quite uplifting and different” and then incorporated a sequencer and programmed beats from a Roland TR-808 electronic rhythm box. Simon Le Bon’s interest was piqued when he heard what Rhodes was doing, and the vocalist immediately worked up melodies and lyrics in the studio. Then Andy Taylor walked in and came up with a scorching guitar riff—a “Marc Bolan-ish guitar part, a very Marshall-sounding Les Paul guitar lick,” as he put it in a 2002 interview.

“He started playing that riff, and we were all completely speechless,” Rhodes says now. “It was the missing piece of the jigsaw and, really, I think one of the strongest rock dance riffs of that whole period that he came up with.” The rhythm section Taylors were equally inspired when they arrived, and “locked in the groove,” as Rhodes puts it. “It just was one of those fabulous moments where everything fell into place like it should.”

Andy Taylor also recalls the Manchester Square demo session that led to “Hungry Like the Wolf,” not least because he was staying at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn. “If you stayed at Holiday Inns then, you were made,” he says. “In the early ‘80s, Holiday Inns—that’s where the footballers hung out.” Perhaps even more important, he also recalls how positive he felt back then when he played the song for his future wife, Tracey. “And it’s like, I knew we had it,” he says. “When we wrote ‘Hungry,’ I knew we had the album right.”

The guitarist’s confident, spot-o n musical instincts and advanced songwriting abilities especially buoyed Duran Duran in those days. Roger Taylor observed that his bandmate could “knock up the backbone of a song in ten minutes,” while John Taylor noted Andy “brought an entirely different kind of musical experience” to the band. “The rest of us were like punks that were adjusting to this new vibe, this new thing that was happening, which was much more groove-oriented, much more R&B-influenced.”

Circa Rio, Andy Taylor’s experience was also a boon. “Everything I know how to play, I’m playing on that album,” says John Taylor. “It’s not a matter of picking something and leaving something behind; I’m putting everything out there. And I think I could say that for Roger and Nick, and Simon, too. Andy had a different kind of toolkit that he was able to dip into and go, ‘Oh, okay, this is what the band needs. This is what this song needs; I can pick this, pick that.’ Andy was a much more versatile musician than we were.”

Still, John and Roger Taylor were especially eager to sharpen their skills and compete with the rhythm sections they admired: Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson; then-David Bowie collaborators George Murray and Dennis Davis; Japan’s Mick Karn and Steve Jansen; and the sound of Roxy Music during the Flesh and Blood era. “We were really going for that super-slick, super-integrated, rhythm section sound, and working with a lot of the sequences, pulses that Nick was feeding us,” the bassist says. “We were just trying to be grown-ups.” As part of this quest for precision, the pair would practice fills together, over and over again—as an example, the bassist cites the “Rio” intro—until things were note-perfect.

Duran Duran’s intense ambition and self-assurance is well-documented—so well-documented that these traits perhaps overshadow the group’s powerful work ethic and perfectionist streak. As self-taught musicians, practicing as a method for self-improvement was built into Duran Duran’s DNA. “We had this belief that we could teach ourselves, and we could be as good as the people that we aspired to be like,” says Roger Taylor. “How quickly we grew was the amazing thing.”

The band members were quite protective and proud of their songwriting, and felt a deep responsibility to each other to produce the best work possible. And they also pushed each other creatively, mingling their disparate influences in unorthodox ways, all in the name of a good song. “The one thing anybody needs to make it in music, above musical training, above everything else, is an attitude,” Rhodes says. “And I think we realized that we had that. We were ambitious kids, and making those records, we were blinkered. We didn’t ever think we’d done something wrong. We didn’t question anything. We didn’t ever say, ‘Oh, hmm, maybe all those songs are wrong.’ We questioned things within songs until we battled it out and said, ‘Yeah, that’s as good as it can be now.’ But we never thought, ‘Have we taken the right direction?’”

That Duran Duran believed so strongly in what they were doing—and never second-guessed their decisions—also illustrated their fierce self-reliance. “We were in the studio with one guy, Colin Thurston,” says Andy Taylor. “That was it. We wrote and produced our own demos, completely concocted it ourselves. Absolutely no one, not ever, said, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ or ‘Don’t do that.’ They wouldn’t have fucking got in the room—[or] out the room.”

“It was all on you in those days,” he continues. “You could go and inspect the master tapes and talk to everyone that ever got near us in a studio. It was all our own handiwork. You had to make that follow up to ‘Girls On Film’ and ‘Planet Earth’—and you lived or died on your own sword.”

Taylor’s response speaks to how often Duran Duran had to defend themselves against accusations that they were a pre-fab, manufactured pop band. Back then, it would’ve been easy for the group to become bitter or angry about such insinuations. However, Duran Duran instead used being underestimated as an incentive to hone their songwriting and become even better musicians.

Although Duran Duran’s dalliances with London were fruitful, Birmingham also figured prominently into Rio’s evolution. As they did for their first album, the band hunkered down in their rehearsal room at the Rum Runner to write songs. This early in their career, having this collaborative space was still a financial necessity as much as it was a creative choice. “It was expensive going into recording studios,” Rhodes says. “We didn’t have very big budgets, we were on time constraints, and we felt that that was the best way to develop our songwriting process.”

But this rehearsal room lent itself to songwriting spontaneity. One day, Rhodes arrived early to practice so he could figure out how the echo and delay functions worked on a coveted new piece of gear, a Roland Space Echo. (He was never one to read manuals.) Using a Roland SH-2 synthesizer and CSQ-100 sequencer, he put together a piece of music and fed it into the Space Echo. “And as I was playing with it, I stumbled upon this fantastic delay that was in time with the sequencer, which was something that I’d never really used on the first album like that,” Rhodes says. “And this was a slower sequence, so it had the space in the music for the delay in between it. It really just sounded hypnotic and magical.” Rhodes then reached for his beloved Roland Jupiter-8 and started playing a trilling melody line on top of the whirring music.

In a stroke of luck, Andy Taylor happened to be in the club’s upstairs office, perked up considerably when he heard what Rhodes was working on, and came right downstairs to work out chords on an acoustic guitar. “I hadn’t even thought about chords at all, all I had was this little sequence and the melody that went on top of it,” Rhodes says. “And he really figured out some beautiful inversions of a chord sequence that worked with what I had.” Presto: “Save A Prayer” was born.

To Andy Taylor, the creation of this song is one illustration of Duran Duran’s unique songwriting approach and confluence of inspirations at this time. “I think I’ve got a ton of musicality,” he says. “And Nick was very, very avant-garde in his approach to things. When you put the two things together, we found a way of molding it. But we didn’t have a classic way of doing things. I don’t think anything was written a typical way. . . . There was no Lennon-McCartney thing or any of that stuff. It was very disparate.”

At the dawn of 1982, after Duran Duran wrapped up promotional duties for their debut LP, they also stayed close to home and hashed out more Rio demos with a beloved Birmingham figure, Bob Lamb. In the 1970s, Lamb drummed for the Steve Gibbons Band, which toured with The Who and had a UK hit with a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Tulane.” By the end of the decade, Lamb had also set up a modest four-track studio in his house and started recording bands. Large-scale success followed: he produced and engineered the Birmingham-based reggae troupe UB40’s 1980 debut LP, Signing Off, which reached No. 2 on the UK album charts. Charmingly, the album’s liner notes dubbed the low-key studio “Bob Lamb’s Home of the Hits.”

“There was this sense that, ‘Wow, Bob has these magic ears,’” says John Taylor. “Actually, he did have great ears.”

Taylor would know: Lamb and Duran Duran had worked together on multiple demo sessions, dating back to the late 1970s, prior to teaming up for these pre-Rio sketches. “We kept going back [to his studio] every time—and every time, we were improving ourselves,” John Taylor says. In fact, as the band developed a sonic identity, Lamb was pivotal. His experience and expertise was eye-opening—Lamb was the first person the bassist worked with that mic’d up a drumkit—and he provided a supportive and nurturing studio environment.

“Bob was like a father figure in those early days,” says Roger Taylor, who recalls that hearing his drumming played back through studio speakers during an early Lamb session was a major confidence boost. “He was a drummer originally, so he was very attuned to the rhythm sections, and the sound of the drums was one of his specialties. When I heard myself [being played] back, it was like, ‘Wow! That’s me! That’s little me that taught myself to play in my bedroom a few years earlier [who] was coming back through these speakers.’”

For Rhodes, the Lamb demo sessions also always had extra significance. The Birmingham studio functioned like a chemistry lab of sorts where he could experiment with textures and techniques, such as the sequencers heard on the first album’s “Planet Earth,” and refine what he wanted his aspect of the music to sound like. Call this process creative pragmatism: many of the early synthesizers Rhodes used didn’t have memory available to save sounds, meaning this experimentation provided him a crucial road map he could then take with him and use in the studio.

“The thing that I used for all the sequences, for example, on ‘The Chauffeur’ and ‘Save A Prayer’ is a tiny little synthesizer that’s completely analog, so every time I made a sound, unless I didn’t touch it, it would be different the next time,” Rhodes explains. “We went through this process at Bob Lamb’s small studio of testing out what I wanted the sounds to be like—and I’d have to try and match it if I liked it again when we did the real sessions with Colin Thurston.”

Although Duran Duran had so much success with their debut, the decision to return home and work with Lamb, the person with whom they had demoed their first LP, was significant and even poignant. “We went back to his studio to feel confident about making another record,” says Roger Taylor. “You know, the second record is often the hardest record to make. You put all the material that you came up with when you got together into this first record, and then you’ve got to do it all again with a second one. So I guess we went back there to really kind of feel our feet again, and go back to our roots.”

John Taylor concurs: “There was this sense of, ‘Let’s go back to Bob’s. Let’s put the songs through the Bob Lamb mill, and get the songs organized and arranged before we go to London.’”

By the Rio era, Lamb had moved studio operations out of his house and opened Highbury Studio in Kings Heath, in a former cricket bat factory. He welcomed Duran Duran back with open arms. “I was busy building the new studio, but we kept in touch,” Lamb says. “Eventually they re-appeared, anxious to work—same plan, but a bit more up-market. The songs were flowing.” He especially recalls Duran Duran cutting the demo of “Save A Prayer,” which Rhodes says ended up being nearly identical to what came out on Rio, save for a slightly different mix and a few lyrics tweaks in the final verse. “We were pretty concise with our demos. We were really like a sort of laser. We were targeting exactly what we wanted, and we knew where we were going with everything.”

Lamb noticed that Duran Duran’s whirlwind 1981 on the road had also provided focus and made an impact—and not just because young women turned up at Highbury Studio during Rio-era demos hoping for a glimpse of the musicians. “The changes in the band after their touring experiences were fairly obvious,” Lamb recalls. “Many young bands have the drive to try to make it in the challenging world of the music business but only a few ever get there. In the case of Duran Duran, they knew without doubt from the beginning that they would be successful and they wore it well. They were confident and the image was more profound.” In fact, Lamb says he didn’t need to give them any advice or guidance as they prepped the Rio songs. “They knew what they were doing. They were playing better than ever. Time on the road will do that.”

Unsurprisingly, the idea of geography and travel was very much on the band’s mind. “Rio is very much an expression of what happens when you take the rawness of Duran Duran in 1981, and you give them a record deal, and send them off around the world for 12 months, playing every day,” John Taylor says. “And then they come back—they come back home, and they cook this up, with all this new confidence and all this new experience.”

The band settled on calling the album Rio during this nomadic 1981 period and never wavered from the choice. John Taylor, who came up with the title, connects the idea to the exciting, adventurous times the band was experiencing, as well as his own expanded horizons. After all, the bassist hadn’t left England until he joined Duran Duran, and in 1981, he saw some of the world’s biggest cities: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, and Berlin. “It was extraordinary. And yet when we came back to Birmingham, the idea of exotica—and exotic travel—was Rio.” He likens it specifically to a colorful, seductive, welcoming Brazilian carnival.

“The next level of global exotica, if you would,” he continues. “That became the label that gave this project its nerve, I suppose, its feeling. These guys—basically, we’re all suburban English kids that really [are] not well-traveled at all—have just [traveled] the world in an extraordinary way. We go back home, and we’re still dreaming. We’re still dreaming about a place far away—and the idea of that escapism, and that escape route, to some kind of lifestyle, some kind of sunlit beach.”

Demos, dreams, and song ideas in hand, the members of Duran Duran next linked up with producer Colin Thurston and decamped to London’s AIR Studios in win ter 1982. Located on Oxford Street, in an upper floor of a building that today houses the multistory department store Topshop, the studio provided the band a bird’s-eye view of the bustling Oxford Circus area below. Duran Duran were naturally excited to be recording in such a historic place—the studio was founded by legendary Beatles producer George Martin—while Rhodes of course was also thrilled to have access to new and cutting-edge recording gear. To sweeten the experience even more, Duran Duran was recording in the complex’s high-ceilinged, spacious Studio 1, which was “the most fabulous, big acoustic room,” John Taylor says. “We did a lot of [Duran Duran’s 1986 album] Notorious there as well. It’s just a beautiful room to work in.”

AIR Studios always had big names cycling in and out of recording rooms. During their July 1980 session recording “Girls on Film,” Duran Duran encountered one of their idols, Japan, tracking the seminal post-punk album Gentlemen Take Polaroids. When the band returned for Rio, Paul McCartney was putting the finishing touches on what would become his 1982 LP Tug of War in Studio 2. The former Beatle and his late wife, Linda, would stop in and say good night to Duran Duran, a gesture that meant a lot to the band members—even if it was “very surreal,” Rhodes says. “It was very, very strange for some young kids from Birmingham who aspired to be, you know, a tiny little bit of whatever the Beatles were. But he was so charming and encouraging, [and] could not have been nicer to us.”

Decades later, the members of Duran Duran each recall different moments about the Rio era, with varying levels of detail and clarity. But McCartney’s kindness still deeply resonates with everybody, perhaps because the icon’s validation represented another great leap forward. “When you were young, you looked up to everybody—and then you’re in the thick of it doing it yourself,” says Andy Taylor. “So I suppose Rio was probably our happiest time. I think we were all probably most fulfilled in that period.”

Accordingly, the actual Rio recording experience went smoothly for Duran Duran. “I said the second album can be the most difficult, and it’s where you really have to find your feet and your confidence, but despite that I recall it being an easy album to record,” says Roger Taylor. “[Rio] was such a lovely, simple record to make. It wasn’t massively overlaid with different tracks, or different edits. It was just literally as it was played.” Adds John Taylor: “There was a clarity of focus that went into it. A lot of albums are very stressful, and I don’t remember being terribly stressed about this one.”

Although the band amassed Rio’s songs over an extended period of time, they recorded the album quickly. Part of that again had to do with being mindful of budgets, Roger Taylor notes lightly: “The record company would only fund you for so long in the studio, so you had to really get in there and get your shit done.” However, because most of Duran Duran’s demos were in such solid shape, studio time included not just capturing sharp performances from each band member, but also leveraging all twenty-four tracks of analog tape.

That means Rio is full of tiny, ornate details that pop up in the mix with careful listens. Le Bon rummaged through the “two enormous trunks full of percussion instruments” Colin Thurston had ordered. “I spent hours trying out all sorts [of instruments]: cabasas, shakers, washboards, swanee whistles,” the vocalist said in a spring 2020 Twitter listening session for Rio. The end result is that Le Bon added vibraphone to “New Religion” and a jaunty marimba interlude on the bridge of “Last Chance on the Stairway.”

The latter song is also full of decadent sound effects, including Rhodes striking a match and lighting a cigarette, and then clinking wine glasses with Le Bon and a “Cheers!” toast. And then there’s “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which features the inimitable giggle of Rhodes’ then-girlfriend, who “had the most fantastic laugh,” he says. “I took her into the studio and just gave her a little bit of a poke—tickle.” He laughs. “And she burst out laughing, and there we had it, the beginning of the track.”

Other members of Duran Duran joined Rhodes in embracing ultra-modern instrumental flourishes. John Taylor overdubbed fretless bass on “Lonely in Your Nightmare,” while Roger Taylor added Simmons’ then-new electronic drums to multiple songs. Unlike drummers from many bands at the time, Roger Taylor didn’t use the entire electronic drum kit; instead, he mainly stuck to using the Simmons electronic tom-toms as an addition to the acoustic drum set. “I’d play an acoustic drum kit and just lay the Simmons over the top, really,” he says. “And I’m glad that we did that. To this day, I love the sound of acoustic drums. And it was great to have something modern coming through as part of the kit, but it didn’t completely dominate the sound.”

This was also an ideal setup for Colin Thurston’s style, which was to overdub tom-toms; as a result, the Simmons drum accents melded seamlessly with the grooves from the acoustic kit. This collision of the organic and the electronic went a long way to explain Rio’s singular sound. By the end of the 1980s, John Taylor notes that technology and programming would dominate modern music. “The modern, cutting-edge music that you were hearing in 1981, 1982—it was still bass, drums, guitars, and keyboards. You had the clay to work with. The lineup of the band, the constituency of the band, was perfect for the music that we wanted to make.”

One of the songs with this perfect blend was “My Own Way,” which Duran Duran re-cut at AIR Studios with Thurston. Although the 1981 single had charted well in the UK and Australia, every member of Duran Duran agreed that the song wasn’t quite working in its existing, disco-influenced form. “We kind of rushed it,” Andy Taylor admits now. “We came back from New York, we were probably a little bit hyper about it all.” In 1982, however, the band landed on a slower tempo that emphasized lightning-bolt guitars, sizzling drum accents, and a thick, twanging bassline. Rather than a frantic dance floor-filler, it was a languid groover, with Le Bon cheekily shouting out a rough approximation of the address for then-popular New York City club the Peppermint Lounge: on 45th street between 6th Avenue and the Broadway theater district.

Another Duran Duran song with a convoluted history finally took shape in the studio: Rio’s title track, which had been evolving across multiple band lineups. John Taylor has said that part of the “Rio” source material came from a song called “See Me Repeat Me,” which Duran Duran demoed in 1979 with former vocalist Andy Wickett. “See Me Repeat Me” eventually evolved into “Ami A Go Go” in a later incarnation of Duran Duran with a different singer. And when John Taylor scrawled out the setlist for Duran Duran’s first show with Simon Le Bon in July 1980, he wrote the song as “Amy A Go Go.” (Over the years, Wickett has also claimed in interviews that “Stevie’s Radio Station”—a song he said he brought to Duran Duran from his former band, TV Eye—also influenced “Rio.” When asked if there’s any truth to this, Rhodes says, “not even a slight hint of truth. I remember that being a very basic rock song.”)

John Taylor likens “Rio” to a painting that’s been added to and revised over time, creating a piece of art that’s full of hidden, discarded layers. “They put the painting under X-rays, and they find all these different versions of the painting—‘Rio’ was kind of like that,” he says. “It had been through a number of iterations before it became ‘Rio.’ And it was, like, just a funky concept song that we stuck with and kept developing.”

Even the final version of the song resembles a complex artistic endeavor. In addition to familiar rhythm section influences (Bowie, Roxy Music, Japan), the song draws on Eurodisco and the kind of driving, 4/4 beats heard in Motown and Northern Soul. Rhodes used the Roland Jupiter-4 keyboard’s arpeggiator to create the song’s frantic pulses, which he thought “sounded a little like crazy steel drums or something,” and added rhythms from a Roland TR-808.

“Rio” also had celebratory saxophone courtesy of Andy Hamilton, a musician already familiar to Duran Duran: he was an auxiliary player on the band’s first European tour dates in September 1981 and was previously recruited to add saxophone on the extended, “Night Version” of “Planet Earth.” Hamilton hadn’t heard “Rio” before arriving at AIR Studios—and so, like other sessions he had done, he says he just improvised his parts, drawing on his own feel and intuition. “Luckily with ‘Rio,’ there were only really two chords for most of the solo; it was only at the end where it changed,” Hamilton says. “It wasn’t that I had to negotiate overloads of chords. With ‘Rio,’ I just played the first thing that came into my head and hoped that it worked.”

Hamilton needn’t have worried: Rhodes oversaw the session to ensure the part was perfect, as the keyboardist viewed the sax solo as “a very important part of the dynamic of the song. I knew it could not be just another sax break. It needed to be special and unique as well as completely memorable.” In fact, Rhodes considers Hamilton’s part as “more of an integral melody within the song rather than a solo,” which is why it’s performed the same way at every Duran Duran concert.

Amusingly, Hamilton—who also played on the band’s 1983 hit “Union of the Snake” and was part of 1984’s mammoth Sing Blue Silver tour—discovered how his part was perceived only after attempting to improvise the sax solo in a later Duran Duran rehearsal. “And they were sort of like, ‘What? What are you doing?’” he laughs. “‘Play the solo you played on the record.’” Hamilton happily obliged, although he adds the solo has one thorny music theory conflict. Guitar-based bands like Duran Duran often had songs in the key of E-major—and the relative minor, C-sharp minor, “for a saxophone player is rubbish,” he laughs. “It’s awful. Horrible key. . . . Solos in D and C are great, but they only occur in keyboard-based bands, and at that time Andy [Taylor] was a big driving force in [the band] musically, the big open E chords and stuff like that.”

The intro to “Rio,” meanwhile, reflected Rhodes’ recent fascination with the experimental composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The keyboardist picked up metal rods and dropped them on the strings of AIR Studios’ grand piano, which had been mic’d up for the occasion. “They bounced all over the place, over the strings, and made a fantastic noise,” he recalls. “They didn’t really settle down until a good 30 seconds.” Rhodes wasn’t done yet, however: he then wanted to reverse the shambling sound by turning the tape over. “When we did, it was such an uplifting moment to hear the sharpness of when the sound ends in reverse and goes into the track, and starts the whole thing. I said, ‘Well, that’s it. Hit the jackpot first time. Don’t change a thing.’” He laughs. “That was it. It was madness and luck.”

That creative freedom was a hallmark of Duran Duran during the Rio era. “We had an open-mindedness with each other musically about anything we created at that time,” Rhodes says. “Really, it was a free-for-all. You had to pass the board of everybody else. But if you wanted to try something out, everybody would just step aside and say, ‘Go for it. Let’s see what we get.’”

That open-mindedness came in handy when Rhodes and Le Bon created Rio’s album-closer, “The Chauffeur,” in the studio, from an acoustic guitar sketch the vocalist originally started writing in 1979 while volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel. (Among other duties, he trimmed orange trees.) Rhodes saw lyrics in Le Bon’s notebook and was inspired by vivid phrasing and imagery. “[The song] sounded strangely exotic, and at the same time it was really visual,” he says. “I had a vision in my head to do something that was almost completely electronic.”

Rhodes admits that an all-electronic track “was politically a little difficult with the band at the time,” but forged ahead. During periods when his studio services weren’t needed, he retreated to an auxiliary production room along with Rio’s tape op, Renate Blauel, and spent hours sculpting the song: programming the sequencer, adding layers of synths, and creating beats on the Roland TR-808. The keyboardist also created homemade sound effects by mic’ing up a glass to capture an ice cube cracking, and carefully cued up a vinyl LP to capture someone talking about nature. (“I think it was grasshoppers he was talking about,” he says.) Le Bon joined Rhodes in this process and added to the ambience. The two men played a piano part together, using one hand each, while Le Bon contributed a mournful melody played on an ocarina discovered in Colin Thurston’s percussion stash.

“Simon loved [the song] and sung on it, and I guess because it sounded right, there wasn’t any need for more live instrumentation on it,” Rhodes says. “And when everybody heard it, they said, ‘Okay, well, fine, yeah—it is what it is. It’s a really cool, unusual piece.’” In an ironic twist, Rhodes notes the band later recorded an acoustic version of “The Chauffeur” that ended up as a “Rio” b-side—and it’s the only Duran Duran song on which he doesn’t play. “I guess that was my pu nishment for having created an entirely electronic track,” he says dryly.

Duran Duran had a hard-and-fast deadline to finish mixing Rio, since the band members were due to fly to Sri Lanka for video shoots before their Australian tour started in mid-April. However, things were running behind schedule, which posed a problem for Rhodes, who took the mixing stage very seriously. Leaving the studio and hopping on a plane with Rio unfinished wasn’t an option; in fact, he told everyone else he’d be staying in London until the album was complete. If he missed the video shoot, so be it.

With other bands, a staggered travel schedule might cause suspicion, although Rhodes knew his bandmates trusted him to be a good steward of the music. To John Taylor, that faith permeated all the Rio sessions. “The level of trust was enormous—enormous,” the bassist says. “I didn’t feel like I had to be sitting in the studio all night while [Simon] finished the lyrics and sang. I knew it was going to be great. There was no sense: ‘Oh, God, what’s he gonna sing?’ Or Andy, you know: ‘Are the solos gonna be good? Do I need to be there?’ There was nothing like that. There’s a sense that the best bands—each individual occupies his or her own corner. They hold down their corner.”

Rio was mixed on an analog desk, meaning it was a hands-on experience that involved fine-tuning the sound with manual tweaks. “To get the mix then, it was a performance, literally a live performance of a mix, with different people involved,” Rhodes says. “And it was fascinating, and exciting, and often we’d get it and we’d go, ‘Oh, damn, we got the whole thing, apart from we missed that one cue there.’” He laughs. “And you’d have to do it all again.” The mixing process was understandably intense: Rhodes had a hotel room in London, but barely used it. “I went there for about two hours in three days, most of the time just to change,” he says. “I’d just fall asleep on the couch in the studio, and we’d get up four hours later and start mixing again. It was that crazy.”

However, Colin Thurston was exceptionally good at understanding and interpreting any proposed changes and how the musicians wanted Rio to sound. To Andy Hamilton, this made Thurston a good match for Duran Duran. “The [band] members were very strong-willed people,” he says. “They’re very self-assured. They knew what they were doing, and they just wanted somebody to translate it more than anything else.”

With little time to spare, Rhodes and the rest of the studio crew polished off Rio’s final mixes; in fact, the keyboardist carried a cassette of the album with him to Sri Lanka. Although Rhodes had been awake about thirty-six hours straight, he couldn’t sleep; instead, he popped Rio into his Sony Walkman and started analyzing and second-guessing. “I was listening to it for however long that terminal flight was, all the time thinking, ‘Okay, what have I missed? Is everybody going to be happy with this? Have I got everything right? Is that edit right on ‘Hold Back the Rain’? Did we put the echo on that? Wait a minute, ‘The Chauffeur,’ have I got the right version of it here?’”

Luckily, what Rhodes heard passed muster. “The last thing I remember on that flight was literally listening to the whole album, getting through it, and thinking, ‘It’s okay. It’s going to be okay,’ and turning it off and falling asleep.”

Rhodes didn’t know it at the time, of course, but this flight represented the exact moments just before his life changed. Post-Sri Lanka, Duran Duran began their Rio promotion in Australia and Japan. The LP itself landed in stores in May and immediately altered Duran Duran’s career trajectory, propelling the group into music’s upper echelon and cementing their legacy as one of the UK’s preeminent rock bands. And MTV airplay for the Sri Lanka-filmed video for “Hungry Like the Wolf” likewise contributed to Duran Duran’s American success. By the end of 1982, barely two years after Duran Duran finalized their lineup, they were on the precipice of global success.

3

Why Rio Matters

Although Nick Rhodes fretted about how Rio turned out, his concern was unwarranted. It’s a perfect album—and a perfect-sounding album—that exudes cool. You don’t just want to visit Rio occasionally; you want to make it a regular stop on your nightlife rotation.

What’s impressive is that Duran Duran achieved this perfection while distilling their inspirations in such savvy ways. The album certainly has antecedents—Roxy Music’s rakish art-pop drama, Bowie’s glammy decadence, Chic’s throbbing grooves, the lacquered glamour of post-punks Japan, the electronic innovations of both Kraftwerk and early Human League—but no direct homages. “It’s a much more inward-looking album than the first album, which was very much a reflection of what we were seeing around us, and the trends that were happening that were influencing us,” John Taylor says. “That first album was created very quickly, but we barely knew each other. And I think that Rio was much more about ourselves responding to each other, and the experiences that we were having, rather than what was going on outside us.”

Rio’s mix bears this out: the album’s blend of sounds is almost supernaturally balanced, as each instrumentalist (bass, drum, keyboard, guitar) turns in confident performances. On “Lonely in Your Nightmare,” when Andy Taylor’s keening riffs surge to the front of the mix, the arrangement is deferential to his entrance; his guitar-god solo in the middle of “Last Chance on the Stairway” contrasts with—but doesn’t overpower—Rhodes’ delicate synth drones. And John and Roger Taylor are completely in sync throughout the whole album, pushing forward “My Own Way” and “Hold Back the Rain” with ecstatic, danceable grooves.

“We were, at that time, incredibly focused on writing together, and we had a really good understanding of each other’s strong points,” Rhodes says. Crucially, the band members didn’t try and suppress their differences, as Le Bon told Smash Hits in April 1982: “We’ve discovered that our real strength lies in what we are, and not what we want to be. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with five pieces. But the puzzle doesn’t have curly edges. Instead there are rectangles and pentagons and triangles—and they all have to fit together.”

Accordingly, the album possesses colorful bookends: the rainbow-hued bacchanalia of “Rio” beckons listeners into the album, and then the enigmatic, dusky hymn “The Chauffeur” eases them out. “[“Rio” is] the poppiest thing on the record,” says John Taylor. “But it’s the gateway—it’s the entry. And once you’re in, then you’re going to hear a lot of really weird stuff.” One of Rio’s enduring highlights—and a fantastic example of Duran Duran’s musical chemistry and darkness—is “New Religion.” The song starts off with Rhodes’ cavernous synth intro, which sounds like he’s a ghost organist haunting a cathedral, before Andy Taylor enters with a slightly ominous guitar solo. As the song unfolds, more sounds emerge: John Taylor’s spiderweb basslines, Rhodes’ frozen tundra synth effects, and even Le Bon rapidly speak-singing, since he was inspired by the nascent hip-hop movement. The cumulative effect is mesmerizing: in the hands of other bands, “New Religion” might’ve been a slog or dirge—here, it’s an abstract mystery to puzzle through and try to solve.

“It was a serious piece of work, wasn’t it?” Roger Taylor said of the song in 2017. “It was a deep cut for a band that was really considered as a teen band.”

The drummer hits on something that’s key to understanding Rio and explains why the album and its lyrics resonated with teenagers. On “New Religion” and other songs, Le Bon sounds like he’s having a conversation with listeners, and validating their experiences, not standing on a pedestal singing down to them. And rather than referencing specific situations, his lyrics are about what these experiences provoked: social uncertainty, debauched good times, philosophical meditation, ephemeral romance, and even insecurity. Le Bon treats all these emotions with respect, acknowledging their importance with a reverential tone.

“Something about the lyrics on this album really got under people’s skin,” says John Taylor. “One of the most important things about this record is the way that lyrics were being expressed. I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone else that was writing lyrics the way Simon was writing at this time. This is a guy whose favorite band is Joy Division but is trying to make pop music and is trying to write über-pop songs. They’re these super pop songs that have really bizarrely dark, lyrical messaging that somehow seemed to work.”

Today, it’s easy to forget how young the musicians were while recording Rio. Age-wise, the teenage Duran Duran fans daydreaming in their bedrooms weren’t that much younger than the band members themselves. The oldest, Le Bon, was twenty-three; Rhodes, the youngest, was only nineteen. Photos of the band taken during the AIR Studios sessions depict fresh-faced musicians quite serious about their work. In fact, although the elaborate Rio-era videos gave people the impression Duran Duran were ruthless capitalists or Thatcherites, these clips were filmed after Rio was complete but before the LP was a worldwide blockbuster. While recording the album, the band members weren’t jaded jetsetters, but hopeful dreamers. The cosmopolitan and escapist vibe permeating the Rio LP is aspirational, rooted in sincerity and earnestness.

“It was all unconscious how we did it. We certainly didn’t sit down and plan that we were going to make this album of escapism and aspiration,” John Taylor says. “No conversations were had to that effect. But subconsciously, all the lives that we had all lived up to that point all got sort of poured into it and expressed.” Duran Duran believed in themselves—and believed they could actually manifest these glamorous and exciting lives—because they had tangible role models. “There was a lot of confidence in what we were doing,” the bassist continues. “I mean, an extraordinary amount of confidence, the kind of confidence that only we could have gotten in Britain at that time, really.”

“And I don’t mean confidence of, like, you know, ‘Hey, man, we got it. We got this,’” he adds, affecting a deliberately gruff vocal tone. “Not gym confidence—just an innate sense of having spent the last 10 years of our lives watching bands like Pink Floyd and Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols and The Clash and David Bowie. Watching these extraordinary, iconoclastic musicians [and] songwriters come out of Cambridge, Bromley, Shepherd’s Bush, Newcastle—wherever.”

John Taylor relays a story that mega-AC/DC fan Andy Taylor used to frequent the same bar in Newcastle as Brian Johnson, a musician who was in the band Geordie and later replaced Bon Scott as AC/DC’s frontman. “And the day Brian Johnson got the job in AC/DC, Andy was in the bar—and Brian Johnson bought a round for everybody,” he says. “And for Andy, that was like, ‘Holy shit. Someone from where I’m from can get that kind of recognition.’”

“That was beyond encouraging—I mean, talk about aspirational,” the bassist continues. “You know, aspiration is fine, as long as there’s some sense of real possibility there. I mean, if it’s just a complete fucking fantasy, then that doesn’t serve any purpose at all. But if it’s grounded in enough energy or self-belief that you can actually build on that fantasy and make it a reality—then it’s substantive.”

Taylor’s perspective points to one reason why Duran Duran were so driven, so determined to make their escapist adventures come true. Some artists are content to revel in fantasy and possibility; it’s akin to someone who pines after a crush and loses interest when feelings are reciprocated. Duran Duran not only loved the romance of the daydream; they also found beauty in the consummation, being able to visit those sunlit beaches and take in the magnificent vistas with their own eyes.

The members of Duran Duran collectively have eclectic and (sometimes) even surprising musical tastes. Case in point: as a kid, Simon Le Bon was “obsessed” with Gordon Lightfoot’s early 1970s folk-pop hit “If You Could Read My Mind,” he said in a 2000 VH1 Storytellers special. Later, he took oblique melodic influence from the song for two Rio tunes. One Lightfoot lyric inspired the first lyric of the chorus to “Save a Prayer”; the common ground between the two is a keening tone, as both lines come off like a gentle, pleading question. And the doo-doo-doo parts of “Hungry Like the Wolf” speed by as if they’re being sung by a motor mouthed lounge crooner—but if slowed down, these wordless bits resemble the cascading chords of another “If You Could Read My Mind” lyric.

Although Le Bon sang in contemporary-sounding bands prior to joining Duran Duran, his vocal phrasing and tone, as well as melodic sensibilities, feel clean and classic. In fact, Rio’s dark textures somewhat obscure the musical theater flourishes built into Le Bon’s vocal delivery. His enunciation is crisp and precise thanks to his extensive stage background, and his voice possesses velvety vibrato that adds subtle intrigue. Throughout “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Le Bon creates seductive tension by lingering on certain words a beat or two longer, while “Rio” has melodramatic razzmatazz; it’s not a stretch to imagine the song as a jazzy lounge staple or a bossa nova track.

The “Rio” chorus also has signature Le Bon plush harmonies. “He’s got a very unusual way of stacking his harmonies up,” Rhodes says. “And when he harmonizes his own voice, I’ve never heard anyone who can do it closer than he can. The double track is almost identical and very effective.” This technique certainly made Le Bon an uncommonly empathetic singer—his double-tracking exudes warmth—and generated emotional depth. Not only did he draw from Bowie’s debonair desperation, but at his moodiest, his tone is of a piece with few peers of his time: the smoky, soulful timbres of Yaz’s Alison Moyet or Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox, or the vocal approach of Sting, or the members of Tears for Fears. Take “Lonely in Your Nightmare,” on which he provides solace via a conspiratorial vocal delivery. “It was a very different kind of melody for me to write. I just let the chords inform it,” Le Bon said in 2017. “You know how melodies tell you stories? That one just told me a story all the way along.”

Lyrically, another touching moment is the disco-pop pogo “Hold Back the Rain,” a musically extroverted song propelled by slashing guitars, percolating synthesizers, and a relentless backbeat. Le Bon wrote the song’s words out of concern for John Taylor, who was at the time overindulging in self-destructive habits. “It’s about being the five of us, and how we need to look after each other—and now it’s time to look after you, and you’ve got to come back to us,” the vocalist said in a 2017 interview. The day before Le Bon recorded his vocals in the studio, he wrote out two copies of the lyrics. One copy he kept; the other he put under Taylor’s door.

But Rio begins, appropriately enough, with the title track, which Le Bon wrote as “an homage to New York, really—to America,” he said in a 2011 interview. As with many of his lyrics, however, inspiration first came from another place: a comely Birmingham restaurant server. “I was infatuated with her, and I came up with that line, ‘moving on a dance floor, babe, you’re a bird of paradise,’” Le Bon said. “I took that home and put it together with all my wonderful feelings about being on tour in America. The song started off with a girl from Birmingham—but it became about the entire United States, from mountains in the north down to the Rio Grande.”

Listening to the song through the lens of international travel brings intriguing new insights. The tumbling rods at the beginning sound like a roaring airplane flying overhead, speeding toward an exciting destination. The chattering, noisy party atmosphere represents the buzzing possibility Duran Duran found while visiting America in fall 1981. And lyrics near the song’s end convey a hopeful note: Le Bon believes that connection and discovery are possible if he looks the part. Whether that bravado is earned—or simply a case of fake-it-’til-you-make-it—is incidental; what matters more is that assuming a confident façade can make good things happen.

It’s striking that Rio starts with a song capturing the excitement and ecstasy of being on tour in America and ends with “The Chauffeur,” a song Le Bon started several years earlier as a younger man, while he was also far away from home. Lyrically, the album feels sequenced like a look back, a flip through a cherished photo album filled with reminders of recent travels. And Rio’s sequencing is impeccable, which was no accident. “We were very particular about running orders,” Rhodes says, “It was really a vinyl experience we were making. You had side one and side two—and both of them needed to be equally dynamic. You have to use your tracks as an overall experience and a journey for the listener.” With the clinking sound effects, majestic percussion and Voltaire reference, “Last Chance on the Stairway” puts listeners in the shoes of someone out of their element in a fancy club; “New Religion” is a pause for inward reflection; the buoyant “My Own Way” exemplifies a giddy night out full of possibility; “Hungry Like the Wolf” captures the pulse-pounding feeling of magnetic attraction.

“People could really relate to the journey that [Simon] was taking them on,” says Roger Taylor. “They were very easily adapted into these travelogue videos that we were making. It was almost like he wrote the lyrics after he’d seen the videos. And when you were in grey, old England at that time, those lyrics transport you to a totally different place. And that’s what I loved about them. They weren’t everyday, ‘I love you’ lyrics. They just had this amazing travelogue feel about them.”

In Le Bon’s eyes, Rio’s gorgeous, atmospheric ballad, “Save a Prayer,” certainly fits this bill. “This song has taken us around the world,” he said in 2017. To John Taylor, the track is also transformative in a slightly different sense: “If I say so myself, it’s got to be one of the greatest one-night stand songs of all time. . . . The words to that song are extraordinary, because they elevate something that up to that point had been considered a little bit dirty—and made it almost spiritual.” He laughs.

In an interesting coincidence, two of Duran Duran’s biggest influences, Roxy Music and Japan, started winding down around Rio’s release. The former released their last album, Avalon, weeks after Duran Duran’s LP landed in stores. Avalon topped the British charts, but the album is a far cry from the rest of the band’s catalog: the LP is debonair and mannered, sandpapering over any lingering weird edges in favor of glacial ambience. Later in the year, Japan called it a day mere months after their biggest UK single, “Ghosts.” In hindsight, Rio feels like a passing of the torch, to a band fully ready to continue the creative work of their heroes.

“We all knew what we were doing,” Roger Taylor says. “We were very close to our influences. Simon knew exactly what he wanted to say. We were just on our game at that point. It felt like we couldn’t do any wrong, really. It just came very instinctively. We didn’t sit around cogitating and thinking how we’re going to make the perfect record. [That record] just came very much from the heart, and from our souls.”

For a band photograph to be used in the Rio album liners, Duran Duran chose to work with Andy Earl. The Sussex native had previously done a memorable early 1981 photo session with the band in Milton Keynes, at a new shopping center that felt “very glamorous” due to its décor, Earl says. “You look at it now and you say, ‘Cor blimey, it’s a cliché!’ But at the time, it was the nearest thing to high tech. We did a session in there literally the day before the shopping center opened. They took all of the wrappers off of the palm trees.” Earl and Duran Duran also took some night shots at “these very abstract looking boxes” the photographer thought looked rather sharp lit up at night. “It was the sewage works,” he says with a laugh. “Not the nicest of places; there was a definite smell there.”

Odor aside, in hindsight, it’s easy to see why the initial Earl session stuck with Duran Duran. These early photos have a certain playfulness that’s endearing. In one photo, Roger Taylor mugs for the camera like a fancy, successful businessman; in another, Andy Taylor hides in the mall’s fake plants. It’s no wonder Earl would later become known for multiple iconic album cover photographs, including for Johnny Cash’s American Recordings and Manic Street Preachers’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours: he had an uncanny ability to draw out unique facets of his subjects’ personalities.

At the time, Earl and Duran Duran were also on the same creative wavelength. “When the idea of Rio came up, the initial conversation was, ‘Yeah, we want to do a picture of the band, but maybe on a bridge looking over the river, with all of the colored lights on the water,’” Earl says. “I thought, ‘That would just look a bit sloppy.’” However, he had another idea: photographing Duran Duran on the roof of a building near dazzling lights. “The album is called Rio and everybody is going to associate it obviously with Rio de Janeiro, so I said, ‘Well, let’s try and give it that sort of vibe, that sort of energy.’”

England had few suitable tall buildings at the time, although the roof of the British Petroleum Building (now Citypoint) in London fit the bill. Although Earl planned to photograph the band using the backdrop of the 42-story NatWest Tower (now Tower 42), which was then the tallest building in the UK, his plans were thwarted: the NatWest Tower’s lights were on an automatic timer and turned off at 9:30 p.m.; he only had time for a solo photo shoot with Le Bon, which took place as the rest of Duran Duran were getting ready downstairs. In a stroke of bad luck, Earl discovered after doing test photos that the other band members’ makeup looked “too extreme” and needed fixing. The weather on the roof was also not ideal, he recalls: “It was freezing cold! Absolutely freezing cold. And you couldn’t go to Photoshop to get rid of red noses. It was very windy up there. But that sort of added to the fun of it all.”

Earl’s Rio photo shoot reflected his experimental bent. He used a technique adopted after studying in America, where he “was just bowled over by color,” in contrast to his usual home in “gray and miserable” Nottingham. “I ended up putting a flash gun on my camera and taking pictures. By doing that, it would reinforce the colors of the people you were shooting. It would just make everything stand out a bit more. It all looked a bit three-dimensional, because the flash would remove them from the background slightly.”

On top of the British Petroleum Building, he took a photo of the band using a flash gun, with a lit-up St. Paul’s Cathedral now directly visible above Roger Taylor’s head in the background. “I kept the exposure going for another 30 seconds in order to get all of the lights in the background to expose properly,” Earl says. “But if I’d just left the camera where it was focused on them, all the background would be blurry.” Instructing the band to stand still, he then focused the camera on the night skyline, which captured that element on film. Then Earl took one last step that elevated the snapshots to something singular. “Because their music was so electronic, I wanted to try to create that energy in the picture,” he explains. “Just before the end of the exposure, I kicked the tripod, and that’s what gives it this fizzy, electronic and glamorous look. Which, to me, captured what the music and they were all about.”

The resulting photo is polished and sophisticated; Le Bon wears a smart overcoat, while the rest of the band wear snappy, tailored suits in urbane colors. Their individual personalities also shine through: Rhodes looks down and away rather artfully, but others stare straight at the camera with looks ranging from bashful to self-assured.

Although the two major photo shoots Earl did with Duran Duran took place about a year apart, he noticed a marked difference in the band. “When they were starting out, they were trying to look cool—now, they were cool,” he says. “It’s a confidence thing.” Duran Duran were buoyed by the success of “Planet Earth” and their first LP, and also galvanized by Rio. This poise and enthusiasm in turn inspired Earl. “Working with bands who are brilliant musicians, who have got lots of ideas, it makes you sort of look at the world slightly differently and to reconsider things,” he says. “That’s what Duran had at the time. A lot of people might say, ‘Oh, they’re a commercial pop band.’ But I don’t think that’s what they set out to be. I think they wanted to be something much edgier than what they were.

“Duran had a peculiar, fresh, experimental, excited edge about them,” Earl adds. “They were like excitable kids in a way. But they were productive with it.”

No discussion of Rio would also be complete without mentioning the sleeve’s star: a Patrick Nagel painting of an impish, confident woman with windswept hair, striking makeup, and an air of mystery. (“The Mona Lisa of the album cover,” Rhodes says.) The cover is simple but possesses marked depth; it beckons listeners to spin the record and explore Rio.

The album cover was a departure from Duran Duran’s debut LP, which featured a band photograph. “We felt that all the album covers we liked were mostly done by artists, and we didn’t need to be on the cover of [Rio],” Rhodes says. “We can put a picture inside. Plenty of people see photographs. There’ll be videos.” While perusing Playboy, Duran Duran co-manager Paul Berrow came upon illustrations done by Nagel, a regular contributor to the magazine. The band members were intrigued, Rhodes says. “We all looked at them and said, ‘Wow. They’ve got a fantastic energy, and they look modern, and they’re sharp. Yeah, we like those.’”

Duran Duran commissioned Nagel to create original artwork. He presented two options: one was a woman posing sideways with a flower in her hair—and the other was “our smiling Rio girl,” as Rhodes puts it. “It was love at first sight. We all said instantly: ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the cover.’” The band sent the image to Malcolm Garrett, who recalls he had “no more than a week” for the Rio sleeve design.

“I’m a very contrary person and I couldn’t have [gone], ‘Okay, it’s fine, let’s put that on there and bang, we’re done,’” Garrett says. “I went, ‘No. No, I’m not doing that.’ One thing that I’ve done with all of my record sleeves is not treat them like art gallery walls. A record sleeve is a box; it’s a package. It doesn’t have a way up; it doesn’t really have a front or a back. In fact, the contents aren’t even physical; the contents are audio. I always had this attitude that the record sleeve had to have more to it. It should have a three-dimensional quality to it.”

Garrett hadn’t heard the song “Rio” at that point, and he was working within some existing artistic parameters: Nagel had included three parallelograms on the painting, ostensibly for the album title, and the color scheme was set. However, the designer had an idea. “In the same way that ‘Planet Earth’ made me think of airlines, Rio made me think of cigars and cigar packaging,” he says, “The whole idea of something Latin and something Cuban and South American.”

Given that the Nagel image was square—and the only way to crop it would be to create a border around it, which Garrett didn’t want to do—he decided to wrap the painting around the sleeve’s front and back. “But rather than wrap it from the front to the back of the sleeve around the spine, I thought I’d wrap it so that most of the picture is on the front, but a bit of it’s on the back. . . . Effectively, in order to get the record out, you have to take it out through the picture.”

The wheels kept turning. “I thought, ‘Okay, let’s extend this cigar analogy,’” Garrett says. “Cigars always had a little cigar band wrapped around them, to keep it together, so let’s have a little cigar band that seals the record.” On later releases, the decorative design was printed directly onto the album sleeve; however, early Rio pressings had an actual sticker sealing the LP closed, meaning fans would have to slice through the decal to reach the vinyl. Both versions of the cigar band, however, had “Assorted Images” incorporated into the design. “Because the sticker was, if you like, the manufacturer, it allowed me to put my design credit on it,” Garrett says with a laugh. “It’s the first and only time I think I managed to get my design credit on the front of the sleeve.”

And for the album title “Rio” on the front and back sleeve, Garrett also went retro with the word’s typeface, and drew on inspiration from cigar packaging of the 1950s. “Taken in isolation, that typeface [used] for [the album title] ‘Rio’ is very ‘50s,” he says. “From the Festival of Britain onwards, it’s a particular type of Egyptian slab serif typeface that was used an awful lot in the early ‘50s. But ‘Rio’ doesn’t look 1950s at all.”

Despite these classic touches, Rio feels bracingly modern and forward-looking. The combination of the Nagel image and Garrett’s design approach created something iconic. “I tend to combine two or three different components, drawn from different and disparate places, and put them together,” Garrett says. “I think that gives it freshness and individuality. And if something is fresh and individual, then it has that element of not necessarily being futuristic, but it has a timeless quality that allows it to look forward.”

Duran Duran were thrilled with the resulting cover. “We all looked at it and smiled back at the girl,” Rhodes says. “It just seemed to represent everything we wanted at that point. It was uplifting. It was fun. It was modern, and colorful, and bright, and optimistic, but with something in it that you just didn’t know what was going on. And that was us, really, at tha t time, I suppose.”

In hindsight, Rio’s promotional cycle was almost astoundingly brief. The album arrived in stores on May 10, 1982, and by spring and summer 1983, Duran Duran had already moved on to promoting a one-off single, “Is There Something I Should Know?” Months later, their third album, Seven & The Ragged Tiger, arrived in stores.

Over in England, Rio had a long chart reign: 110 weeks total, including a 96-week consecutive streak through March 1984. The album was an immediate commercial smash, debuting on the charts at No. 4 and peaking at No. 2 a week later, kept from the top spot only by Complete Madness, a greatest hits compilation from the pop group Madness. The single preceding Rio, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” had a more modest start, entering at No. 35 on the UK singles chart.

Still, the position was good enough to land Duran Duran a slot on Top of the Pops—and three days after Rio’s release, the band appeared on the show mime-performing “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Although the musicians had little room to move on the show’s tiny performance space, Simon Le Bon upped his effervescence to compensate. During the song’s bridge, he dropped to his knees and briefly crawled on the stage, a nod to the “Hungry Like the Wolf” video. At another point, Le Bon slung his arm around Andy Taylor’s shoulders, but kept looking straight at the camera as the guitarist whispered something and then cracked up. The lighthearted exchange resembled the “Starman” levels of jocularity displayed by David Bowie and his guitarist, Mick Ronson, on the 1972 Top of the Pops performance that wowed a young Rhodes.

By the end of May, “Hungry Like the Wolf” had reached the UK top 10 and would peak at No. 5. Follow-up singles “Save A Prayer” and “Rio” reached No. 2 and No. 9, respectively—and Duran Duran were officially an even bigger phenomenon than they were in 1981. This success wasn’t necessarily a surprise to Duran Duran’s publicist in the UK, Suzie Kaplan. “As soon as Rio hit, you could tell they were going to be a big, big band,” she says. “It just all started to happen.” In fact, fan excitement was her cue that things were exploding for Duran Duran. “Everywhere you went with the band, the fan reaction was so incredible,” she says, noting that people would gather at EMI’s then-headquarters in London’s Manchester Square in hopes one of the band members might visit. “They’d stand outside the building waving ‘I love you, John!’ signs.”

In Australia, another Duran Duran stronghold, good things were also happening. A special tour EP drummed up interest in Rio; the LP and “Hungry Like the Wolf” single both peaked within the top 10. In America, however, the album made a more modest splash upon its May arrival. A two-page Billboard advertising spread touting Capitol’s May 1982 releases featured Rio on the bottom left, directly next to Thomas Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless and below soul troupe The Dramatics’ New Dimension. A few weeks later, the magazine warmly reviewed Rio, favorably singling out the “catchy, melodic and accessible” album’s “bright and sassy pop” songs.

In the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart for the issue dated June 5, Rio officially debuted at No. 164, after bubbling under at No. 204 the week before. Over the next few weeks, the LP slowly moved up the charts before stalling out at No. 122 in July and then sliding down. Back then, the members of Duran Duran weren’t necessarily surprised at their initial American fortunes. When interviewed by the UK music publication Sounds in May 1982, John Taylor scoffed, “No way is that album going to take off in the States,” while Nick Rhodes immediately chimed in: “I’m waiting for the headline that says ‘Rio Speedwagon,’ it’s bound to happen.” Still, the band’s US label “was under a lot of pressure to break Duran Duran,” says John Taylor now. “[The band] was starting to break all over the world, but America was really slow.”

There were valid reasons the band might take longer to connect with US audiences, starting with geography and size. “In the UK, you have a top 10 single or top 3 single on Radio One, Top of the Pops—fully overnight, you’re superstars,” says Capitol Records’ Rupert Perry. “You’re on the front page of every magazine, pop magazine, newspaper, whatever it is. And then that crosses over very quickly into continental Europe. When it comes to America, it takes much longer, because it’s a much bigger place.”

Despite the growing presence of MTV, new bands still only had narrow promotional avenues available to them. “The only way you could break an album or a band was through radio—no other way,” says Capitol’s Doreen D’Agostino. This could be challenging: in 1982, the radio landscape was competitive, but bland, as Billboard noted that advertisers that year wanted to reach the 25- to 54-year-old age group, resulting in music that was “softer, more conservative or just plain older.” As the 1980s dawned, radio programmers were also generally skeptical of new and different sounds, with a few notable exceptions: Blondie had multiple No. 1s, while M’s “Pop Muzik” and Gary Numan’s “Cars” became quirky surprise hits in 1979 and 1980, respectively.

Radio consultant Lee Abrams chalks some of this wariness up to differences in perception. “The new wave movement was originally perceived as punk-driven, and the UK punk thing was completely out of sync with the mentality of American rockers,” he says. “Americans were into more uplifting lyrics, strong musicianship, large concerts, and pristine production. Punk was into anarchistic lyrics, low-grade musicianship, small clubs and raw sound.” Even The Police and U2, two bands that later became massive stars, had a slow start in the United States, he adds: “The fact that those bands, among others, were perceived by American radio as new wave, thus punk, hurt their initial impact.”

Several years later, programmers were still hesitant about certain songs and acts. Michael Rosenblatt, Sire Records’ A&R director, told Billboard in May 1982 that Soft Cell’s synth-pop confection “Tainted Love” was “a scary record for some people” at radio, precisely because it didn’t conform. “Programmers say it’s too electronic or too English, they’re afraid of alienating their listeners. All the records on the radio try to sound the same; this one does stand out.” Through a modern lens, this reaction to “Tainted Love” might seem a little odd; after all, contemporary pop culture and commercial radio formats revere synth-pop and 1980s music. Culture was evolving, however, albeit one song at a time: “Tainted Love” reached the top 10 of the US pop charts in July, the same week another English band, The Human League, was spending its second week at No. 1 with “Don’t You Want Me.”

But these English bands didn’t just sound different—they also looked quite different from their American counterparts. “The youth culture of the time and the second British Invasion provided necessary relief from the sometimes confining realities of maleness and masculinity found in more mainstream cultural production of the early 1980s,” writes scholar Brian M. Peters.¹ Duran Duran especially stood out: the band members swapped hair colors and styles as often as someone might change socks, wore fashionable clothes, and always had impeccable makeup. Their take on masculinity was decidedly modern and tinged with glamour, the embodiment of what Peters calls the era’s “alternative images of maleness away from the confines of a more mainstream heteronormativity.” Remarks Rupert Perry, “If you go back to the look of Duran Duran—with makeup, very loud, colorful clothes—you can imagine in certain parts of the U.S.A., that wasn’t particularly embraced, because it would be like, ‘Who are these are effeminate-looking guys from England?’”

Duran Duran did have dedicated, enthusiastic supporters within the halls of Capitol Records, including Harvest A&R executive Bruce Ravid, who was “floored” by how much the band had evolved on Rio. “This band didn’t move up on the ladder one notch,” he says. “They moved up four or five notches.” But Duran Duran faced a few significant challenges on the label side as Rio launched. Capitol Records’ promotional sweet spot remained for straightforward rock acts such as Bob Seger—and certain label employees continued to have a rather retrograde attitude about Duran Duran. “We had a couple of key executives—you could check every box on the bigoted scale,” Ravid says. “So the fact that [Duran Duran] were wearing makeup? … The look of the band was a turnoff to a couple of our key people, and they would say it very openly, slurs and whatnot.”

Andy Taylor also recalls encountering this vibe from certain corners of the label when Duran Duran visited, although it’s clear he didn’t suffer any fools gladly. “Nobody could give a shit about, you know, the guy with a big cigar,” he says, and laughs. “It was quite funny because that’s what they were like at Capitol Records when we first [arrived].”

And so on paper, Duran Duran had quite an uphill battle to reach American success. In fact, Rio’s impact had a long tail partly because the band’s US career trajectory was so nonlinear. Rio’s success retroactively made the band’s 1981 debut album a hit in America two years after the LP’s initial release. And while “Save a Prayer” was a 1982 hit in the UK and the song’s video aired on MTV in spring 1983, the ballad didn’t chart as a single in the United States until 1985, as part of the (mostly) live album Arena. When the dust cleared, Rio spent a total of 129 weeks on the US Billboard album charts.

But Duran Duran’s eventual triumph was the result of a perfect storm, an aligning of the stars, solving a complicated calculus equation. “The timing was just so aligned, it was ridiculous,” says Roger Taylor. “And I think if we’d come along at any other time, it may not have happened like this. The timing was just so perfect.”

Looking back, Duran Duran breaking big in America happened due to many factors falling into place at once: the band’s work ethic leading to Rio’s strong songs and a head-turning live show; support from dance clubs and the rise of MTV; cinematic videos; savvy remixes and reissues; radio warming to new music; management tenacity; and ideal creative collaborators. Had one of these things not happened at exactly the moment it did, you might not be reading this book today.

Notes

1 Peters, Brian M. “Androgyny, masculinities and the re-gendered aesthetics of the new wave: Duran Duran and the second British invasion.” Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, vol. 1, no. 3, 2016, p. 297+. Gale Academic OneFile, . Accessed 13 Oct. 2020.

4

Duran Duran, Video Pioneers

Duran Duran’s video strategy was meticulously planned in advance, not just for Rio, but starting with album number one. When the band looked to shoot a clip for their 1981 debut single “Planet Earth,” they chose Russell Mulcahy, who had directed well-regarded music videos for Ultravox, The Human League, and The Buggles. “He had the surreal fluidity that we wanted,” says Paul Berrow. “Simon’s lyrics are a little obscure at times; there’s a slightly surreal quality to it. And Russell was the right man.” Mulcahy met Duran Duran for the first time at the “Planet Earth” shoot in London, and the band made a good first impression. “It’s 7 a.m. and this bus turns up—they’d driven down [from Birmingham],” the director says. “They all came off the bus and there they are in all of their New Romantic gear, hair all up and ready to go.” Mulcahy says he and the band “just clicked” on multiple levels—personality, sense of humor, creativity, “ideas and visuals. They’re very adventurous with visuals, and so was I. We saw certain things the same.”

The visually oriented Duran Duran were also in good company on EMI, as the company’s roster of bands were known for taking creative risks with music videos. In fall 1975, one of EMI’s marquee acts, the rock band Queen, filmed a clip for the six-minute opus “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Due to a tour, the group couldn’t make the rounds of TV shows to promote the song, which was then enjoying a nine-week run atop the UK singles charts, but they could now send a video for broadcast in their place.

“At the time, it was entirely revolutionary to have a video that long on, say, Top of the Pops—or anywhere,” says Geoff Kempin, who was managing director of EMI’s music video production arm, Picture Music International, between 1980 and 1987. “It really helped to establish video as being an essential part of the marketing plan for an artist, and a sign that the record company was giving a major commitment to the artist in spending the money on those videos, quite frankly.”

Yet “Bohemian Rhapsody” was no rote performance video. Queen used dramatic lighting and special effects to illustrate certain lyrical or vocal flourishes—for example, Freddie Mercury appeared in silhouette, and digital effects mirrored the song’s harmonies cascading downward—and the clip was edited quite skillfully. “Duran Duran definitely caught the wave, and actually helped propel the wave, of the whole music video revolution,” Kempin says. “But they were coming behind Queen.”

Other EMI acts prior to Duran Duran also followed in these forward-thinking footsteps. In the late 1970s, Kate Bush released multiple innovative videos, including two clips alone for her chart-topping “Wuthering Heights” that featured graceful, theatrical dancing. As with “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Bush’s clips could also be serviced to TV shows such as Top of the Pops. However, her videos also had important global ramifications: she was afraid of flying and preferred not to tour after 1979, so her clips could be sent over to the United States and other territories in lieu of in-person promotional appearances or concerts.

In his role at Picture Music International, Kempin was tasked with commissioning these kinds of groundbreaking music videos—a process that involved all sorts of financial juggling. “The record company would agree to spend so much money on a three-minute or four-minute video clip authorized by the label whose marketing budget it was,” he says. “But I had to make it fit between the production company making the video and the budget that the label was prepared to pay.” He laughs. “Being the guy that was the go-between a record company and the artist and the video production companies was like a three-way dance.”

In advance of Rio, EMI directed him to put together a budget to film videos for multiple songs on the LP. “All the tracks off that Rio album had substantial budgets attached to them,” Kempin says. “They were little mini-films, each one in its own right.” All of this was highly unusual at the time: record companies might shoot videos for three songs—but lensing clips for more than that was unorthodox, in no small part because of the costs associated with filming. All told, six of Rio’s nine songs ended up having videos, if you count a Russell Mulcahy–directed clip for the band’s disavowed 1981 version of “My Own Way.” An April 1982 Sri Lanka trip produced clips for “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Save a Prayer,” and “Lonely in Your Nightmare,” while an Antigua visit weeks later led to “Rio,” and a separate London shoot without the band yielded “The Chauffeur.” (The radio trade magazine FMQB reported a video shoot for “Hold Back the Rain” was due to happen in New York City around the band’s summer 1982 tour, but Rhodes says he doesn’t recall any discussion or plans for that.)

Reports vary wildly of just how much the Duran Duran Rio-era videos cost, particularly the portion in Sri Lanka. Published in 1984, The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video says that the shoot’s price tag was “then an unprecedented sum for rock videos”: US$200,000. In contrast, Andy Taylor writes in his 2008 memoir that the Sri Lanka trip cost around £55,000 (or close to what was then US$100,000). A 1984 band biography penned by future best-selling author Neil Gaiman is in the same ballpark, noting that the band had an advance of £50,000 to finance the Sri Lanka trip. John Taylor, meanwhile, noted in his 2012 memoir that the shoot’s budget was a mere £30,000, or closer to $54,000.

Rhodes’ modern estimate also hews toward the conservative side. “We really didn’t have a very big budget at all,” he says. “I think people think those things cost a fortune. They absolutely didn’t. For the three videos, it was probably less than, you know, a good American diva’s makeup budget for one video.” He laughs. “They were done on a shoestring and pulling as many favors as we possibly could.”

However, when all was said and done, Peter Buckleigh—who was working as director of marketing and promotions at EMI Records UK—recalls that the EMI UK budget for the overall Duran Duran Rio video project represented “the largest spend ever by far on a relatively new artist.” The label’s initial budget commitments and projections went by the wayside as “the ideas and creativity rapidly ballooned,” Buckleigh says; in fact, he eventually didn’t have enough in his own budget to cover the proposed video treatments and shoots. But because of global enthusiasm brewing for Duran Duran—Rio had already secured a release in other territories—the UK company’s international marketing arm kicked in extra money to cover the shortfall. “It was kind of a combined company effort, which was a little bit rare at that time,” Buckleigh explains. “Normally, international would wait to see what happened in the UK before starting to wind up the rest of the world. But with this one, we all did it together, as it were.”

Part of this all-hands-on-deck support for Duran Duran was pragmatic. EMI and others strongly believed in the band and wanted to have videos ready in advance for when Rio landed in stores. “I mean, we thought, ‘We’re probably going to need a clip for every track anyway because it’s such a strong album,’” Kempin recalls. Plus, EMI already had big plans to produce a full-length Duran Duran video album, a cutting-edge medium that had few antecedents at the time.

In 1979, Chrysalis Records reportedly paid over $100,000 (more than $380,000 today) so Blondie could film videos for every song on their LP, Eat To The Beat. Monkees member Michael Nesmith was another early adopter: he produced the album-length 1981 video Elephant Parts, which ended up taking home the first-ever Video of the Year Grammy Award.¹ San Francisco art-rockers The Tubes also released a long form video, The Completion Backward Principle, that same year, while both The Kinks (One for the Road) and Gary Numan (Micromusic) issued live concert films.

Duran Duran’s video album, however, was part of a broader, elaborate EMI strategy. In 1979, an electronics company named Thorn had bought EMI. Thorn, in turn, had a stake in video rental stores and also sold a VHS machine under the Ferguson brand name. “[Thorn] thought they could sell a lot more video cassette machines if they had some software to put on those machines,” says Kempin, who was put in charge of compiling commercial video collections on the music side.

“It became putting together, from a major music company’s point of view, the first big release schedule of music home video. Whether it be Kate Bush, Queen, Iron Maiden, or Duran Duran, it was EMI’s initiative to have these great artists release their music in visual format on VHS, Betamax and then on LaserDisc.”

The members of Duran Duran were quite excited about the possibilities of the video album; Rhodes and Roger Taylor even discussed their plans for it with the Associated Press in late summer 1982. Simon Le Bon had even bigger visions for video in an earlier Smash Hits interview, saying he sees the medium as an “art form” that reminds him of film industry innovations (“Videos are the ‘talking pictures’ of today’s music industry”) and the advent of stereo: “Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was the first real stereo record. I want a visual Dark Side of the Moon.” Although the UK by this time already had a robust music video culture, Duran Duran’s lofty visual ambitions were still impressive—and proved crucial to Rio’s rollout.

But Buckleigh says that the 24-hour music video cable channel MTV, which had launched in America on August 1, 1981, was also a factor in EMI’s generous video budget support. “MTV was snaking through America—it kind of spread like tentacles, as they opened up various ways of broadcasting it on cable as states and cities were wired up,” he says. “And everywhere that a Duran Duran video played in a new territory, sales of the records happened. Americans were telling us, you know, ‘This is a whole new way of promoting records; it’s no longer contemporary pop radio and university radio.’”

Unlike artists from the UK such as Duran Duran, American acts were still warming to music video as a promotional tool. Along with Blondie, cutting-edge bands such as Talking Heads and Devo embraced the medium’s artistic merits; the latter group even won first prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival for a music video, In The Beginning Was The End: The Truth About De-Evolution, that included the songs “Secret Agent Man” and “Jocko Homo.”² However, other artists were skeptical of, disdainful toward, or indifferent to videos. “The only reason you needed a video in America was if you had a hit song in, let’s say, England,” says Gale Sparrow, who was MTV’s director of talent and artist relations early on. “If you didn’t have a video for Top of the Pops [to air], then you were not in the Top of the Pops. Or if all of the sudden you became really great over in Europe, you needed to have a video, because you couldn’t tour all of the places.”

At the start of the 1980s, music videos were making inroads in America. Forward-thinking visionaries such as rock ‘n’ roll chameleon Todd Rundgren were exploring the nascent intersection of music videos and television. Michael Nesmith was also an enthusiastic innovator in this area, hosting a music video show called PopClips. Other shows started popping up: the USA Network’s Night Flight premiered months before MTV, while the cable movie channel HBO, which was already using music videos as interstitial time-filler, launched Video Jukebox in late 1981.

MTV had an air of novelty due to its cutting-edge traits—for example, viewers could listen to the channel in stereo if they had the right equipment—and unique 24-hour format. Early on, the channel’s programming approach involved curating a mix of videos from established heritage acts and promising upstarts. The playlist on MTV’s first day resembled a slightly left-of-center rock radio station, with its heavy emphasis on arena rock staples (Styx, The Who, REO Speedwagon) and new wave-oriented acts (The Pretenders, The Cars, Ultravox, Talking Heads), interspersed with a few offbeat curveballs, including Blotto’s “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard” and The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese.”

But because the channel had so man y hours to fill, their video search was global. “What MTV found was that there weren’t a lot of American companies that had footage or videos immediately available,” says Capitol Records’ Rupert Perry. “But if you went to London, you could find all sorts of stuff.” As a result, UK artists also became a core part of MTV’s offerings: on the August 1 launch day, audiences saw videos from two-tone ska bands The Specials and The Selecter, pop Svengali Kate Bush, and power-pop icons Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello. British heavy metal band Iron Maiden was another favorite—the channel aired the group’s “Wrathchild” clip four times alone in the first 24 hours—while quirky New Zealand rock superstars Split Enz had four separate video clips appear on day one.

During the tail-end of 1981 and even well into 1982, MTV’s rollout was slow and incremental: not every city had access—in fact, MTV’s distribution was concentrated largely outside of major TV markets—and by the end of its first month of existence, the channel was reportedly on 252 cable systems, a reach of roughly 2.5 million households. Still, area record stores in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the earliest markets wired for MTV, felt the channel’s impact almost immediately.

An October 10, 1981, Billboard article fleshed out the specifics. The manager of a Tulsa Peaches Records shared that his store sold fifteen copies of a Buggles LP that had been gathering dust for eight months, all because MTV was spinning the band’s clip for “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Other local record stores reported the channel caused greater demand for albums by Iron Maiden, as well as The Tubes, UK rock band Squeeze, and Illinois power-pop icons Shoes. Commercial juggernaut REO Speedwagon even saw benefits after one of their concerts aired during MTV’s second weekend. “I noticed a surge in the catalog,” Record Town manager Tom McMillian told Billboard. “We are considering putting a monitor in-store and [featuring] MTV at certain times.”

Despite these positive signs, the American music industry was still slow to embrace music videos and MTV. Part of that was a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind, as the channel wasn’t yet available on cable systems in the two major music industry hubs, New York City or Los Angeles. Many record labels also weren’t thrilled about the idea of giving videos to MTV without compensation. Plus, US radio still played a dominant role in breaking and promoting bands.

“We weren’t getting great cooperation from many of the US labels, because they saw no reason for us to exist,” says John Sykes, MTV’s director of promotion and artist relations at the time. “They were doing just fine with the current radio structure in America. They just really didn’t see a reason for video. They thought a band should be heard and not seen.”

For American bands as well, adjusting to music video required a rather significant mindset shift. “Everybody at that point was all used to touring and playing live—not being seen on television,” says Alan Hunter, one of MTV’s original VJs. “So they just didn’t have to exercise that part of them. Young Brits, as they came over, were into that sense of display and knew how to work the camera.” As a result, American bands—or acts with “more of an American sensibility” toward videos, such as Rod Stewart—tended to take a more literal approach to their clips, he says. “You know, ‘I’m standing in the rain, smoking a cigarette, thinking about my honey at a lamppost’—and we saw it on screen. Nothing more conceptual than that.” Hunter saw more visual ambition in bands such as Duran Duran: “The music of the young New Wave romantics lent itself better to a more ephemeral interpretation, or a little looser interpretation.”

Unsurprisingly, Sykes observed that the music videos being produced in England “looked like television commercials—highly styled television commercials, because [English bands] understood the platform,” he says. “And that’s why when Duran Duran came over, they basically paved the way for other artists, because they really set a tone and painted a picture that no one had ever seen before in this country.”

Smartly, Duran Duran and MTV established a strong relationship well before Rio. Capitol Records’ Doreen D’Agostino saw music video’s potential right away: not only did she make sure EMI’s international arm sent MTV the “Planet Earth” video, but she also connected Duran Duran and the Berrow brothers with the channel. (In fact, Paul Berrow recalls meeting with MTV executives when they were still working in hotel suites, not offices.) Sykes, meanwhile, vividly recalls the weekly acquisition meeting when the “Girls on Film” video landed in the submission queue.

“[I] said, ‘This is going to change the game,’” he says. “Because it basically took a good song and made it great. You know, a good video can’t take a bad song and make it good. But a good video can take a good song and make it great. And so what happened was, [the video] took the song ‘Girls On Film’ and turned it into a visual masterpiece.”

But the “Girls on Film” clip, which was already making waves in clubs due to its risqué nature, wasn’t quite ready for MTV airplay just yet. “Our audience was younger than we thought it would be,” says Sparrow. “We had a younger audience—and we had an older audience. You had to be a little bit cautious of that. They submitted the edited version—and they had to edit, if I remember correctly, a little bit more before we could play it.” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, D’Agostino recalls that certain MTV markets even had issues with this edited version.)

But MTV spins of “Girls on Film” boosted Duran Duran—and the band’s US label, which inexplicably discovered that the Duran Duran LP was selling in one early market wired for the channel despite garnering no radio airplay. “We found out the next week, ‘You know, there’s a new channel called MTV and the cable here is only in one section of the city, like the north side,’” says Capitol Records’ Bruce Garfield. “‘And that’s where the records are selling. They’re not selling in any other areas of the city.’ We started to put two and two together to realize that the visual was selling the band.” Over in the UK, this success was music to Dave Ambrose’s ears. “I’ll never forget—Bruce Garfield rang me up from New York, saying, ‘Hey—your band’s happening,’” the EMI A&R rep says with a laugh. “It’s on MTV.”³

At this early stage, MTV was eager to work with cooperative, for ward-thinking partners such as Duran Duran and their management team. “We were very open to it at that time, because there were very few record companies that were even giving us videos, and very few thought that we would ever last,” Sparrow says. “So we embraced what we called the visionaries, the ones that got our visions, believed in the power of the video. Because if they succeeded, we succeeded.”

This symbiotic relationship between Duran Duran and MTV would become much, much stronger in the coming years. “MTV really embraced us, and we embraced MTV,” says Nick Rhodes. “We knew that this was a great thing for us, and they needed us, because we had ideas, we had songs that were starting to become more popular, and we were making cutting-edge videos.”

“Hungry Like the Wolf” / “Save a Prayer”

In April 1982, Duran Duran traveled to Sri Lanka to film videos for “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Save a Prayer,” and “Lonely in Your Nightmare” before embarking on their first Australian tour. One of the more infamous tales of Duran Duran lore involves Nick Rhodes’ arrival in the island country after his marathon London Rio mixing session. The musician was exhausted from the long flight and a lack of sleep but assumed his hotel would be about twenty minutes away from the airport.

The reality was far different: He faced an hours-long ride in a decidedly non-air-conditioned vehicle. “He’s sitting there in a flatbed truck in his leather trousers with makeup on, in this boiling-hot country,” laughs Roger Taylor. “It took some adapting to.” Rhodes recalls facing some scary moments during the drive (“We went down some tracks and roads where you thought you were going to fall off the edge of a cliff”) but arrived safely to find the rest of Duran Duran hard at work filming on the beach. “I was so tired—I said, ‘Look, I have to try to sleep for maybe one or two hours,’” he says. “But as I’m walking up towards the hotel from the beach, an elephant walked past me. At this point, I really was so tired, and so disorientated, that I wondered whether I was hallucinating. But clearly, I wasn’t, and the elephant was very friendly and swinging its trunk about, and I went and lay down and slept for a couple of hours, and then went out and joined the afternoon’s video shoot.”

That Duran Duran were filming such adventurous music videos in 1982 was unique. “One of [Duran Duran’s] cultural contributions probably was the beginnings of the really amazing Cecil B. DeMille-type videos,” says EMI’s Dave Ambrose. “I mean, some of them were astounding in terms of settings.” The beautiful Sri Lankan locale—and ambitious video concepts—reflected the cinematic aspirations of Duran Duran’s managers, Michael and Paul Berrow; in fact, the latter thought Sri Lanka “would be a great, unusual environment [for filming], seeing as we’re going to fly over the top of [the country] on our way to Australia anyway.” The shoot also provided an outlet for many talented and ambitious British creatives, since “there was no real film industry in the UK at that time,” says Roger Taylor. “You had this tremendous pool of talent in London that were just full of these cinematic ideas, that somehow made it onto the shoot, that made the most amazing mini-movies. We just had to show up, really, and prance around.”

For these videos, Duran Duran once again worked with “Planet Earth” video director Russell Mulcahy, who traveled to Sri Lanka in advance to scout locations along with the Berrows and one of his regular collaborators, producer Eric Fellner. (The latter would go on to have a long, well-regarded career in Hollywood, including as an executive producer of films such as The Big Lebowski and Four Weddings and a Funeral.⁴ ) The group hopped in a minivan and “traveled around the island writing the concept for all three videos,” Mulcahy says. “We went from Colombo down to Galle and up through the inlands through the Tea Country, up to Kandy in the center. As we’d drive around, we’re saying, ‘Okay, yeah, we can do a bit of ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ here, a bit of ‘Save A Prayer’ also here.’” Mulcahy and his crew mapped out a tight schedule that left little room for error. “There were no days off—it was just film, film, film here; move on, film a little bit of that, move on. . . . It was a road trip movie, actually, with stops on the way.”

This packed schedule also didn’t build in time for unexpected potential sartorial disasters. For example, the night before starting the “Hungry Like the Wolf” shoot in Galle, Simon Le Bon had a hair dye mishap. “He wanted some streaks put in his hair or something,” Mulcahy recalls. “And the next morning, we get up to go into town and start filming, I hear, ‘Oh my God!’ And the dye has gone completely wrong and his hair was completely yellow. And it was like, ‘Holy shit!’” Thankfully, Mulcahy just so happened to be wearing “a bit like an Indiana Jones-type hat” and saved the day. “I go [to Simon], ‘Stick this on, and we’re going into the market to start filming.’ The opening scene where he goes to the market and he’s wearing that hat—if you look very carefully, you can see the yellow hair sticking out.” (Le Bon was able to re-dye his hair shortly thereafter, and all was well.)

That ability to be nimble was a Mulcahy hallmark; it allowed him to improvise if the best-laid plans went awry. But he also possessed the foresight to see the visual brilliance in unexpected places and situations. Geoff Kempin, for example, was in Sri Lanka for the “Save a Prayer” shoot and vividly recalls Mulcahy telling everyone to meet on the set in a jungle at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. “Which is a bit of a stretch considering what had been going on the night before at the hotel,” he laughs. “But they were all great, the band; they were all there waiting for instructions.”

The director envisioned a scene where the song “Save a Prayer” was aligned with a scene of monks walking on stepping stones in a river. “It was one of the most amazing moments of the whole Duran Duran video album experience—to be in that jungle, to hear ‘Save a Prayer’ playing back, and seeing the monks walk across the river,” Kempin says. “It goes to show what can happen sometimes w hen you combine great audio with great visual images—it’s definitely a one-plus-one-equals-three moment.”

The “Save a Prayer” video overall is evocative. Mulcahy highlighted Sri Lankan scenery—children playing on the beach, fishermen, brilliant sunsets—and immersed the members of Duran Duran in these scenes; for example, Le Bon walks along the ocean and picks up a child, and slow dances with a woman at another point. “The island was very spiritual,” Mulcahy says. “So we just wanted the video to be very ethereal, very spiritual, in a way. I mean, it’s sort of a love song to the island.” Adds Rhodes: “A lot of people did not know how beautiful Sri Lanka was. We used the scenery and the beauty that they had there pretty extensively in the videos, when you see the monuments and the mountains and the jungle and the bridges and the town and the, you know, serenity of the actual place. And we were there at a very fortunate time, when it was peaceful.”

Duran Duran were in good hands with Mulcahy, who sized up each band member’s cinematic strengths as he went along. “Simon is very much an adventurer and a bit of a movie star,” he says with a laugh, although with other band members, “there’s a comfort zone, and you don’t want them to be out of their comfort zone.” This dynamic made Le Bon the perfect star for “Hungry Like the Wolf”: The action-packed clip puts him at the center of his own thriller movie—among other things, he runs through a crowded café and marketplace and swims in a river—in pursuit of a beautiful woman played by Sheila Ming Burgess, a Bermuda native who was an internationally renowned model in Europe during the 1970s. (“Shooting the video was a dream,” she said in 2013.) The members of Duran Duran, in turn, are spending the video looking for their missing band mate—a nice twist on the pursuit theme.

Still, Rhodes was happy to go along with Mulcahy’s directions. “Russell was really good at sort of doing things on the spur of the moment, and just say, ‘Right, let’s get a helicopter. We’re going to drop you and Simon out of this helicopter onto the top of that great, big mountain over there, okay?’ And we’d say, ‘Yeah, sure, okay.’ ‘Okay, so we’re going to get on these elephants, and we’re going to ride around on these elephants—two of you on that one, two of you on that one. Roger, you have to get on that one on your own.’ And we were sort of having so much fun as a band, and being together, and exploring the world, that we were pretty much fine to go along with these things, because we knew that we were creating something that nobody had seen before.”

The helicopter incident to which Rhodes refers was a scene in “Save a Prayer” filmed at Sigiriya, a one-time Buddhist monastery that dates to prehistoric times. “We had to hover the helicopter four feet off—we weren’t allowed to land it—because it’s a sacred site,” Mulcahy says. “They had to jump four feet from the helicopter. Then we’d take off, we’d film then we’d have to hover again, and they’d have to scramble back on.” As they were flying back to Colombo, the helicopter engine started failing—and the crew were forced to make an emergency landing on a cricket field with an active game going on, sending the players scattering.

All three Taylors also had incidents involving elephants. John was “soaked” by one, Simon Le Bon told The Guardian in 2015: “It was the elephant’s party trick.” The vocalist also shared that Roger was caught in the crosshairs of animal magnetism during another elephant ride. “One of the guys who look after them brought this female elephant into the clearing. And it did a little girly trumpet, and the male elephant Roger was sitting on went charging off to climb on the female, with Roger still on it.” On a more serious note, Andy fell off a tree branch into a lagoon—a body of water that just so happened to double as a bathroom for the elephants—and contracted a “nonspecific tropical virus” from “ingesting mouthfuls of the dirty black liquid” in the watering hole, he wrote in his memoir. The virus lingered, and he was hospitalized weeks later for several days.

On a lighter note, Mulcahy cheerfully remembers every member of Duran Duran cursing him out while filming a scene at the end of “Save a Prayer,” when they’re all walking solemnly toward a temple. “They didn’t have shoes on, and it’s a rock surface and it’s summer in Sri Lanka,” he says. “And all I could hear from the boys was, ‘Russell, I am going to kill you!’ When you watch this beautiful image, there’s a lot of screaming going on in that shot, because the boys are getting blisters on their feet.” Photographer Andy Earl—who was in Sri Lanka to document the band and the experience—also ended up as an extra in a “Hungry Like the Wolf” scene. “There are two nuns in the café, who are both models that have come up from England,” he says. “And one of the nuns, unfortunately, got food poisoning. And they said, ‘We’ve got to have two nuns. What can we do?’ So I’m the second nun.”

And as the Sri Lanka shoot was wrapping up, Duran Duran were running late and needed to get to the airport, but Mulcahy had to get one last shot of everyone in the same café. He filmed the scene—and right after saying cut, the band ran out to waiting cars and raced to catch their flight, still wearing the same outfits. “To get done what we managed to get done in those few days we were there was pretty remarkable, but we didn’t stop,” Rhodes says. “We were on little planes, and on helicopters, and on boats, and on the river, and with elephants, and in the jungle, and it moved so quickly. But because the scenery was so breathtaking, and Russell had such great vision for what was going to work with those songs, it was really the birth of the travelogue videos.”

It’s clear that everyone involved in the Duran Duran Sri Lanka shoot approached the filming with good intentions and deep respect. That said, in current times, certain aspects of the trip and the resulting music videos wouldn’t necessarily be perceived the way they were back in 1982. Contemporary pop culture especially has a more evolved understanding of colonialism⁵ and exoticism.⁶ Today, artists who choose to film music videos in faraway countries relative to Europe or the United States, especially white artists who are an ethnic minority in these countries, are often criticized. Even back then, in fact, the “Hungry Like the Wolf” clip received both praise and critique: al though The Tampa Tribune in 1982 described the video as “lushly produced,” a 1983 Austin-American Statesman column deemed it “racist and sexist.”

“The Chauffeur”

One of the most alluring Duran Duran videos is “The Chauffeur,” which appeared on the band’s 1983 video album. Shot on 35-mm black-and-white film, the clip is a gorgeous mini-movie that explores rich themes: seductive tension, gender fluidity, romantic passion, and erotic intrigue. “The Chauffeur” video was directed by Birmingham native Ian Emes, who was (and is) one of England’s most forward-thinking animators and filmmakers. In the 1970s, Emes rose to prominence creating eye-popping visuals for Pink Floyd—he animated the famous tumbling clocks video paired with Dark Side of the Moon’s “Time”—as well as Mike Oldfield and Paul and Linda McCartney. A film he shot for the latter, The Oriental Nightfish, received a Short Film Palme d’Or nomination at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.

Emes didn’t know Duran Duran personally, although he also frequented the Rum Runner and liked the band’s music. But he had previously worked with Russell Mulcahy on a few commercials and came to mind when Mulcahy needed someone to direct a clip for the Duran Duran video album. “[Russell] called me up and said, ‘I’m doing this compilation. We need erotic films,’” Emes says. “Okay, so I mean, I’d never made anything erotic before in my life.”

However, business was booming at his animation studio, and he wanted to start doing more short films and live-action films. Plus, “The Chauffeur” video was originally going to be “fully animated,” Emes says, making him doubly perfect for the gig. “The technique that I used in those days was to film everything in live action first. Very often, I sampled live action and I would mold it and rotoscope it and do stuff that didn’t really look like anything anyone else was doing.” In fact, Emes envisioned doing something “Tron-like” for “The Chauffeur,” first shooting a live-action film and then applying a “tinted color, black-and-white animated” effect to the footage.

Duran Duran and Mulcahy were elsewhere working on other things, so Emes had total free rein to come up with his “The Chauffeur” concept and script, and just needed to get approval before starting the shoot. “Creative freedom and trust, which is what they gave me—that’s the most important thing you can give to any artist,” he says. His imagination was energized. “So I write this script and I’m thinking, ‘This is an excuse to do something which I wouldn’t normally do.’ And the music was great, so I’m very happy.” Emes suspected his interpretation of the “erotic” directive was slightly different from what Mulcahy wanted, however. “I think his idea of erotic was a bit more Australian. It was a bit more like girls in bras and knickers—mud wrestling. That was his idea of erotic,” he says with a laugh. “My idea of erotic was more based in film noir.”

Still, his script received a green light. The concept centered on two lingerie-clad women (described by Emes as “clone woman one and clone woman two—they’re obviously some kind of robots”) planning a rendezvous. “They’re communicating telepathically across London while going to meet each other, but the chauffeur is kind of watching and taking all of this in,” he explains. “And it turns out that the chauffeur, at the very end of the sequence, takes off his hat and becomes a woman.”

Knowing the plot in advance takes nothing away from the impact of “The Chauffeur” video. It’s a detail-oriented, stunning piece of cinematic art that reflects the approach of Helmut Newton, as well as Emes’ love for Godard’s Alphaville. The languid pacing and mirrored moves—for example, both women caress one of their thighs seductively, even though they’re in separate locations—only heightens the anticipation of the encounter. As the video ends, the simmering lust and tension between the women spill over into a celebration of physical freedom and malleable gender expression. “It’s really about love,” Emes says, “and it’s about sensuality.”

Incredibly enough given the caliber of talent involved, Emes says the video’s casting process was “very improvised.” The cinematographer was the late British film industry legend Gilbert Taylor, whose lengthy résumé included Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, A Hard Day’s Night, and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.⁷ Taylor shot “The Chauffeur” using a film stock called Ilford, which gives the film its depth. Perri Lister, meanwhile—a Blitz Kid and member of the TV dance troupe Hot Gossip—portrayed the transforming chauffeur. “I had no idea she was that famous and I remember asking her to just make up a dance of her own, which has to do with releasing her physicality through herself into the open,” Emes says. “And I thought she came up with a fantastic routine.”

The video shoot itself took place over four “quite long days” in London around the road known as Westway, near Shepherd’s Bush, and at a few other locations, such as a hotel and a car park. The latter brought other inspirations into the video. “[It’s] very Germanic,” Emes says. “I mean, I’m also very into German expressionism. That’s what kicked me off into film is Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, all of those expressionistic films.”

Emes was pleased by how the combination of the music and visuals turned out. “It’s a beautiful song. And the other thing that I was so happy about—I’m very into, if you like, flying through urban spaces. It’s part of my film style. I love car journeys through cities. Any sequence in a film that involves skyscrapers and flyovers. And it felt very fluid, very flowing and very spatial. It was an erotic piece of music, actually.”

After Emes edited “The Chauffeur” film, a group that included Mulcahy and Nick Rhodes had a viewing. “Russell said, ‘Don’t touch it. It’s beautiful. We don’t want to animate it. Deliver it like that,’” Emes says. “So they had this oddball film that didn’t really fit into the rest of the program. But then being the ‘80s—people were very free, creatively, and acceptin g—they included it. It’s gone on to have its own cult status, in a way. You know, it’s stood up as an independent piece.”

Duran Duran still projects the video behind them when they perform “The Chauffeur” in concert—and Simon Le Bon wears a chauffeur hat each and every time, a 3-D nod to the video unfolding behind him. Although Emes says he’s not sure what the frontman thinks of the video, he has nothing but high praise for Le Bon’s contributions to Rio. “They were damn good lyrics,” he says. “Each song had its own strong concept. So [Rio] was like a concept album, in a way. But rather than being one idea, like Dark Side of the Moon, it was several ideas. But nonetheless, it was very much ideas within a dialogue. The subject matter in each story . . . They were ideas—and they were surreal, conceptual ideas.”

“Rio”

The “Rio” clip was the most exuberant Duran Duran clip to date. Sporting colorful Antony Price suits, the band sail on a yacht, hobnob with beautiful women, and indulge in playful oceanic activities. At one point, Le Bon perches on the bow of the yacht, his hair billowing in the wind as the boat speeds along, the leader of a pack of handsome, carefree young men heading toward a bright future. This particular shot became one of the most indelible images of the 1980s.

“This [video] is where I started to get this idea that directing music videos in those days was a bit like being a tourist, but just with a bigger camera,” says Russell Mulcahy, who directed the clip. “Because I started getting along with Duran and also Icehouse and other people and started going to strange and wonderful places.” Although there had been talk of filming “Rio” indoors in London, that idea was nixed for a more tropical location: Antigua. Luckily, four-fifths of the band (save for Andy, who was back in London) were already on vacation there and didn’t need to travel.

“[We] had all decided to go on holiday together, just like The Beatles,” Rhodes says. “We all had suites next to each other on the beach and thought we were actually taking a break. But after several days we got a call from management saying, ‘Don’t move—we are coming over with a film crew, we need a video for “Rio.”’” The band was into the proposed video concept, so things moved fast. “Within a few days our holiday had been hijacked and we were shooting.”

Part of the shoot involved renting a 70-foot yacht named Eilean that was big enough to double as lodging for some band and crew; others who preferred being on land lived in a hotel on the beach. “I don’t think Nick, for example, is a boating chap,” Mulcahy laughs. (Rhodes said as much in a 2008 reminiscence for The Guardian: “I only like boats when they’re tied up, and you can have a cocktail without spilling it.”) The director’s approach to “Rio” exuded glam. “I had this very definite idea of ultra-color,” he says. “I just wanted the blue water and the contrast of very high tech, the vivid pinks and greens, whether it be plastics, liquids or whatever. The whole thing was based on this explosion of color; it was like a very Technicolor movie.”

In practice, the video explodes with brightness—fluorescent cocktails, rich-hued dresses, tinted water thrown on bodies—and striking figures. The mysterious “Rio” girl in the clip, played by model Reema Medawar (now Reema Ruspoli), lithely moves around the boat while streaked with brilliant body paint. “It’s quite extraordinary to be stopped continually with, ‘Are you Rio?’” Ruspoli told People in 2013. “To this day, I seem to be more Rio than Reema.”

The tropical atmosphere and luxurious setting lent itself to creativity. “Even when we were down there, we were still working out ideas,” Mulcahy says. “For example, it would be like, ‘Oh, and you know what? I need two phones, but get those kid phones—a pink and a blue one.’ Someone would run out—‘Yeah, I found some!’ There was an energy and an excitement, and as we’re filming, you go, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be fun if we did this?’ He laughs. “There were no, like, big production meetings, for example.”

As in Sri Lanka, having an ability to improvise came in handy. For example, an underwater scene meant to have a woman weaving through kelp dotted with fluorescent accents was foiled by the tide going out. “There’s a few shots of her swimming underwater, but not the grand scene of this lovely woman swimming through this magical, surreal, kelp forest,” Mulcahy says. “So some ideas you have, and they don’t work, but then you have your plan B or plan C.” And after the shoot seemed to be done—the cameras were even gone—Mulcahy realized he didn’t have footage of John Taylor miming playing the saxophone. Ever resourceful, he borrowed a sax from somewhere and climbed on top of a mountain with Taylor—where they ran into a German tourist filming the sights on his Super-8 film camera.

“We said, ‘Can we film this little bit with John Taylor up here? We’ll take the film back to London, we’ll transfer it and then we’ll send the film back to you in Germany,’” Mulcahy says. “We gave him a certain amount of money, and he actually said, ‘Okay!’ So on this German tourist’s home Super-8 cassette, we filmed John Taylor doing the saxophone bit in the middle of the video—which is used as a split screen, so the quality is fine, and we made it look better in post-production—and we transferred it back in London. Then we put it back in the envelope and posted it back to the lovely gentleman.”

Go beyond the yachting scenes, however, and the “Rio” video can be quite cheeky. The members of Duran Duran aren’t exactly scoring with the siren-like women; in fact, the men stumble their way through interactions with the video ladies. These fumbles include falling off a dock and being dragged to shore in a net; being yanked into the water by a phone cord; and collapsing in a heap in the ocean after being pinched by a crab. Even if “Rio” looked like an aspirational commercial for luxury goods—a depiction of the good life—the video possessed an appealingly goofy vibe.

“It’s totally over the top, but it’s meant to be totally fun,” Mulcahy says. “The song is fun; the video is meant to be total fun. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek. There’s a little homage. It’s not too deep—just colorful and fun and a celebration, basically.”

For Mulcahy, filming Duran Duran’s videos gave him a certain amount of notoriety. In fact, he recalls experiencing a bit of the act’s fame during one memorable visit to the band’s hotel in his native Australia. “When I would get out of the car, these kids woul d actually know who I was—like I’m a member of the band, in a way,” he says. “It was a very strange period, but yeah—I was like this other silent member of the band.”

The “Hungry Like the Wolf” video also launched his film career, as an Australian producer saw the clip and gave him a call. “He said, ‘Do you want to come to Australia and do a movie?’ To which point, I said, ‘Yes.’ The next question I asked was, ‘What’s it about?’ He said, ‘Oh, it’s about trying to kill a pig.’ And I went, ‘Okay, great!’ So I went off to Australia and did my first film, Razorback.”

Duran Duran’s critics raised an eyebrow at the opulent veneer of these Rio-era videos. The clips exuded the kind of material excess that embodied everything perceived to be wrong about the money-hungry 1980s, especially when the band’s native England was going through tough economic times. Years later, however, Le Bon issued a reminder of how young and even naïve the band were at the time of filming, telling Blender: “When you’re 19 and someone says, ‘Do you want to make a video on a yacht in the Caribbean?’ you don’t say, ‘Hmmm, what kind of statement are we supposed to be making here?’ It was, ‘Girls, boats—yes, please!’”

To Dave Ambrose, Duran Duran’s approach evoked something classy and classic. “That boat image—and all those wonderful sets on ‘Save A Prayer,’ with the beautiful settings—conjured up a completely different romantic style, going almost back to the days of ‘30s romancing and ‘40s with Fred Astaire.” And to MTV VJ Mark Goodman, the band’s strength of vision and execution stood out. “The concept of what these guys were going to be was so clear that you loved it,” he says. “In those first couple of years of the ‘80s, some bands segued into [video] really easily, but other bands were really trying to find their footing. Duran Duran . . . they sort of were born ready, it seemed.”

In late May 1982, a mention of the “Hungry Like the Wolf” video popped up in the trade magazine FMQB, along with a note the clip would soon air on MTV. And during the week ending July 2, nearly two months after Rio’s release, MTV added “Hungry Like the Wolf” into rotation. Other videos added that same week included another Russell Mulcahy–directed epic—Fleetwood Mac’s twirl-a-thon “Gypsy”—and the Go-Gos’ “Vacation.”

“By 1982, MTV had started to gain momentum,” says Sykes. “The band knew who we were, and we worked very closely with them to really get behind Rio and really tell the story of the band to our viewers. They really helped define the MTV brand, because that’s exactly what we wanted it to be—amazing songs and great video presentations.”

When “Hungry Like the Wolf” appears on early MTV “vidchecks”—a modern term used for chunks of vintage MTV programming uploaded to YouTube—it’s akin to when television turned from black-and-white to color. Even at the time, however, “Hungry Like the Wolf” was a revelation for viewers. Journalist and SiriusXM radio host Lori Majewski grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, which was a test city for MTV, and recalls seeing many early videos, including Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth.” However, the young music fan didn’t click with the band until having her life turned upside down—in a good way—by the “Hungry Like the Wolf” clip.

“This video comes on, and I’m entranced,” she says. “And by the time it gets to the part where John Taylor is showing the Polaroid of the missing Simon Le Bon, and he shakes his head no, I was in a trance. And from then on—everything I’ve done in my life has been about Duran Duran.” She laughs. “Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, whether it’s the men I’ve married, whether it’s the jobs I’ve had—I can all trace it back to that first day.”

Majewski stresses that she also has enormous respect for Duran Duran’s music. “But when you are a tweenage girl—Bowie said it best: sound and vision. You took Duran Duran, and you took their music and you added the visuals, and that was it—hook, line and sinker.”

“And I have to give credit to MTV because, yes, I think I would have eventually gotten into Duran Duran musically,” she adds. “But I had to wait a few years for Depeche Mode. I had to wait a few years for the Cure. Duran Duran was delivered to me on a platter by MTV—and that was it.”

Majewski’s reaction when “Hungry Like the Wolf” eventually picked up steam at radio illustrates just how different it was to have video dominating promotion. “I religiously would listen to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 and I remember ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ entered the top 40 somewhere in the 30s. And I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s that band on MTV!’ I remember thinking, ‘How cool—they’re on the radio!’ That’s the reverse of how everything in my life had worked up until then. You always heard the band on American Top 40, and then maybe you saw them perform on Solid Gold, but this was the exact opposite.”

This phenomenon—fans learning about songs via video before radio—played out constantly in the channel’s early days. In fact, MTV added the “Rio” video near the end of September 1982, the same week as clips for A Flock of Seagulls’ “Space Age Love Song,” Saga’s “On the Loose” and John Cougar’s “Hand To Hold On To.” Going by available MTV logs printed in FMQB, the “Rio” video remained in top MTV rotation at least from mid-November to mid-December—the exact time period “Hungry Like The Wolf” started to pick up at American radio.

By this time, Duran Duran’s star was rising fast at MTV. “When [the ‘Rio’ video] came out, there really was no question to put it in—I think it might have gone right into heavy rotation,” says Gale Sparrow, noting that such a move was reserved for major acts. “You had to be pretty big [for that to happen]. You got into heavy rotation out of the box and you were not the Rolling Stones—it was big.”

Duran Duran’s videos also stood out to VJ Mark Goodman. “They were taking us to these crazy places,” he says. “You know, the video for ‘Rio,’ how much did you want to be on that boat? I mean, you just want to be sitting up there on the bow with Simon, you know? It was exhilarating.”

This positivity was a perfect match for MTV’s own u pbeat mindset that year. Launched March 1, the channel’s legendary “I Want My MTV” campaign—which featured Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and Pat Benatar telling viewers to call up cable companies and ask them to carry MTV—brought great acclaim and increased subscribers. In September, the channel was finally on the air in New York City (via Manhattan Cable) and had spawned multiple music success stories, including Men at Work, Adam and the Ants, Judas Priest, and Bow Wow Wow. Billboard’s headline on a September 11, 1982 article (“Survey Finds MTV Strongly Affecting Record Sales”) also reflected increased confidence in the channel.

But to Sykes, Duran Duran made all the difference. “[The band] helped MTV finally garner credibility with the music industry,” he says. “There was a lot of talk in 1982 that MTV sold records and broke bands. But a lot of the labels weren’t quite convinced, because they couldn’t understand the difference between radio airplay and video play. So we had to find a band that really was getting a lot of play on MTV, but not radio, to prove to the music industry that we did sell records.”

The executive had so much confidence because MTV favored data based on robust analytical marketing research, including from an employee named Marshall Cohen, “who was able to tell you within a block probably where Duran Duran was selling and where it wasn’t,” says Chip Rachlin, who joined MTV as director of acquisitions in 1982. “And that’s when the bell went off: ‘Wait a minute: We’re actually doing what we said we were going to do, which was sell records.’ We’re dependent on the labels for the videos, so in return for free videos, you had to be able to deliver sales and make careers, whether it’s Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club, Men at Work. They were all sort of in that first wave of MTV success stories. But Duran was one we focused on because there hadn’t been a band like that since the Beatles.”

In Duran Duran’s case, research uncovered that MTV’s presence—or lack thereof—determined how Rio was selling in Dallas, Texas. The LP sold great in the half of the city that had MTV; in the non-MTV half, Rio’s sales paled in comparison. This phenomenon had been playing out across the country. In August 1982, the manager of Tampa, Florida’s Vinyl Fever Records reported that he couldn’t “keep copies of [Rio] in the store” thanks to MTV spins of “Hungry Like the Wolf.” At a fall 1982 NARM meeting, it came up that the channel was helping Duran Duran sell like hotcakes in Houston. Capitol National Promotion Director Steve Meyer told Radio & Records in November that MTV had a “dramatic influence” on Duran Duran in Buffalo, Seattle, and Dallas.

In the Midwest, meanwhile, the channel was “making a real dent” in sales at the Lawrence, Kansas, record store Kief’s, employee Steve Wilson told Rolling Stone in a 1982 year-end news wrap-up: “We’re definitely selling out artists who otherwise would be shelf death: Duran Duran, ABC, Saga.” And in Akron, Ohio—where MTV had been airing since the very start, August 1981—John Gorman, program director of the Cleveland radio station WMMS, discovered tangible proof of the channel’s impact. “The record stores that served the MTV neighborhoods reported [sales for] a different set of artists than those who served non-MTV neighborhoods,” he says, citing as examples Thomas Dolby, Lene Lovich, Split Enz, and Robin Lane and the Chartbusters. “The stores that served neighborhoods not receiving MTV reported none of those artists as top sellers.”

WMMS was also an enthusiastic supporter of Duran Duran, although Gorman says video was clearly also aiding the band’s record sales. “I believe [Rio] was number one in all the MTV-influenced record stores in Akron,” Gorman says, adding that the record-buyers scooping up the LPs were largely teens or even pre-teens, much younger than the ages of WMMS listeners. “Back then, some albums we would play, if popular, would climb the charts quickly, even making it to No. 1 in three or four weeks—or even sooner if a superstar act. Rarely did a relatively new or unknown act achieve that kind of sales leap.”

Gorman ended up visiting a friend in Akron to check out MTV because the channel had a minimal Cleveland presence. “I had to see, ‘What is this MTV? What is it doing?’ I mean, it’s obviously influencing. And when I saw it, I got it. I had a feeling it’s only going to last for a couple of years, but it’s going to become a major influence—and it’s going to change everything.”

Capitol Records’ Doreen D’Agostino also sensed a change—for the better—as Duran Duran’s MTV presence increased. Elusive publications took interest in the band, for starters. “We started getting fan mail, because they were on MTV, [sent] to Capitol Records’ New York office,” D’Agostino says. “Tons of it. So I took a bag, and I put all of Duran’s fan mail in it, [and] messengered it over to the editor at 16 Magazine. I said, ‘So, what do you think now?’” The gambit worked—and Duran Duran started earning coverage in US teen magazines, just like they had in the UK.

As a musician, Andy Taylor in turn noticed the impact MTV had on record labels. “MTV all of a sudden changed the character and tone of labels, they realized the aesthetic of the band, and the aesthetic of a lot of artists—Boy George—was absolutely driving younger culture,” he says. “They were always smart enough to go with technology—MTV being actually just technology. They saw how it changed the culture of music.” In his own personal experience, he also saw a shift in attitude from some corners at Capitol Records. “These guys that they didn’t want to let in, who they castigated and just thought were five little gay guys from England? That’s actually what they said—no way it’ll work. Within two years, they couldn’t get enough of us, same people.”

MTV at least realized how important Duran Duran were to the channel’s immediate future. “The band and the label were happy with what we were doing, and we were happy because we had poster kids for that demo,” says Rachlin. “We had the Jaggers, we had the Bowies and [Pete] Townshend. But this was younger. This was the sweet spot. And so we ran with that as far and as long as we could.”

So did Duran Duran, whose personalities meshed well with the channel, especially since they were up for anything. Sparrow recalls them being “a great band to work with” while the VJ Nina Blackwood connected well with the band and recognized their depth. “I found them to be very well-spoken and classy guys. They were gentlemen, and very cool. They were intelligent artists—I would say they were more artists than just pop stars,” she says, noting Rhodes’ close friendship with Andy Warhol. “[Duran Duran] were just sophisticated guys. And they were serious about their music, very serious about their career. But they were fun—you know, they had the English humor.”

Alan Hunter remembers the excitement that would swirl around the band when they hung out at MTV. “You know, if it was Robert Plant, the entire office of MTV on 6th Avenue would empty and they’d all come down to the studio in Hell’s Kitchen,” he says. “It was kind of the same for Duran Duran. Everybody wanted to get a glimpse of them.”

Hunter also had the chance to do some unique bits with the group, including sailing in a boat with a few band members (“One of my wall of shame pictures is me and Simon wearing our matching sailor boy striped shirts with suspenders,” he laughs) and introducing Duran Duran as they performed on MTV’s second-annual New Year’s Eve Ball on December 31, 1982. The loose, Rio-heavy set certainly set a great tone for the night—and for the year to come.

“Duran Duran, Simon and Nick being the main jesters, always had a fun, tongue-in-cheek attitude, but they came out of the chute like Bono and U2 did, sort of fully formed in a way,” Hunter says. “They were built for this. Like, Madonna came on built for it. The first time I interviewed her was backstage at the Limelight and her answers and her focus with me was unnerving. She wasn’t some silly, young, naïve star. She was, ‘I’m Madonna, and I’m going to be fucking huge.’” He laughs. “And I was like, ‘Wow, geez!’ You felt that. You felt it with Duran Duran.”

Rhodes appreciated the creative leeway the channel gave Duran Duran. “We used to go to MTV and we’d say, ‘What should we do today?’ ‘Oh, you know, let’s bring a friend down. Let’s have a chat about this,’” he says. “Or, ‘Oh, we’ll discuss Peter Gabriel videos for half an hour.’ And we used to make things up. And they were so open minded then; we knew everybody there. And it started to become more formatted after a couple of years, but right at the beginning it was truly experimental. We had so much fun every time we went there.”

That lightheartedness shone through on March 30, 1983, when Rhodes and Le Bon co-hosted an hour of MTV. The pair introduced videos by favorites—Talking Heads, Japan, Kate Bush, David Bowie, and, yes, Peter Gabriel—and premiered Duran Duran’s video for Rio’s “Save a Prayer.” In the middle of the appearance, Andy Warhol nonchalantly showed up and sat between Rhodes and Le Bon, snapping photos the whole time.⁸ The musicians joke around as if they can’t see Warhol (Le Bon: “Have you ever had the feeling that somebody was following you around?”), creating a surreal comedy scene.

Near the end of the segment, the rest of Duran Duran joined their band mates and presented a gold-selling certification to MTV for Rio, as a token of thanks for the channel’s support. Le Bon carefully hung the award on a brick wall in the studio, and the camera lingered on it as the hour came to a close.

“It was the first real story we had that MTV really sold records,” Sykes says. “And then soon after, radio picked up on the band and of course radio did a tremendous job of breaking them at a massive level, because we really didn’t have the distribution at MTV. But we showed the industry that we could light the fuse and create interest in a band and help them break and get on the road to success.”

Indeed, in December 1982, MTV was in 7.5 million US households,⁹ meaning the channel reached only a relatively small fraction of the total population.¹⁰ Duran Duran had more work to do before everyone in America knew who they were, although they knew exactly how to achieve wider notoriety: securing a radio hit.

Notes

1 https://www.grammy.com/grammys/artists/michael-nesmith/17145

2 “Ann Arbor Film Festival: A 50-Year Timeline”: http://www.annarbor.com/entertainment/ann-arbor-film-festival-a-50-year-timeline/

3 A February 19, 1982, article in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, newspaper The Morning Call also quoted a record store owner noting that MTV was helping sell Duran Duran records.

4 Eric Fellner, IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0271479/

5 Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”

6 Described by Encyclopedia.com as “a cultural phenomenon that projects Western fantasies about profound cultural differences.”

7 Gilbert Taylor, IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0852405/

8 His camera wasn’t just for show; a contact sheet documenting the appearance is part of Warhol’s photo archive at Stanford University.

9 Statistic cited in August 2, 1986, Billboard supplement celebrating MTV’s fifth anniversary

10 The US Census Bureau estimated the country had 83.5 million households in 1982.

5

Winning Over US Radio

Upon Rio’s 1982 US release, Duran Duran had several things working in their favor. College radio, which supported the band early on and understood what they were about, was again enthusiastic. Alternative and mainstream rock radio stations that spun Duran Duran’s debut—including Chicago’s WXRT, KNAC and KROQ in California, and the Washington, D.C.–area outlet WHFS—also remained supportive right off the bat. The number of different Rio songs receiving airplay was also impressive. On August 1, 1982, “Hungry Like the Wolf” was WLIR’s “Screamer,” or most popular song of the day as measured by listener votes,¹ but the station was also spinning “Save a Prayer” and “Rio” in June 1982. And Kid Leo at WMMS, a station that also put Rio in rotation in June, says the album “was a natural progression” and “a major step forward” from Duran Duran’s debut: “‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ just cried out as a hit record. It was a smash with WMMS’ audience before MTV made [it] into a national phenomenon.”

Nevertheless, widespread radio support for Duran Duran’s music still wasn’t coming. “[Our label] sensed there was a chance to break us through at radio,” Rhodes says. “[But] the sound we had—it was a little too edgy and English for American radio. Things tended to be a bit more slick and smooth and compressed.” John Taylor summarizes the challenge even more succinctly: “They were having trouble getting ‘Hungry Like The Wolf,’ getting the Duran Duran sound, on the same radio stations that were playing Van Halen and Journey.”

The latter’s observation is a bullseye-accurate portrayal of what mainstream rock radio was like in summer 1982. “Hungry Like the Wolf” did manage to debut at No. 40 on Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks chart for the week ending August 14—just ahead of “Only Solutions,” Journey’s contribution to the Tron: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, which bowed at No. 41. Holding strong at No. 48 after fifteen weeks on the chart was Van Halen’s cover of the Martha Reeves and the Vandellas-popularized Motown classic “Dancing in the Street.” Although hints of modernity dotted the chart—A Flock of Seagulls’ space-age synth-pop hit “I Ran,” the Go-Gos’ sun-kissed “Vacation,” Lords of the New Church’s ominous “Open Your Eyes,” Roxy Music’s swooning “Avalon”—meat-and-potatoes rock ‘n’ roll dominated.

Prior to this chart appearance, Duran Duran’s label had decided different remixes were needed to jumpstart the band’s American fortunes. Capitol’s Rupert Perry thought of David Kershenbaum, a respected record producer and A&R executive who had signed the English songwriter/pianist Joe Jackson to A&M Records, and scheduled a meeting with him at the famed Capitol Tower in Los Angeles.

“[Perry explained] that they wanted to start with ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ and see if they could figure out a way to make it more Americanized,” Kershenbaum says. “At the time, [the song] was happening in other parts of the world, but it hadn’t broken here yet. They had tried and tried and nothing had clicked. They were trying to maybe get a little different perspective on it.”

Based on feedback and research, Capitol had zeroed in on the best direction: a remix tailored for club play. Kershenbaum was game to try his luck—“There wasn’t any direction [from the label] except make a hit, you know,” he says with a laugh—and so were Duran Duran. “We said, ‘Well, we don’t have anything to lose. If we don’t like it, we don’t want to use it,’” says Nick Rhodes. “We always had creative control over everything that we did. That’s the one great thing. We had terrible deals, and we got ripped off something absolutely terrible by just about everybody, from managers, agents, record labels, publishers. But the one thing we had was creative control.”

Kershenbaum wasn’t familiar with Duran Duran’s music before landing the remix gig, but he did have an affinity for English acts. While working for A&M Records, he crossed paths with two rock bands on the label, Squeeze and the Police, and he had produced Joe Jackson’s first two LPs, Look Sharp! and I’m the Man. Perhaps even more important, Kershenbaum also intuitively understood why UK artists often had trouble breaking America.

“Many times they would take American music, and either mess it up or put their own stamp on it, and it would come out quirky,” he says, pointing out that Jackson’s 1982 hit “Steppin’ Out” has no chorus. “What I found with UK artists is they weren’t afraid to break rules. They were much more liberal with their presentations. It wasn’t as structured as what we find over here—which is, you know, intro, verse, chorus, pre-chorus, chorus, second verse. There was no structure many times; it’s whatever they felt.” When these different-sounding UK acts did connect with the mainstream, he adds, “They would stick out and they would be really, really unique compared to U.S. music, which was much more predictable.”

In Duran Duran’s music, he heard the same iconoclastic spirit. “There wasn’t anything exactly like what they were doing, and that’s what I loved about it,” he says. “It was very, very fresh. It needed focus—and that’s kind of what we did.” Kershenbaum booked time at Cherokee Studios, a Los Angeles studio where acts such as Daryl Hall & John Oates and Rod Stewart had recorded albums, with the late George Tutko engineering.

His proposed changes were sensible, and aimed to amplify existing elements of the song. “For me, it was just a matter of rebalancing it, getting the rhythms to be a little bit different, and [ending] up with different sounds and EQs and so forth,” Kershenbaum says. “I just felt like it was such a commercial song, that if it had the right impact, and the right dynamics, it could break through. That’s really what I was trying to do, is get dynamics and make it really pop.”

Rhodes and Le Bon were right by Kershenbaum’s side at Cherokee Studios—and in sync with these changes. “We wanted to clean up the tracks, and get a more powerful bass and drum sound to start,” the vocalist said in an August 1982 interview that noted Duran Duran were also remixing “Hold Back the Rain” with Kershenbaum at the time. “Also get the vocals sticking out a bit more. The original was a bit confused, so it’s just a question of cleaning it up by mixing.” Adds Rhodes now about the band’s approach to the Kershenbaum remixes: “We went back to the beginning and just started, ‘Let’s put a different drum sound. Let’s see what we do with this.’ And he got a slightly different vocal sound, but it was, again [like Rio], hands on the desk.”

For Harvest Records’ Ravid, who visited the studio as an observer to see how things were going, watching Duran Duran in action with Kershenbaum was an eye-opener. “I got a real sense of how on top of their music this band was,” he says. “I remember at the time thinking to myself, I would love to be videoing this, so that the world can give them the credit that they deserve as musicians.”

Kershenbaum recalls the remix was done rather quickly, no longer than a few days, and that Duran Duran fans turned out in full force at the studio hoping for a glimpse of band members. He also has vivid memories of the actual mixing process—and, just like Duran Duran recording Rio at AIR Studios, it was smooth sailing. “As I recall, it was a very easy experience. It just kind of came together. Sometimes you try and try, and push and push, and it doesn’t quite work. This one just worked. And you knew it at the time; it sounded great.”

The genius of the Kershenbaum “Hungry Like the Wolf” remix is its subtlety. “I mean, oddly enough, if you listen to it now, there’s really barely any difference,” says John Taylor. “At the time, it seemed like a lot of difference.” He’s right: Le Bon’s vocals and Andy Taylor’s guitars are both clearly higher in the mix—meaning Rhodes’ keyboards swoon and percolate more in the background—but it’s still unmistakably Duran Duran. If anything, the orgasmic moans at the song’s end are more prominent at the end of the Kershenbaum remix, which should’ve made the song a difficult radio sell in more conservative corners of the United States.

Everyone liked the resulting sound, and Kershenbaum ended up eventually remixing the entire first side of Rio. When the LP was reissued, some pressings had a jaunty “Remixed & Remastered” sticker plastered on the cover. Duran Duran’s fortunes slowly started moving in a positive direction. “Hungry Like the Wolf” spent six weeks overall on Billboard’s Top Rock Tracks chart in August and September 1982. For the week ending August 21, “Hungry Like the Wolf” also entered Billboard’s Dance/Disco Top 80 chart, which was determined by requests at dance clubs, at a modest No. 51. The song would peak at No. 36 in early October. The influential Boston Top 40 station WXKS (a.k.a. KISS 108), home of legendary program director Sunny Joe White and adventurous playlists that were ahead of the cultural curve, also took interest in Duran Duran.

As music director, Joey Carvello says he was in charge of discovering “the next big hit” for White: “My specialty was ferreting out imports yet to be released in the U.S.” Luckily, he had no shortage of options in 1982 thanks to the brewing British Invasion, and at the East Boston record store Dance Music Plus, Carvello bought a “Hungry Like the Wolf” 12-inch. “It was a first listen record—and Sunny put it right in,” Carvello says, noting that the song was “uplifting” and had a “monster hook,” which suited the time. “Radio was looking to brighten up [that year]!” In fact, WXKS officially added the song to their playlist in mid-August and “Hungry Like the Wolf” charted through early October, months before the song took off at Top 40 nationally.

Duran Duran aided all this momentum by spending the summer of 1982 touring the United States, first with club dates and then as the opening slot for Blondie’s Tracks Across America tour. Blondie wasn’t necessarily in the best place at the time—in fact, the group broke up as soon as the tour ended—but Duran Duran embraced with gusto the opportunity to play big venues. In Toronto, they even earned an encore as an opener, which might explain why a January 1983 Creem feature quoted Debbie Harry as saying, “Duran Duran gave me a hard act to follow,” during Blondie’s set that night.

A bootleg of Duran Duran’s July 9, 1982, Detroit headlining show is another fascinating curio of a focused band on the cusp of stardom. When Le Bon introduces their new single, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” with a lusty growl, the crowd response was appreciative—but pointedly lacked the delirious squeals of delight heard several songs earlier, when he introduced “Girls on Film.” But Duran Duran sound energetic and powerful: Andy Taylor reimagines the “Rio” sax solo as a smoking, bluesy guitar part, and a reinvigorated “Anyone Out There” ended the set. Instead of eerie, marooned-in-space electro, it was propulsive, aggressive disco-punk; you can hear the Joy Division influence loud and clear.

Yet more than three months after its release, Rio seemed stuck on Billboard’s Top LPs & Tape chart: for the week ending September 25, the album languished at No. 151. To this day, Ravid remembers needing to have a difficult conversation about Rio’s fortunes during a dinner with Rhodes and Le Bon. “This was, okay—this is honesty time. This is where I have to swallow hard after a couple drinks and tell them what’s not going on,” Ravid says. He reiterated to the musicians that Rio was “a great album,” but noted that the singles hadn’t helped it take off. “[I said] ‘Only a miracle is going to save this album,’” Ravid recalls. “And Nick, to my left, almost word for word, said, ‘We are going to break in America if it’s the last thing we ever do.’”

Rhodes doesn’t recall that specific conversation, although he recognizes the mindset. “It absolutely sounds like something that would have come out of my mouth at that time in my life, because we were such determined kids,” he says. “I didn’t want to take no for an answer every single day that we worked. We wanted to move Duran Duran somewhere further forward—and America was what we had in our sights.” As a kid, Rhodes read Ian Hunter’s Diary Of a Rock & Roll Star, which chronicled a Mott the Hoople US tour, and found the book enormously inspiring. “I wanted to live that,” he says. “Not necessarily all the parts, but certainly a lot of it. It was hugely appealing to be in the big, open America. America was the thing that you had to conquer.”

This kind of steely ambition was familiar to Capitol Records’ Rupert Perry, as he frequently dealt with Paul Berrow, one of Duran Duran’s managers. “Paul and Michael Berrow, they were determined that this act was going to be huge,” he says. “As well as having the ambition amongst yourselves as the musicians, you also need the people that are guiding you to make sure that they’ve got the ambition and the hunger—and certainly the Berrows had the ambition and the hunger to make this huge.”

In fact, Paul Berrow recalls being relentless trying to convince a powerful Capitol radio executive to back “Hungry Like the Wolf.” “I never had a relationship with him as such—I was just the pest that used to keep coming back up to meet with him in the office,” he says. “And he knew the band was important, so used to be gracious enough to see me, which in itself was already a miracle.” Berrow even hunkered down in Capitol Records’ basement cutting room and made several different edits of the song to play for the reluctant executive. “And every single one of them, I used to have a meeting with him about it,” he says, and notes dryly: “Eventually, he heard the thing so many times that he actually started to like it.”

With a laugh, Perry admits that Berrow and his forceful personality definitely rubbed some people at EMI and Capitol the wrong way. “But I get Paul, and I always have, so I put up with whatever lecture I was getting from him,” he says lightly. “But I always thought that he was one of the driving forces of making this all happen. He didn’t know when he first came to America how America worked, but he was gonna find out and he was gonna make it work for him—and for Duran Duran.”

In addition to reissuing Rio and commissioning remixes, Duran Duran’s US label had another ace up its sleeve: the 12-inch Carnival EP, which arrived on September 3. This four-song release—touted in ads as “A celebration in stylish sound!”—had the Colin Thurston-helmed, extended “Night Version” remixes of “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Girls on Film” on side A, and Kershenbaum remixes of “My Own Way” and “Hold Back the Rain” on side B. In the early 1980s, US record labels frequently used EPs (or mini-LPs) like Carnival to promote newer bands. These 12-inch releases were a lower-cost way for consumers to try out unfamiliar acts, and were more affordable than LPs—a not-insignificant thing, since the United States, like the rest of the world, was in the midst of an economic recession.

Mini-LPs naturally also lent themselves to dance floor-friendly bands. And Duran Duran, which relished having 12-inch remixes in their repertoire and embraced nightclubs, certainly fit that bill. “Everybody was making dance music by this point. I mean, really, all the cool records from ‘81, ‘82—if you couldn’t dance to them, well, they weren’t cool records,” John Taylor says with a laugh. “It was a dance floor moment.”

RockAmerica’s Ed Steinberg saw first-hand how crucial dance clubs were to Duran Duran’s success. “In club land, they were gods,” he says, noting that the band’s sound fit right in with a movement known as dance-oriented rock that was popular at the time. “[Duran Duran] were still kind of pop compared to Depeche Mode or those type of groups that were much hipper, but they fit into the same category as dance-oriented rock, so they were played a lot in clubs.” Because cable TV’s nationwide rollout was piecemeal, dance clubs were also a lifeline to new music in places where MTV or hipper radio stations weren’t available, he adds. In one sense, Duran Duran’s eventual US success was the rest of the country catching up to what was already going on in the clubs. “Which is typical,” Steinberg says. “Usually, clubs are six months ahead; in this case, they were a few years ahead. Radio stations weren’t quite ready for [Duran Duran], I believe. They were good for radio, but the radio programmers were still living in the ‘70s.”

However, in the early 1980s, many rock radio DJs were also spinning in clubs at night, and could test out crowd reaction to singles. Successful ones would be brought back to their day job. “When you put a song on, and right away people get up and start dancing, or dance in a certain way, that’s a very immediate type of feedback,” Steinberg says. As a format, dance music was also continuing to have more of a presence on the FM airwaves, says Donna Halper, a media studies professor and former DJ who was a radio consultant at that time; program directors at these dance-oriented stations “were seeking longer versions [of songs] they could play.”

But radio stations across all formats appreciated the multiple “Hungry Like the Wolf” remixes available, not to mention the sharp-sounding Carnival EP. Some of Halper’s hit music stations played the shorter “Hungry Like the Wolf” mix during the day, and the longer, “Night Version” after dark. And at rock station WMMS, John Gorman was knocked out when he heard Carnival. “I went down to the station and said, ‘Holy shit, listen to this,’” he says. “‘These are the versions we should play. Forget the album versions; let’s play the versions off this 12-inch.’ And that made all of the difference in the world.” The station started playing the remixed “Hungry Like the Wolf,” as well as “Girls on Film” and then “Planet Earth” once again. “All of the sudden, Duran Duran became our biggest act,” Gorman says, and adds, “When we had those remixes, that really changed everything. I mean, you know, on a car radio hearing ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ and ‘Girls on Film’—people crank up the volume.”

Rock radio stations were already used to playing album versions of songs rather than edited single mixes, so spinning an extended “Hungry Like the Wolf” wasn’t out of the ordinary. “What separated us as [a rock] station was that we would do things like that—whereas our competition, the Top 40 stations, did as much as they could to edit down a song,” says Buck McWilliams, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Rio via his Toledo station WIOT. While sometimes these trims were to play more songs in an hour, Halper recalls that some Top 40 program directors considered the “Hungry Like the Wolf” ending “too suggestive,” which prompted the label to issue a shorter radio edit where the woman’s voice is de-emphasized. “On the dance music stations, however, we played the long version—and let people have whatever fantasies they wanted to have.”

And, of course, at this juncture, the influence of MTV can’t be underestimated. Ray Tusken, Capitol Records’ AOR promotions manager, connects the dance music movement squarely to the channel. “The demographics were young. They were record-buying demographics. And once you have real, legi timate sales—even if you’re a radio programmer and you’re not terribly excited about this kind of music—you have to pay attention.” In turn, when Capitol noticed MTV was helping a band such as Duran Duran sell records, this informed their label strategy. “We took that information, gave it to all our promotion and salespeople, and started trying to spread the word about how popular this group was on MTV,” says Capitol National Promotion Director Steve Meyer. “One by one, radio stations started playing the single—and, just like on MTV, the response from the audience was explosive.”

In fall 1982, everything started coming together for Duran Duran. The Carnival EP started selling—for nine straight weeks starting in mid-October it actually ranked higher than Rio on the Billboard album charts—and MTV support remained strong. At some juncture after being reissued with Kershenbaum remixes on side one, Rio was rereleased in the United States again, with the “Night Version” of “Hungry Like the Wolf” swapped in for the Kershenbaum remix. (Trying to keep track of all of the available Rio LP pressings—not to mention the various Duran Duran single edits and remixes floating around—is a daunting, if not impossible, proposition; among other things, Capitol Records took over reissuing various releases by the end of 1982 and into 1983.)

As the 1982 holiday season rolled around, rock radio went all-in on Duran Duran. Ten stations added the band the Friday after Thanksgiving; that figure tripled the next week. And in the Radio & Records issue dated December 10, 1982, Duran Duran were the most-added band at rock radio, with forty-three stations playlisting the group—placing them immediately ahead of the veteran arena act Foreigner and surging San Francisco hard rockers Night Ranger.

For the week ending December 18, “Hungry Like the Wolf” also made a grand re-entrance on the Billboard Top Rock Tracks chart at a new high of No. 20. Three months after Duran Duran’s last appearance on the chart, the musical landscape looked quite different. The Australian pop troupe Men at Work and fellow ex-New Romantic Adam Ant had Top 10 hits; colorful synth-rock act Missing Persons, Duran Duran’s label mates, boasted two charting songs; moody rockers the Fixx and quirky rockers Wall of Voodoo made respectable showings. Even Duran Duran’s fellow former rehearsal space neighbors Dexy’s Midnight Runners were gaining an American foothold with “Come On Eileen,” a new entry at No. 32.

To drummer Roger Taylor, Duran Duran’s guitar-based approach explains a lot about the band’s US success. “We never went down the complete electro route, and that’s probably why America really took us to their heart,” he says, while also citing as crucial Andy Taylor for the way he “brought a rock edge to the band” as well. “I don’t know if we would have made it in America without that, actually. I think that was very important, that made that transition from England to America, because it really suited the rock radio.” Thanks to this burgeoning support, “Hungry Like the Wolf” finally debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100 at No. 77 for the issue dated on Christmas Day 1982, marking the start of what would become a wild ride.

This turnaround was quite a pleasant surprise to Nick Rhodes. “Suddenly, we got a phone call saying it’s charted—you know, ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ has gone back up. It seems to have risen like a phoenix from the ashes,” he laughs. “You know, it all went to a different gear from that point.” Or as Suzie Kaplan puts it: “Once America started to happen—everything got crazy.”

Notes

1 Full list of WLIR Screamers available here: https://wlir.fm/playlists/screamers-1980-87

6

1983: The Year of Duran Duran

The first issue of the trade magazine Radio & Records published in 1983 boasted a full-page ad touting Duran Duran’s meteoric ascent. “Duran Duran breaks through!” proclaimed the copy in a gigantic, celebratory font size. “This is a true story of undeniable talent and steadfast commitment.” Next to a photo of the band lounging below a jaunty skyscraper were capsule blurbs on the band’s 1982 highlights—Kershenbaum remixes, Carnival breaking out, MTV embracing the band, “Hungry Like the Wolf” exploding at radio, New Year’s Eve—and then a bold proclamation: 1983 was “The Year Of Duran Duran . . . it’s inevitable!”

For once, such hyperbole turned out to be almost understated. “Hungry Like the Wolf” hit No. 1 in Canada in 1983. Duran Duran played for one of their biggest fans, Princess Diana, at a UK charity concert. And the band also absolutely exploded in the United States. By the end of the year, the band had notched a staggering four Top 20 singles—including three that peaked in the Top 5—released a best-selling home video, and at one point had three studio albums on the Billboard charts simultaneously. Duran Duran had rock and pop radio hits, appeared on Saturday Night Live, and had their faces plastered on the cover of teen magazines. Impressively enough, the group achieved all of this while spending most of the year outside of the US recording (and then promoting) the 1983 LP Seven & The Ragged Tiger.

“Rio made the band global,” says Andy Taylor. “It was the perfect record for us, I think.”

The banner year happened first thanks to “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which only kept gaining steam in America after its late-1982 surge. MTV had the videos for that song and “Rio” listed in heavy rotation, or three to four plays per day, in late January. That dovetailed with continued radio support: in the Billboard issue for the week ending January 22, 1983, “Hungry Like the Wolf” hit No. 1 on the rock radio charts, a position it would hold for the next three weeks.

This triumph illustrates US radio industry changes that had started in late 1982 and stretched well into 1983. Some US rock stations adopted a new-music-focused, “Rock of the ‘80s” format pioneered by KROQ in Los Angeles. A portion of rock stations following an oldies-heavy format dubbed SuperStars, which was conceived of and programmed by consultant Lee Abrams, also started pushing new music. Newer sounds—including Duran Duran, Abrams specifically pointed out then—were in; well-seasoned older tracks were out. “[Duran Duran] was a ‘new wave’ band, a movement radio wanted to embrace, as it was new, but it had to blend with the classics that made up most playlists,” Abrams says now. “‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ did that. It was a good, melodic song by an approachable band with a fresh but compatible sound.”

Ray Tusken recalls that Abrams championed new music in January 1983 at annual meetings he had with radio stations. “I walked in, and some of the program directors came up to me and they said, ‘Oh, you’re going to like what you’re hearing,’ because they had gotten a preview of what Lee was going to talk about,” he says. As it turns out, Abrams recommended stations using the SuperStars format switch to playing 80 percent new music. “And so out of that,” Tusken says, “I got Thomas Dolby played, and Duran Duran.”

Although Tusken notes rock radio did eventually drift back to 1970s music, the window of time where new music was embraced aligned perfectly with Duran Duran’s ongoing ascent. “I was just lucky at that moment, let’s put it that way, because the timing was so good and they were interested in these new bands,” he says. “But before and after, [Duran Duran] probably wouldn’t have even been considered by rock stations, because it’s definitely not like American rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not like the Doors or Led Zeppelin.”

“Hungry Like the Wolf” soon expanded beyond the rock world and started receiving significant airplay on Top 40 stations. For the week ending February 19, 1983, the single ascended into the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. The single would later peak at No. 3 in late March, kept from the top only by Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” “Hungry Like the Wolf” in turn helped the Rio LP start making moves on the overall Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart. The album jumped into the Top 40 in late January—at No. 28, it was one spot behind Prince’s 1999—and then kept rising until it peaked at No. 6 for seven weeks in a row starting in March.

Drummer Roger Taylor knew things were really starting to connect for Duran Duran in America by the band’s sheer omnipresence. “They always had FM radio playing in the cars in America, and we would start to hear more and more of our music on the radio,” he says. “And you’d go into the hotel room and you put MTV on, and we’d be on there as well. You’d go into a club and, God, they were playing our 12-inch records. It started to become a saturation of American media that you just couldn’t miss, especially if you were in New York.”

As evidence of the popularity, he also mentions the band’s memorable March 19, 1983, in-store appearance at a Video Shack in Times Square to support the release of the “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Girls on Film” Video 45. Duran Duran were one of the first three artists to have a US single released on the nascent format,¹ which was simply a pre-recorded VHS or a Beta tape featuring popular music videos. (In an added twist, the “Girls on Film” video on the Beta was the bawdier version, while the edited take appeared on the VHS tape.) Fans started queuing up at 6:00 a.m. for the band’s 2:00 p.m. appearance, and things nearly spiraled out of control once Duran Duran showed up for the meet-and-greet. “Kids began crawling up the iron gates covering the store windows and were being pressed by the crowd,” Video Shack’s director of advertising and promotion, Marcia Kesselman, told Cash Box. “It was real scary, but the police did what they had to [do] to prevent the crowd from killing each other and obt aining injuries.” All told, 150 cops were on hand to oversee and manage the estimated 5,000 fans that showed up and crowded behind police barricades spanning three city blocks.

“That was the moment,” Roger Taylor says now of that Video Shack event. “It was like, ‘Wow, this is like Beatlemania.’ And we started to have problems getting out of the hotels because the kids would start to gather outside the hotels in New York. It suddenly went to another level, and it was very apparent that it was happening.”

He also mentions the band’s music being on Casey Kasem’s weekly syndicated chart countdown radio show American Top 40 as another major success indicator. In fact, as “Hungry Like the Wolf” starts playing on the show’s April 23, 1983, episode, Kasem cheerily notes: “Duran Duran have been chuckling in the top 10 for nine weeks. Now, they drop to No. 11.” However, the band’s new single “Rio” was also on American Top 40 that week, already at No. 31 and streaking upward. Duran Duran were so popular that in the Billboard issue dated just a week later, the band had two Top 20 singles—“Rio” at No. 16 and “Hungry Like the Wolf” at No. 17—and videos for two different songs, “Save a Prayer” and “Girls on Film,” in medium rotation on MTV.

Roger Taylor admits seeing and hearing himself everywhere during Duran Duran’s peak saturation could be “pretty overwhelming,” but adds, “At the time, though, it felt quite natural, and it was something we all aspired to. We all wanted to be in a big band, and especially in those days, it came with the territory. We knew that had happened to the Beatles. We knew it happened to Bowie. So although it was kind of difficult to deal with—and it came very, very quickly—none of us wanted to really change it.”

After “Rio” reached its peak of No. 14 and started tumbling down the charts, yet another Duran Duran single was waiting in the wings: the nonalbum track “Is There Something I Should Know?” A No. 1 hit in the UK, the song was appended to Duran Duran’s self-titled 1981 debut LP, which was promptly reissued in the United States with a modified tracklisting and a different cover picture. That album too finally started selling and reached the top 10 of the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart in August 1983, a few weeks after “Is There Something I Should Know?” peaked at No. 4. This chart domination lasted through the end of 1983. When Duran Duran’s third album, Seven & The Ragged Tiger, debuted on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart on December 10, both Rio and Duran Duran were still holding strong on the chart.

In addition to notching impressive album sales, Duran Duran parlayed their MTV popularity into home video success. The longform video album that band members had been discussing in the press for months finally came to fruition in spring 1983. Called Duran Duran and released via Thorn EMI Video, the 55-minute program was sequenced and edited together almost as if it was a remix album or an extended Duran Duran megamix; each track flows into one another musically and visually. For example, “Lonely in Your Nightmare” starts with Simon Le Bon picking up a dusty photograph featuring a still shot of Duran Duran taken during the “Planet Earth” video.

The Duran Duran video album also enticed fans with rare clips for “Night Boat” and “The Chauffeur,” and was one of the only places outside of clubs and the Video 45 that people could see a taboo extended version of “Girls on Film.” As it turns out, this longer version was in the works all along. “The production company called me up one day and said, ‘You know, Geoff, we heard you’re going to make a video album,’” Kempin says. “‘Why don’t we film some more on that ‘Girls on Film,’ so that when you release the VHS, it’s got some material that’s not been seen before? People will want to buy the VHS because they can see the extended version.’ So, of course, it was a little licentious what they did, but they did a sort of X-rated version of ‘Girls on Film.’ A lot more mud wrestling on behalf of the girls.”

Kempin was initially worried about the added costs, but agreed to expand the budget, which ended up paying off. “We never looked back on doing that, because it definitely helped to sell a lot more copies,” he says. “That was part of also what evolved to be when you bring out new formats, you’ve got to bring out something that’s got something different on it from the artists that wasn’t already available. It became part of the marketing mantra that you have different versions.”

He notes that this was quite rare for video back then since these three-minute clips were so expensive. “I think the Duran Duran video album was the first instance that I can think of where the music company consciously decided to spend more money for a longer duration version of what they would normally supply anyway to TV.”

Upon release, the Duran Duran video itself embarked on an eight-city tour that landed in bars and venues in places such as Chicago and Cleveland, as well as Studio 54 in New York City. According to Picture Music International director of marketing and promotion Peter Blachley, the video received a wild reaction similar to what the real-life, 3-D Duran Duran experienced. “People not only got up and danced—but there [were] girls literally screaming at the screen,” he said at the annual NARM Convention in 1984. “I think I was the first one to ever tour a band in my briefcase.”

Duran Duran’s timing couldn’t have been better for the video album. In 1983 and 1984, VCRs dropped in price, which increased sales of the machines tremendously—meaning there were more households clamoring for home videos, either via rental or purchase. “One out of seven homes has a VCR now; it’s no longer a novelty, something for only the affluent or the videophile,” Frank McCann, vice president of the RCA Corporation’s consumer electronics division, told The New York Times in November 1984. Luckily, Thorn EMI’s commitment to releasing unique home videos paid off; in fact, the Duran Duran video stayed on Billboard’s videocassette sales charts into 1985. “Generally, we sold about half a million VHS and Betamax around the world,” says Kempin. “Which is an extraordinary figure, really, considering on a pre-recorded level, VHS was new. Most people had been using VHS to record off air.”

To put a cherry on top, at the February 1984 Grammy Awards, Duran Duran took home two trophies in brand-new categories: Best Video, Short Form for the Video 45 of “Girls on Film” b/w “Hungry Like the Wolf” and Best Video Album for Duran Duran. The Grammys took place as Duran Duran were in the midst of the US leg of the Sing Blue Silver tour, their first run of shows in America since becoming superstars. The trek allowed the band to fulfill the last of their three major venue goals: on March 19 and 21, 1984, Duran Duran rolled into New York City for two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. “It was amazing,” says publicist Suzie Kaplan. “I remember being in the limo with them and the car being mobbed with people. I’ve never been in a situation like that before.” She laughs. “And they kept going out through the sunroof to wave at everybody.”

A high-quality audio bootleg of the March 21 show—the concert was broadcast live via satellite on radio stations across the United States—captures the crackling excitement of this triumph. The audience’s delirious screams are palpable as Duran Duran runs through a red-hot set that demonstrated what a tight live act they were by this point, demolishing the notion they were all style and no talent. “New Religion” was brisk and groove-heavy—Andy Taylor’s coiled guitar licks are spring-loaded, John Taylor’s bass moves are buoyant and nimble, and soulful countermelodies from backing vocalists B. J. Nelson and Charmaine Birch add a cautionary tone—while the ever-evolving “My Own Way” is a no-brakes punk-funk jam. An extended, “Night Version” encore take of “Girls on Film” was also amazing: the song featured guest appearances from Chic members Tony Thompson and Nile Rodgers, and a brief but satisfying jam on Chic’s disco hit “Good Times” during band intros.

Still, even after the Sing Blue Silver tour wrapped up in the United States in April 1984, Rio’s chart reign wasn’t over yet. The album remained on the Billboard album charts until the start of November and was still bubbling under the Billboard Top 200 in December and January. In fact, Rio charted again for two weeks in early 1985 before falling off the chart for good in early February.

And, incredibly enough, the album possessed commercial life beyond a chart presence, as “Save a Prayer” was finally issued as a single in America in conjunction with the 1984 live album Arena. For the week ending February 2, 1985, the single was the highest-charting debut on the Billboard Hot 100, coming in at No. 53. “Save a Prayer” peaked at No. 16 in mid-March, a full two-and-a-half years after the song nearly topped the UK charts. In fact, by this time, “Some Like It Hot”—the first single from the Power Station, the funk-heavy side project anchored by John and Andy Taylor—was already rumbling to life.

Despite all this success, critics in the 1980s could be downright nasty when writing about Duran Duran. Certain Rio reviews savaged Le Bon’s lyrics—The Guardian mused, not rhetorically, “Why do bands with no lyrical skill insist on printing their ghastly efforts on inside record sleeves?”—while Allentown, Pennsylvania’s The Morning Call newspaper wrote the album itself was “a pain in the butt to sit through.” A March 1983 Record Mirror cover story even bluntly describes Duran Duran’s music as “thoroughly competent and yet bereft of the soul, passion and wit that makes a great record.”

The band was fully aware that certain UK publications would never give them a chance, partly because anti-pop biases were ingrained in some corners of the British music press. But Duran Duran also rubbed some people the wrong way because of early interviews in which they disavowed politics, a marked departure from the socially earnest stances taken by their early 1980s peers. “There’s no politics in our music,” John Taylor told The New York Daily News in 1981. “We think it’s irresponsible to preach to young, impressionable people who, if you told them to go throw a brick at Parliament, would. Music should be entertaining.” To be fair, in a San Francisco Examiner profile from around this time, Le Bon praised UB40’s political lyrics and said about Duran Duran, “We don’t preach party politics, but we do preach personal politics, emotions and humanism. We want to get people thinking.”

In class-conscious England, Duran Duran’s middle-class upbringing also left them open to critique, especially as their popularity skyrocketed. And Rhodes theorizes that, early on, the London-based media “probably didn’t want to take us as seriously because we’d come out of Birmingham at that time,” although he adds, “As we started to put out records, it was the public that embraced our sound. And that was much more important to us, that we were connecting with real people.”

Around the world, these fans included teenage girls, a group whose musical tastes often tend to be demeaned and dismissed as frivolous. Journalist and author Lyndsey Parker—a long-time Duran Duran fan who says she used to write indignant letters to some of these dismissive critics on her Hello Kitty stationery—points out the misogyny inherent in the phenomenon where “an artist that has a largely female fan base gets criticized for that—the fact that because girls liked them, they were not considered as legit” as other bands. “If they had not gone that teen idol route—or hadn’t looked the way they did or hadn’t had the music videos that they did—I don’t think there would have ever been a time when they weren’t considered one of the, quote-unquote, serious bands of the New Wave era, like Echo & the Bunnymen, or the Smiths or New Order or Depeche Mode.”

Duran Duran’s class wasn’t necessarily a consideration in the United States; that they were British was much more of a relevant identity marker, which explains why they were associated with other UK bands such as Echo & the Bunnymen and the Smiths. (In contrast, this grouping wouldn’t necessarily happen in England due to class differences.) However, articles often mentioned that the band’s American fans were middle class, an intriguing detail inversion.

Unsurprisingly, many US critics viewed the group’s fan base with disdain. Duran Duran’s 1984 Rolling Stone cover story (“The Fab Five”) insinuates that the band’s young, female fans couldn’t also possibly like the Clash and Elvis Costello. A newspaper feature published not long after stresses that the Duran Duran phenomenon isn’t as big as Beatlemania—but then demeans a teen for not knowing the Rolling Stone cover text reference because she didn’t read the story, “just pasted the cover on her bedroom wall.”

These cynical aspersions overlook how important it is for teenagers to have a band of their own, music they can gravitate toward during a tough time in their lives. Duran Duran poured their own youthful hopes, dreams, and fantasies into their albums, especially Rio, and gave their fans that same optimism.

“These are guys from a very nice, suburban area of England. And yet they find themselves yearning for way more,” says Lori Majewski, who notes that Rio functions as a “passport” for these aspirations. “That’s the thing about it being so escapism—and then they pass it to us, and I want to escape. I want more than just Weehawken, New Jersey. I look across at New York City and say, ‘How can I get out of this? Oh, well, maybe I’ll be a music journalist and interview Duran Duran.’ David Bowie showed them the universe—the Starman showed Duran Duran the universe—and then Duran Duran did that with me.”

Parker too can connect her teenage Duran Duran fandom to the present day. “Because of the time and place that I was born—when MTV was at its heyday, when the teen magazines like Tiger Beat had friggin’ Duran Duran in them—it really set me on a path I’m still on now.” Back then, the band’s opinions served as guiding forces (“I listened to anything they said—I mean, I put lime marmalade on toast because I read that John Taylor liked lime marmalade”) and offered insights into intriguing music: Chic, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols, and Kraftwerk. “John Taylor would mention these [acts] in interviews, and I’d be like, ‘Okay, note to self—check those bands out,’” she says. “It opened up a world to me that was actually really cool.”

Today, John Taylor has the perspective to appreciate how Duran Duran “played this role in people’s lives”—and also connect this role back to the records that meant everything to him at age thirteen, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Aladdin Sane. “Those albums, and the way that Bowie telegraphed his psyche to his audience—I mean, I’d listen to his music in my dark bedroom,” he says. “You know, I’d be almost, like, tripping—I was so there with him. And we got to do that with Rio. We got to connect with a generation of people that had that kind of experience with that kind of record.”

“You feel the benefit of it every day for the rest of your life,” he continues. “Maybe one record a year comes along like that—that speaks to that age range of those young people that are shedding their skins, like they’re morphing into butterflies.” He laughs. “They need music that’s going to be the soundtrack to that experience. And that happened with this record to a lot of people aged between, I don’t know, 13 and 17.”

The bassist also has a sanguine take on the massive superstardom Duran Duran experienced. “It was a tremendously fun adventure for the five of us for the first few years,” he says. “We were there for each other in every way. And to be able to travel like that in a posse, and take our values with us, our sense of humor—it’s really an extraordinary way to experience fame. Fame can be quite damaging if there’s a lot of isolation involved with it, but when you share it . . . I mean, you’ve seen all these films with The Beatles dealing with it. And when you can deal with it together, you don’t take it quite so seriously, and it’s kind of fun.”

For him, what it all comes back to is the music. “As abstract as the idea of fame is—and the idea of fans screaming at you, and trying to get inside your car, and all of that really bizarre shit that happens to you when you’re in the eye of that kind of hurricane—when you’re playing, you’ve always got the music to go back to. Music becomes the anchor.”

Decades later, now that the Beatles-chaotic fame and attention has subsided, Duran Duran’s music is also what endures and grounds the band. Their songs continue to attract new fans, which is an impressive and even rare feat: every generation has their own pop and rock stars, and these artists don’t always sustain a career as trends or tastes change. But Duran Duran stay relevant thanks to a perma-cool vibe and youthful zeal, two things Rio embodies. The album conveys what it means to be young and starry-eyed, and embracing life’s vibrant moments: feeling awe-struck and humbled while visiting a new place; soaking up the elation of a debauched night out; experiencing the flushed-cheek blush of romance. While associated with a very specific era, Rio captures a timeless experience—figuring out who you are and what you want to be.

Notes

1 The other two artists were Jesse Rae and Michael Nesmith.

7

Rio’s Impact and Resonance

Rio’s success galvanized an already-percolating 1980s British Invasion. Duran Duran’s star rose in tandem with that of electro bands Human League and A Flock of Seagulls, soulful pop act Culture Club, and the band’s synth guru labelmate, Thomas Dolby. As the group dominated the American charts in 1983, more UK acts started making commercial waves: Tears for Fears, Eurythmics, Naked Eyes, and the Nick Rhodes discovery Kajagoogoo. Even fellow former New Romantics Spandau Ballet had a US hit with the debonair “True.”

In the following years, UK newcomers such as Wham!, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pet Shop Boys, and Dead or Alive would also find US pop success. An elite group of veteran bands that started off in small clubs alongside Duran Duran—The Cure, Depeche Mode, Psychedelic Furs, Echo & The Bunnymen—would amass large, enduring American fan bases. And the band’s soaring popularity even coincided with the resurgence of their idol, David Bowie, who experienced his biggest US success with the smash 1983 LP Let’s Dance.

Bowie’s refreshed look and sound illustrated how much Duran Duran’s essence lingered in the 1980s. “I hear songs all the time from, like, ‘83, ‘84, ‘85, and I go, ‘Holy shit, that is such a Le Bon-esque lyrical concept,’” John Taylor says with a laugh. Beyond the British Invasion, Rio’s sonic approach—blazing electric guitars blended with moody synthesizers—became the dominant template for mainstream 1980s rock. Bands such as INXS tapped into Duran Duran’s originality and took Rio’s blueprint to massive commercial heights with a harder-edged, funky sound.

But what was true then—and remains true now—is that nobody came close to replicating Duran Duran’s actual Rio sound. “When I hear things like ‘Hungry Like The Wolf,’ it doesn’t sound like anybody else,” says Roger Taylor. “When I hear that coming on the radio, it can only be Duran Duran.”

Sonically, the band evolved quite quickly after Rio. They embraced heavier grooves and more elaborate electro atmospheres, and found another kindred musical spirit in Nile Rodgers, who produced “The Wild Boys” and remixed Duran Duran’s first No. 1 US hit, “The Reflex.” The James Bond theme “A View To a Kill” also topped the American charts in 1985, the same year Duran Duran split off into two side projects, the swaggering Power Station and more experimental Arcadia. “We were our own artists,” says Andy Taylor. “We were the children of Bowie. It’s like, you do your own thing, and then you change it, and then you change it again.”

Duran Duran also very deliberately treated their existing catalog as an ever-evolving thing. Consider how often over the years Rio’s hits, especially “Hungry Like the Wolf,” have been rearranged. In 1987 concerts, the band’s take was much glammier. By 1993, “Hungry Like the Wolf” had assumed a completely different form. The version on the band’s MTV Unplugged episode had stately orchestral flourishes and ended like a rollicking Rolling Stones soul-blues jam, while the song’s arrangement during tours of this era had whiffs of cinematic Ennio Morricone twang. Two years later, during a rather loose MTV appearance, Duran Duran transformed “Hungry Like the Wolf” yet again, into a gloriously bratty punk number. And in 2012, the band worked with superstar DJ Steve Aoki on an EDM remix of the song.

Fittingly, the members of Duran Duran also consider their visual aesthetic ripe for deconstruction and commentary. The back cover of 1997’s Medazzaland, which features Patrick Nagel’s Rio cover art covered in scrawled text and doodles, is a canny statement on legacy. The artwork concept for 2015’s Paper Gods, meanwhile, involves colorful, pop art-styled iconography—including the lips from Nagel’s Rio cover woman, a chauffeur hat, and a pink phone that nods to the “Rio” video.

Yet other musicians also view Rio’s songs as malleable. These tracks have been reinterpreted in the styles of ska-punk, crooning jazz, indie-emo, hard rock, swooning indie-pop, and stoner metal. Tori Amos has covered “Rio” live, as has Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley, while Nirvana also did a discordant version of the song in 1993. A decade or so later, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl mentioned that version while onstage with his band Foo Fighters and loosely jammed on “Rio” again—despite protesting he didn’t actually know how to play any Duran Duran songs: “They’re too difficult!”

A playlist of just “Hungry Like the Wolf” covers would run hours and span genres. Rocker Courtney Love performed a searing version on Hole’s 1995 MTV Unplugged episode, while the metal bands Asking Alexandria and Korn teamed up for a raucous 2014 live version at the Alternative Press Music Awards. Five years later, two more unique covers surfaced: the UK power trio Muse unleashed a faithful synth-rock take, while members of Twiztid and Mindless Self Indulgence interpreted the song as a midnight-electro banger. The band Deftones—which once produced a line of merch based on the design of the “Is There Something I Should Know?” single—are also known for a churning, space-rock version of “The Chauffeur,” while Warpaint transformed the same song into antique, gothic dream-pop. And Duran Duran themselves have covered “The Chauffeur” live with Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and “Save A Prayer” with Eagles of Death Metal.

In pop culture, Rio also pops up everywhere. NASA played “Hold Back the Rain” in 2001 as a wake-up call to astronauts orbiting in space. Actor Bruce Campbell transformed “Hungry Like the Wolf” into a seductive piano-lounge song in an Old Spice ad, while Shrek 2’s karaoke scene hilariously played up the animal references in the lyrics. And a trailer for the Apex Legends Season 5—Fortune’s Favor video game features a dramatic, underworld-ready version of the song by the soundtrack production troupe Hidden Citizens—a stark contrast from the chipper show choir medley of “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Rio” heard on the TV show Glee.

And, in gener al, the list of artists calling Duran Duran an influence looks more like a Wikipedia page about popular music of the last thirty years: The Killers, My Chemical Romance, Linkin Park, No Doubt, MNDR, AFI, Moby, Blur, Beth Ditto, Scissor Sisters, and Arctic Monkeys. This list grows exponentially when including tribute albums: 1997’s The Duran Duran Tribute Album, 1999’s Australian tribute The Songs of Duran Duran UnDone, and 2014’s charity covers album Making Patterns Rhyme. El Ten Eleven’s Kristian Dunn even performed an album-length cover of Rio on bass.

All of these covers and homages illustrate that Duran Duran are finally earning long-overdue respect for their musicianship and songwriting. Even peers that have always known the band’s power see an evolution. “I’ve never seen a bad Duran Duran show, but man, the way they play now,” Nile Rodgers told me in 2016, before he and the modern lineup of Chic opened for Duran Duran in Detroit. “Before every show, after we come off, they have a practice room set up [backstage]. [It’s] next door to me. I think they probably plan it like that.” He laughed. “They sound so funky and so amazing, just jamming before the show. They never play anything that they’re actually going to do; they’re just making up jams, and they’re killing it. I get so jealous every night.”

That chemistry persists. In September 2019, Duran Duran sold out two consecutive nights at the Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. In a power move, the band started the second night’s show with “Hungry Like the Wolf”—although the night ended with the usual closer, “Rio,” a song Rhodes says is “always a joy” to play live because of the rapturous crowd reaction.

Duran Duran have come a long way since their Rum Runner days and the Rio era, both personally and professionally. Part of that is because the band’s lineup shifted through many configurations after the mid-1980s; although Andy Taylor rejoined the group for several years in the 2000s, the current core Duran Duran configuration is Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, and John and Roger Taylor. However, links to their younger selves persist. Rhodes still sees open-mindedness “in the spirit of the band,” while playback of a studio session with Mark Ronson in recent years made Roger Taylor realize how much Rio still informs his musical relationship with John Taylor. “We’re still playing the same way, really,” he says. “We learned so much in those early years that became the core of our identity as players.”

Yet there was nothing like Rio then—and there’s been nothing like Rio since. “Although we had all these various influences that we were pulling on, from Japan to Roxy [Music] to Chic to the Sex Pistols, when it was all combined, it created this force that was totally unique,” says Roger Taylor. “When you listen to that album, when I listen to it, it couldn’t be anybody else. It’s so Duran Duran, it’s ridiculous. And that’s why people love it so much.”

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and everyone else at Bloomsbury for their patience and support; also thanks to Samantha Bennett for her sharp insights and perspective on the manuscript.

Thanks to Sharon Cho and Adam Manson with Duran Duran’s management for their help, support and enthusiasm. Thanks to Andy Taylor, John Taylor, and Roger Taylor for their thoughtful and insightful reminiscences about Rio; special thanks to Nick Rhodes for being so generous with his time and patiently and thoroughly answering my detailed questions.

Thanks to Seven Webster and everyone at 7pm Management for connecting me to Andy Taylor. Thanks to Peter Buckleigh, Hugo Burnham, Doreen D’Agostino, Malcolm Garrett, Martha Quinn, Greg Renoff, Ray Tusken, and Brian Thomas for additional interview connections and/or clarifications.

Mike Duquette provided invaluable chart research and analysis that made getting to the finish line that much easier.

Matthew Chojnacki, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Alison Fensterstock, D. X. Ferris, Holly Gleason, Kate Izquierdo, Maura Johnston, Chris O’Leary, Amanda Pecsenye, Jason Pettigrew, and Caryn Rose were supportive and positive at times when I really needed it, and I am so appreciative.

Thanks to my family—mom, dad, and brother—for your unwavering support and patience. (And thanks for driving me to the Pop Trash tour in 2000, Mom!)

And, last but not least, eternal thanks to my ever-supportive husband Matt Wardlaw, who transcribed interviews, unearthed out-of-print research materials, and was the book’s first reader and fan. Although we didn’t meet at that 1997 Cleveland Duran Duran show, we’ve made up for lost time since.

Works Cited / Source Material

Interviews

Unless where noted, all quotes came from original interviews conducted by Annie Zaleski between November 2019 and August 2020 either via phone, email, Twitter DM, Skype, Zoom, or WhatsApp.

Chart Positions

References to US Billboard chart positions and FMQB logs are both drawn from publication archives at worldradiohistory.com, which were accessed throughout book research and writing.

Audio/Video

Casey Kasem’s American Top 40. (1983) [Radio program], Originally aired April 23, 1983; replayed on July 12, 2020, WMJI-FM, Cleveland, Ohio.

Classic Albums: Duran Duran, Rio. (2008) [Documentary], Dir. George Scott, UK, USA: Eagle Rock Entertainment.

Duran Duran. (1981), “Girls on Film” (edited), YouTube video, 3:24. https://youtu.be/KCjMZMxNr-0.

Duran Duran. (1981), “Girls on Film” (unedited), Internet Archive video, 6:25. https://archive.org/details/Duran_Duran_Girls_On_Film_SVCD.

Duran Duran. (1981), “Live at Hammersmith Odeon, London, December 17, 1981” [Radio Broadcast]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9NDNrn7B1k&t

Duran Duran. (1981), “My Own Way,” YouTube video, 3:39. https://youtu.be/QUrIDz6L5vc.

Duran Duran. (1981), “Planet Earth,” YouTube video, 3:59. https://youtu.be/8NF6Qa84mno.

Duran Duran. (1982), “Live at Clutch Cargo, Detroit, Michigan, July 9, 1982” [Audio Bootleg].

Duran Duran. (1982), “Hungry Like the Wolf,” YouTube video, 3:41. https://youtu.be/oJL-lCzEXgI.

Duran Duran. (1982), “‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ on Top of the Pops,” May 13, 1982, YouTube video, 3:31. Available online: https://youtu.be/mQLxz8Vp-YI.

Duran Duran. (1982), Rio, Harvest - ST-12211, 1982, LP, US.

Duran Duran. (1982), “Rio,” YouTube video, 5:04. https://youtu.be/nTizYn3-QN0.

“Duran Duran MTV New Year’s Eve – Live” (1982), MTV, December 31, 1982, YouTube video, 26:46. Available online: https://youtu.be/FK0dFgnT4gc.

Duran Duran. (1983) [Video Collection], Dirs. Ian Emes, Godley & Crème, Perry Haines, Russell Mulcahy, UK, USA: London, UK: Thorn EMI Video, VHS.

Duran Duran. (1983), “Save A Prayer,” YouTube video, 6:05. https://youtu.be/6Uxc9eFcZyM.

Duran Duran. (1983), “The Chauffeur,” YouTube video, 4:58. https://youtu.be/1B__8N5d_LA.

Duran Duran. (1984), “Live at Madison Square Garden, New York City, March 21, 1984,” [Radio Broadcast]. Available online: https://youtu.be/77I7ElIxVLQ

Duran Duran. (2010), Duran Duran, Deluxe Edition Reissue, EMI – EMCX 3372, streaming via Apple Music. Original album released in 1981.

Duran Duran. (2012), “‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ with Steve Aoki,” YouTube video, 4:31, https://youtu.be/Fci4WYQN2P8.

Duran Duran. (2015), Rio Deluxe Edition reissue, Parlophone – RP2 543662, compact disc. Album originally released in 1982.

Foo Fighters (2005). “Foo Fighters Jam to Duran Duran,” trevgreg2. Posted on March 19, 2010. YouTube video, 1:11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQxRRFAbwAA.

“Hungry Like the Wolf.” (1987), [TV program], Duran Duran performance on The Tube, April 24, 1987, UK, YouTube video, 4:19, https://youtu.be/34D2TdoH_Jg.

“Hungry Like the Wolf.” (1993), [TV program], Duran Duran performance on MTV Unplugged, November 17, 1993, U.S., YouTube video, 6:30, https://youtu.be/K87sBXWPyvY.

“Hungry Like the Wolf.” (1993), Duran Duran performance in Miami, Florida, November 20, 1993, U.S., YouTube video, 1:51:06, https://youtu.be/2o-8nT-zhec.

“Hungry Like the Wolf.” (1995) [TV program], Duran Duran performance on MTV’s Most Wanted, April 1995, UK, YouTube video, 3:06, https://youtu.be/VBMebg1er8Q.

MTV. (1982), “MTV: 6 Hours with J.J. Jackson - September 9th, 1982,” Internet Archive Video, 6:07:52. https://archive.org/details/1982.09.09_MTV_6_Hours_with_JJ_Jackson_September_9th_1982.

Queen. (1975), “Bohemian Rhapsody,” YouTube video, 5:59. https://youtu.be/fJ9rUzIMcZQ.

“Simon Le Bon & Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran) MTV Guest VJs 1983.” (1983), MTV, March 30, 1983. YouTube video, 9:03. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGFVXOLXzGI.

Taylor, J. “Duran Duran – ‘Rio’ Bass Tutorial with John Taylor,” Duran Duran. Posted on May 22, 2020. YouTube video, 7:34. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtcLKAGN-II.

VH1 Storytellers. (2000), [TV Program] VH1, September 23, 2000, USA. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S92agxdLKxQ&t. Accessed September 5, 2020.

Books

De Graaf, K. and Garrett, M. (1982), Duran Duran: Their Story, UK: Published by Proteus Books.

Denisoff, R. Serge. (1988), Inside MTV, New Brunswick, NJ: Published by Transaction Books.

Gaiman, N. (1984), Duran Duran, New York and London: Published by Proteus Books.

Shore, M. (1984), The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video, New York: Published by Quill.

Taylor, A. (2008), Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran, New York: Published by Grand Central Publishing.

Taylor, J. (2013), In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran, New York: Dutton Published by the Penguin Group.

Newspaper Articles/Magazines/Websites

“Abrams, Billboard Meets Signal Changes in AOR Programming” (1983), Billboard, February 5, 1983: 1.

Andy Earl . (n.d.) “Duran Duran Photos.” http://autonomy.digital/ae/work/duran-duran/. Accessed October 16, 2020.

Andy Hamilton . (n.d.), “Biography.” http://www.andyhamilton.net/biography/. Accessed October 16, 2020.

Angus, J. (1985), “Colin Thurston – Record Producer,” Home Studio Recording, February 1985. Available online: http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/colin-thurston/6306. Accessed August 7, 2020.

Arar, Y. (1981), “Duran Duran Isn’t Another of the English Fad Bands,” Associated Press, published in The Paducah Sun, October 25, 1981: E-6.

Arizona PBS. (2020), “Duran Duran Members Talk Memories, Inspiration,” Embedded YouTube video, “Duran Duran: Rio,” February 19, 2020. Available online: https://azpbs.org/2020/02/duran-duran-members-talk-memories-inspiration/. Accessed August 29, 2020.

Bessman, J. (1983), “First-Ever In-Store at Video Outlet Draws Thousands of Teenage Fans,” Cash Box, April 2, 1983: 12.

“Billboard’s Top Album Picks” (1982), Billboard, June 5, 1982: 62.

Birch, I. (1982), “Le Bon Viveur,” Smash Hits, April 1–14, 1982: 4–5. Available online: https://sites.google.com/site/smashhitsmagazineremembered6/home/1st---14th-april-1982. Accessed August 1, 2020.

Black, J. (2003), “The Greatest Songs Ever! Hungry Like the Wolf,” Blender, January–February 2003. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20101013160905/http://www.blender.com/guide/67126/greatest-songs-ever-hungry-like-wolf.html. Accessed August 3, 2020.

Campbell, M. (1982), “Duran Duran Tries Making Video Disc,” Associated Press, published in The Daily News-Journal (Murfreesboro, Tennessee), September 24, 1982: 16.

“The Capitol Market: This Month’s Releases Now in Stock,” (1982), Billboard ad, May 15, 1982: 12.

Cash Box. “Photo of Members of Duran Duran with Andy Warhol After a Video Screening.” October 31, 1981: 5.

Connelly, C. (1983), “In Review: Who Won, Who Lost,” Rolling Stone, February 17, 1983. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/1982-in-review-who-won-who-lost-69510/. Accessed August 5, 2020.

Darling, C. (1981), “Music Monitor,” Billboard, October 17, 1981: 40.

Denselow, R. (1982), “Review of Duran Duran, Rio,” The Guardian, May 28, 1982: 12.

Denver, J. (1982), “MTV’s Effect on CHR and Record Sales, Part Two,” Radio & Records, November 26, 1982: 20.

“Duran Duran Ad” (1983), Radio & Records, January 7, 1983: 11.

“Duran Duran Signing At VideoShack (1983),” WNBC, New York City, March 19, 1983. Posted on July 20, 2020, YouTube video, 1:51. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owew8tb2d0Q.

Duran Duran. “Duran Duran - RIO 35th Anniversary: An Oral History with Roger, Nick, John & Simon,” Duran Duran. Posted on May 10, 2017. YouTube video, 15:28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW-gdyJJBII.

Duran Duran (@duranduran). (2020), “John Taylor & Nick Rhodes Interview, Duran Duran Appreciation Day 2020,” Instagram Live video, August 10, 2020. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLGUOd7Ez3M. Accessed October 15, 2020.

Duran Duran. (n.d.), “Ask Katy – ‘Gordon Lightfoot’ Info.” Accessed September 5, 2020. http://www.duranduran.com/wordpress/index.php?s=gordon+lightfoot&cat=12.

Duran Duran. (n.d.), “Duran Duran Complete Tour List.” Accessed October 15, 2020. http://www.duranduran.com/wordpress/duran-duran-complete-tour-list/.

Discogs. (n.d.), “Colin Thurston.” Accessed August 7, 2020. https://www.discogs.com/artist/60619-Colin-Thurston.

Discogs. (n.d.), “Duran Duran - Rio.” Accessed August 21, 2020. https://www.discogs.com/Duran-Duran-Rio/master/79632.

Discogs. (n.d.), “UB40 – Signing Off.” Accessed July 28, 2020. https://www.discogs.com/UB40-Signing-Off/release/409773.

Foti, L., Morris, E., and Sippel J. (1982), “Survey Finds MTV Strongly Affecting Record Sales,” Billboard, September 11, 1982: 3, 60.

Malcolm Garrett . (n.d.), Pinterest, “Malcolm Garrett RDI.” Accessed October 15, 2020. https://www.pinterest.com/malcolmgarrett/_saved/.

Malcolm Garrett . (n.d.), Personal website. Accessed October 15, 2020. https://www.malcolmgarrett.com/.

Gelb, J. (1983), “Consultant Comparison: Rick Carroll and Lee Abrams,” Radio & Records, January 28, 1983: 28.

Goldstein, T. (1983), “Duran Duran: OH! You Pretty Things from Planet Earth,” Creem, January 1983. Duran Duran. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed August 2, 2020, from http://www.rocksbackpages.com.eresources.cuyahogalibrary.org/Library/Article/duran-duran-oh-you-pretty-things-from-planet-earth.

Gomez, B. (1982), “Music for Dance, Not Romance,” Cleveland Scene, August 5–11, 1982: 13.

Grein, P. (1982), “Long U.S. Road for ‘Tainted Love,’” Billboard, May 8, 1982: 10.

Hall, D. (1982), “Radio ‘82,” Billboard, December 25, 1982: TIA-8.

Henke, J. (1984), “Middle Class Heroes,” Rolling Stone, February 2, 1984. Available online: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/duran-duran-middle-class-heroes-64193/. Accessed August 5, 2020.

Hilburn, R. (1984), “Duran Duran ‘Insults’ Beatles Fans,” The Los Angeles Times, published in Asbury Park Press, March 18, 1984: G5.

Ian Emes . (n.d.), “Info.” https://www.ianemes.com/info. Accessed October 16, 2020.

“Innovations Spur Boom in VCR Sales” (1984), The New York Times, November 12, 1984: D1, D19.

Kibbutz Volunteer Club. (2018), “Simon Le Bon Speakers of His Kibbutz Volunteer Experience,” March 23, 2018, Facebook Video, 1:52. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=185800752144977.

Le Bon, S. (@SimonJCLeBON). “LCOTS: Colin Thurston Had Ordered 2 Enormous Trunks Full of Percussion Instruments, & I Spent Hours Trying Out All Sorts - Cabasas, Shakers, Washboards, Swanee Whistles etc. There Was also a Vibraphone & a Marimba Which I Play in the Middle of This Song#TimsTwitterListeningParty,” Twitter, May 27, 2020. https://twitter.com/SimonJCLeBON/status/1265742060100952065.

Le Bon, S. “@Tim_Burgess @duranduran #TimsTwitterListeningParty 45 between 6th and Broadway - It’s the Address of the Old Peppermint Lounge in NYC,” Twitter, May 27, 2020. https://twitter.com/SimonJCLeBON/status/1265736877870587905.

McCullaugh, J. (1979), “Chrysalis Scores Vidcassette Beat,” Billboard, October 27, 1979: 1; 16.

McCullaugh, J. (1981), “MTV Cable Spurs Disk Sales of Artists Aired,” Billboard, October 10, 1981: 1, 68.

“MTV Helps Sales, Dealers Told” (1982), Billboard , October 30, 1982: 27.

”MTV To Be In 4½-5 Mil Homes: Lack” (1981), Billboard, October 10, 1981: 68.

NASA. (2015), “Chronology of Wakeup Calls.” Accessed November 19, 2020: https://history.nasa.gov/wakeup%20calls.pdf.

“National Music Formats – Added This Week, MTV” (1982), Radio & Records, July 2, 1982: 34.

“National Music Formats – Added This Week, MTV” (1982), Radio & Records, September 24, 1982: 43.

“‘New Music’ Weekends For SuperStars” (1982), Billboard, August 14, 1982: 20.

Odell, M. (2003), “Fame Had Its Way With Us!” Blender, June–July 2003. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20070626185804/http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=316. Accessed August 29, 2020.

Official Charts - Home of the Official UK Top 40 Charts. (n.d.), “Duran Duran.” https://www.officialcharts.com/artist/19319/duran-duran/. Accessed October 15, 2020.

Okamoto, D. (1982), “Music TV Is Rock For Your Eyes,” Tampa Bay Tribune, August 22, 1982: 9–I.

Page, B. (1980), “‘We Want to Be the Band to Dance to When the Bomb Drops…’: Big-Bang Glam from Brum’s Duran Duran,” Sounds, December 13, 1980: 17–18.

Page, B. (1982), “Duran Duran: From Brags to Riches,” Sounds, May 29, 1982. Duran Duran. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed August 2, 2020, from http://www.rocksbackpages.com.eresources.cuyahogalibrary.org/Library/Article/duran-duran-from-brags-to-riches.

Peters, Brian M. (2016), “Androgyny, Masculinities and the Re-gendered Aesthetics of the New Wave: Duran Duran and the Second British Invasion,” Queer Studies in Media & Pop Culture, 1(3): 297–313. Gale Academic OneFile. Accessed October 13, 2020.

Price, S. (2015), “Duran Duran on Being Snubbed by Dylan, Riding Rutting Elephants in Sri Lanka and Wearing Pink Trousers,” The Guardian, September 10, 2015. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/10/duran-duran-snubbed-dylan-simon-le-bon-paper-gods. Accessed August 26, 2020.

Queenpedia. (n.d.), “Bohemian Rhapsody - Promotional Video.” http://www.queenpedia.com/index.php?title=Bohemian_Rhapsody_-_Promotional_Video. Accessed July 26, 2020.

Reid, J. (1983), “Duran Duran,” Record Mirror, March, 26, 1983: 27–30.

Rhodes, N. (2008), “Flashback: November 1982,” The Guardian, November 8, 2008. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/09/duran-duran-rio-video. Accessed August 27, 2020.

Roehl, R. and Varian, H. (2001), “Circulating Libraries and Video Rental Stores,” First Monday, 6 (5), May 7, 2001. Available online: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/854/763. Accessed October 16, 2020.

Righi, L. (1982), “Review of Duran Duran, Rio,” The Morning Call, September 4, 1982: 67.

Robins, W. (1983), “It’s Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Turn on Tube,” Newsday, published in Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 13, 1983: 1-D, 10–D.

“Scoop” (2013), People, November 18, 2013. Available online: https://people.com/archive/scoop-vol-80-no-21/. Accessed September 13, 2020.

Snyder, M. (1981), “Romantic Elegance With Duran Duran,” San Francisco Examiner, October 4, 1981: 42–43.

Somach, D. (1982), “The Source” News Report, FMQB, May 28, 1982: 38.

Spears, S. (2006), “Fame Again for Former Duran Duran Singer,” Stuck in the ‘80s (blog), March 16, 2006. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20080924195307/http://blogs.tampabay.com/80s/2006/03/fame_again_for_.html. Accessed July 19, 2020.

Taylor, J. (n.d.), “JT’s Vault: Tailoring Duran Duran.” http://www.duranduran.com/jtvault/JTDDfashion1.html. Accessed September 13, 2020.

Taylor, J. (n.d.), “JT’s Vault: Where It All Started.” http://www.duranduran.com/jtvault/JTscrapbook1.1.html. Accessed July 19, 2020.

“The Band? That’s a Name?” (1981), New York Daily News, October 9, 1981: 128.

The Paul McCartney Project. Last modified May 12, 2020. “Tug of War Sessions at AIR Studios, London.” https://www.the-paulmccartney-project.com/session/tug-of-war-session-at-air-studios-london/. Accessed July 27, 2020.

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Video interview with Peter Blachley. (1984), Reel CAZ-55, 02:19:11-02:23:43. https://www.historicfilms.com/search/?q=%22duran+duran%22#p1t56063i0o5288&video=online.

Ward, E. (1983), “MTV Showcases U.S. Record Industry,” Austin-American Statesman, Time Out section, January 22, 1983: 25.

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Young, G. (2015), “Listen to Duran Duran’s First Demo Tape and See Inside Band’s Recording Studio in Kings Heath,” BirminghamLive, June 16, 2015. Available online: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/music-nightlife-news/duran-duran-kings-heath-studio-9464956. Accessed July 27, 2020.

Index

Abrams, Lee here–here, here–here

AC/DC here, here

AIR Studios here, here–here, here

Ambrose, Dave here–here, here, here, here, here

Arcadia here

Arena here, here

Beatlemania here, here, see also Beatles, The

Beatles, The here, here, here–here

Duran Duran compared to here, here, here

fame experienced by here, here

Berrow, Mike here, here, here, here–here, here

Berrow, Paul here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here

Blachley, Peter here

Blackwood, Nina here–here

Blauel, Renate here

Blondie here, here, here

Bowie, David here, here

influence on band members here, here

influence on John Taylor here–here

1983 success here–here

1972 Top of the Pops appearance here, here

rhythm section influencing Duran Duran here, here

Boy George/Culture Club here, here, here, here, here

Buckleigh, Peter here–here, here

Buggles, The here, here

Bush, Kate here–here, here

“Careless Memories” here, here

Carnival EP here–here, here

Carvello, Joey here–here

“The Chauffeur”

filming music video for here–here (see also Emes, Ian)

video release here

writing & recording here

Cherokee Studios here

Chic here, here

“Good Times” live jam here

influence on Duran Duran here, here, here, here, here

influence on John Taylor here

Christopher, Jimmy here, see also KNAC

D’Agostino, Doreen here–here, here, here–here, see also Warhol, Andy

Dexy’s Midnight Runners here, here

Devo here

Dolby, Thomas here, here, here

Duran Duran (band)

1983 appearance at Video Shack here–here

ambition & confidence of here, here, here–here, here–here, here

artists influenced by here–here

Birmingham’s influence on here–here

challenges to US success for here–here, here

covers of here–here

critiques of here, here–here

evolving sound of here–here

filming music videos here–here, here–here

initial US response to here–here

inspiration to teenage fans here–here

intense work ethic of here–here

John Taylor vision for here, here

lineup formation here–here

music video budgets for here–here

rhythm section inspirations here, here

signing to EMI here (see also Ambrose, Dave)

songwriting approach here–here

working with Colin Thurston here, here, here, here, here–here

Duran Duran (LP)

belated US chart success of here

initial US response to here, here

writing & recording here

Duran Duran (video album)

band support for here

chart success here

origins here–here

special features of here–here

touring clubs here

Earl, Andy here–here, here

Edwards, Bernard here

Emes, Ian here–here

Fleetwood Mac here

A Flock of Seagulls here, here, here, here

Gabriel, Peter here

Garfield, Bruce here, here

Garrett, Malcolm

designing Duran Duran single sleeves here

designing “Planet Earth” sleeve here

designing Rio sleeve here–here

design philosophy of here, here

insights into Duran Duran here

“Girls on Film”

commissioning extended video for here

live jam with Chic members here

music video popularity in dance clubs here–here

music video popularity on MTV here–here

1980 AIR Studios version here

risqué nature of music video here, here–here, here

Go-Go’s, The here, here

Goodman, Mark here, here–here

Gorman, John here–here, here–here, see also WMMS

Grammy Awards here, here–here

Haines, Perry here

Halper, Donna here–here

Hamilton, Andy here–here, here, see also “Rio”

“Hold Back the Rain” here, here, here, here, here, here

Human League here, here, here, here, here

“Hungry Like the Wolf”

on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 99, here

covers of here

David Kershenbaum remix of here–here

early radio supporters of here–here

filming music video for here–here

music video on MTV here–here

“Night Version” remix of here–here

pop crossover success here–here, here–here

on rock radio charts here, here, here–here, here

success in UK & Australia here–here

on Top of the Pops here

Video here release of here

writing and recording here–here, here

Hunter, Alan here–here, here–here

Hunter, Ian here

Iron Maiden here, here–here

“Is There Something I Should Know?” here, here, here

Jackson, Joe here–here

Jackson, Michael here

Japan (band) here, here, here, here, here

Journey here

Joy Division here, here

Kaplan, Suzie here, here, here, here

Kempin, Geoff here–here, here–here, here, here–here

Kershenbaum, David

remixing “Hungry Like the Wolf” here–here

remixing other Rio songs here, here

Kid Leo here, here–here

KNAC here, here, see also Christopher, Jimmy

KROQ here, here, here, see also Street, Dusty

Lamb, Bob here–here

“Last Chance on the Stairway” here, here–here, here, here

Le Bon, Simon

appearing on MTV here–here

approach to lyrics here, here–here, here–here, here

on David Kershenbaum remixes here–here

enthusiasm toward music video here–here

filming music videos in Sri Lanka here–here

insights into band chemistry here

joins band here

musical contributions to Rio here, here

recording “The Chauffeur” with Rhodes here

response to “Girls on Film” video here

vocal style here, here–here

Lightfoot, Gordon

influence on Le Bon here

“Like an Angel” here

“Lonely In Your Nightmare” here, here, here, here, here, here

Longobardo, Vinnie here–here

M here

McCartney, Paul here, here–here, here

McNamara, Denis here, see also WLIR

McWilliams, Buck here, see also WIOT

Madison Square Garden here, here

Madonna here

Majewski, Lori here–here, here

Manchester Square Rio demos here–here

Meyer, Steve here, here–here

Ming Burgess, Sheila here

MTV

ability to affect album sales here–here

connection to dance music movement here

Duran Duran appearances on here–here (see also Warhol, Andy)

Duran Duran support for here, here–here

Duran Duran videos in rotation on here–here, here–here

first day video selection on here–here

growth as a channel here, here

impact on Duran Duran album sales here, here–here, here–here

influence on radio here–here

support for UK artists on here–here

Mulcahy, Russell

association with “The Chauffeur” video here–here, here

career impact of music videos on here

directing “Rio” video here–here

filming music videos in Sri Lanka here–here

first meeting with Duran Duran here

“My Own Way” here, here

Kershenbaum remix here

Manchester Square demo version here–here

music video here

original single version here, here, here

recording new version at AIR Studios here

Nagel, Patrick here–here, here, see also Garrett, Malcolm; Rio

Nesmith, Michael here, here

“New Religion” here–here, here, here–here, here, here

New Romantics here–here, here–here, here

“Night Boat” here, here

Numan, Gary here, here

Parker, Lyndsey here–here

Peppermint Lounge here, here

Perry, Rupert here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here

Pink Floyd here, here, here, here

“Planet Earth”, see also Garrett, Malcolm

chart success here, here

following up on success of here, here, here

music video shoot for here

sleeve design for here

Power Station, The here, here

Price, Antony here, here

Prince here, here

Queen here, here

“Bohemian Rhapsody” video here

Rachlin, Chip here–here, here

Ravid, Bruce here, here, here, here

“The Reflex” here

Rhodes, Nick

adding sonic flourishes to Rio here, here–here

on David Kershenbaum remixes here, here

on Duran Duran’s confidence here–here, here

on Duran Duran’s open-mindedness here, here

enthusiasm for studio gear here–here, here

filming music videos in Sri Lanka here–here

forming Duran Duran here

on “Hungry Like the Wolf” here–here, here

on Le Bon’s vocals here–here

mixing Rio here–here

recording “The Chauffeur” with Le Bon here

on recording with Bob Lamb here

relationship with MTV here, here

on Rio’s album art here–here, here

on Rio’s songwriting here–here, here, here

on “Save a Prayer” here–here

songwriting on synthesizers here, here, here

Rio

album photo & sleeve design here–here

aspirational vibe of here–here

demos at Manchester Square here–here

demos in Birmingham here–here

galvanizing the 1980s British Invasion here

LP reissues here, here

origins of album name here–here

presence on US Billboard charts here, here, here, here–here, here–here

recording at AIR Studios here–here

relationship to debut LP here–here, here

UK chart success here

“Rio”, see also Hamilton, Andy

chart success here–here

filming music video here–here

music video on MTV here

recording song here–here

saxophone solo here–here

RockAmerica here, see also Steinberg, Ed

Rodgers, Nile here, here

Ronson, Mark here

Ronson, Mick here, here

Roxy Music

influence on Duran Duran here, here, here, here, here

release of Avalon here–here

US chart presence here

Rum Runner, The here, here–here, here–here

Ruspoli, Reema here

“Save a Prayer”

chart success here, here

meaning of here

music video here, here–here, here, here

writing of here, here

Seger, Bob here, here

Seven & The Ragged Tiger here, here, here

Sex Pistols, The here, here, here, here, here, here

Simmons electronic drums here–here

Sing Blue Silver Tour here, here

Soft Cell here

Spandau Ballet here–here, here

Sparrow, Gale here, here–here, here, here

Steinberg, Ed here, here–here, see also RockAmerica

Street, Dusty here, see also KROQ

Sykes, John here–here, here, here, here

Taylor, Andy

AC/DC influence on here, here

on Duran Duran being “the children of Bowie” here

joins band here

live performances here, here

on MTV’s impact on culture here

musical versatility & experience of here, here

on perceptions of Duran Duran here–here, here

on Rio here, here

rock influence on band here

songwriting insights from here, here–here

writing “Hungry Like the Wolf” here–here

writing “Save a Prayer” here

Taylor, John

on Andy Taylor’s musical experience here

on barriers to breaking America here, here

David Bowie influence on here–here

on experiencing fame here

filming “Rio” video here

forming Duran Duran here

on honing the rhythm section here–here

insights into Rio lyrics & themes here–here

musical inspirations here

on recording Rio here–here, here, here

on recording with Bob Lamb here–here

on Rio’s songwriting here, here, here–here

on “Save a Prayer” here

vision for band here, here

Taylor, Roger

on Andy Taylor’s musical experience here, here

on Duran Duran’s sonic singularity here, here

on experiencing fame here–here

on Le Bon’s lyrics here

musical inspirations here, here

on “New Religion” here

on recording Rio here–here, here

on recording with Bob Lamb here–here

on Rio’s enduring impact here

on success here, here

on technology and drumming here–here

Thompson, Tony here, here

Thorn EMI here, here, here

Thurston, Colin

producing Duran Duran here

producing Rio here–here

working with band in studio here, here, here

Top of the Pops here, here, here, see also Bowie, David; Roxy Music

Tusken, Ray here, here

Tutko, George here, see also Kershenbaum, David

UB40 here, here, here

Van Halen here

Video Shack meet-and-greet here–here, see also “Hungry Like the Wolf”

“A View To a Kill” here

Warhol, Andy here, here–here, see also MTV

Warr, Rob here, here

“The Wild Boys” here

WIOT here, see also McWilliams, Buck

WLIR here, here, see also McNamara, Denis

WMMS here, here, here–here, here–here, see also Gorman, John; Kid Leo

Also Available in the Series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis

4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli

8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry

9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo

13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore

15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy

17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz

19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi

23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks

24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken

27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes

28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven

29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper

30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy

31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario

32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green

34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal

37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt

47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef

51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich

52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay

54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw

56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle

57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris

58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs

59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron

60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen

61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl

62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay

64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier

65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton

66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards

67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal

68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson

69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois

71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson

75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent

76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin

77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks

78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer

80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost

81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell

82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield

83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman

84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen

85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton

86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson

88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer

89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum

91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J. H. Dettmar

92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor

93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez

95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden

100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast

101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner

102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford

104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann

107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker

108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra

109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland

110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr.

111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod

112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole

113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork

114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts

115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic

116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas

117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi

118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney

120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero

122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker

123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein

124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch

125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly

127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay

128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross

130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony

131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman

132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett

133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel

134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson

135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry

136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson

137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans

138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin

139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn

140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland

141. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach by Roshanak Kheshti

142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner

143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler

144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

145. Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt

146. Elton John’s Blue Moves by Matthew Restall

147. Various Artists’ I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett

148. Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier

149. Suicide’s Suicide by Andi Coulter

150. Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson

151. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley

152. 24 Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld

153. Carole King’s Tapestry by Loren Glass

154. Pearl Jam’s Vs. by Clint Brownlee

155. Roxy Music’s Avalon by Simon Morrison

156. Duran Duran’s Rio by Annie Zaleski

157. Donna Summer’s Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in the United States of America 2021

Copyright © Annie Zaleski, 2021

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p.143 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zaleski, Annie, author.

Title: Duran Duran’s Rio / Annie Zaleski.

Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: 33 1/3; 170 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In the ‘80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade’s music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act’s breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound-influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy Music’s art-rock-the full-length sold millions and spawned smashes such as “Hungry Like the Wolf” and the title track. However, Rio wasn’t a success everywhere at first; in fact, the LP had to be buffed-up with remixes and reissued before it found an audience in America. The album was further buoyed by colorful music videos, which established Duran Duran as leaders of an MTV-driven second British Invasion, and the group’s cutting-edge visual aesthetic. Via extensive new interviews with band members and other figures who helped Rio succeed, this book explores how and why Rio became a landmark pop-rock album, and examines how the LP was both a musical inspiration-and a reflection of a musical, cultural, and technology zeitgeist”–Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021000588 (print) | LCCN 2021000589 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501355189 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355196 (epub) | ISBN 9781501355202 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Duran Duran (Musical group). Rio. | Rock music–1981-1990–History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML421.D8 Z35 2021 (print) | LCC ML421.D8 (ebook) |DDC 782.42166092/2–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000588

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000589

ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5518-9

ePDF: 978-1-5013-5520-2

eBook: 978-1-5013-5519-6

Series: 33⅓

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Table of Contents

Introduction

1 The Road to Rio

2 Writing and Recording Rio

3 Why Rio Matters

4 Duran Duran, Video Pioneers

5 Winning Over US Radio

6 1983: The Year of Duran Duran

7 Rio’s Impact and Resonance

Acknowledgments

Works Cited / Source Material

Index

1

The Road to Rio

2

Writing and Recording Rio

3

Why Rio Matters

4

Duran Duran, Video Pioneers

5

6

7

8

9

10

Winning Over US Radio

1983: The Year of Duran Duran

Rio’s Impact and Resonance

here