Duran Duran Were Never as Shallow as You Thought

The easiest thing to do with Duran Duran is dismiss them. The videos were glossy. The hair was enormous. The suits were expensive. Simon Le Bon once capsized a yacht during a transatlantic race and survived to make more records about it. Everything about the band's surface presentation in the early 1980s invited the kind of critical eye-roll that has followed them for forty years.

The problem with the dismissal is that it requires ignoring the music. And the music, examined honestly, is considerably better than the band's reputation suggests.

Birmingham and the Birth of Something

Duran Duran formed in Birmingham, England in 1978, taking their name from a character in the science fiction film Barbarella. The founding lineup coalesced around keyboardist Nick Rhodes and bassist John Taylor, who shared an interest in combining the electronic textures of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder with the energy of punk and the melodic ambition of David Bowie. They were not trying to make art rock. They were trying to make music you could dance to that also had something going on underneath.

By the time Simon Le Bon joined as vocalist in 1980 and the classic five-piece lineup solidified with guitarist Andy Taylor and drummer Roger Taylor — the two Taylors being unrelated — the band had developed a sound that did not quite exist before them. The rhythm section of John Taylor and Roger Taylor was the engine. John Taylor in particular was playing bass with an aggression and melodic intelligence that went largely unacknowledged because the band's image overwhelmed everything else. His lines on "Hungry Like the Wolf," "Rio," and "The Chauffeur" are the reason those songs move the way they do.

The Gear

Nick Rhodes was the band's sonic architect, and his keyboard choices defined the Duran Duran sound as much as any other element. His primary instrument through the classic period was the Roland Jupiter-8, a polyphonic analog synthesizer capable of the lush, wide pads that gave songs like "Save a Prayer" and "The Chauffeur" their atmospheric depth. He also used the Roland Juno-60 for its chorus-heavy string sounds, and the Oberheim OB-Xa for leads and brass stabs. Rhodes was not a technically trained pianist in the classical sense — he approached the keyboard as a texture painter, building sonic environments rather than playing melodies.

Andy Taylor's guitar work has been similarly undervalued. He was a hard rock guitarist who had absorbed influences from Mott the Hoople and the Who, and his job in Duran Duran was to provide the rock energy that stopped the band from floating off entirely into synthesizer pop. He played a Gibson Flying V through a Marshall amplifier for most of the early records, and the crunch he brought to "Girls on Film" and "Union of the Snake" is what kept those songs from sounding like pure club music. The tension between his rock instincts and Rhodes's electronic palette is what gave the classic Duran Duran sound its particular electricity.

John Taylor played a variety of basses through the period — most notably a Music Man StingRay, which has the punchy midrange presence that cuts through dense electronic production — and ran it through an Ampeg SVT for the low-end authority that made the rhythm section physical.

What the Critics Missed

Duran Duran were written off almost immediately by the serious rock press as a teen-idol act, a judgment that stuck because the evidence for it was visible everywhere — the magazine covers, the screaming crowds, the videos filmed on yachts in Antigua. What the serious rock press missed was the compositional intelligence operating underneath all of it.

"The Chauffeur," the closing track on Rio, is not a pop song. It is a six-minute atmospheric piece built on a repeated chord sequence, with no conventional chorus, a string arrangement that sits just below the surface, and a vocal melody from Le Bon that treats the lyric as texture rather than narrative. It has more in common with Talk Talk's later work than with anything on MTV's heavy rotation. Rhodes's synth work anticipates ambient music developments that wouldn't emerge as a recognized genre for another decade.

"Ordinary World," released in 1993 after the band had been written off a second time, is one of the genuinely great ballads of the decade — a song about grief and disorientation that works because Le Bon's voice, which had always been better than critics allowed, found exactly the right emotional register for it. It went to number three in the United States and number six in the UK, which for a band presumed finished was remarkable.

The Influence Problem

Part of what makes Duran Duran's legacy complicated is that their influence is everywhere but rarely attributed. The Killers cite them directly. Mark Ronson has discussed their production approach at length. Charli XCX's understanding of how to make pop music feel urgent and physical owes something to what John Taylor was doing in the rhythm section forty years ago. CHVRCHES, Haim, and a dozen other acts working in the territory between pop and electronic music are building on foundations that Duran Duran helped lay.

None of these artists are typically described as sounding like Duran Duran because the name still carries the baggage of the image. The music is the influence. The association is the liability.

What They Actually Were

Duran Duran were a band that combined a rock rhythm section with synthesizer production and a vocalist who could write a genuine melody, before that combination was a recognized template. They did it at arena scale, with videos that defined what music television looked like, in suits that cost more than most people's rent.

The suits are not the point. The music is the point. Rio still sounds like nothing else. "The Chauffeur" is still one of the stranger and more beautiful things to emerge from the early 1980s. John Taylor is still one of the most underrated bass players of his generation.

They were never as shallow as you thought. The hair was just very distracting.

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