A Duranie's History

"Back in the Day," as folks of an older generation like to say, if one were to dare to step outside of one's closeted Duranmania, one would no doubt be regaled with taunts like "What a bunch of fags!" (an epithet that would lead to heart failure and consequent therapy in today's cult of political correctness) or simply, "They suck!" It was never easy being a fan of the 80's pop band Duran Duran.

It was far easier to stereotype a fan of the Fab Five than to actually be one. Obviously, only girls could like them. And if any boys dared admitting to liking them, they were surely "fags" themselves. Which was, again, something to make fun of and terrorize one over back in the 1980's. And the girls, well... Surely they didn't have boyfriends. And likely they were fat. Or scrawny with no tits. Oh, and ugly. And spazzy. Screechy, spazzy, unattractive girls with no social life, who spent all of their hours writing fan letters, dreaming up their fantasy wedding to one of the boys, and crying every time they heard the strains of "Save a Prayer" through their Walkman headphones or stereo speakers. Oh, and a good cross-section of them had to have taken a photo of themselves (some thirty years before the collective viral narcissism of the Millennial Selfie Generation) against the backdrop of their bedroom walls, of which every square inch was plastered in posters and pages from magazines like Star, Smash Hits, and Tiger Beat; extra points if she was a John Taylor fan and was sporting a fedora, or a Panama hat like the one Simon donned during the "Hungry Like the Wolf" video. Duranies were also foremost authorities on the cinematic (big and small screen) career of director Russell Mulcahy, the fashions of designer Anthony Price, and the quintessentially Seventies/Eighties Playboy neo-art deco illustrations of Patrick Nagel. And of course a Duranie would rent the bizarre sci-fi sex-kitten cult classic (and embarrassment to Hanoi Jane) Barbarella, if only to encounter the band's namesake firsthand, the villainous Durand Durand, in a deliciously evil portrayal by the late Milo O'Shea, rivaled only by his deliciously evil eyebrows.

These are gross generalizations, but I really think that's what the general public believed about us. Like all stereotypes, there are perhaps small grains of truth to them. But I believe them to be more exceptions to the rule. Growing up in Bucks County, PA, northeast of Philly and southwest of New Jersey, the fave raves of the day tended to be Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Bruce Springsteen, and burgeoning hip-hop and R&B acts that bordered on pop. And of course the chart-topping heavies like Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. Duran Duran, for all of their contributions to that new medium on the horizon, seemed to get pigeonholed for their appearances rather than lauded for their talents. 

It's more than thirty years after I somehow contracted this incurable affliction, but I can now proudly claim that I am a Duranie-- then, now, and forever. I think it's something more to do with being in my mid-Forties now, and I just don't give a shit what anyone thinks of me. I'm also tired of the current culture that delights in erasing and re-writing history. In my opinion, one should embrace the good, the bad, and the embarrassing, because if you alter one dyed-and-damaged hair of it, your present would simply not be, period. That's one of the more freeing lessons that Life deals you with the coming of age and a modicum of wisdom. 
I honestly don't know how it all happened. But it had a good deal to do with the times in which we lived.

MTV came on the scene on rather unsteady legs in August 1981. Most people didn't know what it was, much less why it was. Up until that time, if you wanted to hear music, you'd put on an album, an eight-track, or a cassette tape, or you went to see a live show. Why would you want to see your rock heroes lip-syncing with these weird, bright backdrops, and strange computer-generated images? But, there they were, the first handful of music videos in constant heavy rotation, until other groups got on the bandwagon, as it were.
MTV became the single-most important and far-reaching marketing tool to transform our cultural landscape, the likes of which had not been witnessed since the advent of the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, rock and roll-- or to put it in Millennial terms, since the Internet. It finally came to Cablevision, which served the greater Bucks Co. area, around 1982-3, and it was a MAJOR event. I don't think MTV's creators had any idea of just how revolutionary this ambitious yet ramshackle little cable station would become, in terms of changing the music industry forever, of creating a product that would market both music and fashion to the demographic of ages 12 to 34. It might have limped for a year after its inception in 1981, but when what I like to call the MTV Trifecta-- Michael Jackson, Madonna and Duran Duran-- came on the scene with innovative, charismatic and downright theatrical videos, the entire game changed. Where were you when the nearly fourteen-minute "Thriller" video premiered? Do you remember Madonna dry-humping the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards in a wedding dress? And do you recall seeing those three boys from Birmingham, one boy from Newcastle and one boy from London for the first time as they were sailing on that spiffy yacht in the blue-green waters of Antigua while chasing the elusive body-painted siren named "Rio?" Of course you do. It was a rite of passage, a flashpoint in an 80's teen memory. Video was pure magic, pure sex, pure fashion. Just an extension of pure rock n'roll fantasy.

I always rather thought she was winking at Simon's hiney in those white linen pants.
"And when she shines, she really shows you all she can..."

I remember hearing Duran Duran long before ever seeing them. I even remember people in school referring to them as "fags" before ever watching a video. They were all over WCAU-FM, a Top 40 station out of Philadelphia that I listened to in junior high and part of high school. Between 1982 and 1983, on any given day you could tune in to hear "Rio," "Hungry Like the Wolf," or "Is There Something I Should Know?" right alongside "Borderline" or "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." The airwaves were also rife with hits by Soft Cell, the Go-Go's, Asia, Journey, Loverboy, Eurythmics, David Bowie (in his fifth or sixth reincarnation since 1969), Human League, Culture Club, even 60's and 70's acts like the Rolling Stones, Styx, Donna Summer, The Tubes, The Police, Kenny Loggins and Elton John were still dominating the airwaves, now peddling their wares to a younger crowd through the medium of video. I found Duran Duran's tunes were catchy and fun to listen to. But the video revolution changed the entire game for me, right in mid-hormonal flux.

*RAWR*

Their videos were so much more visually interesting than their contemporaries-- "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Rio," in particular. And they did wear an awful lot of makeup. But so did that guy Boy George, and I thought he was as darling as hell. They also had the best haircuts. And dye jobs. And the best clothes... and...

Ladies, please, if you keep screaming like this,
you'll only miss out on my wondrous lyrics... 

Soon, it would be all over for me. I was slain. I was done for. And I was a willing victim. When the single "The Reflex" hit radio and MTV in early 1984, I was broadsided and smitten, particularly by the latter video offering. I think it was the first time that Simon Le Bon and John Taylor  were literally in my face, captured in a staged "live" performance (in Toronto, if I'm not mistaken) set to the studio track of the song. And that's all it took to win me over once and for all. Simon with that spiky blonde 'do, those otherworldly sleepy baby blues, crooning and sweating and hopping about the stage in those tight black trousers; John in that now-fairly ridiculous Yohji Yamamoto get-up, brown eyes peering from underneath those softly peroxided bangs, and those leather pants, ohmiGOD, wielding that bass like it was his woman. It was more than a done deal for me at that point. No turning back. 

Most boys who came of age in the 1980's can trace their sexual awakenings to the pool scene with Phoebe Cates in Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or else to Jabba the Hutt's palace when Princess Leia wore that metallic bra/slave-girl outfit in Return of the Jedi. I myself had been "boy crazy" since I was five years old. But these Duran boys... this was something else, entirely. I was pulled from shore straight into their waters, much like Simon being yanked from the Rio boat by the end of that blue phone cord, hook, line and sinker. 

At some point that same year, I was at the grocery store with my mother, which oddly enough featured an aisle devoted to vinyl LP's, and there it was, their latest release: Seven and the Ragged Tiger. The cover art was simply glorious, depicting a tea-stained map grid littered with mysterious, almost alchemical, symbols alongside rivers and mountains; the front sported a band portrait, with all of them standing around and looking entirely too sexy, swaths of tigerskin peeking through the painted clouds that dotted the map. I parted with some allowance money to meet the approximately $7 price tag, and could not wait to race home and up to my bedroom to unwrap the 33-1/3 r.p.m. masterpiece that was going to change my life forever.

I only knew three songs on the album: "Union of the Snake" and "New Moon on Monday," which had been popular on the radio the year before, and "The Reflex," which was enjoying heavy play on both radio and MTV at that time. But I didn't care. Once I slit open the plastic that sealed the album cover and pulled out the record sleeve, I was stunned to discover all of the lyrics neatly typed on its glossy surface.

I put the album on my turntable, then lay on my bedroom carpet to pore over the words as the music played. My brain changed in ways that I can't rightly describe to this day.
Like with anything else that ever entered my life and left an indelible mark on my soul, I had to learn everything there was to know about said subject. So nearly every cent of my allowance and odd jobs went into the purchase of teen magazines, posters, and books about the band. I had long coveted Duran Duran: The Book of Words, an interesting history of the group featuring Simon's explanations for several of his lyrics, including rare photographs of hand-scrawled poetry from his pre-Duran days. The day I finally brought it home from the mall heralded a new level of obsession. The importance of owning this book was second only to scoring a copy of Duran Duran by Neil Gaiman (who would go on to be known the world over for his Sandman graphic novel series as well as his other works of fiction, and his playing lyrical Muse to Tori Amos); the pages are now falling out, but it is still one of my treasures. Then there was the repetitive rental of a videotaped documentary called Sing Blue Silver, a behind-the-scenes look at their 1983-84 world tour, the very pinnacle of their collective success. World domination had come a year earlier than their original flippant prediction.

All of the Duran 101 Super Easy Trivia was child's play. I knew their birthdays, their birthplaces, their musical influences. I knew that all three Taylors-- John, Andy and Roger-- were not related. I knew John's first name was really Nigel, and Nick's last name was really Bates. I knew the fabled story of how, in 1980, Simon had answered a newspaper advert the band had placed in search of a vocalist, and went on an audition at the coaxing of his ex-girlfriend, a barmaid at the Rum Runner club on Broad Street named Fiona Kemp; how he'd worn sunglasses and pink leopard print trousers while carrying a binder of his lyrics, on the cover of which he had scrawled the name RovOstrov; how as soon as the five of them started banging about on their instruments, and Simon began to sing the lyrics to "Sound of Thunder," they all looked at one another and realized that yes, this was indeed it-- the search was over... As alluded to earlier, they decided upon world domination within five years, and that is exactly what they would have, only in four.

My bedroom walls were no longer adorned with pictures of Michael J. Fox, Jason Bateman, Ricky Schroder, collie puppies, unicorns, John Stamos, The Outsiders, Journey or Van Halen. As a matter of fact, a much-beloved two page "centerfold" poster of John Stamos was flipped over to reveal a promo portrait of DD from 1983, and was the very first of their magazine pix to adorn my walls. Within a few months, I had constructed a room-sized shrine to the Fab Five, with certain sections dedicated to 1981, 1982, and so forth. I was the curator of my own Duran museum of curiosities.

Had to wear it backwards for maximum effect. 
Before the first application of Sun-In  * Photo © 1984

I was given the 1983 re-issue of their first album for Christmas that year, and later I purchased Rio on vinyl (for some reason, having their music on vinyl was extremely important; I didn't want to buy cassettes. Instead, I made cassette copies of the albums and played them on my Walkman or in my parents' cars-- when I wasn't taping music off the radio or the television-- who doesn't remember doing that?!), and I fell even more deeply in love with the band's spirit. I think to this day, Rio is my favorite album that they have ever recorded. The bass-lines are particularly stunning-- I hear them apart from the rest of the music-- and I marvel at the fact that John was on the verge of turning 22 when they were recorded, having made the switch to bass from guitar only 2 or 3 years earlier. The lyrics are, again, pure poetry; pure Simon.
The album is tight and lush at the same time. The groundbreaking videos, produced by director Russell Mulcahy, captivated the world and set the band well above, beyond and apart from MTV's other artists.

Far-off exotic locales like Sri Lanka and Montserrat became part of the Duranie atlas lexicon, as these were the places where the bulk of the videos from the Rio album were filmed. Everyone knew the stories of Andy contracting malaria after an elephant took a dump on him, and how the five of them stood in what appeared to be solemn reverence before a Buddhist temple during the "Save a Prayer" video, only to beat a hasty retreat off-camera as soon as "cut" was called, the soles of their tender feet burning from having to stand on the sun-soaked stones...

In addition to renting Sing Blue Silver (to the point that I probably could have purchased the videotape itself), I rented Duran Duran, a collection of their first eleven videos, including the naughty "Girls on Film" and the provocative "The Chauffeur," as well as the long-form video for "The Night Boat." This grandiose and sinister little mini-movie filmed in Antigua gave the boys a chance to flex their acting muscles, complete with goopy oatmeal-caked zombies and my first exposure to the "Queen Mab" speech from Romeo and Juliet, a bombastic soliloquy given by Simon long before I had ever taken a course in Shakespeare. I swooned each time I hit rewind, and learned the monologue by heart before long. I somehow cleverly rigged two VCRs together-- the Betamax to the VHS recorder-- and made copies of both for myself until they disintegrated after too much play. 

I bought their fourth LP Arena, a collection of live recordings from their 1984 world tour, which featured one new studio track, "The Wild Boys." The strange video did not disappoint, featuring images of Simon tied to a raggedy windmill, his head dragged through a pool of water during each rotation, while John Taylor was strapped to the hood of a car, forced to watch projected scenes on a video screen depicting his earlier years. Something in my teen brain snapped, because seeing JT in such a vulnerable and borderline masochistic position kind of set my adolescent id on fire.

What better fuel for creativity, no? In leather pants, no less. Woof.

I had been writing since the age of four. I'd really never had an "influence" for my musings and literary wanderings, outside of the fairy tales I'd read, or the stories I would dream up out of wishful thinking. After writing stories for nearly a decade, winning little creative writing awards here and there and earning high marks in my English classes, I had briefly tread into the territory of poetry the year before, only I hadn't realized it was poetry that I was writing, because it didn't rhyme. At the time, I didn't know poetry didn't have to rhyme; I knew nothing of free verse. I hadn't known of the words of Simon John Charles Le Bon until I started reading the lyrics on the albums I was now listening to. They were magic. They were marvelous. They were non-linear. On paper, they occasionally didn't make sense right away, at first glance. Coupled with the music, and that voice... they conjured strange images in my still-green, untapped brain. I suppose the moment could be compared to those kids in the 60's when they heard the Beatles' White Album, or those in the 70's who first listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon through the miracle of stereophonic headphones. Only I wasn't even remotely high on pot, shrooms, or acid. I was literally high on the music I was hearing, coupled with the words that I was reading. Of course it didn't help that my father constantly complained about all of the incessant whining, comparable to a "funeral dirge," because that's apparently what Simon's voice sounded like to him. Little did he know that I'd fall in love with The Smiths and The Cure during my college years. Talk about a funeral dirge...

Not long after that, I started scribbling like mad, eventually compiling my first forays into poetry into a red Mead spiral-bound notebook. Inside the cover, I had scrawled the following:

Lyrics, Poems, Words & Excerpts
by Heather Lynn Gibson

compiled of notes from 1983-1984 &

actual orginals recorded in this book

from 1986-1987

dedicated to

Simon John Charles LeBon

of

Duran Duran & Arcadia fame

Thank you for bringing so much joy & meaning into my life 

at times when nothing else in the entire world could.

Oh, brother. What was I doing, practicing for future "A Note From the Author" pages in books I thought I'd be publishing in the decades to come? It read like a damned epitaph. Who did I think I was, Emily Dickinson? Edgar Allan Poe? (This was nearly a decade before I ever laid eyes on said authors' works, or delved into music of a more "gothic" nature.) It was all too much. But in that moment, it was anything but too much. It was simply not even close to being enough. Ah, the double-edged sword of being a moody, sensitive teenager given to fits of creativity. 

Among the endless reams describing mythological beasts, unrequited love, crushes gone bad, odes to the Poet Laureate of my heart (yes, gag, I know, shut up, little girl), there are a few bits that still survive within the now-struggling synapses of my brain, like this crumb from a poem I apparently penned on January 15 and 16 of 1986:  

Images of dragontwine
Stretch along a lonely wire
Woven between two hearts
Whose souls are about to break

Well, it was a start.

The very definition of "good" art is when the artist makes its audience feel or react to said art. A connection, a relation, an emotion. Contemporary music-- at least, up to the point of my generation, at any rate-- works not only with sound but with words to bring about a particular feeling or conjure particular imagery. The double-whammy of the music so readily embracing the words made for a potent cocktail when it came to listening to Duran Duran-- at least it did for me. I felt so much of what I was hearing.

You've built your refuge
Turns you captive all the same

Because you're lonely in your nightmare

Let me in

And it's barren in your garden

Let me in

Because there's heat beneath your winter

Let me in... 

-- "Lonely In Your Nightmare," from the Rio LP, © 1982

***

Lady Ice slips into her soul
Lady Ice leaves a house so cold
Lady Ice did you know
That the world was lonely too
Drifting snows
Searching plains and high
Turning stones as she looks
For the heart somebody stole...
Lady's eyes slip away
To the part she plays in school
She knows of roles and hideaways
Suppose she knows but turns away
She knows where to find
A true heart for Lady Ice...
Lady Ice, step outside your soul
Lady Ice do you know
That the world is frightened too...

-- "Lady Ice," from Arcadia's So Red the Rose LP, © 1985

***

How does it feel

When everyone surrounds you? 

How do you deal? 

Do crowds just make you feel lonely? 

What do you say

When people come and try to pin you down?

Acquaintances smile

But that's no understanding

How after awhile

You keep falling off the same mountain

Try to explain it

But nothing really gets them that high... 

-- "A Matter of Feeling," from the Notorious LP, © 1986

In the year that followed the release of Arena, the Fab Five seemed to splinter off into two factions. Simon, Nick and Roger went off to work on the dark-and-artsy project Arcadia and record an album (with the help of guest stars Sting, Grace Jones, David Gilmour and Herbie Hancock) called So Red the Rose which resulted in a few hit singles. Conversely, Andy and John got their rocks off-- literally and figuratively-- with their funk/rock n'roll project The Power Station (taking their name from the studio in which they were recording), which featured the smooth blue-eyed soul vocals of Robert Palmer and Chic's Tony Thompson on drums, rounded out by stellar Chic alums Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers at the production helm, turning out an album with a couple of chart hits as well. Later that year, John and Andy were featured in a guest spot on one of the hottest TV shows at the time, Miami Vice, playing-- what else-- rock stars, and performing one of The Power Station's hits, the cover of T. Rex's "Get It On (Bang a Gong)." It just didn't get more over-the-top 80's than that.

The future of Duran Duran as a band seemed to hang in the balance, but whenever anyone was asked during interviews if these side projects signified the Beginning of the End, they all had clever ways of evading the question, but assuring whomever held the microphone that they were indeed working on new Duran material.

I spent the entire morning, afternoon and evening of Saturday, July 13, 1985 in my parents' living room, parked in front of the television with a stack of videotapes to record the global phenomenon that was Live Aid. Little did I know that Duran Duran would not perform until after the sun had gone down. Still, they were at Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium, just a half-hour from my house in suburbia. Practically in my back yard...

It was a fairly horrible performance, by most accounts. 

The bum note-- and apparent zipper malfunction--
seen and heard round the world by millions. 1985

They sang their latest single, "A View to a Kill," the theme song to the new James Bond film of the same name, which was crawling its way up the charts. While it was so good to see all five of them together again, it was obvious that they had not played together as a band in over a year. Simon infamously hit a bum note heard round the world, and it was just embarrassing. He was looking a little chunky, as was John, and Andy just looked high as shit. Nick pouted in purple (lips coordinating with jacket) while nestled behind his keyboards, and Roger was as anonymous as ever behind his drum kit.

Despite these potentially threatening truisms that loomed large, like any good Duranie, I denied that they could ever split up. The world wouldn't be the same, and therefore, it could never happen. They would overcome the negative press. They would prove wrong the naysayers who waited in the wings with poison-tipped darts, daring them to fall on their faces. The boys had always managed to throw their wit and talent at the paparazzi to keep them guessing and derail their attacks, and surely they would do so again.

Little did we the fans know that the boys had barely spoken to one another during the Paris video shoot for "A View to a Kill," and were not exactly chummy during the Live Aid fiasco. It was the beginning of the end. 

Anything and everything British was deemed superior at this point in my somewhat obsessive state-- I suppose it would be akin to Beatlemania that occurred in 1963-64. I would watch episodes of the British soap opera EastEnders broadcast Sunday nights on PBS, and even sent away for a free booklet that served as an EastEnders glossary of Cockney phrases and rhyming slang. The totally mad comedy show The Young Ones made a splash on American shores via MTV, and even though three-quarters of the time I had no idea what was going on, I was hooked. Monty Python Sunday nights on PBS were happening as well. The following year, I watched the documentary The Story of English and expanded my fascination with the evolution of the English language, in all of its countless accents and dialects. Ah, the blossoming of Anglophilia...

I suppose I should admit at this point that I indeed did own a Panama hat similar to those hats John and Simon both wore on occasion between 1982-83. And I often daydreamed about slowdancing with either of them as "Lonely in Your Nightmare" (my then-favorite track from the Rio album) played. I had no boyfriend (the track record of awful blind dates and near-misses was epic, and would continue to be for years), and I indeed felt quite ugly as I had begun to put on weight and fight the seemingly unwinnable fight against cystic acne that ravaged my face and body. So the stereotype I mentioned earlier, as stereotypes often are, smacked slightly of the truth. I had indeed posed in front of my Duranified bedroom walls on more than one occasion to take a photo. I also had a purple half-shirt made at one of those custom t-shirt transfer shops with the boys on the front, and the word "DURANIMAL" in white fuzzy iron-on letters on the back. I still have it in a drawer somewhere-- it is approximately the size of a postage stamp when compared to my now 40-something year-old, majorly-expanded body. I marvel at the fact that it ever fit me at all. 

I met my one and only true Duranie friend, Marialice, at a mutual friend's birthday party, on the very eve of Simon Le Bon's 28th birthday, October 27, 1985 (how could that not be fate?). We bonded over this very fact, and we were soon inseparable, as no one else seemed able (or willing) to comprehend our undying devotion to this most magnificent band of gorgeous and talented individuals. 

But Marialice was a truly goofy, totally mad fan, whereas my own goofiness and borderline madness was kept carefully under wraps most of the time. She once stole three or four pads of blank ballots from a clothing store at the mall during a promotional contest in which one could theoretically win a pair of tickets to a concert of your choice (three guesses who we would kill to see?), and I begrudgingly grabbed more than a stack or two of them myself. (Needless to say, we won nothing. Duran Duran didn't even tour that year.) 

This was the exact photo, except
with an autograph... sigh. 

Then there was the time when I posed as Mari's British pen pal ("Alison Bailey") who had flown across the pond to spend a week with her in the States. She introduced me to her cute 17 year-old neighbor (I think his name was Dave), and I put on the accent and the charm in ways I simply never could with boys as my true self. To my amazement, he seemed both intrigued and interested. He invited us into his apartment and we hung out for about an hour, chatting about politics, sports, even the Royal Family ("Well, they're just figureheads after all, aren't they..."). I had so much source material to work with, since I'd amassed a few Brit and Scottish pen pals by this point. It was around this moment that I think Mari was more than a little miffed, what with my getting the lion's share of this guy's attention, so I turned it all around again. I pretended to suddenly remember something, then dug deep into the cavernous recesses of my classically-oversized 80's purse, only to pull out an autographed photo of Robert Palmer (yes, I actually had one, which I'd received in the mail after sending him a fan letter-- sadly, it has since been lost during one of the more than ten family relocations and college moves I've made since then) and hand it to Mari, claiming to have run into him at Heathrow and then make off with his signature before catching my flight, since I knew she dug him. This Dave kid's jaw nearly dropped on the kitchen floor. I mean, how much more convincing could we have made this ruse? We didn't miss a trick.

My conscience got the better of me, however, and two minutes after Mari and I'd said our goodbyes to him, I felt the need to come clean about my utterly charlatan behavior. Dave's face wore the pitiful expression of extreme disappointment and embarrassment, and I'd never see him again after that day. 

These were both relatively harmless incidents, and paled in comparison to future endeavors. Mari actually called New York City Information several times, trying to be put through to Renee Simonsen's phone (she was the supermodel girlfriend of John Taylor at the time). According to my friend, she was actually put through when she made up some incredible lie about "Renee's uncle Roger" being in hospital, and recounted how a man with a British accent (presumably John) answered the phone, and said, in a puzzled whisper, "Roger..?" perhaps thinking of his bandmate Roger Taylor... I was so pissed at her for making such a breach in the Duranie code, I think I refused to talk to her for three days. You simply didn't harass them, or mess with their personal lives. That was a bridge I'd never, ever cross, no matter how much I adored them. It was all about respect, and I took that so very seriously. It's kind of laughable now.

My fandom was evolving at a slow and methodical pace. If Simon Le Bon had taught me nothing else, it was that words could be thrown on a page much like acrylics or oils to a canvas; you could literally paint with them. Swirl 'em around, and see what sticks. Try what combinations make sense. And even if they don't make sense right away, they could with time-- let them marinate as you ruminate... And who cares if they make sense, anyhow-- what exactly is "making sense," anyway? Maybe someone would read my words and conjure images in their own brain, much as I did when I heard Simon's lyrics. It was my first headlong dive into poetic experimentation, many years before discovering the dark lyrics and poetry of The Doors' Jim Morrison-- whom I later learned was an early influence on Simon's own work. 

By now I was switching on and off between free verse and the rhyming form of lyrics. I didn't have the music in my head necessarily while writing them, but I was continuously filling notebooks with plenty of angsty and artsy up-chuckings. I remember taking one of my tatty notebooks to school one day, and in the middle of my 9th grade English class, I passed it to my friend Linda. She in turn shared it with her friend Nicole who was sitting at the desk in front of her. I was initially mortified, not intending these pages for just anyone's eyes, until Nicole came up to me to return the notebook. "These are incredible," she said. "They sound like they could be Duran Duran lyrics." I nearly died. What better compliment could any soul have paid me at that very moment? None. Absolutely none. 

I was interested in the musical influences of DD's youth, with David Bowie topping the list. Bowie was enjoying his third or fourth chameleon-like resurrection as a pop star in the early 80's with the release of his Let's Dance album, but I wasn't a huge fan. My friend Linda, however, was, and she shared a copy of her Changesonebowie "best-of" cassette tape, and that opened another new world to me (she was less than impressed when I shared DD's 1981 b-side cover of the Bowie/Lennon collaboration "Fame;" I believe her exact words were "Ewwww, it's DISCO!").

I picked up a vinyl copy of the 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and it was soon spinning on my turntable during the long hours I was spending locked in my bedroom. I had long-since outgrown my childhood desire to be a cartoonist or an animator, and took to drawing portraits of rock stars in my art class sketchbooks, poring over the pages of Rolling Stone and SPIN, as well as studying the models in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vanity Fair, and any other jet-setting, name-dropping magazine I could get my hands on. I was soon recognizing leather designs by Claude Montana and the polka dots of Carolina Herrera (as well as a young upstart designer named Marc Jacobs) without needing to read their names. My charcoal sketches of the models sat alongside colored pencil drawings of David Bowie, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. My many art class projects included an acrylic painting of the Rio album cover and a colored paper abstract of John Taylor playing his bass.

I listened to their music everywhere. I listened to it while sketching, writing, or just dreaming while staring at the curling smoke at the end of an incense stick. I listened to it while perched on the bow of my parents' boat, or hanging on to a safety bar at the rear, no doubt pretending behind closed eyes and cool shades that I was in the "Rio" video as the sea spray kicked up and the wind blew back my sun-streaked (or perhaps Sun-In streaked) hair. Wherever I went, Duran Duran were sure to go. 

I think the reason they were so important to me far surpassed image or beauty, and went deeper than longing for the unattainable, infectious joie de vivre they inspired. They were often the only thing on this earth that could make me happy.

Let's just say that I was not a happy teenager. I suppose one would be hard-pressed to capture, identify and release such a mythic creature back into the wild, because the fabled happy teenager pretty much doesn't exist, and a generation-and-a-half has not brought us any closer to finding such a rarity. It was an understatement to say that I was pretty miserable. I was blessed to have an intact family unit, but all I did was fight with them. I was equally-blessed to have numerous friends and many acquaintances, but I fought them all just as frequently. I was highly sensitive, increasingly paranoid and anxious, incredibly unhappy inside my body, beyond disappointed with the face in my mirror, and felt trapped inside my own skin 24/7. The only thing to ever lighten my mood or make me want to face another day was the music. I had moments where I truly no longer wished to live; there were more than one or two occasions when I felt that going to bed and simply not waking up the next morning would be preferable to simply being me for another day. But the music washed away all of that pain and provided a backdrop to my creative spirit, further enabling me to paint and draw and write, thus exorcising any demons of self-loathing, if only temporarily in the moment. The teen years are never really a total cakewalk for anyone, but hormones can be a horrid thing for some kids. I must have had the equivalent of 12 teenage girls' in my system. 

The Happy Couple, 1985

1985 was a banner year for Simon (despite the horrid Live Aid performance); he married his model girlfriend Yasmin Parvaneh (breaking millions of fangirls' hearts around the globe, inciting hate mail-- again, something I found astoundingly disturbing). Prior to their brief civil service wedding, he'd nearly drowned when the sailboat he was on during a lead-up to the Whitbread Round the World Race capsized and trapped him along with some of the crew members underwater until they were rescued just in the nick of time. The following year, he recounted this nearly-tragic tale during a television special entitled Disney's Living Seas, after which he recited the haunting John Masefield poem "Sea-Fever." To this day, it is one of my favorite poems. It just sounded so grand coming out of his mouth.

Puffy John, circa 1986. Lithe
or large, made no difference
to me, in my ignorant youth. 

1986 brought a single from the much-talked-about semi-erotic Adrian Lyne film 9 1/2 Weeks starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, in the form of a song called "I Do What I Do," featuring none other than John Taylor-- on lead vocals. The close of the video showed him outside the NYC nightspot the Odeon, and two years later I stood outside the very same spot while commuting to work with my father, and had him get a photo of me in front of the neon sign. JT was looking a little rough these days, face a little puffier and eyes a little pinker than I'd been used to seeing, and of course my sixteen year-old brain wouldn't dare to acknowledge that perhaps he was dabbling in some unmentionable excesses at that time. Little did I know, as I would learn years later, that he was getting stoned quite regularly, and cocaine as well as alcohol was starting to become a real problem. His relationship with Renee Simonsen was often strained and at some points cruel, and it would only last another two years or so before she finally left him.

Pretty, pretty, pretty...

1986 also brought a new Duran Duran album, Notorious, this time only featuring Simon, Nick and John. While it was a definite departure from earlier works, each of their albums always had a different flavor. They announced another roster of tour dates around the world. This was finally my chance to see them up close in the same space. My heart almost couldn't take the thought of it.



For my sixteenth birthday, I got a real electric guitar, gorgeous and shiny black, complete with whammy bar, pickup selector, volume and tone controls, etc.. I promptly named it "Andy." It was built by an older man who was selling them at a craft fair somewhere north of Philly. It looked something like a Fender, and the name on the head was Palmer. I picked up two Mel Bay teach-yourself books, and quickly learned about five chords. But it was not like playing the piano I'd been used to for the past eight years. I grew frustrated very quickly, and soon after, I chucked it into my bedroom wall, which needed to be patched (right after it had been recently coated with new paint...). Strings were not my thing, no matter how much I felt the music in my soul. I still have the guitar to this day. Perhaps one day I'll seriously learn how to play it.

Around this time, Andy Taylor recorded a solo album called Thunder (after poaching the rhythm section of the L.A. new wave band Missing Persons). I bought the album on cassette, as well as the hit single 45 r.p.m. "Take It Easy," featured on the American Anthem soundtrack. That same year, Andy did a guest guitar spot on Go Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle's solo song, "Mad About You,"  and was featured prominently during the MTV New Year's Rockin' Eve to ring in 1987. I sat up all night to watch him, and was blown away by his performance, though he was likely wasted at the time. I had never seen him sweat so much. But he sounded fantastic. He got to truly "rock out" without the constraints of the DD image or the demands of the publicity machine. I could appreciate the boys in their individual elements, because they were all equally talented. 

My ticket. Yes, they cost under $20 in those days, kids. 

Marialice and I saw Duran Duran perform on June 22, 1987 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The opening act was a band called Erasure. I'd never heard of them at the time, so I could not wait for them to promptly exit-- the sooner, the better. At some point between Erasure's leaving and Duran Duran taking the stage, Mari and I jumped a barrier and wound up in a section of general admission seats that was a little bit closer to the stage, next to these two guys who were drinking (so obviously they were older than we were) and kind of flirting with us (which again was odd, because I didn't think any straight guys liked Duran Duran). 

This is how close we got. Needless to say, I was dying.
Photo © 1987

Fifteen songs later, we left the arena drained, freaking out, and kind of laugh-sobbing the whole way home, in between fits of recalling little bits of the show that had to be related again. And again. And again. Like that time I was certain Simon had seen me fist-pumping the air and he raised his arm in much the same fashion, looking *exactly* in my direction, and crooning "Oooooh, MUSSSCLE..!" And then there was that time when he was on all fours and humping the stage (lucky stage) during a saucy rendition of Arcadia's "Election Day"... And how gorgeous did JOHN look, having lost all of that party bloat, he was lean and mean and sexy as hell... I'm sure my parents were both deaf (or wishing they were) by the time we got home safe to suburbia. 

I was silently bummed that we'd never quite figured out how to get backstage, and even more bummed that I had given my rolled-up letter to Simon to a girl who had presents for the band and claimed to be going backstage to see them... who knows where that letter ever wound up. All I ever wanted to do was thank them for what they had given me... In that sense, I was a tad more mature than the impression I often gave.















Later that summer, my friend Laura's family and mine spent two weeks at a rental house near Ocean City, Maryland. I'd been going down there for as long as I could remember. Days were spent at Assateague Island among the wild ponies who roamed the beaches and dunes in search of salty-sweet marsh grass, late afternoons and evenings passed at dinner followed by strolls along the boardwalk in OC, riding the rides, playing skee-ball and arcade games, nearly getting high from chemical fumes in the sweaty, stuffy t-shirt shops, munching on those enormous buckets of french fries from Thrasher's that NO ONE could ever finish, scoping on boys... and once in a blue moon eating those sinfully disgusting, over-the-top gluttonous build-your-own ice cream sundaes at Zipp's.
 
That particular summer, Laura and I noticed a proliferation of British twenty-somethings working in the restaurants and boardwalk kiosks. One night we went to Harrison's Harbor Watch for dinner with our parents and Laura's little brother, and were amusing ourselves by singing bits of Duran Duran songs (I had recently converted Laura to semi-Duranie status). Our waitress opened up her mouth to introduce herself as Rachel and to take our drink orders, when our jaws hit the table. Another British accent. As soon as she left, we were chittering back and forth about this amazing occurrence. In my unparalleled brilliance (ah, youth), I declared that she couldn't possibly be from Birmingham, as that particular accent-- the Brummie accent-- was quite distinct. When she came back to hand out glasses of ice water, one of us (it might have been Laura's father, since I was far too chickenshit) asked Rachel where she was from. "Redditch," she replied (after which I nearly choked and croaked on my steaming plate of crow), "a little suburb of Birmingham, England" (Yes, YES, ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod, YESSSSSSSS) "where those Duran Duran chaps are from-- my sister went to school with one of them," and off she went, gliding away with a twinkle in her eye; she must have overheard Laura and I humming and singing Duran tunes earlier. Bring on the shrieks. I'm fairly sure my parents would have liked to have disappeared in a puff of smoke at this point in the ridiculousness, and what was to come. 

When Rachel returned to our table, I was nearly foaming at the mouth. I couldn't believe this was happening. Here was someone who GREW UP in the same place as my beloved John Taylor, whose very own SISTER went to school with him in Birmingham... "So, who here's the Duran fan? Who's your favorite?" Laura tried to pipe up with something about Simon, but clearly I had seniority and shut her up immediately. "Me..." I croaked, raising my hand slightly, and followed with "John Taylor..." I think that was all I managed to spit out.

"Well, my sister attended the Abbey, and he was called Nigel back then. She said he was a real drip!" laughed Rachel, and she disappeared again with our dinner orders. It would be accurate to say that I was in near catatonia at this point.

Postcard from kind waitress Rachel Mooney, postmarked from Redditch,

Birmingham. A coveted Duranie artifact and evidence of conversation. 

By the end of the meal, I managed to convince Rachel to send me a postcard from her hometown when she returned in the fall, since I was such a huge fan of the band and was so utterly obsessed with the city where they got their start. Any normal human being would have probably smiled and nodded and politely shredded my mailing address in the privacy of the restaurant kitchen, but Rachel seemed to have a warm, endearing soul. A month or so later, I received a post card from her, again detailing that John had attended the Abbey with her sister, and how he was a "real drip!" She said that I seemed to know more about her hometown than she did, and was amazed I'd even heard of the Rum Runner, adding that it had been closed down due to drugs. I still have the post card to this day, and treasure it as my two degrees of separation from the band-- particularly my darling John. Two miserable attempts at blind dates and well-intended set-ups had left me somewhat jaded on the relationship front over the past couple of years, but I was ever the Romantic when it came to dreaming.

After amassing a collection of original 12" and 45 r.p.m. singles and their obscure b-sides, and after absorbing all of their history and quotes, I felt like I was surely their number one fan. You couldn't be a fan if you didn't know all those obscure b-sides. Late Bar, Khanada, Faster Than Light, Fame, the live version of Cockey Rebel's Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile) (What Duranie could hold back the tears and inner shrieks for that one, hm?), Secret Oktober...  For a year or so I had been dabbling in creating what I would later learn was called fan fiction-- crafting various fictional scenarios featuring members of the band-- and the magnum opus was entitled A Travel Thru Time, a time travel story (as the title would denote-- I had always been a sucker for time travel) complete with love triangle between myself, Simon and John, set against the backdrop of 1980 Birmingham, just as the band members have come together after Simon's audition. I would share pages of this monstrous joke of a literary attempt with my closest of friends in between class periods at school, during study hall, and on the bus. They would often return the pages with the admonition "Give me the parts where you really get to the GOOD STUFF!" ("Good stuff" of course being code for SEX), and I again managed to convert a few more of them to semi-fan status. One of my friends paid me the ultimate compliment-- levels higher than the one I'd received two years earlier in English class-- when she told me that one of the more emotional scenes actually left her in real, honest-to-God tears. At the time, I really didn't grasp the enormity of such an accolade, but today, it almost feels as though it happened to someone else, and that perhaps I had imagined her words of praise.

My musical horizons were a little bit wider now. I was no longer just locking myself in my room and listening to DD, Bowie and the Beatles, but I was also revisiting my childhood favorite Blondie and Deborah Harry's solo music, as well as discovering Cyndi Lauper's pre-She's So Unusual band, Blue Angel. I was also listening to the Sex Pistols (much to my parents' horror) and tuning in to college radio stations WPRB (Princeton) and WTSR (then Trenton State College) to hear hardcore punk acts like The Meat Men and interviews with boys I'd met in high school who had their own new wave band, Vermeer. I almost dated a juvenile delinquent who called me Nancy (and whom I called Sid-- rather a harbinger of doom, don't you think?) who was expelled and shipped off to rehab the very same day I had made up my mind to say yes to his asking if I'd go out with him (true story). And just after receiving a cassette copy of Siouxsie and the Banshees' Tinderbox album for my 18th birthday from my fellow Sex Pistols and only Monty Python-loving friend Melissa (she also had a mad crush on Simon and completely understood my love of the band), I heard "Just Like Heaven" for the first time when it was performed during a cheesy Battle of the Bands assembly in the gym, and headed straight out to the mall to pick up The Cure's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. 

The coming year brought about many more changes. I left for college in the fall of 1988, and within one semester, I had become acquainted with the full music catalogue of the Smiths, the Cure, Depeche Mode, REM-- all bands I'd heard of in high school (the other Art Major kids had them all emblazoned on their t-shirts and notebooks) but had never ventured beyond my comfort zone to try out-- and other obscure UK bands like the Housemartins and the Mighty Lemon Drops, as well as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, a new Icelandic band called the Sugarcubes, a wacky group from Philly called The Dead Milkmen, and all the cool new stuff that was being played on a new program called "PostModern MTV," which later evolved into "120 Minutes" hosted by Dave Kendall, a deejay at the infamous Limelight club in NYC. 

Duran Duran had released a follow-up to Notorious that same fall, entitled Big Thing. It had a couple of decent songs on it, but overall... I wasn't really impressed. I had my new college friend Judy play "Do You Believe in Shame?" on her radio show for me periodically, but I was swept up by a different wave of bands by now, and a little too fascinated with Robert Smith's kohl-ringed eyes and fright-wig spider-nest hair and Morrissey's plaintive moans and bitchy declarations to be bothered much with what Duran Duran were doing these days. Between that and learning to drink vodka straight from the bottle, it left very little time for my boys. 


I picked up their "greatest hits" album Decade in 1989 (on CD, no more vinyl albums for me, not even for the Durans...), but after that we sort of parted ways, for better or for worse, for the next several years. I ignored their Liberty album altogether in 1990, as I was in over my head with the Sisters of Mercy, Peter Murphy, Nine Inch Nails, Gene Loves Jezebel, and the inexplicable dive into Guns n' Roses and Poison. And Crosby, Stills and Nash. And the Indigo Girls. And The Doors... Had I known how in over their heads the boys were with personality rifts and drugs, perhaps I might have been more upset...

Through my friend Judy (after she had graduated and returned home to New Jersey), I had made the acquaintance of a young man, and embarked on a pen friendship with him for a couple of years, exchanging stories and observations. One of the first things we had in common was an appreciation of early Duran Duran. I nearly died when I learned he had been in a Duran Duran cover band in high school. And he had a rather John-ish look about him-- tall, rain-thin, floofy hair, occasionally wore glasses like the "drip" Nigel did back in his teen years...  Despite the briefest and sweetest of interludes, and the other relationships that would come and go in the decades to follow, he will always be the One Who Got Away. (But that's another story for another time...)

The next Duran album I picked up was in 1993, the self-titled album the fans called "The Wedding Album" (due to the album cover's depiction of the band members' parents in sepia-toned wedding photos) and again, save for the singles "Ordinary World" and "Come Undone," I wasn't all that enthused. They had the most success with "Ordinary World" than they have had with any of their other singles, and while it's a lovely song, I just didn't feel I was in it any more for the long haul, or so I had believed at the time. Duranies eventually grew up, I suppose.

I skipped their next album, this time a collection of cover songs called Thank You, and their follow-up release Medazzaland, which now only featured Simon and Nick as original members; John had departed before recording was complete. I ignored their next few albums, Night Versions, Greatest Hits, and Strange Behaviour (remixes, hit singles, and more remixes). By this point in the mid-90's, I was listening to Enya, Loreena McKennitt, and more Celtic new age-type music, as well as delving into Scottish and Irish folk music and the occasional medieval chant after attending my first Renaissance festival. I was also lighting candles, collecting faeries and corresponding with a musician via the Internet who had expressed a sincere interest in collaborating with me. But since I could never possibly deem myself as worthy of such a compliment, I declined, as did our relationship over a couple years' time, and all I was left with were a pile of letters, several of his demo CDs and cassette tapes he'd made for me of Fleetwood Mac and a copy of the much-coveted 1973 album Buckingham Nicks. I made the mistake of falling for a kid seven years my junior while working in a grocery store, and it was doomed from the beginning. He was a baby Jerry Garcia in many ways. And I found myself listening to an awful lot of Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Crosby, Stills and Nash, even catching the latter two on tour at the tail end of the 90's and 2000.
 
With the millennium came a bald tattooed barbarian of a boyfriend, and the release of Pop Trash, still sans John Taylor, who had done a stint in rehab and was hard at work trying to save himself from the chemical and egomaniacal excesses of pop stardom. 2003-2004 brought more disappointment, with the release of two more compilations of hit singles from 1981-1985 and 1986-1995 respectively. I felt like a very bad fan, indeed. A true fan would stick with a band through thick and thin, even if the Fab Five were whittled down to Just Two, and even if you didn't really like the new music... I hadn't bought an album of theirs since "Ordinary World" first hit radio. I remember when my mother mentioned that Duran Duran were playing the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and I just shook my head.

All of that changed in 2004, some two or three lifetimes later.

2005, during a set on Good Morning America-- I think?

Duran Duran's first studio album of original material in four years, Astronaut, appeared on the surface to be a ploy, a trick to bring back all of the original fans-- we were now adults between the ages of 34 and 38 or so-- with the promise of an original Fab Five Reunion including John, Roger and Andy. In late October of that year, the album was released as part of a CD/DVD package, the latter featuring behind-the-scenes footage and good-natured mischief from a performance at Wembley Arena that had taken place earlier that year.

I was laying on my couch in my one-bedroom apartment in Houston, when my mother called to say that she saw the new Duran Duran CD/DVD was on sale (I think she may have been out shopping at Target), and asked if I would like for her to pick me up a copy. I was rather ill with a headache at the time, miserable about life in general, and said sure, that I would pay her back. She brought it awhile later to my door, and I popped the video portion in the DVD player and curled back up on the couch when she left. After only about ten minutes, the lights came back on again inside my brain and soul, for the first time in what had felt like decades. I called my mother a little bit later, in tears, to thank her again for picking it up for me, that it was the most amazing thing I'd seen and heard in years...

On February 20, 2005, I got to see Duran Duran again, only this time, as they were intended to be seen: Andy, John, Simon, Nick and Roger, the original quintet together again. I was such a basketcase, I'd bought a ticket for my second bald tattooed barbarian of a boyfriend to go along, too. I couldn't handle the drive into downtown Houston, and I wasn't sure if I could handle a concert of such epic proportions alone. I had already calculated that John was always on the left side of the stage, so we got seats on the left side of the arena. I couldn't afford front-row (as much as I would have killed for such a thing-- I barely made enough money to pay my rent and health insurance, and still be able to eat), but that was okay. We were sitting outside, waiting for the doors of the Toyota Center to open, and that gave me plenty of time to eavesdrop on the hardcore Duranies' conversations that surrounded us. "Oh, I remember back in '86 that time when I was hanging out with Simon..." and "Yeah, we followed them from San Antonio..." and the like. I was getting angrier and angrier, bitching wishes for their death under my breath. My boyfriend gave me a dirty look and pointed out that I had been weeping over the fact that it had been nearly 20 years of painful waiting to see this historic, epic, unprecedented event, and that I should shut up and be thankful. And he was absolutely right.

The opening band was a group of young lads from L.A. called Clear Static-- I don't know how or why I have this memory, but we got something signed by them at some point. I have long since lost it, but oh well, I've also lost the specific memory. I think every cell in my body was so hyped beyond the traditional three dimensions, I had discovered another plane completely. For once in my life, I was going into something without the aid of alcohol to face my fear, anxiety and stress. I didn't want anything to be altered; I wanted to experience my boys completely unadulterated, utterly pure. The opening act was pretty good, I had to admit, and out of sheer reactionary nerves, I had already screamed myself nearly deaf. I had to save myself for the real deal. I hadn't been to a big arena show like this since 1987; other bands I'd seen, like the long-ago and faraway Smashing Pumpkins, were in clubs and smaller venues, and while there had been noise at these other gigs, it wasn't within a monstrous space filled with the shrill screams of thousands of rabid fans.

Just as predicted, John was on the left side of the stage, as always, so that's where our seats were. Not general admission, but I could SEE them; I could see HIM. We weren't in the nosebleed section by any means. And I'd left my camera behind in the car, like the chickenshit I was.

My shirt © 2005

I really thought I was going to have a heart attack and die. I did not think I would be able to physically and emotionally withstand the importance of this moment that had been nearly two decades in the making. I kept telling my boyfriend that I was going to just croak, that I wasn't going to be able to handle it. Meanwhile, he was watching the stage with more than a rapt interest; he was atypical to the rest of the crowd, bald tattooed barbarian, former biker, wannabe swordfighter and guitarist... He was fascinated with all of Andy's gear being set up, identifying the make and model of this guitar or that, and I'm all "Yeah, yeah, it's a Gibson, I can see it, it's an SG, I don't like those, they have the little devil horns, and yeah, that's a Les Paul, Sunburst..." His jaw hung open in amazement that his fiery little redhead could name all the gear. He was enthralled. People were stopping me and asking about the t-shirt I was wearing; a very hipster gay couple said they just had to know where I'd gotten it. When I told them I'd made/designed it, they were beyond impressed. People far cooler than myself were digging the shirt I'd made. I was on cloud nine. Next stop... 

John, Simon and Andy, 20 February 2005, Houston, TX
(lucky-as-shit photographer unknown)

Once my boys hit the stage, I turned into a dancing, stomping, screaming fool. I was in my element. I figured I'd already died and gone to heaven, so I may as well make the most of it. It was the single-most incredible performance I had ever witnessed in my entire lifetime. They were beyond on-point; they were beyond on-key. They were simply ON. They were rocking. They were all in their 40's at this point, and they owned that stage. They owned the entire Toyota Center. Hell, they still owned the world. 
From the opening strains of "(Reach Up For the) Sunrise," their current hit single and video, and straight through seventeen more songs PLUS three encores, it was clear that the magic was there. The original alchemy that should never, ever have been broken up and distilled over the decades was there. That kernel of their original brilliance, that ember of their original fire, it was all there. They even reached back as far as their very first album and played the non-single "Night Boat," which was the moment when my boyfriend had chosen to go off to find a men's room. When he came back, he was chattering away about a guy he'd met in there who had hung out with Andy in L.A. back in the 80's, even showed him a photo of the two of them together. I was like, "I so hate you right now..." Another two degrees of separation...

To this day, I still don't know how I made it through that show without my heart simply bursting with joy. "Honey, I have never seen you DANCE like that!" my boyfriend exclaimed. I think all I could say in response was "I saw John... I saw my boys..." 

38th Birthday Redhead Massacre © 2008 

Duran Duran went on to release two more albums, but sans Andy once and for all. All sorts of rumors and stories swirl about how and why this happened, and in the end, I suppose it really doesn't matter. It was all about who was in it for the long haul, and people gotta live their lives.

2007's Red Carpet Massacre was something of an odd duck to me. It seemed they were too eagerly embracing their contemporaries from different genres, like rap artist Timbaland and former NSYNC/now solo R&B artist Justin Timberlake, and the resulting recordings left me a little confused. I received it 2 months later for my 38th birthday. My darling fantasy husband of more than 20 years (JT had long-since beat out Simon for that title) would be turning 48 that year, inching toward the big 5-0. It seems when our idols suddenly face mortality, we do a bit of our own soul-searching at the same time. Kind of puts everything in perspective. I didn't bother to see them on that supporting tour.

2010 brought the release of All You Need Is Now. I grabbed it up and fell in love with it. Even though Andy was long-gone, that mystery recipe was more evident and shining through once again. It sounded like a Duran Duran album made for the millennium that actually matched Astronaut, but it felt even more connected.

To me, it felt like a love letter to the fans, particularly in the lyrics of its first single of the same name:

Everybody's gunning for the VIP section
But you're better up and running

In another direction
With your bones
in the flow
Cold shadow on the vine
But your lashes let it shine...

Every moment that arrives You're the greatest thing alive... 

And you sway in the moon
the way you did when you were younger
When we told everybody
All you need is now
Stay with the music
Let it play a little longer
You don't need anybody
All you need is now...

Ironically, I didn't try to see them on this tour, either, as I still had no one with whom I could share in the magic-- no one who would be equally invested, or would just "get it."

The following year, I got JT's autobiography In The Pleasure Groove for Christmas, and I devoured it immediately. Parts of it broke my heart. I knew he and his mother were Catholic, but I had buried this fact in the darkest recesses of my brain, and it brought another flood of memories to follow. I had always, always fallen for lapsed Catholic boys. ALWAYS. I also knew that he'd been an only child, but reading about his childhood and how somber it could be at times with subtle shades of loneliness and resulting creativity, it broke my heart all over again. I sworeI knew on some level that he was sensitive and sweet deep down, and perhaps this is what drew me to him all those years ago. Yes, he had a pretty face, but I continued to adore him long after he'd turned fifty. His dark eyes, even with the lines of age at their corners, still have that twinkle when he's on stage and funking it up-- and his wide smile is every bit as infectious as a Duran Duran hook. He had gone from bespectacled ugly duckling "drip" to sexy five-star Gorgeous seemingly overnight back in the day. And he still made me weak in the knees. He always will.

Over one month ago, Duran Duran released their 14th studio album, Paper Gods. From the get-go, the reviews from the media were stellar. The voices of the fans, however, were mixed at best. Opinions seemed pretty polarized-- either they hated the album, or they loved it. I purchased a version released specifically for Target, with three bonus tracks, and then ordered the traditional version, released with two more different bonus tracks. On the first listen, I was puzzled as well. To me, it sounded as though the boys had allowed the bass, guitar and drums to take a backseat to more electronic means. I was also a little disturbed when pop culture hot mess Lindsey Lohan had a "guest vocal" on the track "Dancephobia," which was really no more than a ridiculous throaty spoken word voice-over during an instrumental. The overall feel for the album at first was that Duran Duran were doing their damnedest to mesh with the current music scene and infuse their sound with the same kind of electronica dance pop feel.

A few songs jumped out at me immediately, though. Their first single, "Pressure Off," was an easy winner, probably due to the Nile Rodgers funk influence. "Butterfly Girl" leaped out from the get-go, probably due to the title (I love butterflies), and because I found it to be an immediately infectious groove. "What Are the Chances?" broke my heart all at once. Classic Simon lyrics, swirled through with melancholy and longing. And then I realized why I wasn't reacting quite as vehemently as some of the other fans who had taken to Twitter and Facebook to pan the album; it was because, in my eyes (and ears), the magic was still there.

When the official Duran Duran Facebook page asked fans to reveal what surprised them most about the new album, I thought about posting my opinion among the hundreds of others that were popping up. At first, I thought better of it, because normally Facebook (and the Internet, in general) is no more than a forum for people to bash others for their opinions, and my words might incite a riot of disagreement and ridiculousness. But something in me changed, and I put the following out there to be mocked and/or ridiculed: 

I never thought in a million years that 4, much less 46, people would not only agree with my initial assessment of the album, but that they would praise my observations. Granted, there are over 2.5 million people in the Facebook DD fan community, but still. It kind of floored me to be acknowledged at all.

Having listened to the album many more times since I purchased it, I have grown to enjoy it immensely, and stand by my original assessment. I find the overall sound to be far better than Red Carpet Massacre, even though I'm not a fan of current pop music. I think their essence is both timeless and current. I also think there is something cosmic about pairing them with Nile Rodgers. He worked magic on The Power Station project and the Notorious album some 30 years earlier, and he's done it again with "Pressure Off."

I recently posted another response to a DD Facebook question, asking what everyone's favorite video from the Rio album was. My share of "Lonely In Your Nightmare" brought an astonishing 136 "likes," along with 13 comments. I remarked that at forty-five, I no longer had any Duranie friends, so the commentary I was receiving was so nice. One of them replied "Heather, you have a whole page of fellow Duranies. We are all one big happy family.  " It kinda warmed my heart.

Present-day Duranies are not ashamed in the least of their fandom. They embrace it wholeheartedly, and the girls, who are now in their mid- to late-forties and early fifties have an understanding with their husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, partners, and now their children. When Duran Duran is on the radio, on tv, or on the iPod shuffle, be quiet and let Mommy dance and wig out. And if Duran Duran are coming to town, you can bet your ass that Mommy will be going. So you probably won't see her for a day or two. Or, if you're lucky, you'll be going along with her to experience it first-hand, and come away with a better understanding of why Mommy's been hung-up on them for all these years. Or not. Mommy doesn't care...  

With the explosion of social media and resulting hyper-connectivity between fans and artists of all stripes these days, I see evidence on a daily basis of Duranies in their 40's still hitting the concerts and immediately uploading their iPhone videos and selfies taken with the boys backstage and on the street. Long gone are the days of recording bootleg tapes and seedy propositions to roadies and the like. Still, I cannot help but wonder if I could ever cough up enough dough for a VIP ticket and whatever it entailed? It caused me to seriously consider joining their fan club, where supposedly such perks are made available before being unleashed to the general public (you would think such a "fan" would have joined their club decades ago, but alas, I never did). I never thought I'd join a fan club of anyone's at the age of forty-five. After much deliberation, I coughed up the cash only a few days ago, laboring under the delusion that it would give me access to backstage meet-and-greet opportunities as well. After hitting "send," I learned that meet-and-greets are not exclusive to every city, and that one really needs to subscribe to Crowdsurge.com, and after doing so, I still didn't understand the process... But I received my fan club package of an exclusive t-shirt (which of course does not fit, even in the largest size offered), a magnet, a swank pen, a keychain, a stainless steel insulated mug, and some high-tech data-saving thing that I will probably never use or need since I don't own any Smart products, as well as a copy of Simon's handwritten lyrics to "Pressure Off." Fingers still crossed that DD even plays Tampa in the coming year. This old dog doesn't know the tricks that it takes to get a decent seat or a meet-and-greet... And I don't know who you "need to know" like so many folks do in this world. I could never boast being "well-connected" during my lifetime.

If I were ever granted such a dream-wish to spend a mere five minutes in their presence, it would be to simply say "thank you," and nothing more. There is absolutely nothing I could attempt to express to them that they haven't already heard a million times before over the past 35+ years, so I can only assume that there would be no point in even trying. But my feelings of thanks eclipses the music or the past misplaced idolatry. They are instead for essentially saving my life when a melodramatic, hormonal, painful and angry adolescence could not be healed by anything else on this earth. So to give a heartfelt thank-you once and for all would be a nice sense of closure. A hug in return would be nice, too... 

My one true wish is that they're still having fun and loving what they do, even now into their mid- to late-fifties. The clips I've caught of concerts posted to YouTube and the guest spots on the late-night circuit and early-morning news shows seem to show great evidence of this. And watching the recently-released official video for "Pressure Off" shows the best evidence of all-- they are all smiling and having so much fun with it. I don't think anything could make me much happier than that.

But that hug would be nice, too...