Robert Smith, lead singer of goth rock band The Cure, put it like this:
“Duran Duran (…) loved us, and they used to come to our shows, but they represented everything we hated: the whole glamorous ’80s, consumer bullshit; this horror show that we were up against.”
So there’s that. But what’s interesting from the perspective of this blog is that, when I was choosing a trio of new wave albums to review, I opted for Remain in Light, The Hurting, and Rio – ostensibly very different records but, any way you slice it, Duran Duran, Talking Heads, Tears for Fears and, indeed, the Cure are all widely considered to be new wave acts. This might be indicative of the essential meaninglessness of the term, given that The Hurting is a document of childhood trauma and mental breakdown, and thus a million miles removed from the sun kissed beaches and supermodel-bejewelled parties that provide the setting for Rio. In the end, though, it’s all shimmering, cleanly produced, synth-inflected pop-rock music, isn’t it? If we imagine ourselves as extraterrestrials, coming to earth for the first time and, upon arrival, immediately listening to first Rio and then The Head on the Door, we’d surely assume that it was the same genre of music – perhaps even the same band, except that one album was recorded after taking lots of coke, the other after reading Octave Mirbeau. The moment of revelation would arrive only when we actually saw the music videos or live performances and were confronted by, first, the glowering, fright-wig-sporting, rotund goth Smith, and then by the willowy, yacht-riding, Anthony Price-wearing Le Bon.
Which means that, in the end, the apparent antagonism between Duran Duran and, say, the Cure is a matter of visual style, or even personal ideology, rather than musical substance. Or is it? Actually, I would suggest that there’s also something in the lyrics that renders Duran Duran distinctive from some of their wilfully freakish and preeningly marginalised new wave contemporaries. This is by no means a straightforward argument to make, because most of the lyrics on Rio are incomprehensible nonsense. John Taylor, Duran Duran’s bassist, once described Simon Le Bon as “Shakespeare’s idea of a rockstar” and, apparently, many of the band’s lyrics started out as poetry in Simon’s little blue book. I consider this story to be absolutely credible, because I am very sure that Le Bon wrote bad, very pretentious, inchoate poetry which he considered to be of exemplary literary quality, and I would be prepared to bet money that his juvenile scribblings found their way into Duran Duran’s music, and thus into the brains of an unsuspecting global audience which, because it was too busy driving to work or drunk on Harvey Wallbangers in bleak provincial discos, never really heard or thought to reflect on the semantic cohesion of the lyrics. Rio is full of pseudo-literary, achingly affected doggerel – “ripe gibberish”, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds described it.
And yet, throughout Rio, there are moments where the lyrics and music together summon the “horror show” of “glamorous consumer bullshit” that Robert Smith was alluding to. This vision of Duran Duran as the poster boys for 80s largesse comes most starkly into focus on the album’s title track and opener. “Rio” starts with hyper, frantic bass, tottering, circus-like synths, screeching, slashing guitars, and metallic, heavily treated vocals. In some ways, it’s anything but a comfortable listen, for such a pop megahit. But the chorus is resplendent, triumphant, an unashamed celebration of youth, beauty, and fame, much like the music video, which sees the band on a yacht in the Caribbean, while the lyrics conjure an 80s supermodel languishing on golden sands. The braying saxophone and general cacophony of the song’s ending mark the moment of wanton inebriation, the fuck-it-I’m-rich abandon of drunk rockstars on a desert island with beautiful women and Ronald Reagan in the White House.
No doubt such in-your-face opulence constituted a provocation to the benighted weirdos and dole-queue outcasts of 80s alternative music but, looking back, it’s hard not to be amused by it – and to acknowledge it as a wellspring of frankly excellent pop music. Indeed, the most memorable and cohesive moments on Rio offer some variation on this general mien of wealth, fame, glamour, and sex, and they comprise irresistible slices of synth-saturated 80s pop-rock. “Hungry Like the Wolf” is so self-assured and upbeat that I can easily understand why it might have sounded abhorrent to a doom-merchant like Robert E. Smith. Le Bon is a horny beast out on the town, prowling for prey, marshalling the classic “she was asking for it” argument, while staccato synths and bright, bullish guitars churn away in the background.
“My Own Way” pulls a similar trick; it starts at an airshow – another nod to the minor aristocracy, for indeed, it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine Joe Strummer or Robert Smith watching airplanes through binoculars, while slithering around the object of their desire, coyly sipping a margherita, and occasionally retiring to the billiards room to sketch something in their “little blue book of poems.” After all, Strummer is otherwise engaged in dark, dingy Brixton, seething about police brutality, while Smith is in his bedroom, writing mordant seven-minute rock songs and crying about them. But Le Bon is at an airshow, chasing “public figures”, before repairing to Forty-fifth between Sixth and Broadway for cocktails and coke. There are – quite literally – oceans between these worlds.
And yet, “Save a Prayer” hints at a dark underbelly to the affluence, perhaps the feint prick of a yuppie conscience. It’s a song about a one night stand with a supermodel in an exotic location, but it sounds surprisingly haunting and haunted; the sociopathic womaniser blithely enjoining we mere mortals not to bother saying a prayer for him now, but to save it until the morning after – that is, let me have my night of irresponsible pleasure, and tomorrow you can worry about my soul. This song is, in effect, the counterpart to “Rio” – a reflection on the unsettling consequences when look-but-don’t-touch turns into something more involved. It’s internally conflicted; the music is unsettled, but the lyrics are a vision of pleasure-seeking, emotionally detached 80s neo-liberalism, with people and experiences presented as commodities to be bought and sold on anonymous and deregulated markets.
The album tracks on Rio are not quite as compelling as these catchy, futuristic yuppie synth-rock trillion-selling singles. Indeed, at several points, a rather worrying paucity of ideas is in evidence. On more than one occasion, I fear, Duran Duran resorted to subtle reworkings of their own songs in an effort to fill the record. “Hold Back the Rain” was apparently written as a warning by Simon to John about his rock’n’roll excesses while the band was on the road, and it’s a nice enough song, but it sounds remarkably like a knockoff of “Hungry Like the Wolf”; it’s got the same bright, jabbing guitars, the same mid-tempo chorus, the same glowering lyrics. Alarmingly, this sense of déjà vu visits the listener once again on “Last Chance on the Stairway”, which features a bassline only marginally different from that on “Rio”, and lyrics which also talk about sipping martinis with supermodels at beach parties. I don’t want to rag on this too much – to some extent, it’s the price you pay for a cohesive sounding album, something that Duran Duran definitely achieved with Rio. But there’s a difference between, on the one hand, hammering home a central idea and, on the other, including early drafts of the album’s best songs, changing the titles, and hoping that nobody notices.
That said, the tone of Rio changes toward the end of the album, as darkness descends, and not just on “Save a Prayer.” There’s a post-punk vibe to the sinister plucked guitars and paranoid lyrics of “New Religion” which, according to the wearyingly and predictably affected liner notes, was conceived by “Shakespeare’s idea of a rockstar” as a “dialogue between the ego and the alter-ego.” In the song itself, this manifests as two overlapping vocal tracks; the lyrics to both are largely unintelligible, and no doubt the result of a teenage Le Bon reading The Outsider in the sixth form common room. The unsettling vibe persists into “The Chauffeur”, the album’s closer, a spidery synth song which is presumably about a man and woman in the immediate aftermath of having sex in the back of their car – probably an Aston Martin.
It would be a bit unfair to dismiss Rio as singles-plus-filler; none of the songs are obviously skippable. But while “Hold Back the Rain” and “Last Chance in the Stairwell” are nice enough, do you really need to hear them if you’ve got “Rio”, “Hungry Like the Wolf”, and “Save a Prayer”? You may as well just buy the singles collection. And maybe this is the problem with Duran Duran – it’s a triumph of style over substance. Beyond the oblique references to supermodels and beaches, there’s a remarkable lack of lyrical or musical ideas, which is precisely what makes, say, The Hurting, Disintegration, or The Queen is Dead so enduringly compelling.
But maybe this is beside the point. In my review of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, I alluded to a strange and clandestine kinship between, on the one hand, punk rock’s nihilistic and negativistic refusal to see positive value in anything and, on the other, Thatcherite neo-liberalism’s autistic, there-is-no-such-thing-as-society individualism. It could be argued that Duran Duran, by articulating the dream of I’m-alright-Jack opulence more unashamedly than any other band, were the true successors to the Sex Pistols – the post-punk band par excellence, the absolute negation of the immaculate 60s dream made flesh and skin.
7/10
Highlights: “Rio”, “Hungry Like the Wolf”, “Save a Prayer”